Month: July 2005

A misty fug

So yeah, Borders last Friday at midnight, buying that highly popular book. With the rest of those robe and lightning bolted kids. I’m not embarassed, although I felt out of place standing way above even the parents. I got to be lucky customer number 477, receiving my lucky treasure at ~2:30 AM. And although the Border’s crew is usually overtly helpful and nice, they were tight lipped about how many copies they receieved. From the looks of the line, at least 500.
So the popular series draws a little closer to the end…and…

HARRY DIES!

Edit: To avoid a potential spoiler skip the next paragraph. But there aren’t any names mentioned either, just hints.

I finished it last night. This time around I was pleased to find things had become quite a bit more mature for a supposedly ‘junior’ novel series, with more plausible tensions and a quite significant death. No, not Harry, but someone rather important. It was quite unexpected at the time but upon reflection it will certainly help the last book’s thrill factor. Good for JK that she gets away with all of these PG-13 things in this day and age.

Regardless of how people feel about Harry Potter, I think JK is deserving of some praise. Absconding with my idealistic seeds away from the pervasive big car/fast food/short-lived marriage culture, my views of the future generation gravitate towards the cynical. But JK, you’ve turned an entire generation of kids on to reading. You had to compete with PlayStation and HDTV, and won square and fair.

I wonder what book will have me lining up at midnight next time.

A Picture Of Nectar

It’s just so endearingly cool when software from the open source side of the fence gets really cool like this.

When I returned from the Grand Canyon I setup the trip website gallery for everyone who wanted to contribute (the stuff nerds love to do). Having used Gallerybefore, I simply installed it again knowing it would work well for our needs. Later I found out about Coppermine, an even more feature-packed web gallery, designed for integration with phpBB or other forum software. I briefly considered moving the Gallery install over to Coppermine, but even though the install went great decided to KISS for my users.

Wow. I just installed Gallery 2 beta 3 on a whim, and it’s just day and night between Gallery 1 and 2. It’s DOS vs. Mac OS X, the differences are just that profound. They’ve moved over to a MySQL architecture instead of flat-files, and have improved the coding internals for more abstraction/extensibility. But since I’m an interface junkie, I appreciated the installer/administration/UI changes the most. Instead of navigating between ugly tabbed pages that smack of coder “design”, you get a very slick graphical, intuitive experience. Instead of throwing around various PHP technicalities and demanding server/Apache know-how from Joe Hapless, the installer finally takes care of everything it possibly can ala WordPress. Whereas Gallery 1 returns you to the “installer” pages when you want to change settings, 2 has a handy sidebar-driven interface that is much clearer.

My hat is off to you, Gallery 2 guys, excellent work on another polished LAMP offering.

Technical

Quality Control, Apple?

Apple really is finding itself embroiled in more than a few lawsuits these days. Once, I would have chalked such legal issues up to the Apple user culture. Back when I was a Maclot, I felt entitled to a more competitive degree of quality what with the significant extra costs going Apple entails, but these days evidence indicates there simply are quite pervasive quality issues Apple needs to work out.

Back in 2001 Apple initiated a power adapter recall for more than 500,000 power adapters sold between 1998 and 2000. According to the Consumer Product Safety Division, the adapters could get too hot, causing fires and what have you. I had a 1999 WallStreet that fell into this category, and happily receieved a replacement adapter at Apple’s cost. I didn’t think much of it either, chalking it up to an Apple fluke. (Incidentally, the power adapter I receieved was an iBook yo-yo style adapter that didn’t really fit the PowerBook. It looked like someone had used a pair of pliers to pry the width of the plug out a bit so it would fit into the PowerBook, leaving an ugly gap in the plug.)

Fast forward to 2005. Recently in the mail, I received two district court documents from California. It turns out that Apple is being hit quite hard with class action lawsuits, one regarding the iPod, the other a power adapter fiasco redux. Even more telling are the lawsuit settlement notices that greet every visitor to apple.com. The iPod lawsuit is about (surprise surprise) the battery replacement issues, the other that the replacement power adapter also failed.

Beleagured? Hardly. The iPod has proven to be hugely successful, with more iPods sold than Macs.

Co-op Technical Web Design

The Corporate Life

So I’ve been working at my summer job. Similar to most reasonable people, I like telemarketing about as much as Marmite (that is to say, not very much at all). However, I do get to work on their website code, which is currently absolutely abysmal. Things like the same stylesheet declared twice or unused inline styles in every page is quite sloppy, so it’s been satisfying cleaning things out. The only irritating aspect of the job is the awful fonts and dated layout which I’m supposed to live with. I’m not allowed to change the page layout because it’s “been approved” by the high ups. Blech.

Of course this means I’m replacing all the yucky table code with CSS. Don’t tell anyone, they won’t notice I’ve been coding the layout because it will look exactly the same, but now pass W3 validation. I hope I can fudge that layout rule at least a little bit though, the navigation bar I made for the top is about 100x nicer than that awful splotchy Goosebumps font.

P.S. If you ever come across an opportunity to use a PCI video card with an already-installed AGP card, save yourself three hours of Googling and hand wringing. Set the PCI card to be the “Primary” in the BIOS and everything will just work. Kind of like a Mac.
[nerd quotient: fulfilled]

Vacation

Shifting gears

It’s been an interesting readjustment to modern life since living for so long on the Colorado river. It was a great trip, complete with steak dinners, daily morning douses of the Colorado, and the call of the Groover (don’t ask). Coming back to the ‘real world’ feels unusual since I haven’t been on any trip where society is so disconnected. You literally see nothing but the others on the trip and the occasional raft trip on your journey. Every campsite is just as if you were the first there – no litter or obviously human marks. The string quartet was wonderful, playing in the plentiful natural amphitheaters the side canyon walls create, and hikes were just right. Deer Creek was beautiful as always, and the stars! Honestly, light pollution really hides a lot of sheer and sudden beauty right above our heads. I can’t recommend just looking up enough, its truly amazing.

It actually turned out First Lady Laura Bush had decided to go on the same raft trip at the same time, launching a commercial/private trip with ~15 friends and daughter Jenna about an hour before we left. Our boats caught up with her trip a few times but of course weren’t allowed to even breathe at her. Perhaps understandable, considering our guide’s boats had bumper stickers pronouncing ‘Anyone but Bush.’ Our string quartet did get to play for her, lucky coincidence.

Anyway I’ve put up a Gallery install here for trip members to upload their pictures. Dad and I took 1.032 GB pictures/video with our memory cards combined, and they are all being filtered, organized, and ogled appropiately. They should be up Real Soon Now.

Update 12/2009: when I moved to alternative hosting a while back this Gallery install didn’t make the trip. The photos are still around though, just no longer online. If you’d like me to put them back up please contact me.