…is probably the only class I’ve ever had in which the professor skips more than I do….
Oct 29
CS3210
GA Tech, Get Your Dork On, Grumbling
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Oct 23
I need to stop with the squirrel stories
GA Tech, Randomness
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Today I was going to the student center and then to physics. I was walking through the courtyard outside between my building and 6th Street east. And in the grass beside 6th street was a squirrel, standing up. Entirely motionless. And his little paws were curled into fists, and his arms were curled in, kinda….it was like a body builder pose. And the little guy stared me down. He did. I slowed down to look at him cause he was just sitting there not moving. His little friend was a few feet away rustling through the grass. But not him. He just watched me go by slowly, turning his head to stare.
I’m kind of a wuss. I’m sure I must be scared of people staring me down if I was scared of an 8 inch squirrel standing there staring me down.
But I got out of physics lab in a mere two hours. And everything worked this week. And I was the last person out except for the TA. I hate physics.
Oct 21
More squirrels!
GA Tech, Randomness
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Today I saw 4 squirrels playing together under a tree. They were frolicking about without a care in the world. And then one ran straight up a tree cause he (or she…probably she) was being chased. And then I realized that hey, these aren’t insects, or reptiles, these are mammals. How come they can run straight up trees and we can’t?
So I started thinking about being a squirrel (physics does strange things to my mind).
So I started thinking about um, that cartoon….uh…The Sword in the Stone. Where Merlin turned them into squirrels and they went scurrying around the forest. And then Merlin sang a song or something about the girl squirrel trying to get with Arthur. It was all fun and games until the old fat woman squirrel tried to get Merlin. And then it was all over and Merlin turned them back into people.
Which just goes to show you that wizards aren’t all that wise. And they’re hypocrites.
Gandalf is pretty cool though.
Oct 14
Brand Spankin’ New
Get Your Dork On, Site Changes
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OK, if you haven’t noticed….I have a new website. You can get to the old one at oldsite.progoth.com, but a lot of it probably will be broken. But I’m not worried about it.
I imported some of my more interesting news articles from the old site.
It took me 2 or 3 weeks to do this new site, working when I wasn’t doing school or work stuff.
If you care about details, the new site is written in php (obviously). I have one file, index.php, that has the layout and holds the information about what other pages exist. Then I made *.php.inc files for all the pages you see, specified by index.php?page=whatever. They have printTitle(), printSummary(), and printPageContent() methods that are called by the index, and then they can have their own functions to do their thing. I handled protected pages by putting them in a password protected subdirectory (such as /administration/), and symlinking to /index.php in each one. I wrote it to be flexible, so when I moved the new site from /~Progoth/beta/ to the main location, all I had to do was change one line at the top of index.php for all the css and images and whatnot to work.
I also converted all of my MySQL stuff to use PostgreSQL, a much more advanced open source database.
Pretty much the only thing I didn’t rewrite for the new site (that I actually kind of care about) is the ability to update information on site users. But, out of >160 users and 2 years of using the usermanager, I’ve used the Update feature a total count of Never times. So I figured it wasn’t worth it:)
Oct 11
Slow Going
Site Updates
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I never really realized how much code supports progoth.com. I have tons of (pretty bad) Perl code holding progoth.com together, and now that I’m doing a mass conversion to PHP….it’s taking a while.
So anyway, I got a user manager pieced together, and the new Apply for Access page works. I also added a feature I should have done years ago, which is the ability to look up your login from your username or email address. It’s accessible from the Apply for Access page.
Oct 06
Mensa
Get Your Dork On, Randomness
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I got a letter from Mensa a few days ago. Entitled “Notices: Ready To Join Mensa?”.
It’s supposed to be an organization of geniuses. Geniusii. Something. And they can’t even title their emails correctly. Shouldn’t that be “Ready to Join Mensa?”, with a lower-case ‘T’ in ‘To’?
So they’re asking me to take a $30 test to see if I can join. I already emailed them asking if my score on the WAIS was good enough to join, to which I received a positive response. I assume that’s where they got my email address, anyway.
So they want me to send them $30 for a test I don’t need, and then they want me to pay them every year for a chance to….um….what? I still have no idea what they’re all about. I just wanted something that might look good on a resumé…
Oct 02
Um…
GA Tech, Randomness
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Oct 02
New Site (kinda)
Get Your Dork On, Site Changes
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Yeah, I’m not really into the whole website thing. Not anymore, I guess. But I had to renew my domain today, and I did. So I guess that calls for something.
I decided that that something will be a new site design.
This design was made for me freshman year, it’s a great design. But it’s old. Half of the links probably don’t work. Lumpy promptly lost the images used to make the menus, so I can’t change them. So I’m going for something lower bandwidth, easier to maintain, simpler, standards-compliant, and, unfortunately, boring.
Since I can’t design websites, I started at Open Source Web Design, a resource I discovered while checking out Ogg Theora. So I took a design, made it XHTML1-transitional, separated colors and styles into CSS, did some tweaking, and ended up with a base design for the site. You can look at it here. Next on my list is to write code to support it through Perl, PHP, or maybe even Python, probably with some SSI, so I can make an easy-to-maintain-and-update site.
And here’s a picture of my newly cleaned and layed-out desk, with me making this entry and working on the new site…
