Our little corner of the interwebs
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.
thats right bee-otches, i said it, and i’m a little tipsy, so everybody have fun !!!
i found out a little while ago that there is an open table night at a local club where i live and decided that i need to play my music on a big system again. so i grew me some balls and went down last night. i don’t know why i was so nervous, but there was something about it that made me a little bit apprehensive about going down there.
anyway… i got down there and got my time, which was 11:55-12:40 (45 min). cool. i got a little time to kill, so i get some drinks and hang out.
my friend started playing just as we got there, so that killed some time, but then more and more dj‘s showed up and they were friends of the people who were in charge of this little thing and so they got put on the list and everybody got bumped down to 30 min. pretty lame, but whatever. so i’m now supposed to play from 11:50-12:20. then some other guy started getting ready at around 11:45 and i was like, wtf? so one of the guys in charge told me that i would be after him at 12:20. not too bad, so i finally get my turn, and up till then, not many people were dancing so i figured i would just play some music and have everybody just sit there and watch me while i spun.
i get myself one last shot to calm the nerves and head on up and start getting ready.
i throw down my first record and it doesn’t match with the record that’s playing (the guys who was before me), so i pull a quick fade mix and start my set, not the smoothest, but it was my first song, so…
the first song i threw down has a super phatty bass line and dope energy and everybody in the place went crazy !
it was so awesome, it got me totally psyched for my set. i threw down the next song with a pretty clean mix, and it all went uphill from there. i think i was the only dj that night to have that many people dancing. it felt so awesome, and i was on a high from it for the rest of the night. the only bad thing about it was when i tried to mix into a cd the cd player they had was super touchy and very sensitive, so i couldn’t get the beats matched up very good and train wrecked into AND out of the cd, although the song i played was dope as hell.
i found out after my set that the sensitivity of the cd player could have been adjusted, but i’d never played on one before, so i had no idea. =/ oh, well.
anywho, just wanted to let everybody know that. =)
i’m finally done with this horrendous semester ! i took my last final on tues night and after the test, the professor took us out for pizza cuz the final went until 10:30p. 10:30p !!
anywho, next semester is my last semester and then i’m graduated with a BS degree. thats right, a BS degree. means i can bullshit for realz, none of this namby pamby high school diploma BS, its a real BS degree from a real school.
anywho… just thought i’d share all of the excitment, and say neener neener to all the folks who stil have finals left to take.
thbtt. =Þ~
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…
its crazy how everything moves so fast. i thought i was gonna start posting in this blog more often, and here it is already a week and a bit after my last post. crazy.
so i stayed out all night a couple nights ago waiting for tickets to the BYU vs. Utah game that’s coming up this weekend. i thought it was gonna be cold and boring and long, but it actually turned out to be a really fun night. we hung out and watched movies, played poker, played old skool nintendo, contra, tennis, tecmo bowl, had a bbq and just basically hung out and messed around all night. made the night go by pretty fast and it wasn’t nearly as cold as i thought it was gonna be, although i did have three layers on…
the game is on this coming saturday (nov. 20th) and will be broadcast on ESPN2 and we (Utah) are gonna whoop some holy ass !!
so anywho…
have a good day !
latt
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