Site Updates, and the ConMan...

It's not going to be my normal practice to mention every little thing I do to tweak this site, but today is an exception.

In the last few weeks or so, I've tweaked the search function, and added some links to interesting blogs of my friends.

I also added a news feed from space.com. Dunno yet if I'm gonna keep it, but for now, there it is. I've not written much yet about space exploration, and our need as a species to get up off out lazy asses and out into the galaxy where we belong, but it's on my very long To-Do List, so there you have it.

I'm still struggling with the reeking M$ tool for embedding fonts, WEFT, which shoulda been called Whiff, as it stinks and misses. Hopefully someday I'll get it to work. As of now, it just crashes when I run it, and/or tells me my fonts, which work just fine in every app I use them in, are corrupt.

If anyone has had any luck with getting this steaming pile of code to work, let me know what the magic words are, OK? I've been wandering in the wasteland of the M$ Knowledge Base and the WEFT documentation for weeks now looking for clues, to no avail. You should be seeing this, in my dreams, anyway, with a font called "Graphos". Do me a favor, and go download it from somewhere. A quick google tells me you can get it from several places. I just picked a random one for you.

On a somewhat related note, if you wanna send me a screen shot of how you're seeing this site, that'd be OK with me, particularly if you have a Mac, as I don't have one to test it with. Send it here. I've pretty much coded the site for a 800x600 screen resolution, as it's text-intensive, and if I let the brower resize the table to fit a wider screen, the line lengths are so long as to make reading difficult. The eye loses it's place returning to the beginning of the next line. A truly logical language would alternate left-to-right with right-to-left characters, but it's waaay too late to start a crusade to fix that. I've set the typeface fairly large to increase readability, and tried to pick a fairly high contrast color scheme, but one that still doesn't have the high level of eye fatigue caused by the brightness of plain black text on a white background. I want you wandering around here for hours, dammit!

As you may have noticed, this site isn't about setting trends in design, flash stuff, and eye candy, but about writing. I'm trying to make the site easy to read, easy to navigate, and fast to load. Everything else is tied for last place. I do use pics, when they are part of the story.

Last night I added a feature that the stone cold ubergeeks at antville have mentioned implementing some day, but haven't had time for yet - an email alert system for when the site is updated. Join the list, and a bot'll send you an email when there is a significant new entry. This is a feature I love on the blogs I read, as I don't have to wander around seeing who's been writing, and who's been on vacation from the keyboard. I am a laaaaaazy dude.

This service was coded by, and courtesy of, my buddy Captain Napalm, who is, without a doubt, one of the smartest goddam ubergeeks I've ever met, and I've known quite a few in 20+ years of screwing around with these silicon beasties. Read a few of his more technical journal entries, and you'll see what I mean. This maniac wrote his own operating system in college when he got bored sitting around the computer science lab, where he was, of course, maintaining the school networks.

His operating code ethics are to write stuff that is clean, bug-free, fast, secure, and concise. As such, he tends to eschew more modern, resource intensive languages, in favor of old-fashioned stuff like C and assembler. His stuff runs like lightning. He's hosting a dozen or more websites on an old machine than most programmers would give to their nephew, that is, if they didn't really like the nephew.

Since he's already written the code, iffn you like this nifty feature, and you ask him real nice, he might let you have it for a song, I dunno, I haven't asked him. And if anyone out there needs the Ubergeek Code Warrior From Hell for a project, you owe it to yourself to contact him. I ain't lyin'.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I didn't write an operating system in college (although I did want to, and I still have the design notes). I did, hoever, write my own language for fun, and did use it for work (I worked in the math department for a psychologist---don't ask) and for a class project (a programmable Unix shell).

The school's network was maintained by a seperate department (that no one liked, but that's another story); all I was responsible for were a few computers in the math department (student programmer and admin for said psychologist). Still, I did help out the CS department on some serious breakins (early 90s), and disassembled a computer virus that was going through the campus (late 80s). That was fun.

I eschew the more modern, resource intensive languages primarily because my server is one that no one in their right mind would use (well, maybe for a firewall these days). Also, I don't particularly care for Perl or Python (for asthetic reasons) but I did like Java when I used it. Right now I'm exploring Lisp, which is the second oldest high level language ever developed and still kicks most other langauges today.

-spc (Oh, and Marcus, you never met my friend Mark. I'm a newbie compared to him 8-)