Monthly Archives: April 2003

Recent Comments

All the cool kids are doing it, so here it is. If you put a number at the end, like comments/50, you will se the last 50 comments. Neat huh? Want to see something really fancy? After you put the number on the end, add “rss” like this. Hot damn. It’s even valid. Some feedback would be helpful, because I don’t have an aggregator to test it in on this machine. As Mike would say, “Baaaahhhh.”

The real reason I put this up in the first place is that there is some good discussion (and sometimes not) in the comments occasionally that I feel gets lost in the shuffle. Furthermore, the RSS monkeys have no idea which posts have comments already, or to know automatically if new comments have been posted since they last checked the feed, so this will give them something else to subscribe to for the closer-to-full PhotoMatt Experience. 😉

Nominations Closed

Yes it should have happened yesterday, but there was always the chance that a absolutely brilliant submission would come in under the wire of the deadline and blow all the others away, and I didn’t want to kill that chance. That was the theory at least anyway. Anyway it’s closed, though if you visit it there is some new content.

Now of course comes the task of picking which categories are the best. Rather than make it a long and arduous personal cross, I think a party of some sort is in order. (Hmmm, tagline: “Mixing metaphors since…”) Thoughts?

A Sad Day Indeed

The “Syndicate” page has been updated, which you could tell from its emphasized status on the menu bar if you were actually at the site. I’m afraid one day my RSS feed will start getting more hits than my main page, and that will be a very sad day indeed.

The Wait

Well my laptop is now in the hands of the Best Buy service people. For a little background, last time they had it I didn’t get it back for almost two months. It wasn’t so bad because I had another laptop I used as a loaner, but that’s not an option this time and it’s going to be tough. I’ve added a day counter to the sidebar to track how long this takes, thoug I truly hope they surprise me and have it back with a week or two. On the bright side, since this is the third or fourth time it’s going back there is a possibility I’ll have the option to get a new laptop, in which case I’m definitely eyeing the new Z1 series.

Farewell

The charger on my laptop has finally given out, mere weeks after it came back from its two month repair trip. I’m preparing to do a brain transplant of the hard drive right now. Hopefully this will turn out better than attempts to fix it have before. For now though I’m going to be computing primarily on my desktop, with its new motherboard, and I’m moving all my development stuff over here. I’ve forgotten how snappy a nice desktop can be, and it’s actually a relatively pleasant experience. The thing I can’t stand is being tied to a desk though, I had gotten quite acustomed to working anywhere and everywhere, bouncing from WiFi hotspot to hotspot throughout my day.

So Easy

For the project I mentioned in my last post I’ve also been using a fantastic class called ezSQL that really makes a lot of things an absolute piece of cake. I don’t remember exactly how I came across this class, perhaps via Simon, but at the time I wasn’t doing anything I could use it for and so I just bookmarked it and made a mental note to check it out later. After not much more than a night of using it the syntax is already very intuitive to me and I look at the documentation hardly at all; the class itself is so logically done that a quick glance at the code is just as helpful as the documentation. Of course there is some room for improvement, for example it would be nice if the errors and such were valid XHTML, but I’ll survive.

Hit Diggity!!!

Click here, right now. Now I know what you’re thinking, “What is Matt making us click now? Maybe I shouldn’t, although that date thing was pretty funny…” Well to save the lazier among you some trouble, that’s the second page of Google results for “matt” and yours truly is at #13. Now before you call me the most narcissistic blogger ever in my defense I was merely vanity surfing my referrers when this popped up. Vanity surfing is not nearly as bad as vanity searching.

Anyway I’ve joked for a long time that the only reason I’m on the web is to become the #1 hit for “matt” on Google, it’s been the brass ring of my online existence. Before this latest Google dance I was somewhere toward the end of the 18th page if I remember correctly, so obviously something has been going right. Better yet, I now have a nice short hit list of people that have to go so I can make #1. 😉

I am so going to start using this at parties!

Image Fun

Been playing with manipulating images with PHP all night, something I haven’t done much since I had the fancy capital thing on this site, and that wasn’t as much manipulating images as generating images using truetype fonts. With GD included PHP is very easy to use for this sort of thing. I’m storing the images themselves in the database as BLOBs, along with a bit of meta-data I grab from them when they’re uploaded using a web form. I have a small PHP script that returns the images from the database, resizes them to whatever width I specify in the query string, and does “funky” caching so if the image has already been generated/grabbed it returns just about as fast as reading it directly from the filesystem would. I have to have some fun because the site I’m doing this all for uses tables.

Speaking of tables, everyone head over to Big Pink Cookie and see how there aren’t any there. I recreated the basic layout in CSS and then helped Christine tweak it till it became the beauty you see before you now. If you’re curious, here are some of the changes I made:

  • The CSS and Javascript is now in seperate files, as to be easily cached.
  • The header graphic is now a h1 tag with the text hidden and the graphic as the background.
  • The latest pictures from Pixelog at the top of the page are now an ordered list, styled to display horizontially through CSS.
  • There is a “rapper” div (gotta have some flava) of a fixed width centered using margin: auto and a IE workaround.
  • Inside that there is a content and menu div, the menu has a fixed width and is floated on the right.
  • ms that were previously all preceded by “::” are now unordered list items with the :: effect recreated through a list image. Now if Christine wants to change the way her menu looks she just has to edit one file instead af change hundreds of double colons.
  • It now loads really, really fast. Especially when compared to before.

It might still have a stray error here or there that’s keeping it from validating, but give it a few days and all those should be ironed out. More importantly, it validates in spirit. I can now add Christine to the list of site I check when I’m browsing on my Palm over a 9.6k connection. Best of all, I think CSS no longer makes Christine’s eyes bleed, and she can see Tantek again.

Late Night

… and I need some sleep. Finishing up an admin package for a client tomorrow, as well as some satisfying personal project stuff. It’s Sunday so I don’t want to set the alarm, but I don’t want to sleep all day either. It’s been a nice weekend.

New If This Darn Thing…

Well I picked up a motherboard at Fry’s with my dad, and hopefully this will resolve the desktop issues I’ve been having. The new motherboard is pretty sweet, and was quite cheap. I’m quite disillusioned of expensive motherboards with this one failing months after I got it. With the strong prospect that I’m taking my laptop back again it’s important that I at least have a working desktop though, so this will be good. It works!

While It’s Hot

Not that I’m advocating anything, but now probably would be a good time to buy some PhotoMatt, especially since the price just drastically dropped and there is a new juicy front page link that hasn’t been picked up by the bot yet. Is this wrong? Maybe, but all’s fair in love and BlogShares.

In other meta-news I stole some buttons from the incredible Eric, but the real reason was I have a strange irrational desire to please this thing.

I better get to sleep though. I’m sitting in a rehearsal at 10, presenting for HPUG at 1, and again at the Web Technology SIG. Stop by HAL-PC if you’re interested.

Next Semester

I just finished registering for all my classes and I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out. I don’t have an amazing Monday–Thursday schedule like I did this semester, but the classes should be quite good. Here’s what I ended up with:

  • 3332: Philosophy of Language
  • 1336: U.S. and Texas Constitutions and Politics — Introduction to the constitutions and politics of the United States and Texas, emphasizing constitutional structure, federalism, separation of powers, limited government, public opinion, elections, and civil liberties. Taught by A. Little, who I had this semester for Politics of the Greek Theatre and was great.
  • 3310: Introduction to Political Theory — Recurring themes and problems in the study of politics; draws upon classical and modern works. Taught by the inimitable R. Lence, who is a very colorful character and a fantastic teacher.
  • 3319: Politics of Social Policy — Public policy initiatives in areas of civil rights, welfare, education, human resources, and housing, including criteria for evaluating proper impact. Taught by R. Lineberry, who I haven’t had yet but is one of the “theorists” of the Political Science department.
  • Jazz Band and Lab — Haven’t finalized all this yet because I haven’t heard back from the director about the times.

You’ll notice there are no economics classes there. This is more a result of the classes I’ve taken than a result of changing interests. I still love economics, in fact I’m going to be interning at the Dallas Fed this summer, but the classes and department seem mediocre. Moreover I’ve been wooed by the Political Science department, as my educational experience with their professors and classes have been outstanding.

In further changes for next semester I’ve decided I’m going to start a notes blog. What I really need is some sort of rich-text document management system, but I can make the blogging paradigm fit my needs. Classes can become categories; everything will be searchable, dated, archived, accessible from anywhere, and support various meta-data. What I’ve been doing so far is a combination of text files and folders, and frankly it’s weak. I haven’t decided yet rather I’m going to make it public or not, but even if I do it probably wouldn’t make sense to anyone but me.

Mouse Pad

Mouse pads are probably the most personal and often changed components of most people’s computing setup. I have come to the conclusion that every mouse-pad has a story behind it, and I’m curious to hear them. What’s yours?

I’ll start it off. I have two mouse-pads, the first has a Picasso painting on it, Three Musicians. My mother got it for me as a present, and I believe she got it from a museum store. The other one I use at my desktop has each of the Presidents of the United States on it in chronological order. I bought it when I was in Washington D.C. for the G8 camp over the summer, which was a wonderful experience by the way, and we visited the Lincoln Memorial. Your turn. 🙂

Psychological Egoism

Okay you know the drill. This is a paper I turned in today for my Ethics class. It deals with psychological egoism, and if you have any leanings toward this moral theory I’d be interested in hearing your feedback on this. My language is strong in the paper, but that doesn’t mean my mind isn’t open. I didn’t have as much time to put into the print (PDF) version of the paper this time, but it’s still a nicer way to read it than the HTML below.

Every human action is at its root a selfish act; even acts that are altruistic on the surface are primarily motivated by a deeper selfishness — or so a psychological egoist would say. Psychological Egoism is a descriptive theory that rather than suggesting, as ethical or rational egoism does, how people ought to live, suggests how people actually go about their lives. The assumptive nature of the theory introduces a number of possible avenues for refutation, some of which are very compelling. Continue reading Psychological Egoism