June 2003 Archive

Welcome to the Archive for June 2003! What you will find here may be old. It may scare you. It may even scare me! More importantly, you might find links that no longer work, and *gasp* information that is no longer, or possibly never was, accurate in any way. Don't rely on this information to save your life!

June 2003 Archive

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

[Comments: 0] 11:21 PM - ranting-makes-the-world-go-'round

I decided to split off some of the lengthier news posts into a new feature called "Rants." These are static articles which can be accessed via the new Rants page. They each have their own comments thread, just like a news post, but placing them on their own pages should help keep the home page from getting too absurdly long, which is always good.

[Comments: 3] 1:52 AM - honors-all-around

I decided to honor Mr. I-can't-remember-his-last-name, a.k.a. Mr. Vranjes, a.k.a. UBC_Wiskatos. He's another friend of mine who recently started his own personal site, MironV.com.

So, I present to you the new MironV theme which can be accessed via the selector somewhere on this page (depending on your currrent theme). This theme mimicks the design of Wisk's site. As usual, this theme required no HTML changes, and was implemented by way of an alternate stylesheet and three images. It appears to be largely successful! :)

Thursday, June 12, 2003

[Comments: 1] 10:13 PM - are-we-ever-getting-to-the-point

Trepia. The idea is intriguing... an instant messaging client which automatically populates your buddy list with people in your vicinity. The implementation, however, is worthless.

I decided to give the client a whirl. Each user optionally chooses a small picture to associate with the account and fills in a required profile of personal information. After logging on, Trepia is supposed to determine your location using your computer's address. Not suprisingly, that did not work as intended. My list was instantly populated with a hundred or so people, in no particular order, from Long Island (good), New Jersey (not bad), Florida (oops), California (hmm), and Japan (huh?), among others. The proximity detection was so poorly implemented, it was basically like entering a hundred random screen names in AIM and then looking at their profiles and buddy icons.

There's also this rating system, which tells the person explicitly what you rated them, with selections like cute, funny, and delicious. Hmm. No one has rated me. I imagine, like myself, people don't want others to know exactly what they think about them. :)

A few days later, Trepia released version 2.50 which was supposed to fix many of these issues. Perhaps they improved the proximity detection? No! They painstakingly added hundreds of regional locations to chose from in an absurdly massive list. So now proximity detection should know exactly where you are as long as you remember to tell it.... Right?

Well, no. I now have 150 people on my list. Never more than two are from New York, and I get the odd Malaysia or Japan as well as lots of Californians. Plus a new, but utterly useless proximity meter now graces the list. At least it lets you sort by proximity now.... and I thought Florida was closer to New York than California, but apparently not.

Now considering Trepia has reached a version number of 2.50, you would think it would have been fairly well tested, maybe have a few interesting features, perhaps even be done. The client chat interface is plain, and the latest release just introduced the ability to block users. That's something that should have been there before the client tried to pass itself off as any round number release.

So, while the idea had merit, it's going lazily in no particular direction at the moment. You might want to check it out if you have little else to do, or if you want to meet some other people that live nowhere near you that are also wondering what the hell is going on. :)

My Trepia name is KStange and regardless of where you live, I'll probably be on your list. Feel free to send me a message if you try out the service.

Wednesday, June 11, 2003

[Comments: 0] 3:55 PM - yeah-sure-whatever

I started working at Harborfields fairly recently. One of the new big things here is the network. Everything is finally online! For the "safety" of the children, Harborfields has gone with the Bess internet filter.

I can't imagine why, but this filter didn't like the SimGames.net server. Any site on the server was automatically filtered out with an error page. The server even tells you what's wrong. In this case, pornography was the category. I couldn't imagine why, so I submitted the a few of the sites for review, and a few days later it seems the block has been lifted from the entire server.

I'll probably keep checking, just to be sure that it's not just a fluke, but my guess as to the reason for the block: The IP address we have on our newest server was formerly that of a pornography web site. I don't know this for certain, and I could be wrong. I wonder if there are any other filters that are blocking SimGames.net and Nozone, Inc. as a whole.

Sunday, June 8, 2003

[Comments: 0] 12:38 PM - try-our-new-flavor

I've got the same "Now Playing" feature set up in Linux now.

In Linux, I use Winamp clone XMMS, plus this XMMS Now Playing plugin, and the Linux version of Apache HTTPd.

The XMMS Now Playing plugin is apparently very new, and seems to be a bit broken. In order to get it to work, I had to specify a -l option in the CXXFLAGS when I compiled it. The plugin also crashes XMMS if I try to edit the options in the UI, so I looked around the source code to determine the configuration file name and format and wrote the file myself.

Maybe the guy will fix it up a bit more, but I don't feel like trying to trace the segmentation fault right now and submit a bug report. I got far too little sleep last night. Maybe I'll take a nap.... :)

Friday, June 6, 2003

[Comments: 2] 1:43 AM - more-work-for-me

I haven't set this up in Linux yet, but while I'm in Windows and listening to music, you can see what I'm listening to. I was trying to decide where to put such a feature, and I decided that just putting it on the home page would suffice.

I can't really think of anywhere else to put the feature that wouldn't involve modifying the site layout, and I don't think it's important enough to put it on every page anyway.

How did I accomplish this whole thing, you ask? You know you want to know. :)

I am running the Apache web server on my computer. I have a Winamp plugin called the 'Now Playing' Plugin which writes out the currently playing song to a file on my hard drive. Then, on this server, I use a Perl script to retrieve the file and print it out to this page.

In addition to writing the current song name to a file, the Now Playing plugin can also output the current song name to the screen. This was the reason I installed the plugin to begin with. Since I like Winamp to run in a minimalistic sort of way and can't usually see its window, I configured the plugin to display the current song in the lower left corner of my screen for two seconds and then fade away. The feature is similar to that of the XOSD plugin for XMMS in Linux. Very nice.

[Comments: 0] 12:45 AM - money-makes-the-world-go-'round

So, I had to get a job for the summer. I need the money because it helps me buy things, and it helps to pay for college. I was kind of hoping I could find something really interesting this summer, that pays more than $8 per hour, but I was either too late, or there simply was no good time with the job market as it is. I only hope things recover by next summer, because I won't just be looking for a job, I'll be looking for a career.

It seems that there are hardly any jobs to be had to begin with, and I probably waited too long. I had contacts... people I know have connections in my field, but apparently no one could find anything out there that suited me. Fortunately, my job of previous summers, as a computer technician at my former school district, came to the rescue. Though the rate is less than what I'd like, and more of the work last summer was manual labor than actually working on the machines, I'm still happy to be working somewhere, and earning something.

While this will be my primary job, and can provide as many as 30 hours per week, I have also had the good fortune of finding some referrals from existing regular clients for other people that need computer help. For about $15 per hour (which is really less than I should probably be charging), I show people how to use their computers, install hardware, and fix problems. The last several jobs involved installing a CD burner, fixing a printer, teaching a person to use WebTV, and tomorrow I'm getting up early to replace someone's motherboard. We'll see how that goes.

The current workload isn't enough to be a job in itself and I constantly consider advertising my services somewhere, but I feel a lot more comfortable with people my clients feel comfortable referring me to. However, if I were able to line up 30 hours per week of tech support like this, I'd make substantially more money than I am now. For now, I guess a few extra hours on top of the school job will be enough. :)