Had a few thoughts/ideas that have been running through my head lately.
Thought I might share them.
No one, no one on the face of the earth, deserves to be king.
The worst thing to happen to someone is the worst thing to happen to them; ever. To belittle them or their pain for that fact is a sickening display of pride.
Most people, even bad people, don't think of themselves as bad.
OK
That was deep thoughts with Jamie Poitra.
Sort of like Jack Handy but less funny or ironic.
Or something.
]]>As some of you may know Ethereal has been superseded by a project called Wireshark. The new project has already been ported by the people at MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts). The MacPorts version of Wireshark will compile itself for your specific processor so it works on PowerPC and Intel macs and doesn't require any of the hand-holding that the previous versions of Ethereal required.
To start you will want to follow the installation instructions found on the MacPorts site. I would then go and install the update to X11 that Apple recently released. It fixes some font issues that made previous versions a little wacky.
Then you will want to compile and install Wireshark by launching your Terminal application and typing in sudo port install wireshark and pressing Return. You will be prompted for your admin password and MacPorts will likely list some dependencies (other software that Wireshark needs in order to work). Just follow the prompts always saying yes to MacPorts' questions. Just as before the compile will likely take awhile. Once its done simply launch X11 from your utilities folder, type sudo /opt/local/bin/wireshark, and press Return.
Thats it. Wireshark works in basically the same way as Ethereal did so you will have very little to relearn.
]]>Then someone asked me to pray for their father who is in a really bad way medically right now, and suddenly last week didn't seem so bad.
]]>In honor of my 28th birthday on which I'm pretty sure I will not have a party, surprise or otherwise, I will quote Ze Frank from The Show:
A surprise party is where your friends and family lie to you to make you feel alone and unloved. Then, when they throw you the party they would have thrown, regardless, you experience a sudden rush of emotion as your depressed self returns back to normal. Some people think that life in general's like that. They keep waiting for the party. I call that: denial.
In reality I got birthday wishes from a number of my friends and family basically moments after the one from the web forum. Thanks guys. :) I appreciate it.
]]>I do web design and development for a living now. I used to do it just for fun. It is funny how your perspective on things changes when you do this stuff every day.
Now to qualify this. I'm going to beat up on Drupal. Drupal is currently very popular. I have built one site in Drupal. I have experience with a number of CMS type scripts, with MovableType, pMachine Pro, PHPNuke, and WordPress being some of the more well known ones I have dealt with in my time (besides Drupal and ExpressionEngine). But I'm not Mr. Genius Web Coder Extraordinaire. I don't know everything. I just think I do. So feel free to think I'm stupid or simply disagree. :)
When building sites anymore it is almost a given that you will be using some kind of CMS (Content Management System). The most ubiquitous CMS on the web right now is generically referred to as a blog. There are a quite a few different choices for a blog CMS. There are ones that are hosted and setup for you (Live Journal, Blogger) and those that you install and setup on your own host (WordPress, MovableType).
When building a site for a client that doesn't want a blog you typically go with a real CMS; something that isn't just for blogging. Some will tell you that WordPress is perfectly sufficient as full CMS. I think those people are insane.
Regardless people are instantly met with a very big decision. What CMS are they going to use? There are literally hundreds (probably thousands) of choices and they obviously can't all be equal. So you start looking for things to help you make a decision. Price often comes into play.
Some people want their CMS for free. Lately these people often end up with Drupal which, since it is Open Source Software, can be used for free. Free. Lovely word. Sadly free is typically anything but.
On the other hand there are CMS's that require you to pay for a license to use them in your site. The CMS I prefer is one of those. ExpressionEngine has a free Core version that doesn't cost a thing to use but if you want all of the fun stuff you have to pay. You don't have to pay as much as you do for some similarly capable commercial CMS's (in fact I think the price for EE is way more than reasonable) but you do still have to shell out those hard earned dollars.
Why do I use ExpressionEngine when there are perfectly good CMS's like Drupal around? And let me be clear, in many ways Drupal is a great CMS. It has some good stuff going for it. But in my view it isn't enough to have good ideas and powerful core features.
Let me explain.
When I built the one site I have done in Drupal I occasionally ran into problems understanding the CMS. This isn't unusual, no powerful CMS comes without a learning curve, and I can accept that.
So I went to Drupal's forum and asked for help. The first time I got a response that basically said this:
Did you read the Documentation?
Sometimes this is referred to as the RTFM response. I've been guilty of giving this response myself from time to time. The problem here is that I had read the documentation and it left me utterly confused. The documentation seemed to talk about things that didn't exist. Maybe they did at one time but I couldn't find them in the admin panel where they were saying they were. So I went back and looked at the documentation again. I was still completely baffled.
In the end it turned out that a lot of the things that the documentation was referring to had been renamed in the admin. The documentation hadn't been updated yet to match the changes. Thank you to Kurt for making me aware of that.
Another time I had a problem the response I got at the forum was like this:
There is a plugin/module that does that.
Great I thought to myself. So I followed the link to the plugin, downloaded the latest version put it in the folders I was told to and no dice. The plugin/module had been written for a previous version and hadn't been updated yet to work with the new version. First I was slightly bothered that Drupal required plugin/module writers to actually rewrite their plugins when a new version was released. Upgrades are going to be a nightmare as a result. But then I went to the forums and apparently the guy who wrote the plugin just wasn't interested in working on it anymore. This found not by asking for help but by doing a search on the plugin. So I was left with the choice of fixing it myself or doing without the feature.
Which brings me to another time where the person on the forum that replied said something like this:
Why don't you just program a plugin/module that does that?
Huh? Now I can program my own plugin. I have that ability but can you imaging paying for software and then being told that? And what about the people who can't do that? What about the people who looked at all the features Drupal claimed and is now stuck because the feature really isn't a feature yet?
I also had some help requests that simply went unanswered.
Then I tried to upgrade Drupal to the latest version. Heaven help me...
And don't even get me started on the default HTML and CSS templates with sometimes Three ID's on the same element. Three ID's on the same element. Three! Its like the HTML and CSS code from three different sites got combined by some insane monkey. (Ok probably not a monkey but that just sounded good to me when I was typing.)
So here is what I got for free:
And therein lies a big part of the problem. Open Source Software doesn't have to answer to anyone. They can afford to promise things and not really deliver, because, in the end, its free; and as a result you have no room to complain. What do you expect? Yeah its nice that anyone can work on it. But in the end what I really care about is whether it can do what I need efficiently, whether I can maintain the software without too much trouble, and whether I can get help when I am in need of it. These things mean a lot when you have 10-30 sites that need to be developed and maintained. And Drupal didn't deliver on any of those three fronts
I'll be happy if I never have to build another Drupal site ever again.
Contrast that with ExpressionEngine. When I first had a problem with ExpressionEngine I got a response within 10 minutes. I don't always get a response that quickly but more often than not I do. And those responses often come from paid support staff that know what they are talking about. They are getting paid to help me. And they do actually help me and follow up with me until my problem is solved. I've even had the CTO occasionally step in and either fix or add a feature that I was having trouble with in a matter of hours.
I also find that half of the things I needed a plugin/module for in Drupal was something I could do in ExpressionEngine without any added software.
When I do need a plugin/module I don't have to fear that the developers of ExpressionEngine are going to change something so drastically in an update that my plugins/modules are all going to stop working. There has been one major change in it's history and developers were given time to fix their code before the change happened.
And upgrades? I can get every site I maintain upgraded in one work day. Typically quite a bit quicker than that. I upload the new files. Run an update scripts. Delete the update script. And I'm done.
Does ExpressionEngine have a learning curve? Yes. Are there occasionally things that don't work the way I want? Yes. But it has real support. It has documentation that is actually helpful and up to date. And it has a company behind it that has a vested interest in keeping me and its other customers happy.
And that makes all the difference.
In the end I wish Drupal well. But unless I see a marked difference in future versions I have no interest in ever using it again. Not when I have other solutions that are so much better despite their upfront cost. I think Open Source Software can work but there has to be someone capable and strong willed at the helm. And there has to be some sort of motivation for those involved beyond the good feeling they get from helping out (money always works). And I think that is what Drupal seems to be missing. I look at the Open Source projects that have succeeded so well and they always seem to have serious money behind them as well as some way of keeping things on track.
]]>Yet, despite how much I enjoy reading Science Fiction I'm sometimes embarrassed to admit it to people.
Why would that be? Lets explore the issue.
Science Fiction immediately makes people think of Star Wars. And if they aren't thinking of Star Wars they are thinking of Star Trek. In either case great literature is not the thing that comes to mind. Even before Star Wars and Star Trek the genre had a bad rap. Science Fiction was relegated to the Pulp Fiction level. It was viewed as juvenile. And much of it was. The predominant reader of Science Fiction was the young male American of the 1950's. It was even at one time extremely difficult for female authors to get published. Alice B. Sheldon an early female author in the genre actually used the Pseudonym of James Tiptree Jr. and was very successful. So successful in fact that prominent critics and readers of the time often used her as an example of why men were better Science Fiction authors then women. Of course that audience did eventually grow up and as a result the genre grew up too. Not that anyone noticed.
There authors who are considered to be both Literature and Science Fiction. These authors seem to have transcended the genre and become well known names in literary circles. George Orwell and Ray Bradbury come to mind, though the latter only considered one of his novels Science Fiction (Fareheit 451). Mary Shelly is often cited as an early author of the genre though again I doubt she would have considered herself such and the genre didn't really exist during her time. And of course, there is always Jules Verne the venerable father of Science Fiction. And to round off the name dropping Poe is often cited but again really existed before the genre had truly taken hold.
Why did the above authors succeed in literary circles when others did not? I think it is because they wrote Science Fiction before people really knew what it was. Now that people think they know what it is they blithely ignore it. It isn't really literature. Its just a bunch of laser gun fights and space battles. Nothing deep can be confronted by that. Nothing worth an intelligent person's time.
I've heard some authors who published their first novel as Science Fiction comment that they wish they had never done it. The reason being that the literary cognoscenti have decided that it isn't worth paying attention to. Science Fiction has its own prestigious awards within the genre The Hugo and The Nebula. But if you want a literary award that people know the name of? Here is a little advice. Never publish a Science Fiction novel. Once you have you are marked, for life. A well known and incredibly successful Science Fiction auther named Orson Scott Card has published upwards of 5 or 6 novels (that I know of) that are not in the Science Fiction genre. Where will you find those novels? In the Science Fiction section. Where will you find reviews of those novels? In the Science Fiction magazines. Who published those novels? A Science Fiction publisher.
One of my favorite authors is Mary Doria Russell. She wrote two Science Fiction novels and then a Historical novel about WWII in Italy. Where did I find a copy of her 3rd novel? Not where I looked the first time. Amazingly enough she managed to get nominated for a Pulitzer. Which is, I think, a sign that people are beginning to realize that there is more to Science Fiction, or at least to authors who have chosen to write Science Fiction, then laser guns and space battles.
However, thats quite enough of my complaining about the treatment of my favorite genre. I obviously think the genre as a whole is very much worth a person's time. But what books do I think transcend the genre itself? Are there any that weren't written be the ancient names above?
Of course there are. And in no particular order, and with the knowledge that I'm going to inevitably leave out some very deserving books, these are the ones I feel deserve to be recognized.
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
Canticle is one of those books that is not only strange literature in general it is strange Science Fiction. There is no particular plot in the usual sense; which causes many readers to get frustrated and bored waiting for something exciting to happen (a space battle perhaps?). There is only one reoccurring character and he isn't exactly what you would call a main character. In fact there really isn't a main character. Rather than being about an individual person the book is about people in general. Our faults, our virtues, and our propensity for self destruction are all major topics. The book is also about God and how he might fit into the mess of our lives. What makes the book Science Fiction? The fact that it takes place in the future with a post apocalyptic backdrop is the main reason. The book is one of those books you find yourself thinking about a lot when you aren't reading it. Something most authors would be proud to do regardless of the genre they write in.
The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss
The Dazzle of Day is a Science Fiction novel about Quakers. Really. The novel uses the setting of a multi generational spaceship taking a colony of Quakers to a new planet to examine how a closed society might change when their entire existence has been aboard a spaceship. What would it be like not to know what it is like to live on a planet and deal with things like weather? What would these people think and how would they react when confronted with the planet their great great grandparents originally set out for generations ago? Molly Gloss doesn't focus on the technology that makes all of this possible. Rather you are simply asked to accept it. The characters certainly do. It is all they know. Rather, Molly Gloss focuses on the people and their quiet lives. Most of the story could have taken place anywhere but the setting does add something new and faintly alien. You recognize the emotions but don't always recognize why the emotions are being felt and it all makes it feel very strange. Why Quakers? Who better to survive a generations long trip on a spaceship with a little sanity then an already closed and close-knit society of avowed pacifists?
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Connie Willis is easily one of my favorite authors. I can truly say every novel she has written is delightful. Delightful despite the fact that she has a tendency to address things that are anything but. Doomsday book was the first novel of hers that I ever came across. The gloomy name is quite fitting as the novel is about the Black Death. Connie Willis' style of writing is often referred to as a modern form of comedy of manners. She almost always involves her main characters with people who are inane in one way or another. These inane characters are the agent for humor that Willis' intersperses among the pages as her characters maneuver through the terrible or sometimes painfully ordinary situations they are placed in. She uses the technique to great effect in Doomsday Book. The Science Fiction world took notice as the book won both the Nebula and Hugo awards the year it was published.
Dune is one of those books that inspires people to make movies. Don't ever watch those movies they aren't worth your time. The novel thankfully is. Dune takes some things we all readily recognize; The Feudal System, Religious Movements, Fear, Ignorance, and thrusts them into the far future. A future that is almost unrecognizable to someone from our culture. This is a future of intergalactic spaceships yet there are no computers to be found. This is the far future yet we don't have a glorious democracy we have fiefdom upon fiefdom of sometimes petty rulers who are all addicted to a drug that is actually good for you. We have what appear to be muslims but there is something not quite the same. There is an another religion centered around a bible that sounds vaguely similar but the members of the church are all women and are feared by other men and woman alike. They are called witches when their backs are turned. Again though these things are all interesting in and of themselves the story is really about the people. I wish I could say I enjoyed the subsequent books written by Frank Herbert but I did not. Whatever was inspiring him when he wrote this book got lost soon after.
The Speed of Dark by Elizebeth Moon
The Speed of Dark is written in the first person perspective. Not something typically worth commenting on but in this case it makes an incredibly big difference because of who that person is. Lou, is a high functioning autistic. He enjoys his life. He has a good job. He has good friends. He even has a beautiful girl whom he thinks might be interested in him. I can hear you asking, "OK, how is this Science Fiction?" The novel is Science Fiction because it takes place in the near future with the possibilities of medical advances that are in many ways very real. The main theme of the novel regards what things make a person who they are. Lou is in many ways defined by his autism. He is aware of it and knows that it causes him to react strangely to things. He also knows that it has prevented him from doing things he may have done otherwise. What if he could cure his autism? Would he still be the same person? Or would he fundamentally change? Would he want to change being that he is happy as he is now?
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russel
A novel about a Catholic priest in space. Have you noticed yet that I have a penchant for Science Fiction that addresses religious questions? It would be easy to say that this book is about the implications of the existence of aliens and a belief in the Christian God. In fact many people have called the book just that. Instead, I found the book fascinating not for that implication, which I've already spent plenty of time thinking about myself, but rather the implication that an alien race might be both so utterly foreign and so utterly similar that we would misinterpret the evil for the beautiful and vice versa. What are aesthetics? I had an art class were we spent the entire day arguing about the answer to that question. If we can't decide as humans about a concept so integral to our lives how could we hope to understand how those ideas apply to an alien race? And how might we affect those aliens with our ideas and concepts. Could it be that God would mean for us to affect them for the better? How would you go about affecting that change? What would you do if you didn't get what you expect from your efforts? How would you react? What if what you got was so horrible that you have trouble comprehending how a God could allow it to happen? Almost immediately the book makes you aware that something horrible happened to the priest Emilio Sandoz while he was at the alien planet and the rest of the book slowly leads up to the revelation of what happened. I found it fascinating and refreshing that whatever happened did not cause Emilio Sandoz to no longer believe in his God. Rather it cause him to hate his God. Too often we are told there is only one choice or the other. You believe or you don't. But reality is much more organic than that; much more emotional.
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
If you hate math this isn't your book. Otherwise you will be presented with a well written novel that can best be described as an exploration of how much the idea and implementation of Cryptography has shaped and will continue to shape recent times as well as the past. The novel takes place over 2 different time periods, WWII and the near future. An important book in that it really does change how you view your privacy in our current culture. As information gets easier to move around do to better technology things like cryptography take a more important role in protecting us from passing information to people we don't to pass it to. Its easy to think people are paranoid when they worry about their email being read by their boss. Or when the stress about using their Credit Card online. They have reason to be worried. The novel isn't a public service announcement though. There is a story here and a fascinating one at that. Again, it is the messy details of human life which add realism and better understanding to a topic that most people would normally find rather dull. And again the book is one you continue to think about long after reading it.
]]>Speaking of friends, I got to spend a bit of an evening with Joshua (Not to be confused by my friend Joshua from Sitka) and his wife Rebecca this last Saturday.
Joshua is a friend I have known for going on 8 years? now but hadn't met until about 2 years ago. How is that you might ask? Well, we met on the Internet through a common interest in Sixpence None the Richer.
I recently heard about a study that claimed people didn't build real friendships anymore because the internet caused us to have online friends. The obvious intimation being that you couldn't have a real friendship with someone you met online.
I agree to an extent because I think it is hard to truly know someone you haven't met. But I think its safe Joshua and I could be pretty good real friends if given the chance. His wife Rebecca is pretty cool too.
]]>I've been doing lots of PHP coding lately. I've noticed a marked improvement in my coding ability as a result. It tends to take me about half the time to work through the logic I need to get my desired result and I spend a lot less time debugging. I was also introduced to a neat little trick at the pMachine Forums that makes debugging a ton easier. Its a simple trick, too simple really, but I hadn't read it mentioned anywhere in all of my searches for PHP debug tricks so I thought I would mention it in more detail.
PHP has no built in debugging abilities beyond using the echo() and print() functions to spit back variables at different points to get an idea of what is going on within a piece of code that isn't working the way you want.
This works great, most of the time. However, I find myself often writing pieces of code that are embedded in larger pieces of code. The issue here is those echo() and print() functions don't show up in those cases. So what I used to do was rewrite problem code separately using dummy strings that I hoped would match the real world situation so that I could run them on their own to debug.
So where does the trick come in? At a spot where you want to get your variable spit back you use an exit() function immediately after it on the same line like this:
echo $debug_variable; exit();
When the larger script runs and it pulls in the smaller chunk of code and hits that exit function the whole thing stops and you get just the debug variable as the output. If I had known I could do this years ago it would have made life so much easier. So thats it. I can hear all the real programmers groaning at my silly excitment over something they probably think I should have already known. Oh well. I refuse to not be excited.
I've recently been watching ReGenesis a TV show made in Canada about the near future where genetics and diseases are the next big thing (of course they already are kind of the next big thing). Anyway, the show is great and deals with some interesting topics in pretty even handed ways.
Even handed that is until it gets on religion.
I know I shouldn't allow myself to be bothered. And it doesn't really bother me in a real sense because I know the portrayal is silly. But it saddens me a little to always see Christians presented as idiots. It isn't that I don't know some stupid Christians. It isn't that I haven't had moments where I myself have thought, "why are my fellow Christians so stupid?" However, I know Christians that are intelligent. I know Christianity itself is not incompatible with science. There are plenty of scientists who are themselves Christians. But they don't make very much noise. And sadly they are overshadowed by the ones who do make alot of noise doing idiotic things.
Oh well. :)
The last 4th of July that I watched fireworks on was in Sitka two years ago. I stood on the bridge connecting Japonski and Baranof islands with two of my childhood friends and watched the city sponsored displays reflected on the water. It was one of those moments that felt oddly poetic. This 4th wasn't nearly as beautiful in that way. But I can't complain with a nice walk in the dark to the sound and colors of the local amateur fireworks displays.
]]>
What does it mean?
What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags
This forgetting to eat thing has been a long standing problem of mine when I'm focused on something that I am enjoying. I didn't have this issue while working at XEROX. It happens an awful lot now. I've also found that I've started taking showers in the evening more often than in the morning. Unless I need to meet with a client I have very little need for such things.
But what does this have to do with taking walks?
OK, OK, so I've gotten a little off topic.
As a result of that fact that I work at home I get pretty sick of being here. My solution has been to take 1-2 hour walk every evening at the end of my work day.
Every day I see something different.
Take yesterday. I walked towards downtown and met woman walking her cat. On a leash. I hadn't known that people even did that with cats. She actually seemed a little embarrassed about the whole deal when I said hi like she knew it was a little strange. Or it could have just been the fact that I said that embarrassed her. I sometimes forget I'm living in a city and people don't always just say hello to people they walk by on the street.
Then I took a right and accidently kicked a car key across the street. After picking it up and quickly identifying it as a Toyota key (It had TOYOTA written on the side of it) I found a nearby house with a brown Toyota Corolla parked in front. Figuring there was a good chance the key belonged to that car I knocked on the front door of the house.
A middle aged woman came to the door with a look of complete and utter fear on her face. I wasn't expecting the fear. So at first I just stood there staring at her. Finally after what felt like a half hour I managed to spit out that I'd found a key to a Toyota on the street and was wondering if it belonged to her. It turned out that it was her key. She had just brought the car back from the shop and the key had been the extra one she had given to the mechanic. She was much warmer almost immediately, and said thank you to me. I continued on my way.
I did have to wonder though. What did she think I had been doing when I first knocked on the door? Am I that scary looking? Or was there someone she was expecting that she should have been afraid of?
Two blocks later I walked by an attractive girl in her 20's who wanted to know if I had a spare cigarette. I don't smoke so I had to apologize. Then she wanted to know when the bus typically showed up. I had to apologize again.
She responded with a heartfelt, "GOD!" stomped her feet and sat back down on the bus bench. Apparently I wasn't everything she had been hoping for.
That was the last interesting occurrence on yesterday's walk. I did get something interesting in the mail though! I found out from the Government that I am now old enough that if I were to die my children and/or spouse would get Social Security benefits. Now if only I had either one of those I could rest easy.
More neat links:
Tiny little images of sites I'm designing at the moment:
Thankfully, I'm not completely out of work. I happened across a posting from the Principal of NetRaising a web development company that specifically works with Schools and Non Profits Organizations (NPOs).
He was looking to add someone to the company. Now as some of you may know. I was a teacher; and I have many friends in the Non Profit field. So the idea of a company that did web development for NPO's was intriguing to me. I sent the owner an email and arranged to meet with him since he just happened to live in Portland Oregon as I myself do.
Long story short, the meeting went very well. I really like NetRaising's philosophy regarding the work they do. They offer a service that is beyond affordable (really that a for profit company charges this little is somewhat amazing) and yet will hopefully allow me to make a good living doing something I enjoy and can feel good about. That Kurt, the owner, is such a standup guy is only icing on the cake. Now if I can just make it through the next 5-6 months on my slowly growing salary life will be good.
On another note, I am happy to say that I won 7th place in the Personal Category of the pMachine Shootout. I am pretty happy with my placement. I started and finished the design in about a weeks worth of time. Which was fast for me when doing a site for myself. And I used a lot of javascript stuff that I had never attempted before. I was both happy and disappointed with the result. As such I'll likely be redoing it again soon but at a much slower pace and leaving the current site up until the new design is finished.
So here is to the future. May it be good.
]]>The previous design was done because I hated the design before it. I was mostly happy with the last design however, it looked pretty bad in IE and my font choice of Lucida looked beautiful on my Mac and absolutely horrid on every PC that didn't have the font (which would be most of them). I also wasn't fully supporting visitors who had smaller screens than I did. Since part of the site is a fan site for Sixpence I had visitors coming from places were high resolution screens are a little harder to come by. Enter the awesomeness ofJavascript. I happened to read an article a month or two ago about getting the visitor's browser width and feeding them StyleSheet based on the width that is obtained . Why would I want to do that? Basically so that I can make sure the site works whether your screen is at a 640x480 resolution or 1280x1024. The article and the idea isutterly brilliant. However, there was one issue the code the article provides doesn't work quite right in IE. So I go back to the source of the idea The Main in Blue who wrote a similar article. However, there was an issue. His code (which worked in every browser I tested) didn't server up three different style sheets based on three different browser widths like the Particle Tree one did. So I had to edit the code a bit. And thankfully, success.
You can try it out your self by making your browser window smaller or larger. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I could go on but I really should get back to my responsibilities. I hope you like the new design. And I'm going to try to be better at posting semi regularly from now on. I promise. :)
So I used this as an opportunity to design for all of the major browsers.
]]>For my recent jobs I have been doing a lot of coding work. That means I spend hours on end looking at XHTML, CSS, and PHP code in it's naked form. Not real pretty stuff. However, I have recently discovered three things have made that more enjoyable of late. First I have been using an incredible new text editor for macintosh called TextMate. Before this I did my coding in BBEdit which still has a place on my computer. BBEdit's search and search and replace functionality puts TextMate's to shame and I can't do without it when coding a large project. However, for everything else TextMate puts BBEdit to shame. It is hard to describe exactly how TextMate works so I think I will simply point to these videos of TextMate in action.
One of the great things about TextMate is it's flexibility in how to display the code. This brings me to the next two discoveries.
If you are staring at code all day it should look good right? Apparently I'm not the only one who agrees. I came across Bitstream Vera recently. Bitstream Vera is a free font that has a mono-spaced sans-serif version that was designed specifically for coding. It is both attractive and easy to read at small sizes. Not an easy to thing to do.
Finally, TextMate has the ability to allow you to customize how it colors the code. I have been using a customized version of this theme.
So there we have it. A nerdy post about making coding fun, or at least more enjoyable. Did you make it this far? :)
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