If you use mod_rewrite on any of your pages (like we do here) you should replace PHP_SELF with REQUEST_URI in the below code. I should have thought of that.
Category Archives: Personal
Getting Better
Well it’s looking like all the trouble with the desktop is related to some funky memory, and now that I’ve taken it out things are rock solid again. Espescially now that the new motherboard came in the other day and it has been working out great. It has a ton of cool features that I know I’ll never use, like a voice that tells you what goes wrong (if anything) during POST. Some other things though, such as the DDR333 RAM, USB 2.0, and ATA133 I hope to utilize sooner rather than later.
Update
Okay well the installation finished, and it booted XP up and I was able to do a few things. I decided to reboot to make sure everything was kosher, and what do you know, it isn’t. Currently it looks like NTLDR, the loader for the operating system itself won’t load. I’m not sure exactly why I’m going to all this trouble with the new motherboard coming tomorrow, but I would like to get it working tonight. Hopefully the new motherboard will fix things.
Arrrggghh!!!
Unbelievable! I couldn’t make this stuff up:
Yes your eyes are not decieving you. Apparently the genius known as Windows XP is having trouble installing the SYSTEM!! I’m typing so hard I think I might hurt my laptop, so I am going to stop now. Grrrrrr. Appparently, despite a small setback setup should complete in “9 minutes,” we’ll see.
Another Movie Post(er)
One thing they still need to work on though is there posters. From a design standpoint, many of their posters have shabby typography and often consist of nothing more than putting a few star faces dominating over a simple element from the movie. There is little in the way of intrigue or elementary design elements that capture you attention, besides the blaring face of a super-star you’ve seen ad nasueum in magazines, newspapers, and on the web. One of my favorite posters I’ve seen in a long time is this one, which is really a work of art. Ocean’s Eleven is obviously a movie with tons of star power, however the poster actually cuts off their faces, leaving us with a strong sillouette of their lower bodies and a large, slanted 11 that leads the eye downwards to their illustrious names. The overfeel is one that matches the movie, cool and debonair, and the typography really matches that. A lot of the same elements are present in this poster which has similar feel and colors, though I don’t think is really avante-garde enough to capture your attention like the first one. Then, they lost it with the typical and clichéd lining up of the biggest names in the movie, each with a unique and strange look on their face and in an odd position. Finally they totally messed it up with a poster that completely throws away any of the better elemetns in the earlier posters. First, you have the same tired names paraded at what I’m sure what thought of as an eye-catching angle, then, more seriously, they have completely mangled the logo in some strange half-faded font which looks better suited for O Brother Where Art Thou than a hip Las Vegas-centered movie! The colors, mood, and most importantly the typography in the last poster don’t match the movie at all, and could have come from any cookie-cutter design shop in the country. Next time you’re at the theatre take a look at the line of posters on the wall, and you’ll be amazed at how similar and badly done they all are; we really need more with thoughtful and well-executed design like the first one above.
Apple – Mac OS X
Apple – Mac OS X: Amazing. Even as a Windows/Linux dork I can’t help but appreciate the attention to detail and aesthetics that went into this operating system. Some of the neater features include the new Sherlock, which they cleverly bill as “Web services for the rest of us,” and Rendezvous, a combonation of auto-discovery and Bluetooth/WiFi. Rendezvous is the most exciting to me because it’s a precursor to what I’ve been predicting will happen with Apple and Bluetooth; hopefully we’ll start seeing a lot more Bluetooth products on the market soon!
State of Mind
I have bad news, and weird news. The bad news is that my desktop (Gamebase) is sick, very much so. It all started when I installed the .NET update and firewire card in the same reboot, and went downhill from there. At one point explorer.exe (start bar, etc.) wouldn’t start because of a missing DLL file, then IE wouldn’t work, but Mozilla would. Then I noticed that about half of my Windows directory had become corrupted, and had about 200 missing DLL files. After doing a home-brewed fix and simply copying them over from computer number 2, a few more things worked, but still it was patchy. After a reinstall of XP, now it simply won’t start, and freezes on boot. *sigh*
Anyway this is a wonderful oppurtunity to renounce Microsoft and convert the box to all-GNU/Linux workstation.
Now for the weird news: Taking the main hard drive out of my desktop (a 40GB Fujitsu) I noticed there was something written on the side. Closer examination revealed a name, Lucille. Now I’m not sure at what point or what state of mind I was in when I named one of my hard drives, but I hope it never happens again. I’m going to stick to the story that it’s a tribute to B. B. King, and leave it at that.
I’m at a Loss for Words
From Rachel: NPR : Wait Wait — Which Newsmaker Are You?
YOU’RE BILL CLINTON
You’re smooth. You can sell anything to anyone. You can tell lies with a smile that’ll melt the hearts of those you’re lying to. At the same time, you require boat loads of unconditional love to compensate for your deficiencies. People spend their entire lives and fortunes trying to bring you down. Someday, they might just succeed.
Power?
The strangest thing just happened: I’m in the case of my desktop taking out the old modem card, because I don’t use it anymore and I have no free PCI slots. Actually, I do have one free PCI slot but whenever I plug anything in it freezes my computer, so I try to avoid it. Anyway, I was swapping out the modem card for a firewire card, but while I was pulling out the modem I heard thunder and the computer started turning on! I immediately reached for the ‘real’ power switch on the power supply but I forgot that this case doesn’ have one, so I unplugged it. The card was half out of the PCI slot when this all started so I was very worried that it would hurt something, but it seems everything is alright. This has been the strangest day.
Google Toolbar
I tell this to people all the time, but if you haven’t tried it yet you should get a Google Toolbar. Gooder than grits.
Birthday mess
On the front page of Mullenweg.com I’ve been using a query that grabs all the birthdays for that month and displays their information, ordered by the day of the month. Here is the query I’ve been using:
SELECT id, first, middle, last, private, dod, DATE_FORMAT(dob, '%M %e, %Y') as nicedob, DATE_FORMAT(dob, '%M, %Y') as mob, DATE_FORMAT(FROM_DAYS(TO_DAYS(NOW())-TO_DAYS(dob)), '%Y')+0 AS age, DATE_FORMAT(dob, '%M %e') as day, DATE_FORMAT(NOW(), '%M %e') as today FROM people WHERE MONTH(NOW()) = MONTH(dob) ORDER BY DATE_FORMAT(dob,'%d')
This has a couple of problems: first, it has a bunch of junk in there that I’m not using anymore and/or should be done in the PHP, not the SQL. More fundementally is the problem that it reports birthdays incorrectly! My sister Charleen pointed out that the front page had the date of her birthday, July 21st, right, but it was going to be her 28th birthday and not her 27th. The problem was the code was calculating how old she is today and then reporting that. The column is even being called ‘age’ because I took the code from another part of the site where I was calculating age. Obviously some changes were needed. I started by removing the stuff I don’t use anymore, and making it a little tighter:
SELECT id, first, middle, last, dod, DATE_FORMAT(dob, '%M %e, %Y') as nicedob, YEAR(FROM_DAYS(TO_DAYS(NOW())-TO_DAYS(dob))) AS birthday FROM people WHERE MONTH(NOW()) = MONTH(dob) ORDER BY DATE_FORMAT(dob,'%d');
Now we have a much more managable chunk of SQL, but still nothing to fix the problem. After much deliberation, and thinking about ways to implement a conditional statement to check whether the day had passed yet and then add a year to the ‘birthday’ column if required, but after a while I just realized that the simplest and most accurate solution would be to just subtract the year of birth from this year. This has no issues since the year never changes in the middle of a month. Here’s the final product:
SELECT id, first, middle, last, dod, DATE_FORMAT(dob, '%M %e, %Y') as nicedob, YEAR(NOW())-YEAR(dob) AS birthday FROM people WHERE MONTH(NOW()) = MONTH(dob) ORDER BY DAYOFMONTH(dob);
Ahhh that feels good :).
Danger of games
Yesterday I did nothing. Not a lazy day, not a restful day, a day where a video game completely took over my day. The game is called Black and White, and it’s not even that new, about a year and a half old. But anyway I just got it and once I started it I couldn’t put it down. This isn’t necesarily a testament to the game, that’s just how I always start games. Anyway, according to the game statistics, which are quite good, I’ve spent 16 hours on the game as of this morning. Sixteen hours! It’s a fun game, but it just feel wierd that Sunday was an entire day when I didn’t produce anything. Oh well, the only solution is to beat the game as soon as possible :).
Summer Cleaning
Who knew that cleaning could be so nostalgiac? Every thing I pick up seems to make me think, whether it be computer magazines from the height of the dot-com boom to the piece of paper with a number on it that facilitated a certain prank on the last day of school. I’m a terrible packrat, and for the past four years I’ve been saving tons of schoolwork, assignments, handouts, absent notes, everything because of some misconcieved notion that somehow I might need it at some point in the future. The downside to this was of course when I did need something I had so much other stuff I had the hardest time finding the thing that I was looking for. The other thing that strikes me is all the stuff that I saved that hasn’t been used since. It has put me into a strange mood, but the cleaning must go on. I just hope I don’t throw away anything important.
Terrorist Alert! (from Charleen)
The President of the United States, George W. Bush, has asked that all Americans and Canadians unite together in a common action to root out terrorists hiding in our community.
Since the Taliban cannot stand nudity and consider it a sin to see a naked woman that is not one’s wife, on Saturday afternoon at 2:00 p.m., EST, all North American women are asked to walk out of their house completely naked to help weed out any neighborhood terrorists. Circling your block for one hour is recommended for this antiterrorist effort. All men should position themselves in lawn chairs in front of your house to prove that you think it’s OK to see other women nude. (Since they do not approve of alcohol, a cold six-pack at your side is further proof of your anti-Taliban sentiment.) Names and addresses of non-participants should be sent to CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia.
The United States of America appreciates your efforts to root out terrorists and applauds your efforts. Please, by all means, send this to your fellow Patriots to ensure 100% participation.
Thank you for your participation,
Bill Clinton, Former President of the United States
Houston
Back in Houston, finally, and it’s nice adjusting back to old habits and comforts. Besides family and pets, I think the thing I missed most were my speakers, and it’s bliss to hear high fidelity sound again. Uploaded the last day from the trip, so enjoy! I’m also working on some layout/design changes for this site. The plan is to have a different theme for every month.
Hurricanes are great!
A common misconception of students of economics is that events that normally would be viewed as economic detractors actually stimulated. I’ve heard this called the ‘window’ argument before: if someone walks down the street and throws rocks at all the windows, then all of a sudden the window man has work! He will use that money to eat at restaurants, buy clothes, send his child to college, and the world will be a better place. From the beginning this argument sounds a little off, and in this context, the flaws of the argument are especially obvious.
The money that was used for repairing existing facilities could have been better redirected towards capital investment, or any other sort of monetary allocation that increases long-term growth prospects. Anything that promotes inefficient allocation of resources (regulations, quotas, mandates, tariffs, etc.) ultimately hurts the country in the long run. It would take someone pretty heartless to bring this up in the context of the Trade Center, but in situations such as hurricanes where there is usually high property damage but only minimal loss in life the argument still seems to rear its ugly head. Perhaps it’s a simply a misinterpretation of creative destruction :).
More april fools
A nice subtle one from PHP.net – interesting bloke. Apparently this was showing up in place of the PHP logo when phpinfo() all of yesterday. For some reason I don’t know it just won’t work on my server; in fact, I don’t get any graphics in my phpinfo at all! Oh well, life goes on.
Online Game from IRS!
From the mind-numbingly exciting category: Braintaxer – “the mentally taxing game show from the IRS”
I couldn’t make this stuff up 🙂
Searching for Religion
“Scientology” as a search phrase analyzed by the VisIT softare – interesting article, if just from a web design/search engine standpoint. Before you make any judgements about Scientology, however, please note that this guy is a very ardent critic of it.
Church Condemns “radical libertarianism” on internet
The ideology of radical libertarianism is both mistaken and harmful?not least, to legitimate free expression in the service of truth. The error lies in exalting freedom “to such an extent that it becomes an absolute, which would then be the source of values….In this way the inescapable claims of truth disappear, yielding their place to a criterion of sincerity, authenticity and ‘being at peace with oneself’ There is no room for authentic community, the common good, and solidarity in this way of thinking.
Ouch. As a Catholic this harsh criticism from the Church concerns me. They seem to be having as much trouble as anyone adjusting to the changes brought on by the net.