Searching for Tao, 7573 Kilometres from Home

April 24, 2004 05:14 +0000 | Geek Stuff 5

some of you may have heard, but there was recently a death in my home. not of a human being of course, but of something rather important to me. my handspring visor.

it had served me well for years on end, but just the other day, i tried to turn it on, and it refused to budge. replacing the batteries only worsend my pain however, as when my favourite toy bleeped back to life, i discovered that it had miraculously forgotten everything i had taught in in the past 4years. a tradgedy if there ever was one. i had thought that hope was lost, but just now, as i rebooted to windows to play some command & conquer, i found that i still had an old copy of the palm db on my hard drive. a couple clicks and a hotsync and my favourite toy has it's life back! o joy! o rapture! ...note to self. backup more often.

April 15, 2004 19:06 +0000 | Geek Stuff 1

you won't understand why this is SO VERY COOL unless you're remotely familiar with X|HTML & CSS. but trust me. this is frickin' amazing.

April 12, 2004 06:30 +0000 | Geek Stuff 2

so it turns out that when i upgraded my blog i missed a very important bit of the upgrade: the database. this oversight caused none of the comments to work, so if you left a comment anytime between now and then, sorry, i missed it.

the sad (or funny, i guess) part about all this is that the person who found the bug was my grandmother -- thinking that it was her own inexperience with the web that was causing her comments not to show up when it was in fact my own lack of attention to detail and testing that was the problem. so yeah, next time, if you see something like this, please tell me. i don't want to be responsible for confusing my grandmother anymore ;-)

April 09, 2004 07:54 +0000 | Geek Stuff 0

you probably won't even notice unless i point it out, but you're looking at a new version of the blogger. the software itself still has no name, but i've managed to come up with a name for "my" blog... it's long, but i think its appropriate.

new features include:

better search engine - now you can search both the blog entries and the comments and it works more like google does, but with less content ;-) ie. you can search for bush "our number one enemy" and your results will only include posts containing the word "bush" and the prase "our number one enemy".
bad code stripper - after i read about angela's bad experience with spammers in her blog, i got to thinking that i should restrict bad code from popping up in there. no one's tried yet, but i like to be prepared.
new user management - i built a rudimentary user object to handle user data from now on and have also abandonned persistent sessions in favour of cookies because... well... i could go in to it, but let's just leave it with: i was an idiot to use sessions in this fashion in the first place
the time is now in a standard format - i tried a few variations on formatting the timestamp you see at the top of each post. this one, while more cryptic than a few of the other options, had the benefits of (a) being a recognised standard style (apache uses this format in it's logfiles for example) and (b) it can tell you that it was written in eastern standard time, so the blogger is now as time-passive as possible... if that's even a proper term.
new and improved swear filter - it's more expandable now, less restrictive. now i can make up a list of exactly how i want to lock out bad words... i can even rename them: "instead of 'shit' say 'poo' as in bull 'poo', 'poo' head, and this 'poo' is cold" ...mmmkay ;-) i plan to expand it later to include support for those dorky smileys everyone is so fond of.
printable layout - it was easy to do, so i threw it in.

i also laid the groundwork for a few other major adjustments still to come. most notably an ugly bug that rejects your comments if you forget to put your name and blows away all of your post (ew). for now, uh... just don't do that kay? it only happens if your comment is really long, and if it does happen, just hit the back button on your browser and things should work. it's next on my list of stuff to fix.

so yeah, enjoy the blog. i'm going to bed.

April 01, 2004 02:04 +0000 | Geek Stuff 0

so i decided that i would try and use freecycle to acquire some old pc hardware. there had to be some people out there looking to offload some old parts that are still good for me right? i posted a "WANTED:" message to the list and got a response from a nice man that would like to offload "an old windows3.1 box". why not? i thought and bribed a friend with dinner to drive me out there to pick it up..

i'm now the proud owner of a doorstop.

not only does it not have a cdrom (i had hoped) but the hard drive is only 210mb and the on board video is so old, it won't work with my old monitor. so basically, i can turn it on and stare at it... i can' t even put a version of linux on it until i find a monitor that'll connect to it, and buy a network card that'll fit it...

so then i remembered that there's a recycling day coming up in my neighbourhood, so i went online looking for times & locations i could dump this thing... aparently, there's nothing anywhere near me. if i wanna dump this thing at any of the events, i'm looking at cab fare at the very least (you'd think they'd do it near a subway station or something... i did however find this page that describes what i've been saying for years now. it IS possible to adapt an apartment building's garbage chute to handle more than just garbage. in fact, this thing will do garbage, paper, plastic and metal. ...and they're looking at ways to do organics as well... now if only i could figure out what to do with this doorstop. maybe aaron can help...

March 30, 2004 01:11 +0000 | Geek Stuff 1

apologies for the dead space for most of the day today. rogers changed my ip on me and i had to switch over the dns... i have to find a better way to do this...

March 06, 2004 06:28 +0000 | Geek Stuff 2

the search engine is finally finished. have fun, and please leave a comment if you find a bug / security hole.

March 04, 2004 06:17 +0000 | Geek Stuff 1

if you log in (it's not hard. click 'login' on the left there, enter your username and password and you're good to go) you'll notice the new user preferences option on the left just above 'logout". check it out. at the moment, it's not all that impressive, but i plan to have more stuff there eventually. for now though you have two options:

easier reading: select this option to enlarge the text and raise the contrast.
swear filter: set to "on" by default to keep my grandmother from getting mad at me ;-)

so yeah. that's it. i SO have to go to bed.

February 29, 2004 20:07 +0000 | Geek Stuff Society & Culture 1

you know how all the car companies are saying that electric cars are a "nice idea" but are refusing to mass-produce them, citing supposed performance problems? they claim that "electric vehicles just don't have the power and range that the modern consumer demands". well it's all garbage:

http://www.kaz-style.com/en/

400m in 15.3seconds
and a top speed of 300km/hr
this limo-sized vehicle rivals many of the top sports cars out there. and it runs on electricity.

February 28, 2004 08:25 +0000 | Geek Stuff 0

you remember "command and conquer: red alert"? well i wanted to play it today and was rather upset at the fact that it won't install in windows xp. turns out, the program's apparently just too old. i thought i was s.o.l. until i remembered wine, the windows emulator for linux. (well it's not an emulator, it's a fake windows install, but that's harder to say). but it works! and it's as easy as:

# emerge wine winesetuptk
$ winesetuptk
$ mount /mnt/cdrom
$ wine /mnt/cdrom/setup.exe
$ wine ~/.wine/fake_windows/WESTWOOD/REDALERT/ra95.exe

it might look complicated for the non-geek, but it really was pretty easy. and now i can play any old games i like and not be bound by bill ;-)