I can see from my referer logs that lots of people find this page while searching for something specific from search engines like Google. And a lot of them probably had trouble actually finding the story that the search engine had indexed.
I’ve just added a search feature to this site, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble anymore.
Suze and I went to see Spider-Man last night. It was good. I expected to be entertained, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the movie. Of course, the special effects were fantastic. I expected that. But the best part was that the characters were well done, and they did a really good job of sticking to the essential elements of the comic book. They took a couple of artistic liberties here and there, but even the most die-hard Spider-Man comic purist should be able to overlook them.
This is, without a doubt, the best movie adaptation of a comic book, ever.
Now, we can look forward to the movie version of The Hulk, with Ang Lee at the helm….
I’ve always liked things like fractals and the works of M.C. Escher — the combination of mathematics and art holds a certain fascination for me. So I thought that this link to the Japanese Tesselation Design Association was really cool.
That page reminded me of a book that my mom got me when I was a teenager. It was called Inversions, and it’s by a guy named Scott Kim. If anyone is interested, you can consider any of Scott’s stuff fair game for my Christmas and birthday wish lists.
Yeah, yeah…. No updates in a while. I’ve been in the zone at work, and haven’t had time to get online from home.
Over the last week or so, I’ve spent a lot of time hacking my way through some SOAP::Lite and XMLRPC::Lite voodoo. After converting one of my perl libraries into a proper module, I was able to implement an XML-RPC server in about 7 lines of code (20 lines, if you include blank lines, comments, and some unnecessary stuff). Cool.
The client side weighs in a little heavier, at around 100 lines. But most of that is just in how it turns the XML-RPC result into formatted HTML.
I’ve also worked a little with some C code today. Tomorrow I’ll be doing some more Perl, and touching lightly into some Java Server Pages stuff. I don’t really know Java or JSP, as such. But I can figure some of it out when I have to.
Maybe I should keep a running tally of which technologies I touch on any given day. It might make an interesting graph…. HTML, CSS, XML, SOAP, XML-RPC, Perl, C, JavaScript, Java….
Oh yeah, speaking of JavaScript…. New site feature — There’s a checkbox in the menu that will control whether external links will open in new windows, or in your current browser window. Eventually, I’ll set your preference in a cookie, in case you don’t like my default setting.
Brent just let me know that there is a problem with my XML/RSS/RDF (whatever you call it) syndication. The problem is that the permalink URLs generated here use ampersands (&) to separate GET variables. XML requires you to escape ampersands by using the & entity. I’ll investigate a fix when I find time.
Update @ 15:20 — Took a quick look. Actually, it wasn’t the ampersands after all. The root of the problem was some variable changes that happened in the last upgrade of the base myPHPblog code. Fixed now. I’ll commit the fix to the myPHPblog CVS tree later.
No, it’s not a new Don Ho song. It’s lots of itsy-bitsy icons that you can use on your web sites. I’ve previously considered using icons like this to indicate whether a link is internal to a site, or leads to an external site. Or if it opens in a new window. Here are some sites with icons for just those types of functions, and a whole lot more.
Once upon a time, there was a television show in the UK called “The Magic Roundabout“…. [via Brent]
Microsoft and Unisys recently launched a new joint advertising campaign — under the slogan “We have the way out” — to promote the Unisys ES7000 Enterprise Server, which can run a data center version of Windows 2000. The server and operating system combination is being promoted as an alternative to Unix-based server products.
On Monday, it was revealed that a Web site set up to promote the advertising campaign was running the FreeBSD operating system, a free version of Unix (see story). Netcraft Ltd., a company in Bath, England, that monitors the software and operating systems being used by Web sites, also said that the site was running Apache server, another piece of open-source technology.
Then yesterday, the site disappeared. Attempts to access it earlier today brought up an “Error 404, file not found” message. According to Netcraft data, the anti-Unix site was migrated yesterday from the FreeBSD operating system to Microsoft’s Internet Information Server 5.0 software on Windows 2000.
Neither company was immediately able to comment on any connection between the switch and the disappearance of the site.
And my boss keeps asking me why I want to switch our web servers over to Linux or FreeBSD….
See also: We have the way in.
If you’re doing any kind of graphical design, be it for the web, print, or whatever, iStockPhoto.com is a great resource. For a long time now, I had been meaning to upload some pictures. I finally got around to it about a week ago, and my pictures finally made it through the review queue. If you’re interested, you can see some of my photos.
There’s nothing spectacular there, though I am fond of the Sunset Behind Winter Trees
picture, which I’ve made my desktop image at work. One of these days I’ll try to do something more along the lines of traditional stock photography (objects isolated on a plain background). We’ve got a curio cabinet in the house full of nify subjects….
Unbelievable…. Words fail me. New happenings in The Car Tag Saga.
Any suggestions out there for a new custom car tag? I kind of doubt they’ll let me get “ALSUCKS”.