Our little corner of the interwebs
i recieved an e-mail from jer, who downloaded my moonlite skin, and he had updated the images to work on both light and dark backgrounds as well as increase the size and add a nice gloss over the front and a shadow.
when i first saw it it blew me away. it looks so good. it will be added to the zip file as soon as i get a chance, but it will be worth it.
i’ll keep you posted here.
sample image:
well… wordpress 1.5 came out not too long ago, and i’ve upgraded the blog software as you may be noticing right now. the only thing that sucks is they changed the whole skinning process and started to use themes. i’m sure it’s a step in a positive direction, but now i’ve got to figure out how to skin the darn thing and get my old skin back (which was based on Human Condition by Ian Main)
so i’ll probably be working on that soon, and i hope that this new version is everything they say it is…
but it should be, the people over at wordpress are super cool and probably the best developers anywhere… keepin it real, just like it should be.
*UPDATE*:
as you can see, the theme is coming along nicely, i’m learning some cool things about wordpress and have implemented a few upgrades and plugins to make the iohelix blog experience even better.
well, i finally finished my rainmeter skin that shows you the phase of the moon on your desktop. took me long enough.
the skin is available for download on my site, and rainmeter is available for download on rainy’s site.
if you need any help setting it up, don’t hesitate to ask.
i hope people find this as interesting and informative of an addition to their desktop as i do.
i’ve been working lately on a feed for astronomical data on the sun and the moon that has taken up pretty much every waking moment of mine for the past couple of weeks and it’s nearing completion !
aren’t you excited ?!?
yeah, figured you would be.
the feed was created for the sole purpose of running a rainmeter skin that i am creating to go with it that will display the moon in its correct phase on your desktop (these files will all be available on my site as soon as i am done). so i figured, while i’m writing all this code to figure out the phase, why not do the major phase dates for the current lunation. and while i’m doing that, why not sunrise and sunset times, as well as transit times, and altitude and azimuth values for those times, and do all that for the moon, too.
needless to say, it got pretty big, and every bit of data needs to be output in several different versions, too.
for instance, decimal degrees, as well as degree, minutes, seconds; local time, universal time, julian day, modified julian day, and terrestrial time. all these different values get calculated in the process, why not output them to the user?
so anywho… i have a working prototype on my desktop that pretty much kicks all ace. i will clean it up, as well as the output of the feed, and make it available for everybody. one thing though, it will only run with rainmeter, so click the link above and get it.
i’ll keep you posted. shouldn’t be too much longer now, just some minor additions, and a little tweaking and its ready to roll out.
p.s.- i’m not a geek.
i just discovered that, when using a compatible mail client (such as mozilla thunderbird), you can have my blog entries sent right to your inbox without having to check the site every day.
this is also true of any RSS feed.
so, what are you waiting for? get the latest version of thunderbird and check it out !
there is also, as of the time of this writing, a Release Candidate for the 1.0 version of thunderbird.
you may want to check that out as it has many bug fixes and newer features.
now for the instructions:
to set up thunderbird to read the rss feed, click on Tools -> Account Settings…
then select ‘News & Blogs’ from the menu on the left. this will allow you to click the button labeled ‘Manage Subscriptions…’click the button labeled ‘Add’, and in the Feed URL: box enter
http://www.iohelix.net/wordpress/?feed=rss2http://www.iohelix.net/blog/feed
(this address can also be found on the main page of the blog in the box labeled “META” on the menu side of the page, as well as some other feeds, like the comments)click ‘OK’, then ‘OK’ again, and ‘OK’ one more time.
after you have returned to the main thunderbird screen, click on ‘Get Mail’ in the upper left hand corner of the screen, and watch in wonderment as the blog posts appear automagically in your inbox.
anytime i make a new post, it will appear there all bolded and highlighted and ready for your reading pleasure.
if you wish to comment on one of my posts, just click on the link provided in the header info of the post and it will sweep you off to internet land where you can view the post on my site and add comments however you see fit.
amazing, isn’t it?
that is all… for now…
this new blog software has got to be the best thing ever.
it looks pretty cool, the back end is awesome and the best thing is… automatic comment moderation.
which means, i don’t have to sift through all of the comments any more and search for comment spam. before a comment hits the screen, it’s sent to a queue where it sits waiting for me to delete it before ever appearing on the blog.
nice.
except that i didn’t have any comment spam until i added the link to the old location of the blog…
maybe thats my fault, maybe it was inevitable, either way, i still don’t have to sift through them.
yay =)
so i went to my first college football game ever on saturday night and it was awesome !
first off, it was the last game in an undefeated season for the utes and it was against our rivals: BYU. the game started off kinda slow and i was a little bit worried for the first quarter, the cougars (BYU) were keeping up and had the score tied just before the end of the half (14-14), then we came back after an interception by the cougars that almost got them a touchdown, and intercepted thier ball and brought it back 92 yards for a touchdown. it was the best play of the night. when the game was over the score was 52-21 Utah and the crowd stormed the field. it was an amazing sight, even from outside the stadium where we were waiting to beat the crowd but still watch the field rush. if you’ve never seen one, it’s like red water rushing onto the field… but faster.
the whole game was an experience, even during the game, the drum section of the band would play little ‘songs’ that were pretty cool, and when the cougars made a touchdown their band would play but our drum section would play something else really loud trying to mess them up, it was pretty funny.
after the game, we went home, got some food, and then i headed over to a friends house for a LAN party that lasted until about 5:30 in the morning. my brother also came to the party, and i’m assuming it was his first, and i think he had a good time, he actually surprized me a little when he started doing good.
anywho… if you ever get a chance to go to a college football game, especially on rivalry week… go. it’s fun.
but even though i waited in line for tickets for like 10 hours, our seats were still pretty shitty, maybe next time i’ll just buy them…
bleeding edge, for those of you who don’t know, is the term for the top most version, the cutting edge, the newest and in most cases, not even supported yet, recomendation or version of codes, code structures, and languages and other technological entities.
the bleeding edge that i am referring to now is the new XHTML 2.0 specification. it is still in its infancy and is not even released as a recommended specification yet, but when it is, it is going to radically change the way that web pages are created and displayed.
when html started, it was a markup language, not unlike TeX (pronounced ‘tech’, like the greek letter chi, which is not pronounced like the tea, but like ‘ki’.). it was designed to allow people to produce a page and then tell about the content (with tags like h1 {a first-level header}, and p {a paragraph}, etc., and the client reading it was supposed to make desicions on how to display that content.
then the web got popular. people wanted to be able to edit and control the way that people viewed their pages. along came all of the superfluous tags like u {underline}, i {italics}, etc. that are the bane of current specifications and have been deprecated (which means they are no longer recommended but are still supported by most, if not all browsers). that is all going to change with xhtml 2.0. there will be no support for any deprecated tags and even more tags are being removed(img, for starters, h1, h2, etc.) with others being deprecated (such as <br />). these tags are going to be replaced by new (, or already existing but rarely used) tags like section, line, and object.
some new exciting features of xhtml 2.0 is the change of the href {Hypertext REFerence} attribute of the a {anchor} tag, which is now part of the global attributes, like class or name. this means you can turn ANY object, be it a list item, an image, or a table cell, into a link without having to wrap it in an anchor tag ! this is cool.
but… as cool as the new features may be, the fact that ALL specifications that came before are now unsupported, nearly the whole of the www is going to have to be re-written. including all of my pages and other sites that i am working on, which is quite a few, sometime in the near future. that sux0rs.
for more information on this subject, here are some links:
The Web’s future: XHTML 2.0
XHTML 2.0 Working Draft
well… it’s official… Utah politics sucks my ass. I can’t believe that that many people are willing to throw away the rights of other people based on the sole fact that thier (the other people) way of life makes them (the stupid ones) uncomfortable.
election day was yesterday and on the ballot was a constitutional amendment (#3) that changed the definition of marraige to being the union of a man and a woman. it also took away the rights of any other such union. here is the actual text of that ammendment:
(1) Marriage consists only of the legal union between a man and a woman.
(2) No other domestic union, however denominated, may be recognized as a marriage or given the same or substantially equivalent legal effect.
now, the first part in itself is severly fucked up. why? because. who are we to say that two people who aren’t a man and woman can’t get married? why does it make you so uncomfortable? and why do you think that by taking away thier rights it’s going to make you feel better about yourself? i mean, while we’re at it, why don’t we take away women’s rights, and the rights of blacks, too? what makes a gay marraige so threataning? is it the fact that some book says it’s a sin and therefore it must be true? or is it something to do with the safety of children? because lord knows that gay people can’t love a child the way straight people can *end sarcasm*.
the second part of this little two line atrosity is even worse. look at it closely. it takes away the rights of common law marraiges, for ALL PEOPLE, not just same sex couples, who now, by law, can’t get married, visit each other in the hospital, make desicions in times of emergency, and determine what is best for the person with whom they’ve shared their whole life and love with because a single sentence that just got added to the utah constitution says so. how fucked up is that?
and don’t even get me started on the damn presidential election. i mean, if i hear one more person say they hate bush, AND THEN NOT VOTE FOR KERRY?!! wtf? i hear it all over the place… that bush is stupid and bush is lame, and bush sucks at this and bush sucks at that… blah blah blah… well, you just had your chance to fix it and what did you do? sat on your ass and moaned about it. i voted. but only two of the things i voted for passed because the rest of the people in this closed-minded, bigoted state can’t see past thier own narrow feelings.
*end venting*
sorry about that, i’m just so frustrated, and it’s not just utah, like 12 states passed similar amendments. i mean, seriously.
— insert huge topic change here —
so… i got engaged a little while ago, kinda excited, kinda nervous, kinda swamped with school, work, and now planning for a wedding (ok, not really ‘planning’, but saying ‘okay, sure’ to ideas my fiance throws out). it’s not like i’m super stressed right now, but there are times when i’m not quite sure where to start and it gets to me a little bit.
also just got back from disneyland where my niece had her fourth birthday, got to hang out with my sister, and my niece for a day while at California Adventure, which is way cool. Tower of Terror is awesome, i recommend it to anybody, except for you wussies out there.
i’m also working on the new corporate intranet and public site for EGI, which is pretty dang huge for a guy who only designs websites as a hobby. the site uses ColdFusion, which is a server side script not unlike php and perl. although it does have its pros and cons. pro is its simplicity, theres no distinguising between the code and the html while coding, the code merely consists of specific html ‘tags’ (for instance <cfif> </cfif>), but because of it’s simplicity, it’s also a little harder to do complex things without a superfluous amount of code.
i also designed a site for a friend of mine (soon to be brother-in-law through two marriages) at www.photmillard.com. i really like the way the site turned out for him, i’m actually quite proud of it. it’s simple, but the backend is custom coded in php to select a different random picture from each of the various photo albums and display it as a rollover on the main page every time it is refreshed. i also re-skinned the photo album that he uses (the same php script as mine), and created all new graphics, edited css, and code.
anywho… it’s been a while, sorry to keep everybody in the dark about what’s going on, but i been busy.
plur, lates
p.s.- you may also notice (if you frequent my blog) that the look (and script) has changed, i was forced to do this by some weinie that kept comment spamming my blog. why do people feel they have to be dickheads? what happened to respect?
i got done putting the finishing touches on my new and improved website layout last night, made a few new pics for the walls section, and uploaded them today. take a look around at the new site and enjoy!
i really like the cleanliness of the whole layout, its very easy on the eyes, no part is too contrasted, and they all blend very smoothly. if you’re using mozilla or firefox as your browser, you also get an added bonus, if you’ll look in the blog (which you are right now), you’ll notice that as you move the screen up and down, the background doesn’t move, not even inside the light parts. makes for a really interesting effect. i kinda like it. oh well, enough about me, lets talk about you.
leave comments if you wish, or sign the guestbook and let me know what you think.
plur, lahter.