The Archives - misc
Just when you thought the fun was over, there's more.
Site Updates
» 29 May 2006, 9:58pm - 0 commentsI've implemented a few small changes to the site recently, and made an addition to the site's main menu bar at the top. The sites uses many scripts written in PHP to display content that is stored in the database without having to create all of the individual web pages. The scripts use templates, then query the database and essentially fill in the blanks to create what you see. The dynamic nature of the pages requires URLs with query parameters, which in the past looked like this: http://www.pinciuc.com/photos/index.php?gallery_id=111&media_id=3 It seems that URLs with query strings attached (everything after and including the ? mark) sometimes don't get indexed nicely by the major search engines. So I've followed suit with the major content management systems (CMS) and reprogrammed my scripts to use URLs like the following: http://www.pinciuc.com/photos/gallery/111/3 This change has affected the blogs, Photos, and Music sections of the website. It should be transparent to you, and the "old style" URLs with query strings still work (in fact, the webserver just rewrites the "new style" to the "old style" internally, automatically). I've also added a Search function to the website. In the main navigation bar on the right hand side you'll now see a text field with the word "Search..." in it. You can click in there, type in some keywords, then hit Enter (or click the "Go" button) to search my entire website. The search is powered by Google and implemented using the Google Web API. It should now be easier to find something specific on my website just by searching for it. Try it, you'll like it! Lastly, I've limited the homepage blog content to entries from the past 30 days. This should reduce some clutter (and motivate me to keep the page fresh!) You can now find the past 10 entries listed on the right hand side, just in case you missed something, and you can, of course, still browse the archives.
Scum of the Earth
» 14 Mar 2006, 6:51pm - 2 commentsComment spammers. That is what I think of them. Seems that they have finally caught onto me after 2 1/2 years. I've had to implement a CAPTCHA (a Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) on my comment forms to prevent spammers from using their automated scripts to flood my site with links to their usual wares (you know the ones). I apologize for the inconvenience. On the plus side, over 10 people have left comments on my Why MySpace Sucks post, a record. It looks like editorial/opinion stirs people's desire to comment more than just plain old boring news about my life... so expect more of it. Just wait until I'm brave enough to post my "Why Toyota Corolla Sucks" manifesto!
New galleries, music
» 27 May 2005, 1:11am - 0 commentsJust a quick post to let you know that there are a couple of new galleries available in the photos section: - Algonquin in April: Some photos from a day trip to the park in early April - Algonquin Canoe Trip, May 2005: Pictures from my recent canoe trip There are also a couple of new albums in the music section: - Thunder, Lightning, Strike by The Go! Team - Nightsongs by Stars More soon.
Layout Change
» 29 Mar 2005, 1:42am - 0 commentsI promised more changes to the site, and now changes there are! For a few reasons, I've decided to update the layout of the homepage to something a little more flexible for me, given my posting frequency (or lack thereof). With the three column layout I previously used, I had to carefully limit the entry count in the left and right to try and keep them about the same length. Of course, with varying lengths of posts this was hardly infallible, and the page often had a tendancy to look a little lop-sided down at the bottom. Well, now you get one long column with entries from both the conduit and divert intermingled and sorted by time posted! It may or may not resemble a certain famous professional blogger's layout (no link provided, you figure it out), but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, isn't that what they say? And most importantly, no more worries for me about post length, column length, or trying to decide how to eloquently present excerpts of posts; and no more lop-sided pages and hacked up entries for you. It's a win-win.
New website design unveiled
» 3 Mar 2005, 3:08am - 2 commentsAt last the new website design is up! It wouldn't have been a real "coming soon" post if I hadn't waited at least a month to launch! The new site is not a lot different from a functional point of view--there are a few new features here and there--but I definately think it looks better. Hopefully over the next little while it'll improve even more. I know there are a few rendering issues with Internet Explorer that need to be worked out, so for best viewing (and for supporting web standards and your own well-being), download Firefox. I have some ideas for new features and enhancements as well, so keep checking in and I'll post when anything is implemented. As I mentioned in the previous post, the entire site is built to web standards using XHTML and CSS, with no tables for page layout whatsoever (there are one or two for tabular data, but that is what tables are supposed to be used for!). The XHTML source should be easily viewable on handheld devices and mobile phones, and is also screen reader- and TTY-friendly. I've found CSS to be very powerful and, once you learn its ins-and-outs and get used to working with it, it can actually speed up site development. Of course it also speeds up site access, eliminates redundant code, reduces authoring errors... it's the bee's knees! There are links ("xhtml", "css") in the footer on most pages that you can click to verify that the page is compliant with the respective standards. If you happen to find one that generates an error, I'd love to hear about it. So, I hope you like the new look, and of course, feel free to leave comments and suggestions, good, bad or ugly :)
New site coming soon
» 31 Jan 2005, 2:35pm - 1 commentYes, it's true, I've been working on a new site design for pinciuc.com, and have been spending countless hours in front of the computer learning all sorts of new trickery (who says you can't teach an old dog?). The new design will be more stylized, modern, and attractive, although as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I'm impressing myself by becoming a CSS guru practically overnight. Well that's not entirely true, it was over a weekend, and I'm not a guru, but I am finally learning why this whole CSS thing is really catching on (see this great article). If Micro$oft can save 924 GB in bandwidth a day simply by getting rid of a few tables, I must be able to salvage at least a couple hundred bytes. Anyway, the new site will be done entirely in XHTML and the aforementioned CSS. It should look exactly the same in most modern browsers (Spread Firefox!), it should load very quickly, and it should look nice. It will work mostly the same way as the current site, but I hope to introduce some new elements and changes over the next little while. And before I forget, why doesn't Internet Exploder get with the program and support CSS properly? And why doesn't it correctly display alpha channels in PNG images? And why does it stick extra little white spaces and lines where they should'nt be? All this (and much, much more) is why Firefox is now my default web browser.
Still alive
» 19 Jan 2005, 11:11am - 1 commentHappy New Year! It's been two months since I've written anything so there's lots to talk about. I'll try my best to keep it brief (and to update more often). I found out in December that I will be keeping my job at the newly formed Sony BMG Music Canada. Hooray for employment... I think. The holidays were spent doing the usual family things back in Windsor. K and I went to Chicago to spend new year's with Jody and Dave. I hardly remember Chicago being such a beautiful city (and what a skyline!) from when I visited years ago. We mostly just walked around downtown during the day, and bar-hopped at night. Photos of our exploits are now online. To my near insanity, I've spent the past two weeks troubleshooting a friend's PC that kept freezing up. After countless software and BIOS tweaks, and swapping out virtually every component but the CPU, I finally discovered the problem: the damn power supply! It seems the P/S wasn't putting out enough juice when the computer demanded it, causing the lockups. Of course, it was literally the last component that I could possibly test out... Murphy loves me. Some new music is online, and you can now check out the latest adds on the music section homepage. Standouts are controller.controller's 'History' and The Arcade Fire's 'Funeral'. I've added some new functionality to the photos section. Galleries can now accept comments; you can now hide the comments section; photos can now have different titles and descriptions in each gallery they appear in; and a list of other galleries an image appears in (if any) can be found just below the image or description. A list of friends' web logs now appears on the homepage in a new section called "network". Why don't you visit them when you have a moment? That seems to be almost a novel now so it's time to shove off.
Fall Arrives
» 8 Oct 2004, 11:05am - 1 commentA few things to unleash on the world this time. First, a couple of new galleries: Distillery District Algonquin Park In Fall Also reorganized the photos section a bit, with a new parent gallery called "Around Town", containing galleries of photos from around the Toronto area. Two websites that I work on are nominated for ADISQ awards, which are like the French Juno Awards. The sites are for French-Canadian artists Céline Dion and Garou, and are nominated in the "site internet de l'année" (website of the year) category. I ordered three books from Amazon.com and they were subsequently lost in the mail. Fortunately they do maintain good customer service and they reshipped them (priority express!) promptly. The books are: The Print - Ansel Adams The Negative - Ansel Adams Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs - Ansel Adams I've previously purchased The Camera by Ansel Adams, and with The Negative and The Print, now have the complete Ansel Adams Photography series. These books are highly recommended for beginning and advanced photographers alike, and I like to think they've helped me out a little bit! That's it for now, get out there and enjoy the fall colours!
More Music, More Photos
» 13 Sep 2004, 1:19am - 0 commentsA few new albums in the music section: The Hives - Tyrannosaurus Hives Hot Hot Heat - Make Up The Breakdown Modest Mouse - Good News For People Who Love Bad News The Zutons - Who Killed The Zutons? The photos section has undergone a bit of a reorganization. I've categorized the galleries so finding them should be more intuitive, and the page less disorganized. Two new galleries to go along with the new layout: Algonquin Backpacking 2004 Canadian International Air Show 2004 Enjoy, and please leave comments on the new galleries!
Email Updates!
» 12 May 2004, 2:00pm - 3 commentsHi hi hi everybody... if you are reading this, then my attempt to code a system which allows me to update my website via email has worked! I've seen this capability on some other blogging sites such as Blogger and I got jealous, and naturally I wanted it here too. So, hopefully, this will eliminate one bottleneck - logging in - to making my posts more frequent. Good for you, good for you! Good for me, good for me! On to more interesting things (right)... Kev is pretty much moved into the place now. Finally, there is a table and chairs in the dining room! Of course, I haven't eaten there yet (old habits die hard). Been working on a little decorating, finally, and added some things to the bathroom and living room (which also underwent a reorganization last night). Finally printed some of my pictures, mostly in black and white, to put up on the bare walls. Some new music in the collection: Broken Social Scene "Feel Good Lost", Wilco "Being There", Constantines "Shine A Light", and Franz Ferdinand's self-titled album. A couple of new photo galleries, as well: Blur, and some Miscellaneous Algonquin pics from 2002. S'about all for now. So let's hope this works, and here's to updates more than once a month!
The flu strikes
» 21 Dec 2003, 2:20am - 2 commentsThree weeks later, here I am again. Survived a four day battle with the flu last week which kept me in bed for a few days eating nothing but clementines and drinking ginger ale. Guess I should have gotten a flu shot this year. I can’t remember the last time I’ve had the flu, and I’m in good health, so I figured, why bother. Work has been insane, so much to do, so little time to do it. I’m off from the 24th to the 5th so I have to do all of that work ahead of time, on top of the work I missed while sick, making it feel like the worst two weeks of the year. I received my new 50mm f/1.8 lens in the mail last week and took some pics with it at my department holiday party. Still haven’t decided to put any up in the gallery since it’s people from work, but a few of them turned out quite nice so maybe those’ll make it. Anyway, the f/1.8 really helps in low light, and without it all of the pics would have had to use flash and, consequently, wouldn’t have looked as good. Really wish I had this lens for the Red Wings game last month, it would have made a huge difference. It’s official, I’ve got lens mania. I can’t stop reading about and comparing all the different lenses available, and trying to figure out the best combination that I can actually afford. Next up, I think, will be the 17-40mm f/4L, or possibly the 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 as a “walkaround” lens. I have dreams about the 24-70mm f/2.8L, but at $2,000 it’ll remain a dream. Unless someone wants to buy one for me for Christmas?! Oh yeah, my department went to see the Toronto Roadrunners take on the St. John’s Maple Leafs last night at the Ricoh Coliseum. They’re part of the AHL, farm teams for the Edmonton Oilers and Toronto Maple Leafs, respectively. These guys play really good hockey, and it reminded me why I like college football more than NFL: because they players have something to play for besides money. They’re not there yet, and they have to play hard every night or they will never make it. For $25, we had drink rail “seats”, but they were at centre ice and closer than the $75 tickets for the Red Wings. And if there weren’t eight of us, we could have moved down to good seats since the arena was only half full. Guess that’s all for now. ‘Til next time.
Back online
» 29 Nov 2003, 11:17am - 0 commentsPhew! Lots of problems with my Linksys router lately. It's been a bit flakey for the past while, and then it suddenly stopped working altogether. After a quick check the web interface didn't respond, so I figured it was toast. Went out and bought a new router, and then the next day I got the idea that maybe the router just reset itself. Turns out it did, all settings wiped out, back to factory defaults. So I reconfigured, upgraded the firmware, and it's back online. Now I have a router to return. So I apologize to the throngs of pinciuc.com visitors (hah) who had to live without their daily dose for three whole days. Direct all complaints to Linksys technical support! -R
First post
» 21 Oct 2003, 10:14pm - 1 commentWell it seems like everyone has a weblog these days, so why shouldn’t I? Probably because I’ve been walking around telling everyone how much I hate the word “blog”. Unfortunately for you I’ve been searching for content and programming projects for this website and a weblog somehow seemed like an intriguing idea. I think I liked it so much because if I created the software myself, I wouldn’t have to call it a “blog”, or use anything made by “Blogger”, “Blogspot”, “blo.gs”, “DonutHeadz”, “eBloggy”, “pitas” (who thought of that one?), “TongueWag”, “zBlogger”, or any other of the innumerable “blogging” tools and services that are available. I created this myself, and so now I can call this means of communication anything I want: “channel”, “station”, “journal”, “diary”, “record”, “memoir”, “chronicle”, etc. And I can boldly claim in my best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice, “Eets not a Blogga!” So now we’re clear, that this “record”, or, “chronicle” if you will, is definitely not a “blog”, or even a “pita”. It’s something that I created from scratch, is written in PHP, stores data in MySQL, is interfaced through Apache, and runs on Linux, similar to thousands of other applications out there. But nothing like “DonutHeadz” or “eBloggy”. It may happen to look like a “blog”, but you and I both know that’s precisely what it is not. Appearances can be, and often are, deceiving. Welcome to “the conduit”. (At least until I think of something a little better ;)