Thursday, August 30
Testing, testing...
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11:28 AM
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be able to use all of this theme builder goodness?Wednesday, August 29
The problem with my Western Digital drive turns out to be heat sensitive: It acts up when it gets cold. Because when it gets cold, my heating kicks in (actually a reverse-cycle air conditioner) and the voltage dips for a moment. The baby power supply that came with the drive doesn't have enough smoothing to cope with that, and the drive goes bye-bye. The weather has warmed up over the last week or so, and I've stopped having problems.
Of course, in a couple of months I'm going to want to run the air conditioning the other way, so before then I'm going to invest in a small UPS.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:20 PM
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Monday, August 27
Oh man. No question, Potemayo is the pick of the current season.
I worried after the first episode that the joke would get tired. But Potemayo turns out to be so not the one-joke series.
Highly recommended.
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12:44 AM
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Sunday, August 26
A quick demo of the new layouts and automatically generated banners and footers.
Clicky:
The annoying thing about the theme switcher is that it only works in Internet Explorer in strict mode, and only works in Firefox and Safari in quirks mode. (Opera works either way.) The themes themselves work fine in any browser in either mode, but the Javascript switcher exposes some interesting issues.
Actually, there's one Javascript function required to make the themes work if you have a footer; I'll have to make sure that works in strict mode.
Now I just need to sleep for about twelve hours and then bundle everything up and install it.
Update: Bah. The footer controller doesn't work in strict mode. The banner switcher works fine, but you'd expect it to.
Bumped and updated: Now works in strict mode in Mozilla and Safari. Yay! (I was doing something dumb.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:18 PM
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Saturday, August 25
Ubuntu Studio is a new Linux distro, based on Ubuntu and packaged with a whole suite of audio and video editing applications. This is great, because while some of these applications are very powerful, they are also a huge pain in the arse to install.
What's not so great is that their web site has been down for the past two weeks, and possibly longer.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:00 PM
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Tick - autocrop function works. (This does some reasonably intelligent scaling and cropping of the source image for your banners and footers, rather than just stretching them to fit.)
Tick - new image macro form. (Banners, footers, lolcats, motivators, and simple captions currently.)
Just a few more boxes to tick off and I can get this whole huge bundle of stuff out the door. Look for it very soon.
Tick - applets work. You can create an applet and share it with other meenuvians.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:19 PM
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Friday, August 24
I turned off my old Firewire external drive to see if the power supply is compatible with the flaky Western Digital drive. It isn't. So I turned it back on, and it went skwik skwik skwik skwik skwik skwik skiwk.
Bah.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:07 PM
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I think this line is hungry:
m.rect((r,0,w-r,r),color='white',opacity=100)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:36 AM
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Thursday, August 23
Fire, die in a, likewise.
Update: Okay, I'll withdraw that. You can just get unpleasant blisters in your sensitive parts.
Two things in your favour: While zoom mode breaks automatic reflow, turning off zoom makes it work again. Second, the doctype
HTML PUBLIC "IE-IS-A-COW" works to turn off quirks mode.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:51 PM
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CSS remains as retarded as ever, but I've managed to more-or-less defeat it.
The new layouts will break under certain specific circumstances:
- You are using a footer, and
- You are doing custom DOM manipulation with Javascript (and fail to call the provided function to update the layout) or
- You modify the CSS to be variable rather than fixed width and the user resizes the browser window. (I can fix this one.)
Apart from that, I think they work pretty well. I'll have to test them some more and maybe add a couple of event handlers; I'll post the results tonight so you can see them.
I'm not going to make tomorrow's meeting now, since I still have to install the whole thing and parameterise the CSS, but there are no more roadblocks. There can't possibly be; there's no more road.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:04 PM
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The great strength of CSS is that it separates layout from content.
The great weakness of CSS is that it does nothing of the fucking sort.
To get complex layouts to work, you have to either (a) create your content so that it is aware of the layout, using relative positioning and appropriately ordered divs, or (b) create your layout so that is aware of the content, using absolute positioning and either fixed content sizes or Javascript to calculate stuff.
In short, CSS brings the rich layout of print to the web... Along with the dynamism and flexibility of print.
(I wouldn't be so cross except that I promised to demo the layout module to my business partner tomorrow, after postponing several times, and the layouts refuse to lay out. Grrr!
)
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02:42 PM
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Die in a fire.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:35 PM
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Remember this?
Well, now it has a twin.
This is the GA-G33M-S2H. It uses Intel's G33 chipset for socket 775 CPUs (i.e. Core 2 Duo). It has much the same featureset as the socket AM2 GA-MA69GM-S2H: Up to 8GB of memory, four SATA 3Gb/s drives (including one eSATA port), 2 IDE drives, gigabit ethernet, twelve USB 2.0 ports and three Firewire ports; 7.1+2 sound and optical and coax S/PDIF in and out (with optional bracket); VGA, DVI-D and HDMI video outputs (though you can only run one digital and one analog output simultaneously); PCIe x16 and x1 slots and two PCI slots. And serial, parallel, floppy, keyboard and mouse, though you need to get optional brackets for the serial and parallel ports.
So now I'm looking at getting one each AMD and Intel; one for Windows and one for Linux, as I did back in 2003. But spending far less money for far faster systems.
The only problem is the shortage of SATA ports on these boards. I thought I'd found a cheap 2+2 port SATA/eSATA PCIe card, which would have solved that problem nicely. Turns out its more of a 2-2 card; it's really just a 2-port card with external sockets wired in parallel with the internal ones. Bleh. I can get a proper 2+2 card; HighPoint make them. But they cost twice as much as the motherboard itself, more even than this beastie:
Which has ten, count them, ten SATA ports (9 internal and one external). And two full PCIe x16 slots, and two PCI-X slots, and two PCIe x1 slots, and a PCI slot, and dual gigabit ethernet, and 10 USB, 2 Firewire, etc etc. It doesn't have built-in video, but this board plus a 512MB 8500GT is actually cheaper than the all-in-one board plus the HighPoint SATA card.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:40 AM
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Creator of the entire mecha genre and the magical girl transformation sequence. Which leads us, in 2007, to this.
My brain, it is melted.
more...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:15 AM
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That Western Digital drive I bought that was playing up when connected to my desktop PC? I plugged it into my notebook. Doesn't work properly there either.
It runs fine for (some period), and then just decides to quietly go offline.
Ungood.
Update: I wonder if it's the power supply? Remember Pixy's Law of Random Breakage: A flaky power supply can look like any other fault.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:42 AM
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After some discussion last week, I held off on deploying the theme builder (that is, the style/layout/banner wizard) until I'd implemented the full initial set of features. That's finally nearly done:
More tomorrow.
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12:38 AM
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Wednesday, August 22
[def colorpicker]
<script language="Javascript">
var o_{1}_{2}color = new IColorPicker("o_{1}_{2}color");
o_{1}_{2}color.onPickColor = new Function("document.getElementById('{1}_{2}color').style.backgroundColor=o_{1}_{2}color.color;document.getElementById('{3}').value=o_{1}_{2}color.color;");
o_{1}_{2}color.RENDER();
</script>
<input type="hidden" id="{3}" name="{3}" />
<span id="{1}_{2}color"
style="border:black 1px solid; background-color:[altstyle2.{3}];"> </span>
<input type="button" value="Choose"
onclick="o_{1}_{2}color.show(this);
event.cancelBubble=true;"
id="{1}_{2}colorbutton" name="{1}_{2}colorbutton" />
[/def]
Nested template functions with embedded Javascript inside a table inside a form. Eww.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:02 PM
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Monday, August 20
Zzzzz... Eep! Type type type tyypp zzz... Eep! Typetypetype...
Tired. Upset tummy last night - still a bit twitchy, though fortunately nothing like before. Then trying to wrap up what turned out to be two days worth of work today, which worked about as well as you'd expect.
What I'm working on is the style/layout/image wizard thingy, a.k.a. theme builder. It's nearly ready, but there are so many options (literally, hundreds), screens, functions, and interactions that it's taking a leetle longer than I had anticipated. Plus CSS templates are a real joy to work with. Just like, well, CSS itself.
I'll be installing it on my blog tomorrow to check it against the live environment, and then release it shortly after that.
On the other hand, I worked out how to prevent my external disk from going to sleep: I put μTorrent's download directory there.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:06 PM
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I'm out of disk space (as usual), so I stopped by my local HiFi store and bought a 500GB Destern Wigital MyBook ES. 'Cause it's actually cheaper to buy that than to buy a bare drive and a cheap external case from my usual online computer store.
It looks good. It's fast. It's effectively silent. It has both USB and eSATA. And it keeps falling asleep.
That in itself is not a problem. Having an external drive spin down when not in use is probably a good idea for most people.
The problem is twofold: One, you can't tell it not to spin down. Two, whenever this happens, Windows goes nuts. I get a barrage of "Delayed Write Failed" errors, despite the fact that I've disabled write caching on that drive, and the only way I can get Windows to recognise the drive again is to turn it off and on again, which is less than ideal.
So I had to write a little script in Cygwin to access the drive every five seconds. Originally it was every minute, but that didn't actually suffice to keep the little beasty awake.
I think that part of the problem is USB support on my elderly motherboard, which dates to 2003. I've had problems with other USB drives, but never a hiccup with my Firewire external drive.
Time for a new computer.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:24 AM
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Sunday, August 19
You can order by a case statement.
Well, why didn't you say so?!
I'm working on the layout & style manager, which supports cascading styles. So I need to pick up the default style settings, overlay that with the default settings for your blog, and overlay that with the settings for the current page. There are a couple of tricks on top of that - you can enable or disable the customisation of the style for any block or area - but it at least makes the queries really easy.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:16 PM
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Friday, August 17
Part one of the theme builder - the part that does fancy banners as seen above - is installed, though I haven't activated it for everyone.
Parts two and three, which handle layouts and styles respectively, will go in tomorrow. That brings the total number of colour options available to 104.
That's not 104 different colours; that's 104 different things for which you can specify the colour. Each with a little popup colour selector.
Also, you can spell it "color" and it still works.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:18 PM
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I was testing the new theme builder module on my test box (a good place for that sort of thing). It seems to work well, except that the first thing it does is rename and deactivate your header, footer, and banner templates and replace them with the new standard versions.
Which I haven't actually set up yet.
One good point: Turns out the system is actually still usable with the header, footer and banner templates all missing.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:37 AM
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Thursday, August 16
Okay, that looks a bit weird, but it actually worked.
Also de-tableized the banner.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:56 PM
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Don't know when I'm going to get back to the fansubbing, but in the meantime, here's some Kei and Yuri for you.
Wednesday, August 15
Okay, the ad / no ad switch works fine, except now Floofy has no ears.
So I'll change the banner.
Update: You know what? That looks pretty good. I need to fiddle with the rest of the page style a bit to make it match, but that banner design I'm actually happy with.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:46 PM
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