 |
Halfdone Development |  |
 |
Something of the week |  |
Sunday, May 11th, 2003
I got my catch phrase trademarked! No one better use it!
Sunday, May 4th, 2003
Ever had one of those jobs? Yeah, thought you did. So I don't have to go into details, you know.
I need a car.
Sunday, Apr 27th, 2003
I was checking out the MBTA Website, aka the "T", the local subway/bus system where I buy a pass every month and ran into pictures of the control room:
Now if I was in control of that room, I know what I would do...
Sunday, Apr 20th, 2003
Still moving random stuff from my old webpage:
Sunday, Apr 13th, 2003
I'm still moving info from my old webpage to this one and some are kinda random stuff so I'll move it here.
Sunday, Apr 6th, 2003
There is lots of opinions about OSes like Windows, linux, BSD, apple..etc on the net. But something I've never seen is a Pro windows graphic. I mean there are tons of pictures on the web like: BSD vs Linux, Apple vs Bill, Linux vs Windows, Apple vs Windows, Apple vs Microsoft using Linux (btw, OS X is based on BSD not linux so this is wrong), More BSD vs Linux, and some more Linux vs Microsoft here, here and here. Some even go way over the line and this one I like.
Something I've haven't seen is pro windows pictures. Well to fill the gap I created one myself. As you can see I've not that creative.
Before you say anything, I'm not just anti linux-apple-bsd.
Monday, Mar 31th, 2003
Oooops! Slipped and didn't post anything yesterday, my mistake. Why don't just grab a URL from my 300+ (newly cleaned!) bookmarks/favorites... Um here! Turn off the Internet.
Sunday, Mar 23th, 2003
Just to complete the last SOTW, I got a full refund including shipping! He doesn't even want the old HD back so perhaps I will dismantle it and take pictures. I was able to get some new 6 gig HDs for about $50. I think I will just go with that instead of doing another ebay purchase. Quicker too.
Sunday, Mar 16th, 2003
After 7 years of being "online" with access to the internet, I finally used eBay. I got some old laptops from a guy at work but without any hard drives. So I signed up for PayPal and eBay and looked around for a cheap used 5gig or something.
Using eBay was easy enough. You look for items you want, check the ratings of the seller and where he is. You then enter in your max price you're willing to pay and eBay will take care of the rest. eBay would basically bid for you, automatically raising the bidding to your max as others make bids.
Ended up going with this item, 6gig IBM drive from ravredd. The bidding still had about 2 days left and was set to $1 at that time. So for my first "proxy" bid value I put down $17.50. Decided to go with an odd price thinking it might stick around longer and that it did. I wasn't outbid until 20 minutes before the end of the auction. I was luck in that it ended after I got home from work. Unlike other people at work I don't watch eBay all day. I will need to keep this in mind when I do this again.
As I said I was out bid with 20 minutes left. Since it was my first and it was only by $3 or so I waited until 7 minutes from the end and put down $21. Well I won paying $20.50. Well you know that joy you get when you wait days for a win? Well I don't ;)
The auction ended Wednesday and I would say that within 10 minutes I put the PayPal order through. Even got "Great buyer, quick payment. Smooth transaction" though if you read the emails and his past buyer feedback it seems very automated. Not that it's a bad thing, more likely he would have a replacement and not spend the money the instant he gets it.
Yesterday I get the drive at work in a nice USPS box. I open it up and wasn't too happy with the shipping. It was wrapped in one layer of bubblewrap but both ends of the wrap was open. Although the wrap was a bit larger then the box so it did swish the ends kinda closed but it did so more on the end with a piece of tape, which I assume was suppose to hold the drive in place, then where I found the drive. That piece of tape has USPS logos on it so I assume the seller didn't package the drive himself but I'm not sure. Also the drive didn't have any antistatic bag around it but as long as the drive worked I didn't care.
I put the drive on a system at work and ran tests on it. As per the guy's DOA policy I need to report DOA within 24 hours, kinda short I think but that's the agreement. I let it run while I run around doing that I normally do at work and return to find the drive has failed. Error: "0x73 - Defective Device, Excessive Shock", TRC: "73000563". Of course when you see "Excessive Shock" as a message I think back to the shipping. If you ever look though my picture collection I've seen quite a bit of damage done due to shipping.
Well I've contacted the guy via eBay and now I'll see what is going to happen. He does have other reports of DOA items and he seems to deal with them fine. I assume he would refund my money after I ship it back minus the shipping. Shipping itself was kinda high. He charged $8 for shipping USPS Priority Mail but as the box says it cost $3.85 cents. I do know that he doesn't know the location before hand so he need to put in something. And that by using PayPal there is a fee but I'm not going to care about this at all.
Sunday, Mar 9th, 2003
Quiz time! What do you think this is?
It's a small piece of 2 day old dried spaghetti I left on a plate on my desk that I'm too lazy to bring to the kitchen to get rid of.
Sunday, Mar 2nd, 2003
Snapping your fingers. Did you know that when you snap your fingers, the sound it makes is not from the quick slip of two fingers but the hitting of the middle finger between the ring finger and the base of the thumb. Easy to test by pointing the ring finger out. I have no idea why this just came to mind.
Sunday, Feb 23rd, 2003
"There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going.
There's no knowing where we're rowing or which way the river's flowing.
Is it raining? Is it snowing? Is a hur-ra-cane-a blowing?
Not a speck of light is showing. So the danger must be growing.
Are the fires of hell a-glowing? Is the grisly reaper mowing?!
YES! THE DANGER MUST BE GROWING! FOR THE ROWERS KEEP ON ROWING!
AND THEY'RE CERTAINLY NOT SHOWING! ANY SIGNS THAT THEY ARE SLOWING!!!"
- Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Sunday, Feb 16th, 2003
Goal for the week. This should be easy since it's been VERY cold here. Find a nice large chunk of ice and use it as a kicking "stone" between my home and the bus stop going to work then back again at the end of the day.
Sunday, Feb 9th, 2003
Sunday, Feb 2nd, 2003
I was looking though my picture collection and ran into a picture I took when I first got my new used camera and was playing with the options. I bet I can get this posted in some art galery somewhere, I just need a more artsy name. Late Night At Home.jpg
Sunday, Jan 13th, 2003
I can't make up my mind on how I should do the backend of this site. I want it flexible but secure. I have lots of ideas how I can do it but nothing that works the best.
Requirements:
- Organization: It need to be organized, likely in a tree form. Also easily found and changed. So no files or scripts called Content?Article=23573895
- File based: I don't want a complete sql backend, mostly for the next reason
- No editing frontend: I don't want to write a frontend for my editing.
- Global changes to styles, headers, footers, menu...etc: Have to only change 1 file to change the basic design of the whole site.
- Print friendly: Allow a print version of every page without making a separate page
- I use PHP for webpage coding.
- Have to be secure.
- I would be the only one editing the site and I have direct access to the server, I don't have to worry about content pages changing css or "doing bad stuff."
Thoughts so far:
- I want to avoid putting "include header.php" and "include footer.php" on every content page. Prefer that a script require/include the content then the other way around. The content can still be php or perl or whatevery I want though. The content page would just have content with generic titles like h1 and h2 and stuff and let the php and css do the rest.
- I want to keep the content file based. So an article about file systems would be in FileSystems.php and not part of some other file or in a database. I would also want to keep that file organized in directories/folders. So it would be in Articles/FileSystems.php for example.
- I think I would need to use a script to host most/all pages on the site and that script would need to figure out where the content is. So it might be something like http://www.halfdone.com/Content.php?Article=FileSystems but I would want a url like http://www.halfdone.com/Articles/FileSystems to do this. I see that apache's rewrite would do this but I need to figure out good GET values that are flexible.
- I would be great to not have to create a table or array of all the content files. It would be great if I can just get the page via the GET parameters but do this securely. The rewrite url would be the same format as the directory/folder structure. So www.halfdone.com/Development/VNCStarter would have a content file in /development/vncstarter.
- Perhaps putting some php vars in the beginning of the content pages such as $Title = "Development" and $Page = "2" would work.
...sleep time, more notes to come.
Any ideas? email me
