Off-Hook

I love hardware. I’m currently *slowly* building my own pc. Got the whole thing spec’d out with pricing from newegg and zipzoomfly (formerly “googlegear”). Currently, I have very little, which includes the case, some fans, a power supply (which will be upgraded), a floppy drive and a nice hardware-based modem (Linux-friendly, of COURSE!!!). Anyways, I am constantly updating my list, usually with prices, but twice now I’ve had to update the DVD burner due to NEC. They regularly outdo themselves by outpacing the market, yet somehow keeping their retail prices at or below market average. I wouldn’t bother blogging about it, except that this last upgrade is so far above and beyond the rest of the market… Well I just HAD to holler about it!

The NEC ND-3500a burns dvd+/-r at 16x!!! It still burns dvd+/-rw at only 4x, like its predecessor, the 2510a, but it burns dvd+r9 (dual layer media) at 4x, too! That’s almost twice the speed of any of its competitors. Oh yeah– What about cd burning speeds, you ask? How about cd-r at 48x and cd-rw at 24x?! As if all that wasn’t good enough, it’s a 16x DVD reader, too (the burners typically read a little slower than non-burners, which currently max out at 16x)! The list of compatible media seems almost endless, and firmware updates can actually increase speeds in the future! I can’t say enough good about NEC. All this, and they still charge less than $100 for this monster on newegg! Well, it’s on my list, and it’s gonna take some SERIOUS moves by the competition to knock it off. Way to go NEC!

Finally passed a couple milestones in the church website yesterday and last night. Some tricky code, but it works and it’s W3C standards compliant.

Unfortunately, Internet Explorer is NOT! Even more unfortunate is the fact that most of the site’s readers probably use IE. Oh well, I’m not going to push good standards and write redundant code just to make something look in IE as good as it looks in gecko-based browsers (that includes Netscape, Mozilla and Firefox– not counting Mac versions like Camino).

Here’s the deal– I used “onclick” and “showdiv/hidediv” code with some related javascript to create a page that allows you to reveal hidden text by clicking a letter. Sure, you can do this with anchor code (a href, a name, etc.), but apparently, anchor code and show/hidediv javascript don’t play so well together in IE, so I stick with the original simple span and it works. Thing is– When you mouse over the letter that, on click, reveals the associated text, nothing special appears to identify it as a link. Typically, you expect to see your cursor change into a pointing finger or something else and the text underneath to change in some way (color, underline, etc.). Well, that’s typical of anchor code, not simple spans.

Here’s something cool, though! Apparently with css2, you can assign values to “span” that can make it look like typical anchor links! In the css, it looks something like this:

span:hover {

cursor: pointer;

text-decoration: underline;

}

You can get the cursor: pointer style to show up inline with the rest of your html on the same page with the content, too, by assigning the style in the span, like this:

[span style="cursor:pointer"]F[/span] (replace ][ with appropriate symbols)

Done appropriately, it makes this look like a link

Now the silly part– IE, being non-compliant with css2 standards, doesn’t know what to do when the above code is referenced in a css (like that in {} brackets above), so it does nothing, but the links still work and do their job, you just don’t see the change in text on mouseover, nor the change in cursor.

I figure it’s better, overall, to be standards-compliant, so I’m not including the inline style, which won’t allow me to assign the change in text on mouseover (like underline or color change, etc.). Besides, the code is redundant since it is also in the css, so it’s out.

Bottom line, the hide/showdivs trick works in any browser, but it looks better in gecko-based browsers than in IE. Oh well, I’m still happy, and I’d rather toy with the notion of putting up a disclaimer on the site that says “this site best viewed with internet standards compliant browsers” than “this site best viewed in Microshaft Internet Exploder.”

GET COMPLIANT, IE!

I’m so glad that yesterday isn’t today or tomorrow, I’d call in sick.

What an awful time trying to make things work! All day I’m working on trying to organize a schedule to get bulk downloads for our LNP database over the next couple weeks or so and can’t really seem to work it out, so I had to give up. I was also working on the church’s website and thought my friend and I had accomplished an elegant page of “hidden divs.” Looked very professional, actually. Would have been wonderful if it worked in gecko-based browsers AND mosaic-based… I’m not gonna say that’s back to square one, but we’re gonna have a time finding the offensive code. What I mean by that browsers incompatibility I mentioned is that it works in Mozilla, but not Explorer (which doesn’t seem all that awful, since Explorer isn’t standards-compliant, anyway). Most folks still use Explorer, though, despite the government warning that it has built-in security risks, so this has to work in Explorer. I got some of the “ministries” page done, but gave up on it because of all the time I spent on this other page.

I got to leave feeling like I hadn’t really accomplished anything, yet managed to work hard all day. Such a great feeling. Couple this with attitude from the wife and you have a recipe for disaster. I ended up praying to be in a good mood, and that worked, of course, which allowed me to bail out the rest of the evening from being a total loss for me.

But hey– It’s a brand new day! Today, I’ll make that code work, or use different code, and I’ll get closer to finishing the ministries page, and I’ll have that LSMS bulk download schedule. Then I’ll leave ready to spend some quality family time with my wife and daughter at church.

If you’re a fan of interesting celebrity biographies, you’ll want to see this film. Anthony Hopkins convincingly portrays C.S. Lewis in the 40′s and 50′s (the plot summary on IMDB.com says the 30′s, but that’s incorrect). I also found this really interesting site about C.S. Lewis and his works, including the Chronicles of Narnia.

The movie drags a bit at first, but is very insightful about the relationship that so solidified his belief and strengthened his faith through adversity and heartbreak. It centers on his relationship with an American fan, Joy Gresham, whom he loved intensely and mourned until his death in 1963 (interesting note– he died on November 22, 1963, the same day Kennedy was assassinated). He was reknowned for his christian apologetic, “The Problem of Pain,” concerning pain and suffering before he met Joy, having been born to christian parents, embracing atheism in his youth, and becoming a christian, himself, in 1931 in part due to conversations with his brother and close friends, J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. Only after Joy’s death was his theology truly tested. Joy Gresham was jewish, but was an atheist for a while. She converted to christianity before she met Lewis (in part because of Lewis’ writings).

His intense love affair with his wife, Joy Gresham, was cut short by cancer, which also killed his mother. For the second time in his life, he was confronted with his beliefs and for the second time, he waivered, but in the end, his faith was strengthened and he wrote “A Grief Observed” under a pseudonymn to chronicle the experience and its impact on him. In the movie, Joy is credited with authorship of the line, “the happiness now is part of the pain then, that’s the deal,” during an outing in Ireland during which she means to remind him that there is a price for the joy they share, knowing that she has cancer and is going to die. He refrains this by the end of the movie in saying “the pain now is part of the happiness then, that’s the deal.” This is basically the theme of the movie.

There is also some rumor that a live-action movie based upon The Chronicles of Narnia is in preparation for production! For more news about this, see this site.

My wife’s message about our daughter’s first school day:

“Today our daughter officially started kindergarten. She was very excited about the first day of school! We got up early, I made eggs, sausage, and biscuits for breakfast, which she didn’t eat but about 3 bites of. Then she got dressed in what she’d picked out, a red polo and khaki pleated skort. (They have to wear uniforms.) When we drove up at school she jumped out of the truck and wanted to walk straight to her class without us! Her class is the very last one on the hallway closest to the playground. There are 19 kids in her class, from what I could tell more boys than girls, but they weren’t all there when we left. Our daughter shares a locker with a friend from her preschool, so she was happy about that. They were starting off the day watching a video of some puppets that the teacher had smaller versions of in her class. They all have a number next to their name, and that tells them what day they are the teacher’s helper, the leader, and get to have their nap in the special spot at the top of the reading platform. She was especially fascinated with the cafeteria –I’m sure that won’t last!”

“So she is officially a big girl now. It was hard to leave her there, but she seemed fine with us going, barely even waved or said bye. I wasn’t so fine, but that’s ok. I did take some regular pictures, and we borrowed a friend’s digital camera and took some. We didn’t get very many, because she didn’t want to pose, she was too interested in getting to her spot and checking out the other kids….she’s a little bit nosy – wonder where she gets that from!”

Well– I finally broke down and renewed my subscription to Norton. I feel like I just bought a full tank of gas for a big truck I’m going to trade in tomorrow for an electric car. You see, I’m building this new 64-bit box that I’ve carefully designed to be Linux-compatible. Yes, I’m a mandraker. Anyway, I won’t need av on this machine, and even if I did, there are some lovely open source firewalls and av freeware that are specifically designed for Linux (that is, they don’t have to be as heavy or secure as typical Windows-compatible software as it does not attract quite so many viruses).

Still– I had to do it. I have recently upgraded my connectivity to DSL and now have a big, open pipe to the internet. I’m currently using a firewall because I’ve had to NAT some ports in order to get some of my favorite utilities to work and to be able to remotely access my machine. Sure, I could use a secure, point-to-point ssh tunnel (my buddy, BlueKnightWriter, is gonna have to show me how to do that one of these days), but the indirect tcp should be secure enough with my firewall settings. Of course, I run all this by my networking buddies before committing to open ports.

Anyways, My original intention was to reformat my current machine when my new one is 100% built, updated, clocked and online. The old machine will go to my daughter. Now, of course, I’m having doubts about exposing my daughter to Windows. I’m not like all those other parents who figure if they had to suffer through it, their children should, too. I really really really want to get my daughter a nice, inexpensive IMAC. I’m actually looking forward to it (very much).

The daughter is in class right now at her first day of school (kindergarten)! What’s cool is that the school has IMACs everywhere you look! I’m hoping she’ll get used to that. I do intend to get her the MAC. Heck, I want one, too… though I’d prefer the laptop. Still– Pretty cool that my daughter may be introduced to MACs from day 1. I’ll have to post some pix when I get some. How time flies… My daughter’s very first day at school. Sometime later I’ll have to post my wife’s thoughts about that. She really has a way of delivering the visualization.

I love open source software. You can recompile it to fit the needs of your specific hardware, and that’s kinda important if you like to upgrade your machine’s hardware from time to time, but I’m preachin’ to the choir.

I have this one little problem with open source software. Constant updates and revisions. You know, there are a few freeware progs out there that go check, then tell you when your software is out of date (like Gaim).

But many other progs, like Irfanview, Filezilla, Filzip, Virtualdub, etc. can sit on your comp 5 or 6 updates behind without the slightest “hey– maybe you should just go check, it’s about that time” message. Consider this my official blogged request for autoupdate functionality on all open source software.

Not really upset, just frustrated…

A simply excellent quiz! I can’t believe I rated what I did– Really thought I’d end up as Mac or possibly even Windows (which would have made me a little upset, but not entirely surprised). Anyways– Take the quiz and have some fun!

Here’s my rating:

I LOVE this browser. If you haven’t already switched, do so immediately! I currently use both Firefox and Thunderbird (a standalone email client based on Mozilla Mail) and can never turn back. The customization features are incredible, including the ability to narrow down to 2 or even just 1 toolbar and still have full functionality (and that’s not even in fullscreen).

I’ve been using it since it was known as “Phoenix,” then it evolved into “Firebird,” and now “Firefox.” It truly gets better with each successive release, addressing bugs and integrating even more customization (not to mention its compliance with all W3C standards). There’s also a very active community on mozillazine where bugs can be addressed immediately. If I had to list all the advantages this browser has over, say, IE, I’d be writing all week.

If you try Firefox, I encourage you to install Stumbleupon. This is an incredible utility that takes websurfing to a whole new level. Imagine being able to put into an online database all your favorite subjects to surf (like Linux, Instant Messengers, Religion, etc.). Now imagine that a community of more than 10,000 other surfers all did the same. Everybody surfs from time to time, but “stumblers” remark on any site they find of particular interest and it is automatically catalogued according to the site’s subject matter (sourceforge.net is categorized as “open source” stuff). With the touch of the “stumble” button, you are whisked to sites that specifically match your interests, and you get to rate ‘em in order to further specify what kind of sites pop up when you stumble. The community is made up of “surfing blogs” that include some information about the stumbler and sites they like (and why, if you comment on sites). You collect an audience and friends with which you can identify other interest groups or interesting sites. It’s actually a little difficult to describe, but it is very addictive and seriously enhances the web experience. I can’t recommend it enough.

Another plugin must-have if you’re new to Firefox is Tabbrowser Extensions. This is an all-inclusive extension that allows you to browse pages using tabs. That way, instead of fumbling around with back and forward buttons or multiple browser windows, you can simply click on an internal tab to open or look at multiple sites. Just using this for a week or two and you will never be able to cruise again without them.

Anyways– That’s my evangelism for today. I’ll post the joy of some new freeware later (perhaps Irfanview, Winamp or TightVNC).

A friend sent me an email today with funny bumper sticker quotes. You know– We’ve all seen ‘em, but they get to be so typical (sometimes even a little crude) that we actually get desensitized to them and ignore ‘em all.

I’ll have to start paying attention again after seeing some of these. I won’t bore you with the entire list, let me just give you my 2 favorites (political, of course!):

“If We Quit Voting, Will They All Go Away?”

and

“Politicians And Diapers Both Need To Be Changed, And For The Same Reasons!”

Figured anyone could relate to those, democrat or republican, conservative or liberal.

Please read bumper stickers! Apparently, there’s a fresh batch out there that are truly clever and worth your notice.