Checksum Arcanius

As most of you probably know, I now almost exclusively use Firefox to browse the web. However, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still holds a vast majority of the browser marketshare. The good news is that this market share is dropping – and Mozilla in its various forms are picking up the slack. While users of IE still outnumber users of Mozilla 7 to 1, the trend is in the right direction.

Yesterday, I helped continue that trend. During a meeting at work with a vendor we work with, the topic of Microsoft came up, and, inevitably, the various security holes in Microsoft products. This gave me a perfect opportunity to introduce Firefox, which the people we were meeting with took immediate interest in. I think I gained at least one convert right there, and the others were certainly considering giving Firefox a chance.

As the convert said, open source certainly is a model that creates very good code. Implied, of course, is that open source often doesn’t provide exactly what you want. However, when what it does provide coincides with what you need (think servers and browsers these days), its hard to go wrong going with the less expensive, more robust, and more secure open source solution.

If you happened to check in over the last few days, you probably noticed that, although the new blog may look professional, it also looks quite bland. So today, since work will be light and I have no firm commitments until the evening, I decided to tweak the look some.

As you an see, blue, its various shades being easy on my eyes, is starting to trickle into the blog layout. There is still much to be done, but I’m liking the look more as time goes on. And CSS, alright, its not that bad. I just wish I could remember how to make things italic. I know there’s font-weight, font-family, font-decoration, etc… but italics uses another font-something. Its like the Firefox extension FireSomething, but without the novelty and as opposed to FireSomething, this plethora or names makes it harder to work, in my opinion.

From 7 until 9 today, I played Ultimate, the disc sport game known to some as Frisbee Football. The turnout was fairly good, considering there was confusion about the location being switched from the large but crowded Grass Lawn Park to the smaller but more open Robinswood park. Robinswood’s soccer fields just opened up, so for the first time since we started about a month ago, we had a flat surface to play on. The level of play has really picked up as well.

However, no matter how much I like the game, I seem to be a curse to my team. I don’t remeber yet having won one of the games. My team always manages to loose, although we usually make it close. Today, after getting down 4-9, we rallied to get up 13-11. However, we lost 13-15, despite all of our best efforts and for the last part of the game having an extra person. Fortunately, loosing doesn’t seem to make the game any less fun. If anything, it gives me more incentive to work harder. There were a couple of catches and blocks I think I could have made, had I been a step faster or a bit more agressive. So I have my work cut out for me.

As it is, we are playing regualrly two times a week, on Saturdays 11:00-1:00pm and Tuesdays 7:00-9:00pm. We may need to shift to 6pm as we move later in the season. All skill levels are welcome. Just bring someone that can match up with you and a willingness to have fun. We compete, but we keep it nice (usually, but thats another story).

With the new blog up an running, I am already disliking the way it looks. Don’t get me wrong, its very nice. And since I’m not very good at making things look better, I’m not sure I should touch it. I would probably break something too. But that never stopped me before, and it won’t stop me this time. I do plan on using some CSS, because despite its flaws, it does seem to be the best thing out there right now.

Now, just like when I moved to Greymatter from Blogger, I put up the archives of the old blog, for those who are interested in mucking through the past. They are here. Its even an easy-to-rembmer URL. Or is that URI? I have no idea. Even after I read Bernie’s explanation I had no idea.

Music: WMEA 2000 All-State Jazz Band – Black Orpheus
Mood: Upbeat

Greymatter served it purpose, but it was not flexible enough for my needs and I am still too lazy to really make my own CMS that has any of the features I want. So, on the suggestion of Bernie, I took a look at WordPress. I liked waht I saw. Especially interesting is that several months ago, I almost switched to b2, which WordPress is the direct and official decendent of.

WordPress’s installation was ridiculously easy. I used three shell commands, the rest was all web based. The interface is clean, and it is feature rich and frizicken’ fast. Which is good, becuase the need for sleep always comes quickly these days.

Bob and I (mostly Bob, actually, but I got to share the glory because I was there when everything started working) got GNU Mailman working on silverfir last night. The reason for it, as seems to be the reason for a lot of the things I do, was the Titan Robotics Club. Communication has always been an issue, and for a long time I’ve thought several different well-defined mailing lists would work better than one general mailing list. I tried with yahoogroups, but having multiple lists didn’t seem to work very well since each were so seperate, and nobody else seemed interested in the idea. But recently, interest has picked up, and I think Mailman can provide a better solution as well.

At first, we are thinking of having just a few lists, but we can easily add more if we want/need to:
-Announcements (For the general public and anyone interested in what big things the club is doing)
-Chit-chat (For off-topic chatter between members)
-Executives (For the club leadership to discuss issues)
-h4x0rZ (For attendees of the summer hack sessions)

In the future, we will probably add:
-Lego League
-Travel
-FIRST
-Web Team (if applicable)
-Video (if applicable)
-Animation (if applicable)
…etc

One small step for exim, one giant leap for the TRC

Yay!

Well, hopefully 13 hours of sleep makes up for twelve hours of Counterstrike. I fell asleep shortly after cancelling the movie last night, and I slept straight through for a good 11 hours. Then I rolled over and get another two hours. I am refreshed. I still haven’t put my desktop back into place yet, though. I think that yesterday pretty much was enough counterstrike for the next month.

Today, so far, I’ve had breakfast and I caught Theo (who is in Iraq) online while I am at home for the frst time in a long time. Although his internet connection isn’t the best (he drops offline periodiclly), it is good to be able to talk to a friend even when he is so far away.