Monthly Archives: July 2004

Cookout and Archives

Today was a somewhat busy day … went to the annual Broadband Reports Chicago / SBC – Ameritech Midwest Cookout held at kcazzie‘s house.

It was enjoyable … lots of yaking about geeky stuff.

When I got home I started working on implementing a requested feature for the mailing list archives so that the number of results / page could be selected and remembered. Took a few hours to code and test, but it appears to be working well.

I also used the change as an opportunity to change the way the list index pages are generated … now I’m using Jamon … which is a nice templating engine for Java. I’m not using nearly all the capabilities of the package, but I’m pleased with the results.

iSeries Blogger Button

Ok iSeries Bloggers … now WE have a button!

I would suggest you reference it like this:
<a href="http://www.iseries.ibm.com" title="IBM iSeries -- For when you can't afford to be out of business"><img src="/images/iseries-button.png" alt="IBM iSeries"/></a>

Feel free to use the button graphic on your site … but, please, copy it to your own server instead of referencing mine 🙂

If you do decide to use the image … trackback to this post. Maybe I’ll setup an iSeries blog agregator sometime.

Case in point: Electronic voting

MIAMI, July 27 – Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near.
– The New York Times

Ok, I think the people who are all for electronic voting without the need for a paper trail have proven the case against electronic voting.

Sheesh … the only case for not having a paper trail is so the results can be manipulated without anyone being aware of it. That’s why criminals don’t like checks.

A few blog changes

Well, for those of you who care (and I know there aren’t many of you), I’ve made some changes on the blog … some of them obvious, others not so much.

First, I’m using WordPress 1.3 alpha 2. Yes, I know … alpha code is untested. But heck, this isn’t exactly a mission critical website. I’m actually checking it out of cvs so I can keep my few customizations intact.

Second, you may notice the removal of the “Links” on the side bar (Over there –>) and the addition of “Blogs that I read”. Ginny got me hooked on Bloglines, which is an online feed agregator. I used to use RssOwl, but it was a pain using it at both work and home. Now that I’m using Bloglines, I don’t get notified that something is new when I already read it at another location. It’s also got a nice Windows tray application that tells me when one of my feeds has been updated.

Next on the list is fix the styles … need to tweak some of the spacing.

Fancy titles

Found a pretty cool plugin for WordPress that gives me fancy image titles for the posts.

All I have to supply is a font file and the TitleImages plugin does the rest.

I had to tweak the plug-in a bit so that thte images work with the permalinks, but that wasn’t too difficult.

Video capture card problem — RESOLVED!

Well, the video capture card problem has been resolved.

I ended up going over to Frys yesterday and picked up a motherboard, cpu, and memory (2 motherboards, actually, more about that later).

The upgrade went smoothly … Linux adapted to the new hardware without a problem. Windows XP, however, wouldn’t even boot. I had to reinstall. I kind of expected that.

However, the capture card is seen by the PCI bus now, and is fully functional in XP. I need to figure out how to make it work in Linux though.

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Video capture card problems

Well, I got the video capture card finally … plugged it into my system (mordor) and … it didn’t work.

Tried a few different configurations, even booted up into WinXP (mordor usually runs Redhat Linux Fedora, but the card was just never seen.

I brought the card into work and plugged it into my workstation … it was seen and recognized as soon as I logged on.

Well, that obviously means my play machine is broken. Time to upgrade.

I think I’ll swing by Frys today and see about picking up a cheap motherboard & CPU. I think they have them on sale again.

Switch to Firefox!

Get FirefoxFound another link on Mike Wills site about promoting the switch from IE to Firefox .

After IE crashed on me a few times while trying to actually write blog entries … I decided to give Mozilla Firefox a try.

So far I’m convinced … it hasn’t crashed once, and I really like the extensions that are available.

I had started using Mozillia Thunderbird for my email some time ago … it’s nice, but there are a few things I’d like to see in it.

Right now I’m using Firefox at both home and work without any problems. I only have run into a few sites that don’t work quite right, and one site that outright blocks anything but IE (which I think is incredibly stupid … but it takes all kinds).

Renaissance Faire and accents

Today we went to the Bristol Renaissance Faire up near the Illinois / Wisconsin boarder.

It was a nice day … not too hot, not muggy at all, and there was a reasonable breeze.

It was warm enough, however, for me to forgo the normal ‘garb’ that I wear to the ren faire. Ginny brought, and wore, hers though.

As usual, there was the usual characters … some of who we’ve seen before. A few that we haven’t.

One such character was this gentleman who had taken up residence in a portable privy … who Ginny decided to torment a bit.
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