Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

Nano-nano!

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Just something that I find all sorts of nifty. According to an article in today’s Seattle P-I, Washington is going to house the hub of one of the centers for nanotechnology research. Nanotech has been one of the recent sci-fi concepts to really spark my imagination, especially after reading Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.

Stephenson burst upon the sci-fi scene with his second book, Snow Crash, which I babbled about a couple weeks ago when I was re-reading it. In The Diamond Age, Stephenson does for nanotechnology what he did for the internet and virtual reality in Snow Crash — takes today’s best existing ideas and theories and extrapolates them forward into the future to explore where the technologies can take us. It’s a fascinating read, and with the current apparent stagnation of the space program and George Bush’s restrictions on genetic research, nanotech seems to be one of the few sci-fi concepts with near-future possibilities. Going to be a lot of fun to see where all this could lead in the next 10 to 20 years.

New talkback feature

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One last thing for today. I’m experimenting with more ‘toys’ to play with on my website, and have found a talkback system that seems to fit quite nicely between the limited interactivity of the polls I toss up occasionally and the full messageboard I have running. Whenever I turn it on (which I probably won’t do for every post), you should be able to click the ‘Comments’ link at the end of a post to spout off about my babble, should you wish. As with the other doo-dads I’ve got on here, I have no idea how much or how often they’ll actually get used…but hey, it’s fun to play with, and it’s my website, so I can do what I want. So there. Bleah. ;)

It works!

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Woohoo! Finally got it all figured out!

You’ll notice the new(est) look to the site — finally found a layout I liked, and was flexible enough to work sitewide. Spent most of the day in front of the computer working on it, and now the majority of the pages are converted over to the new design — all that’s left are the pages of the quotebook, and the various pages showing off my artwork.

In the process of mangling things today, I did manage to completely hose my old messageboard/guestbook, unfortunately. However, I decided as long as I had to change things around to find something else, so now I’ve got some new, much more full-featured software running that side of things. Not sure where (if anywhere) I’m going to take that in the future…we’ll see how things go, as always.

That’s been my day, however, so not much more to babble about. Was thinking about seeing AI again tonight, but then got caught up in pfutzing around here and completely lost track of what time it was, and now it’s too late. Ah, well.

Tomorrow should mark my moving day, if all goes well. This may mean I’m not online quite as often until I get things more set up in the new place — I’m currently a bit short on monitors, so may be leaving my ‘puter over here at Casey’s for a bit — but I’ll at least stop in to check e-mail and the like as often as I can. But hey, I’ll have my own place. Yay!

Headaches

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Argh — I’m really starting to wonder if this whole site redesign was a bad idea. Between the fact that I’m learning how to correctly code CSS-based layout as I write this, and the bugginess in the current version of Internet Explorer (Exploder?) for Mac OS X, I’m never sure if something isn’t working because I screwed up, or because IE decided to tweak out on me again.

I think that I’ve got things so that they should be visible at the moment — at the very least, the page displays correctly under Opera for Mac OS X — but with IE crapping out every time I make a change, I’m not entirely sure. Keeping my fingers crossed, that’s for damn sure….

But, I’ll keep playing with it…hopefully I haven’t completely broken my site for anyone out there.

Yet.

Site design: why CSS?

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As I’m currently with a fair amount of time without a whole lot of neccessary things to do, I’ve decided to explore one of the ideas I’ve had bouncing around in my head for a while. I’m redesigning the site (I know, I never got around to finishing the last redesign — but I found some tricks midway through) to comply with current Cascading Style Sheet standards. While I’d been using CSS for a while now to standardize and simplify the formatting across the site, this is my first foray into using CSS for the actual site layout.

Previously, I’d been using a table-based system to lay out the page. It works — and in some ways could be considered a de-facto standard across the web at the moment — but it’s kludgy, makes the code difficult to read, and is a royal pain when facing a site update. By switching to CSS-based layout (the basic framework was found at Glish), my code is much leaner, and once done, I’ll be able to make large, sweeping changes to the site when I decide to redesign in the future by editing a single .css file, instead of having to recode every page on the site. Much, much nicer.

There is one downside to this — certain browsers (either older browsers [Netscape 4.x or previous, or IE 4.x or previous] or browsers still in development [such as OmniWeb for Mac OS X] will not display my page correctly. If you’re using an older browser, visit the Web Standards Organization upgrade project to see what browsers are available to you. If you’re using a current browser that is not standards-compliant, write the company to request compatibility with the currently published standards.

Of course, what this means at the moment is that if you start bouncing through my site, there are currently three different ‘themes’ to the pages — the older blue/green layout, the grid-background I was recently working with, and this CSS-based layout. I’m hoping to get the entire site converted over to this new style fairly quickly, however — this main page was just the matter of a couple hours work, and now that I’ve got the tweaking finalized, the rest of the pages should fly by fairly quickly.

So that’s it for now — a bit of work in front of the ‘puter to give my skin a rest from the constant flirtation with sunburn that I’ve been playing with for the past couple weeks. Ta ta for now….

Slight page updates

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I just went through and made some slight adjustments to some of the pages on the site (mainly this one, my resume, and my DJ Wüdi propaganda) to reflect the fact that I’m not going to be in Anchorage for much longer. More later…it’s about lunchtime here at work.

Though I do have to wonder…should I worry that most of the people answering the poll went for the sex change option? Hmm…just what do people think of me, anyway?

Statistics

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I did a little work on my webserver last night, and was able to get the statistics page up and running again. Now, if you’re really bored, you can take a look at just how much (or, more accurately, how little) traffic my webserver actually gets. The page is generated automatically every day at midnight, so the numbers should always be up to date. Purdy nifty.

Heaven forbid that happen!

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Imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name…without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art.

— Bill Gates, 1983 (New York Times, 25 Sep 1983, pg. F2)

More site work

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Work continues on the site redesign. I’ve completed the changeover of the Quotebook introduction and the first page of Amusing bits, and added some information over to the right hand side of this page. In addition to the link to the messageboard, there is now a section of random stuff about me — some biographical, and some small lists. You’ll find there whatever I’m currently reading or have just read, the last 5 CD’s I bought, and the last 5 DVD’s I’ve bought. Beneath that are links to other blog sites, and then links to some of the places I hit on the web on a regular basis.

I wasn’t really down…

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Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Okay, for any of you who might be interested, here’s the deal. I run my own webserver here at home, and my ‘net connection is provided through GCI‘s cable modem service. Technically, this is a dynamic IP service — my IP address (the four-part number that is the true address of a computer on the ‘net) isn’t permanently assigned to me, and can change every time I establish a new ‘net connection. However, as cable modem service has very little downtime, my ‘dynamic’ IP is almost static — if I don’t have any downtime, then the IP doesn’t change.

It’s because of the dynamic nature of my IP address that I haven’t yet gone for a better web address — i.e., something along the lines of www.djwudi.com or some such — registering for one of those generally requires having a permanent, dedicated IP. Instead, I go through the services provided by www.dyndns.org. This free service allows me to have my djwudi.dyndns.org address, and all I have to do is put the current IP of my webserver into their database.

Occasionally, however, my IP will change — which is what happened today. I’m not sure why my IP suddenly reset today, there was no actual downtime that I’m aware of, and I would have expected it to change when my cable modem was actually disconnected a week ago, but it didn’t. In any case, as soon as I saw that things weren’t working I put the new IP into the database, but it took a few hours for it to propagate through the system. However, between the time I started typing this and now, it’s made it through, so all should be good from here on out…at least, until the next time GCI decides to kick my IP.