Category: Technical

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]

General Meta Technical

Trains and planes

Server is back as of a few minutes ago (thanks Kevin!)

So I’ve been car hunting the past few days so I can actually get to a job. Its pretty crazy what people are trying to sell around here. Now I’ve never bought a car before, but from the classifieds I read in today’s “Lawrence Ledger” people are either overly hopeful, or just plain naive.

MITSUBISHI GALANT LS ’01
$7,500. Excellent condition, leather, full power, bone color, sunroof. 112, 000 highway miles.

Sigh. I’m new to this whole car scene, but something about 112,000 miles in ~three years doesn’t sound too great.

Otherwise things at home are just like normal. Not too much to do until more friends get back. Applying for jobs is going as expected; there’s a position in Cendant Mortgage doing some HCI + web development that looks reasonably enticing.

It’s weird applying for jobs there because you’re only allowed the ‘privelege’ of talking to a computer. I filled out a lot of info online, sent them a résumé, and now…I’m supposed to wait. I have this suspicion that I’m just another row in a database table waiting for some HR guy to SELECT me out. Its all faceless and automated. Guess that’s the way the future is going to be…

Meta Technical

Site downtime

This site might be down for a while while RIT performs “annual maintenance” of the power system.
When I moved the server last week the grub boot config was iffy – hopefully my fixes have worked.