blog

Site updates and anything else related to the technology of blogging and my site(s).

Relaxation, upgrades – and furrets!

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Well, ended up having a very nice weekend. I’m afraid I did oversleep on Saturday — I was supposed to be at work at Suncoast at 10am, and didn’t wake up until sometime after noon — but they were kind enough to understand why. Not only did they let me take the rest of the day off, but they hadn’t scheduled me for Sunday…and they’ll be sure not to schedule me before 1pm on Saturdays from now on, so I’ll be able to get sleep after DJ’ing on Friday nights! Rock on.

I ended up spending most of the weekend working with my computers. I’ve been running this webserver off the Public Beta of Mac OS X since the beta was released, and Saturday was (finally) the official release date of the full retail version of OS X. Ran down to the local CompUSA and picked it up, came home, and installed it first on my main work machine. Everything went smoothly there, so I bit the bullet, backed up the website, and upgraded the webserver.

Luckly, everything went smoothly there, too — for the most part. There have been some under-the-hood changes between the Public Beta and the Retail release that took me by surprise and required some tweaking to get the webserver up and running correctly again (for the tech geeks out there, the Apache webserver, which had been named apache under the PB, is now named the standard httpd again, the various configuration files have been moved and renamed, and the logfile directory is moved), but I was able to find and tweak everything relatively quickly. I was able to bring the webserver down, completely reformat it, install OS X, put the website back, and find all the changes to get the website back up and running correctly in a grand total of three hours — I don’t think that’s too bad at all.

Then, since I was upgrading things anyway, I checked and found a new version of the software I use for my Messageboard/Guestbook, and got that installed and configured. Unfortunately, the new version doesn’t read the threads from the previous version, so things are looking a little sparse in there…but that’s a relatively minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things.

The final big news for the weekend — furrets! :) Miranda had two ferrets that, unfortunately, she isn’t able to give as much attention as she’d like anymore, as she just had a beautiful little girl three months ago. Babies being the wonderful, but admittedly time-consuming creatures they are, she needed to find a good home for her ferrets. I gave it some thought, and figured that I could do that…besides, this way, she can have visitation rights whenever she wants. So, the newest additions to the family here at the apartment are Niko and Ash (otherwise lovingly known as Nikkerbokker and Assmaster). This should be a lot of fun — while my family has almost always had pets (usually cats), I realized a bit ago that I’d never had pets of my own — they’ve always either been my mom’s or my brother’s — so, for the first time, I’ve got little ones of my own. All sorts of cool.

However, it’s now Monday morning, and time to go jump in the shower and get back to the normal workaday week. Off and running like a herd of turtles….

Cam improvements

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I’m up a bit later than I should be, but it’s all well and good (right), as I stumbled across some JavaScript code that’s allowed me to improve the Wudicam page a bit.

Previously, I was using a ‘refresh’ meta-tag that forced the entire page to refresh every 30 seconds — a fairly ridiculous waste of bandwidth, but I didn’t know any better when I put everything together. While surfing around tonight, however, I found a simple little JavaScript that now updates the image only, without needing to refresh the entire page, every five seconds (much better than the previous 30 second refresh), and will only do so if there is actually a new picture to post. So, less unecessary data being thrown across the ‘net, and a much faster refresh time on the cam picture.

Back online

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We’re back!

Sorry ’bout the recent downtime over the past couple of days…problems with the cable modem. In any case, everything’s resolved now, and things are looking good.

The cam is back

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One of the side benefits to the new ‘puter is that as I’ve decided to stick mostly to OS 9 on this box, leaving OS X to be my webserver on the iMac for now, it allows me to resurrect some features of this site that had been on hold for a while. The most notorious of these — the Wudi-cam! Well, it’s back folks…for better or for worse, it’s there. No gaurantees on how often it’ll be up or down, though — guess you’ll just have to check to find out if I’m broadcasting, huh?

At the moment, I’m using free software that only allows me to do incremental updates — the picture will update every 10 seconds, and the page will refresh every 30. I hope to eventually get software that will allow me to do streaming video, but until then, this will work.

Just a quick test of Lynx

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I’m just experimenting a bit here. One of my little quirks when designing websites is to try to make sure that I always make them Lynx compatible. Lynx is a purely text-based web browser, back from the early days of the web, when content was considered much more important than flashy graphics, Flash animation, or any of the other doodads that have taken over the web today. Anyway, while checking my page with Lynx today, I thought I’d see if it was possible for me to not just view it, but update the postings via Lynx — and if this post appears, then it would seem to work. Pretty nifty….

Kind of amusing how a Mac-junkie like me still loves being able to do things through a command line and a text-based terminal from time to time…guess I’m showing my age as a ‘net old-timer or something. :)

Quicker archiving, twins, frustration

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Seeing as how I’m actually starting to update this thing on a more regular basis — and given my tendency for loquaciousness — I figured I’d drop the archiving settings down to weekly, instead of every two weeks, so that this page didn’t just keep scrolling on and on and on and on and on…. I also removed the link to the old hand-generated archive pages (from before I started using this software to automate the updating process), since it’s all really old stuff, and it’s easier for me to just stay with the automatically generated archive pages.

Even though I picked it up a couple of weeks ago, I just got around to watching Dead Ringers last night. Wow…what an incredibly fascinating film. David Cronenberg almost never fails to dissapoint me — he’s got an incredibly twisted mind and excels at putting his ideas on screen — and the one time he has (Crash, which I never even made it all the way through) I’m now starting to consider renting and giving another try. Anyway, the combination of Cronenberg and Jeremy Irons‘ absolutely mindbending performance as a pair of identical twins in Dead Ringers was absolutely mesmerizing. The fact that Irons could play two such identical people and put just enough subtle differences into the performances that it was always clear which was which was absolutely incredible to watch…he just proves yet again why he’s on my list of favorite actors.

In other news…well, not much. E-mailed my resume over to the temp agency, so all I can do now is ‘hurry up and wait.’ Spent most of last night here at home being frustrated with life in general…I’m so burnt out on just about everything here in town, especially with all this drama with TimeFrame, that I’m looking forward more and more to the day that I can just pack up and leave. Ah, well…some days I do better than others.

Now, I’ve got to go jump in the shower and head off to work at Suncoast, selling movies for a few hours. Fun fun fun….

Of blogs, site content, and something funny

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So it appears I’ve (without really knowing or planning it) become one of the growing number of ‘bloggers’ on the web. Blogger? Well read on…the following text is from Blogger, a service for helping people create and maintain their blogs. While I don’t use them, the definition was useful:

What is a weblog/blog?

A blog is a web page made up of usually short, frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically — like a what’s new page or a journal. The content and purposes of blogs varies greatly — from links and commentary about other web sites, to news about a company/person/idea, to diaries, photos, poetry, mini-essays, project updates, even fiction.

Blogs posts are like instant messages to the web.

Having realized while websurfing today that I’ve joined the blogger community, I went ahead and retitled this column on my page to reflect that, and added a couple of blog-related links to the lefthand sidebar on the page.

As far as site content goes, I’ve taken down the link in the Contents bar to the Ak Events side of my site, as I’m planning on going ahead and discontinuing it in the near future. It just isn’t getting the traffic I was hoping for…a good idea, but others are doing similar things, and I’d rather let someone else a little more into the idea play with it.

And finally, an amusing link I found while bouncing around the ‘net today: Pornolize! Warning: don’t follow the link if you’re underage or easily offended (or both) but if you’re neither of the above and have a good sense of humor, it can be all sorts of amusing. Don’t say I didn’t warn you….

Occasional downtime

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First off, about the downtime for the past few days. This may be happening on and off for a while. I’m working on my CD collection again, which often necessitates switching my ‘puter over to Mac OS 9. As my webserver only operates when I’m running Mac OS X…well, no webserver when I’m working. I’ll do my best to remember to switch OS’s before I leave for the day, however there are no gaurantees. Most of the time things should be up and running, however.

Up and running

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Okay, I just got things up and running again. As of right now, everything on my site should be working correctly — now off to bed, I’ve got to get some sleep tonight!

Downtime

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Sorry about the recent downtime (the last couple days or so) — something went seriously glitchy on the machine, and I had to do a system repair on OS X, which nuked the web directory. Thankfully, I’m not a complete idiot, and had backed up the entire site before the repair, and so a quick copy back, and things seem to be up and running again, for the most part.

Unfortunately, the copying has changed read/write permissions on many of the files, and so not all of the interactive elements of the site — such as my messageboards — are working at the moment. I should have those fixed within the next day or two, but it’s a bit late tonight to go digging for the documentation. I’ll post an alert when things work again, of course.