new blog software

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  =)

stupid bleeding edge

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

election day aggravation

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?

it’s done!!

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.

new look coming soon

so i decided that it was about time to revamp the site, take out stuff that wasn’t needed, and redo the over all look of the place. i got the main page done, you cant see it yet, but i’ve heard from a couple of people that it’s pretty cool…

so i was sittin in class today and everybody started handing papers forward to the teacher…  i guess there was homework due today that i thought was due tomorrow. damnit.    oh well.

we got our tests back today, got a 94, which was very unexpected…
sorry for the rambling, i’m not quite all there right now…   don’t know why, just kinda off today.

blah blah blah    nevermind.

OMFH

that’s Oh My Fucking HELL!! for those of you not in the know.

i am so sick of the company that my domain is registered through right now it’s not even funny. they have pretty much killed my site for the past three weeks and it is still dead. (i’m writing this through a more direct path that my hosting provides in situations like these)

my current registration period was going to expire, and my hosting company started offering domain registration services that they didn’t offer when i got the webspace, so i wanted to switch over to them to make everything easier. so i pay for the domain service through them about two weeks before it was to expire, and they tried to switch it but it didn’t work, so they tried again, but the second try was too late and my name (iohelix.com) was now being held ransom (ok, not really, but that’s what it seems like).  come to find out that there was a registrar-lock placed on my domain that nobody told me about, and i can’t remove it until i renew my subscription through my current company, so i finally give in and pay them what i need to to get it working…

still waiting…

its been a week now and i still have no control over my domain. the customer service they are providing is horrible, they have NO customer service on the weekends (?!?), no phone numbers that work, and the customer service they do provide is either wrong, or ambiguous (“don’t worry, we are getting in contact with department concerns”)  WTF???

anyway, they finally figured out that somewhere along the line, the order got lost and they are currently working on it, but that’s what they’ve been saying this whole time, so we’ll see…  anyway, just to let you all know, if your domain is registered through HostDime, Fariert, or any of their affiliate companies (except eNom, who is the actual registrar that HostDime is a reseller for), get out now!

just venting…
>(  l8

more to come when my service is finally back up…

coppermine

so i’m adding a bunch of photos to my photo gallery, which has this really cool feature where you can upload a whole directory full of photos to the site, and then batch add the whole lot in one try without having to upload each photo individually.

so i upload the photos that i took down in escalante, and when i try to batch add them, it says there are no new photos in the bunch… weird. but not that big of a deal. i just head over to the coppermine website to check on some assistance with the problem…   but guess what?  IT’S NOT THERE! i get a 403 forbidden error when i try to access any part of the site!  how much does that suck?

so i’m sittin here with a bunch of pictures that i may need to upload one by one, which will take all day, cuz there’s like 50 of them. shitty. but anyway, it’s lame how they don’t even support their product anymore.

i’m lookin into changing the photo gallery script, but all the others suck ass, like 4images and some others not even worth mentioning.

poopy… plur, late

So this is a blog…. hmmm.

Well, I guess if I’m gonna  be a real ‘webmaster/technogeek’ type person, I’m gonna hafta get a blog thingy so that I dont look like I dont know what I’m doing (looks around to see if anybody is reading this).  So yeah, thats it!