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.

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!

After work yesterday, I returned home grabbed this laptop and my desktop, along with various peripherals, and headed to Erik’s for a LAN party. It had started at noon, and I planned on staying until midight or so, but due primarily to a large amount of Counterstrike playing I ended up staying there until 6:00am. I managed to make it back to my place around seven, when I fell fast asleep after setting ym alarm for 10:30. I got up around then, and though not totally lucid, was able to get myself (with my brother’s driving) to frisbee. Being outside, and the sun, and the activity woke me up, and managed to keep me awake, along with a nice shower afterwards, all through a very productive inagural TRC Hack Session. We had four people show up, with another four deferring their initial visits because of the aforementioned LAN party. Others may become involved as well. At the hack session, we talked about the SRS’s mini grand challenge, and about how we wanted to not only teach but also learn together during these hack sessions. Then Bobby took it away talking about microcontrollers. He began to explain binary numbers, and we went into the topic fairly in depth, and then began talking about logic gates. We then starting working out a system of logic gates to do simple addition of two binary digits. I’ve never done that before, and I found it imensely interesting. Fortunately, the others seemed to handle it pretty well. We made it to looking at circuit diagrams before we broke for dinner. During dinner, we talked about ideas for the bigger project, but by the end it was apparent that we needed a lot more work on the details before we have a good chance at looking at the big picture. While I managed to last all the way thourgh dinner, as I was droping people off afterwards, I began feeling the effects of staying up until 7:00 and then having fulls days of activities on 3 hours of rest. I even got so far as planning a movie with Dan, before deciding it was better that I cancel because I didn’t think I could survive until midnight tongiht. In fact, with this post, I think I’ll be falling asleep.

Email fun
Yesterday I modified my aliases file to send mail both to my mailbox on silverfir and to my gmail account. Its quite nice to access my main mail live while at work and whatnot, a d I’m noticing myself almost liking gmail better than thunderbird. Its hard to beat Thunderbird’s offline capabilities though, so I’ll keep it around at least to store all my mail locally.

Work
Work was good. I had two big stacks of boxed Flics than my head when I was done. Good stuff. I also sent out additional Gmail invites to members of the TRC that wanted it. Just another perk of the club. I don’t know how many invitations are normal, but I’ve had 14 given to me so far. Some people thought that there were usually a lot fewer than this. Anyone else have info on this?

After Work
I left just after 5, and tried to find a Big Five in Kirkland. The directions (Frm QwestDex.com) were crap, and I ended up on NB 405 again. So I turned around at 160th and just went to Gart Sports in Downtown Bellevue. There, I was mistaken for the store manager before I found out that they didn’t have any normal frisbees. I did get an interesting LED nightglow Disc out of the deal though. And ome cones. That might be nice at the next game. The reason for all this hoopla is that I was teaching (or just coaching really) a youth group my mom works with on frisbee techniques. Although it was the first time for a lot of them, many showed some good potential. They were invited to Saturday Ultimate at Robinswood park.

FireFox 0.9
I haven’t really had enough time to test it out extensively, but except for the ABSOLUTE CRAP default theme, it seems to be pretty good.

Belkin Sux
My brother not-so-recently bought a Belkin 54g wireless ethernet bridge. Except for absolutely sucking like no other, its very nice looking. Don’t buy anything from Belkin EVER, except maybe cables. My USB hub from them is a piece of junk as well. Well, I wanted to transfer some mp3s I had just ripped from my Santana CD to the hard drive on the desktop. And it was taking forever using the linksys WET11. So I swaped out for the Belkin. Well, its fast… at least 10 times faster in throguhput it seems. But, well, it seems to die once about every minute. The connection goes kaput. The more packets you try to stuff through, the worse it gets. So probally most of you will have trouble getting this page. But thats ok, it will only give me more incentive to get this darn house wired.

Goodnight, folks
Yay, overuse of subtitles.