Category: computing

  • Get Me My Tricorder!

    Wow… it’s a handheld cancer detector! Next, we need transporters and phasers. We can do without the skintight polyester “Space Dance Revue” unitards. Onwards towards a rosey Rodenberry future!

  • CSS Tabs Hiding And Showing

    I was playing around with li:hover from all those CSS Tabs and Submenus examples that have been popping up on the it-ner-web and decided that it woudl be fun if I could do the same thing with content. It’s a little messy and so far only works in Mozilla, but it’s funny: Tab Content – Hiding and Showing Stuff with li:hover.

    If anyone can get it working in IE 6 and/or Safari, ping this post or leave a comment with the url and let me know! I’d work on it, but I’m out of time for today – playtime is over.

  • OS X Utilities – For Fun!

    Everyday Software (found via Splorp) creates great (and cheap!) utilities for OS X well worth their weight in gold. I can’t wait to get my serial number for Bookit, to manage all of my bookmarks in the dozen or so browsers I have installed on my Powerbook.

    The other nuisance in OS X has been solved thanks to their nice little Show Desktop utility. It’s one of the few things I really dislike about OS X is that downloads, connections to FTP and AppleShare volumes and it seems everything is is done on the desktop. There’s no easy way to get back to the desktop… now there is.

    Honestly, there are other things that bother me about OS X. My Powerbook is slow compared to my RedHat box. Granted, my RedHat box is a dual Xeon beast, but still. The lack of oomph is starting to grate on me.

  • Idee Fixe – Step Two

    Michelle loved the design (with a minor change), so here it is: Idee Fixe: In Utero. It’s nowhere near done, but the shell is there. What do you think?

  • And The Logo Is…

    I’m sure all of you have forgotten about the little redesign contest I ran a month or so ago. Well, I’m happy to share Michelle’s new logo with you. She wanted primary colors, and well, this is what we ended up with.

    Now it’s on to designing the rest of the page… I’ll show you when I’ve got something worth showing.

  • Not As Geek As I Wanna Be

    I am 32.54438[/b> geek, which highly disappoints me. I took the test last week, and didn’t take enough time to fully contemplate my answers and only got a 28]{style=”text-align:left;”}. I know you’ve already seen it, but you can take the test too. I am a huge geek. Not geek to the point of nerd, but I’m getting there. I’m such a geek that I’m embarrassed by how low my score is. My boss said I was too “cool” to rank so high on the geek test. That one knocked me back a step. I’ve never been cool. I think it’s probably because I discovered the joys of geekery after high school, so I missed out on the whole D&D, A/V Club thing. I don’t know… I swear I’m making up for lost geekTime. The last eight years working where I do, and meeting the people I have, and learning the things I’ve learned has been more fun than any other career I could have thought of back then.

    Geeks are cool. Geeks are passionate. Geeks get things done, and in many ways drive the innovation that make our lives better. The advances in all avenues of human endeavor have been brought about by passionate, smart people committed to an idea. That’s what we are. Geeks are folks passionate about something, anything. You’re probably a geek too… about something. If you’re not, I feel sorry for you.

  • Oh no!

    Q: when / will there be the next version of IE?
    \
    A: As part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation.

    Brian Countryman: Microsoft TechChat (about halfway down)

    One of the banes of my existence is that people never upgrade IE. From past experience, and the fact that a good portion of the surfing audience is still running Windows 95, I hope IE 6 SP1 is a perfect browser, because it’s the last one people will ever use. People don’t upgrade their OS as long as it still works. People don’t upgrade their browser unless they’re geeks (like me) or forced, usually when they buy new computers.

    Happy freakin’ Friday.

  • Sorry, Newsreaders!

    I tweaked the rss files (.91 and 1.0) so they only contain the last five complete posts. So, if you get all of the last five posts in your newsreader instead of just this one, I apologize. I should be done playing for now.

    Why did I do it? Well, fifteen complete posts is a lot of crap to download just to read the most recent post. That was just plain inconsiderate of me, and I’m sorry. Second, it means shorter rebuild times for me. Third… I can’t think of a third reason.

    I also added a favicon (I used to have one… I removed it accidentally at some point). If you don’t see it, or have problems seeing it, please let me know (should show up in the address bar of modern browsers).

  • Revolution OS – A Review

    I’m watching the Spurs/Mavs game, so this may end up chock full of basketball metaphors. Last week, I watched Revolution OS. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a documentary about the birth and rise of the free software movement and Linux. The film is full of interviews of such open source/free software luminaries as Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens, Eric Reynolds, Linus Torvalds, Larry Augustin and others. It’s an amazing story, and done so well, and made so interesting that I think even non-geeks can understand it and be at least entertained by it.

    Why should you watch it? It’s a great example of geeks filling their own needs and everyone benefitting from it. It’s a story about the search for community, and real-world idealism. It’s a story about the extremes driving the middle, and how we can all affect change in our world. Yeah, it’s a big story, and I think the film did a great job giving an overview and providing an even-handed view of the players.

    Richard Stallman can be viewed as an extremist. He thinks all software should be free, and is decidedly anti-Intellectual Property. He’s an idealist. I can respect that, and I see the need for Richard and people like him. Without Richard, we may never have had the free software movement, all the great GNU software that drives a large percentage of the internet, and Linux may have never gotten off Linus’ hard drive and into the public imagination. His work on the GNU Project gave the Linux kernel something to run. The GNU Project provided the compiler for people to start porting other software to Linux. It just amazes me that things happened in the order they did. If Stallman had chosen to start on the kernel first, then Linux may never have happened.

    If you get a chance to watch it, please do. It’s informative and entertaining, and you’ll see what all the fuss is about. Heck, you may even jump on board and start using Linux yourself. Ok, maybe you won’t go that far, but you might start to see that there are alternatives to Windows, and that’s good enough for me.

  • MTaste – And More?

    I read about mtaste a while ago, and thought it was an interesting idea. Unfortunately, I was really busy when it first came up and I promptly forgot all about it. Then, Mr. Frank wondered aloud about what the best way to implement it in a database, and that got me to thinking. How would I do it?

    Well, there are a couple ways to do it, but if you’re going to have a never-ending list of artists that people can vote on, then you need several tables. This also leaves it open to add things other than music to the list (which is what intrigues me about this all). As you can see, I design overly complex schemas. They’re way more fun than simple ones. Honestly, they’re sometimes hard to manage, but they’re a lot easier to extend and add to, especially in this case where you have an ever-growing list of ratings linked to an ever-changing/growing list of artists and genres. The item_types table could grow as well, to add authors, books, movies, actors, etc. I have some idea that you could use the ODP to cut down on the confusion of artist names, and to add to it (so you could end up basically rating ODP categories). Also, this is a first stab at this. I usually way overdo this in the first draft and then trim it down once I start building it. I think I’ll try to learn PHP and MySQL and actually build this (maybe using Movies instead, but you never know). With this schema, a lot of the logic will be held in application logic instead of the database, which I think could be mitigated some with secondary id’s and a simple API (so no one gets access to the db – just the API).

    Here’s the schema that comes to mind:

    users:

    • user\_id int primary key

    • user\_fname varchar(255)

    • user\_lname varchar(255)

    • user\_email varchar(255)

    • user\_zip varchar(24)

    user_taste::

    • user\_id int

    • item\_id int

    • rating int

    • timestamp int

    items:

    • item\_id int primary key

    • item\_type int

    item_types:

    • item\_type int primary key

    • type\_title varchar(255)

    • type\_desc text null

    • type\_public int

    • type\_table varchar(64)

    music_artists:

    • item\_id int

    • martist\_id int primary key

    • martist\_title varchar(255)

    • martist\_genre int