archive.tylerdave.com » Tech

Disconnected

tylerdave — Mon, 11 Aug 2003 12:02:08 +0000

I’m disconnecting my cable modem and router in just a few moments so my next update will (hopefully) be from Delaware.

Tylerdave Has No Style

tylerdave — Sat, 26 Apr 2003 05:59:20 +0000

I finally finished rewriting all of my MovableType templates tonight. I haven’t found a new style that I like so tylerdave.com will be without stylesheets until I come up with something that looks good.

Movin’

tylerdave — Fri, 25 Apr 2003 15:40:35 +0000

Tylerdave.com is being moved and will soon be hosted by the good folks at DreamHost. The transition should be seamless but if you can’t reach the site for a while, that’s probably why.

LAMP for Windows Only

tylerdave — Tue, 22 Apr 2003 00:26:17 +0000

I followed a link on O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com to take a survey about what topics I’d like to see covered on the site. When I clicked on the link, instead of being able to take the survey, I was told that my browser is not supported. Being an Opera user, I’m used to dealing with this kind of ignorance, but I expect better from O’Reilly.

ONLamp.com is supposed to be a resource for developers and users of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Python) systems. To limit the survey to Windows users by using Zoomerang’s survey system is obviously short-sighted. Hopefully next time they’ll choose a more tolerant survey system, maybe even one that utilizes LAMP technology.

(I could have changed Opera’s User-Agent string to report as Mozilla or IE but that’s not the point)

Play Ball!

tylerdave — Wed, 09 Apr 2003 16:57:42 +0000

Today was the home opener for the Cleveland Indians. I’ve been excited about the start of this baseball season even though the Indians probably won’t be all that good this year.

Today though, I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. For the last three seasons I’ve had a twelve game share of a season ticket package, so I got to go to a good number of games. This fall, the people who I shared the tickets with didn’t want to renew the package so no I don’t have any tickets. Of course I could go to a game and buy tickets there (as pleanty are available this year) but I think I’m somehow less likely to go to a random game if I don’t plan ahead of time.

This morning, as I was thinking about going down to a game, a client called me at work and asked if I could use a pair of tickets for this Thursday night. She said they’re pretty good tickets, plus they’re free. Now I’ll get my baseball fix that’ll hopefully last a couple weeks. Go Indians!

Lower Priced Borders

tylerdave — Sat, 05 Apr 2003 03:07:17 +0000

While I was searching around Amazon for a couple books that I want, I noticed that you can now pick some items up at Borders locations. The cool thing about this is that for most items, the pick-up price is the same as the Amazon price (plus sales tax). I think I’m definitely going to take advantage of this.

Ironically, soon enough people will be able to pre-order items from Amazon to be picked up at Borders from within the Borders store thanks to a deal between T-Mobile and Borders to offer wireless internet access at all Borders locations nationwide.

Dial-up Sucks

tylerdave — Sun, 09 Feb 2003 22:21:06 +0000

I’ve been working at my dad’s work all day, again. Currently I’m waiting for QuickBooks to finish installing (on a different computer). In the mean time, I decided to surf around a little. Of course, being a moving company, their only internet connection is a 56k dial-up. Did the internet used to be this slow? I sure don’t remember it this way.

I guess five years of broadband internet has spoiled me. I’m really not looking forward to downloading all of the QuickBooks updates next (around 20MB).

The next few weeks will be tough too. Megan and I will be driving to a bunch of different cities for her grad school interviews. I’ll have to find a dial-up ISP that has access numbers in all of the places we’re going.

Fixed

tylerdave — Mon, 27 Jan 2003 21:51:17 +0000

When I originaly set up the stylesheets for my home page, I had wanted to make the center column scroll while leaving the side menus fixed. This should be easy to do using the CSS standard ‘position: fixed’.

This works wonderfully in both Opera and Mozilla. In browsers that do not support the ‘position: fixed’ rule (such as Netscape 4) but otherwise support CSS, the rule is correctly ignored and any prior ‘position’ property is used. This would allow a page to use the fixed rule in browsers that support it, and still place the menus correctly in browsers that don’t.

Unfortunately, Internet Explorer versions 5 and 6 both have incorrect implementations of the ‘position’ property. Not only to they fail to draw ‘fixed’ elements, but they actually interpret the rule as ’static’, making for a funky looking layout.

Last night I finally found a workaround for this problem. It’s a shame that the largest software company in the world doesn’t want to support a standard that was recommended in 1998.

New Year’s Activities

tylerdave — Wed, 01 Jan 2003 03:12:45 +0000

I’m trying to get a stripped-down version of Python 2.2 installed in my home directory on my web host.

Megan is asleep on the couch.

How are you spending your New Year’s Eve?

New Opera

tylerdave — Fri, 13 Dec 2002 16:45:55 +0000

A new 7.0 beta version of the Opera browser is available for Windows. It’s a free download (with a small banner ad).

It’s even faster than version 6.05 and has a few neat new features like a navigation bar that utilizes the relative links that are embedded in some HTML (ex. documentation). This gives you handy next, previous, up, search, index, table of contents and other buttons. [According to tb, Mozilla has this too but it is disabled by default for some reason.]

The main reason I use Opera is for the standards-compliance which makes it a great tool for authoring. Generally, if you design HTML to look good in Opera it will work the same in IE, Mozilla, or Netscape too.

If you’ve never used Opera version 6.0 or later, do yourself a favor and give it a try.

Pink Fuzzy Google Fun

tylerdave — Tue, 10 Dec 2002 20:21:48 +0000

Guess what website currently ranks first in a Google search for “bright pink furry car seat covers”?

You guessed it!

Turing Tar Pit

tylerdave — Thu, 07 Nov 2002 16:07:30 +0000

For some reason that I can’t recall, I was looking for a definition of a Turing tar-pit.

That’s when I found The Turing Tarpit, a collection of links to programming languages that exemplify the ‘far too painful to use’ portion of the definition.

That led me to the even more in-depth Esoteric Topics in Computer Programming.

You have to be a geek to appreciate.

Fast Food Weight Loss

tylerdave — Tue, 29 Oct 2002 21:04:54 +0000

I use my.yahoo.com as my browser start page. Last night, I saw a banner ad for KFC. I thought that was interesting because I’m pretty sure that this was the first time I’d ever seen a banner ad for fast food.

Today, I opened my browser and the ad was for Pizza Hut. Later in the day, there was one for Taco Bell.

Curious, I decided to refresh the page a few times. The ad alternated between the three I had seen earlier and one for eDiets.

Should I be bothered that I’m being targeted as a big consumer of fast foods that needs to lose weight?

Tumble Bees

tylerdave — Tue, 29 Oct 2002 03:57:20 +0000

Want to waste hours of your life?

If you do, go to pogo.com and play Tumble Bees. Give it a chance and it’ll take you over.

I have Megan to thank / blame for this.

Going on Safari

tylerdave — Sat, 12 Oct 2002 05:02:02 +0000

I finally broke down and signed up for a Safari account today. Safari gives you online access to tons of computer books by O’Reilly and other publishers. For $10/month you get access to up to five different books.

I started doing some development with Zope this week so I wanted a good book on the subject, but I couldn’t justify spending $35-$50 on a book that I may not use that much. Safari seems like the perfect solution.

If you want to try it for yourself, you can get a 14-day free trial and cancel before it ends.

IE Supports A W3C Standard

tylerdave — Tue, 08 Oct 2002 20:46:56 +0000

While working on a web-based project, I was having problems with IE 6 rejecting cookies. As it turns out, IE 6 supports the W3C’s P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences) standard. O’Reilly.com has an article with an overview of what you can do to make your site compliant and therefore make your cookies work with IE 6 (and future P3P-compliant browsers).

Amazon Web Services

tylerdave — Mon, 09 Sep 2002 14:58:59 +0000

For a while I’ve wanted to put together a list of all of the books that I own, to make a sort of catalog for myself. I really didn’t want to write down all the info for each book and I also thought that having cover images would be cool. I couldn’t think of any nice and easy way to do this until I stumbled upon Amazon Web Services. The interface w/ Amazon is really simple (they allow SOAP or XML over HTTP) and I’ve been looking for some practical use for my beginner’s knowledge of XML. So far, I have a form to search Amazon for books and display the result. I will be refining it more in the coming days.