DgtizeD

As is apparent, the layout has changed slightly, I re-constructed my theme around scribbish. I think it’s a bit cleaner then it was before, certainly looks nicer on the code end. It’s a nice update just prior to the final Typo 4.0 upgrade occuring as I type this message.

So last week St. Louis was hit by heavy storms, knocking out power, followed by 100 degree weather, followed by a repeat of heavy storms, knocking out power in even more areas (500 thousand or so at most I believe), and finally cooling down this weekend. Mostly it had no effect on me, as I did not lose power and neither did my place of work. It seems to have bothered quite a number of other people though. It’s interesting that this is the opposite problem of the ice-storm of ’97 in Maine. That happened at the start of january and knocked out power for weeks in some places — at a time when heating is very important. Here, power is knocked out in the middle of summer, at a time when air-conditioning is very important.

I took a few pictures of the dust at the beginning of the storm, I’ll see if I can’t post them at some point. It was a nice cold rain and since the back of my apartment is set back from it’s neighbors giving a bit of a barrier from the winds, I was entertained by running outside to be drenched by the rain. It’s always nice to do that after a being in the heat for too long.

I just upgraded to the trunk of typo again. Unfortuneatly it appears that broke my quote controller, which was why the site was down for a few days. However I think now my quotes code is slightly more robust. I still need to figure out a nice way to include it within the typo database instead of in db/quotes.yml.

On other fronts, I appear to be job hunting at the moment, though prospects for the summer at least seem to relatively good. The “where I am going to live for summer/fall” and “how I am going to graduate with a masters in december” problems both seem to have much less clear solutions at the moment. Not certain about fall employment either, though that is slightly less of a concern.

I aquired a fun new toy last week, a brand new Canon Digital Rebel XT, so hopefully some nice shots from that will be forthcoming presently.

I finally did some digital housekeeping I had meant to due for ages while procrastinating on various assignments. I reorganized all of my unix home directory dotfiles so they all live inside of a directory that is checked out of a SVN repository. Moving to a new box now involves a simple checkout of the code and running the setup.sh file to set up the symbolic links. It also exports a dotfile called .site-config into the home directory which exports information on where all the dotfiles are symlinked from. This allows me to let various auxiliary dotfiles remain inside of the source controlled directory. It also allows other programs like emacs to grab the location from the environment. I used to have a setup similar to this in which I just checked out the home directory itself, but that approach results in a number of annoying issues, chiefly namespace clobbering. When I get everything further along perhaps I will post it as an example. Most documentation one finds seems to describe how they setup there different dotfiles, but not how they manage them between hosts.

It’s probably one of those things that works best for the person that created it, but I would be curious to see how others have managed to solve this problem.

I hadn’t remember to run the validators at the bottom of my page recently. The result was rather amusing:

Haven’t released it to the community yet, but I recently created a quote sidebar component. I’ve been trying to figure out how to stick the quotes in a database instead of in a flatfile with yaml, but I’m not sure what there is for cross-database random selection of elements from mysql. It also makes an interesting question for the sidebar config admin system. It’s nice to be able to drag and drop components but should they all really be configured in the drag and drop interface? The most intelligent way to have a quotes configuration utility would be to add a new quote/author pair for every AJAX add. However that would make the quote entry in the sidebar config far, far too long. Perhaps there should be a way to select and order which sidebar entry to configure and then put the sidebar configuration off to the side?

I also need to determine how to reduce the complexity of the generated queries I am using for the the calendar sidebar entry as it winds up being a rather slow entry. It’s really an excellent example of a component that only needs to be re-rendered on an update or for looking at an older month so it shouldn’t be that slow, but I’m not quite sure how the auto-caching works and if it works well for this.

I somehow have developed an approximately five month backlog of photos that I need to post process. I love the extra quality and control I get from from Camera RAW format, however sometimes it makes things slower. In this case it’s an issue of perhaps too much artistic control. My workflow is not setup such that I can simply rapidly convert each image to the way I want. Each image I feel as if I need to adjust the shadow, contrast, exposure or color temperature, which are all also modified by choosing color or black and white for my proof copy.

There are alot of nice photos I have taken that I just need to sit down and process and at the very least post to flickr, however I never feel as if I have enough time to make a good dent into the backlog. Unfortuneatly since I keep taking pictures, the backlog keeps growing and the ability to make a dent in it grows smaller and smaller.

In other news, I adjusted my flickr display so it puts them side by side instead of all in a single line. Sometimes it looks weird but by and large I think it looks nicer.

I still need to upgrade to the super fancy version of the calender that was posted as a patch on typo.leetsoft.com, but it was loosely based on the calender system running on my version of typo. Unfortuneatly somewhere in my modification I had forgotten to include the critical piece of code that read:

[""] * (self.class.civil(year,month,1).wday)

Which needed to be prepended to the array of dates in the month to ensure the calender started on the right day of the week for each month. Perhaps sometime next week I will dissassemble the patch that followed mine since it doesn’t seem to work as a patch set anymore. It would be nice to have a calender with AJAXy goodness and all that nonsense.

calendar.rb
require 'date'
require 'enumerator'require ‘date’

require ‘enumerator’
class Date

  def days_in_month

    self.class.civil(year, month, -1).day

  end

  alias dim days_in_month
def weekdays
(1..dim).to_a
end
def cal_print
banner = ABBR_DAYNAMES.map{|d| d[0..1]}.join(‘ ’)
puts "#{MONTHNAMES[month]} #{year}".center(banner.size)
puts banner
wd = [‘ ’] * wday + weekdays
wd.each_slice(7) do |slice|
puts slice.map{|d| d.to_s.rjust(2)}.join(‘ ’)
end
end
end
month = (ARGV[0] || Date.today.mon).to_i

year  = (ARGV[1] || Date.today.year).to_i
Date.civil(year, month).cal_print

So I have been delaying publicly writing for a while now. I had various reasons that I procrastinated.

1. I wanted decent content on my site, ie something semi worthwhile
2. I needed a decent system to publish from
3. So I was going to write my own, but that required too much time
4. I needed something that I felt comfortable developing extensions, but that required the above reason
5. I needed a stable server to host it from
6. I wanted textile for my markup
7. I wanted an interesting first post

Some of these happened, some of these failed to happen, and hopefully some of them will happen. Anyway, the whole point of this is that after a while I simply determined I just needed to do it. Which in the long run is generally really all that actually needs to occur.

I’m hoping that my writing will improve. That needs will necessitate me fixing that which I dislike about typo or my layout or any other random problems that plague my satisfaction with this site. I make no promises on updates or content, or anything of else of like ilk. This is for my enjoyment and interest, and if it happens to agree with you then that will be an excellent bonus, but not the purpose of this site. Perhaps I will even let others know of the existance of the site, though one or two might have already guessed. Anyhow this is my first article, it’s pointless, it’s substandard, I don’t really particularly like it, but at least it’s a start.