Dust devils on Mars

Wow. I love space stuff. The Spirit rover, atop a mountain, caught sight of several dust devils crossing the Martian surface.

In sickness

I’ve been a bit light on the posts because i’ve been sick this last week.

Reviewers without reviews

When researching reviews on the internets, I became aware of a particularly interesting development that I call the pure meta-review. It seems that it is more hip to discuss movies in purely meta-film reviews, perhaps because no up-and-coming edgy writer or _writer of substance _or _person writing as a day job until their 4 short-story novella is released _wants to be so mundane as to address the actual plot (was Kael the last honest movie reviewer?). Let’s take The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as an example. Now, in the run-up to the release of the film quite a lot of review ado was made from the question of “is this movie / is it not an secret weapon in the Christian front’s attempt to introduce all children to the Crucifixion?

Blog backlog

I’ve got so much to write stored up! I’ve been driving my spare computer time into the Sudoku application and haven’t had a chance to work on the literary angle. I want to write about: Keira Knightley’s teeth of doom The Mellies My work at work (hint) Learning Ruby and Ajax Other Things (tm)

Not writing much

My girlfriend, Lauren, whom I shall no longer refer too by a pseudonym, and I are moving to Austin and are busy like hell. Boxes here, boxes there, piles here, piles there, clothes, people coming to buy stuff, people calling, people mailing.

Updating some layout

Things may look a bit strange around here throughout the next couple of days. You see, I’m running the WordPress blog engine and when i first got a hold of it i hacked the heck out of it. I put functions in crazy places and generally made a mess of the code. Mess of the code made a mess of the markup. Mess ofthe markup makes it very hard to apply styles consistently. This lack of caution is playing havock in my attempts to get IE to render things properly. I’m also going to add in some groovy javascript functions that I’ve learnt through my Ajax studies.

Testing more formatting

Let’s see if i can find a nice way to insert code <code> #code into a code block $_='yo momma'; print "Please don't tell any more $_ jokes"; $foo='foo'; $bar='bar' for ($foo, $bar){ print "$_\n"; } </code>

Site Update Complete

Hi everyone, not that I imagine that thousands of readers were shocked to see [PHP][1] errors and were woefully impacted by my rather spontaneous site code update decision. I think that I’m pretty much done. I cleaned up the markup within the PHP code so that I could have more power to manipulate the layout / coloration directly. I added some javascript savvy so that the very long sidebars are now shortened by default (at least in Firefox and Apple’s Safari they are). I think it makes for easier reading. Update My girlfriend said that she thought that the long sidebars looked better.

Meta: Small changes to layout underway

In case things look screwy, I’m trying to update my site to look good in Safari. Firefox kept having issues with memory when I was doing Rails development so I’ve been using Safari for a bit. I think that I’m going to convert, it works better for the Mac and it scrolls so-very smoothly.

"I am half-sick of sidebars", said the Lady of Shalott

Apologies to Tennyson. I decided I hate my sidebars. In a white-paper, my colleague Robbie Allen wrote that the present age of web design has a lot less visual busy-ness. I then visited Daring Fireball and read about Gruber taking weeks to pick his background color. A few moments later I was really sick when I headed back to my site. Issue was confirmed by dear girlfriend: Your books section looks like ad-space. wince So, like The King and I, I proclaim, no more busy sidebars, forever! A clap of the hands and a :wq! later and you have what you see.

Ack, dmiessler, getting sneaky on me

So I was recuperating ( by writing Rails code, what other way is there? ) and, stuck on a problem, i decided to visit good old dmiessler.com and he has hit me up with a bloggers game. My favorite sites are mostly friends’ sites: The League of Melbotis Subtraction, by Khoi Vinh Mark Boulton Designs My Best Friend Since 9th Grade

Where’s the SXSW2007 wrap-up?

I apologize. I was thinking about reviewing movies, and then I decided I would make a cool scorecard in CSS for them on some rounded corner squares, and then I wound up reading about how to do rounded corners, and then I wound up testing the corners and getting stupid fricking Internet exploder to do it right, and then I shaved a yak…

The yak-shaving is out of control

In what first started out as “can i make a rounded corners square”, I have now undertaken an entire site redesign and am about 40% through it I’d guess. Is this making progress on the Mellies app? Is this doing amazing things in Ruby? No, instead it’s been time with me running a lot of Textmate and The Gimp. And Helvetica, a lot of “Helvetica.” Order of operations… New site layout Catchup posts on SXSW content Finish the Mellies App. Do taxes. Oh crap. I better do that first actually… Clean out garage Something about cars Read SXSW schwag memorabilia Crap, gotta put my memorabilia stuff in plastic tubs in the garage.

Blog redesign continues...

I have finished the new layout homepage ( index.php for those of you who have built Wordpress themes ) and the right navigation ( sidebar.php ), but I hit a bit of a stumbling block. The “about” page. This seems to be a section of a site where the person who writes the site tells you what they already expect that you know about them. This works like so for famous ( or blog-famous ) people. If you’re Jeff Atwood this is where Jeff says “I’m Jeff and I know a lot about C#” or if you’re at ‘joelonsoftware.com’, it’s where you go “Hm, yes, Joel, I knew that about you, that’s why I"m reading your site.

New blog layout testing

I really have no idea how / if this will work. Please bear with visible strangeness. Later that evening… I’ve tested this a pretty good bit on my PowerBook as I worked out the kinks. Let me just say, folks, web design is hard. I did this with nothing else but Textmate and Firefox+Firebug. The people who get sites to look consistent and nice across all the browser platforms are definitely worthy of your respect and admiration. I know that the different browsers show things a little bit differently, but I think most of these items are within fault standards.

Having screwed with my new theme way too much time lately

I’m going to set it back to Wordpress default for a little bit. I’m not giving up, but I want to leave things not in an ABSOLUTE shambles.

New theme is active, bugs being ironed out

I noticed a few small render issues in IE, but this is the look more or less.

Dear blogosphere, how I’ve missed writing you

Oh my friends. Yak shaving got a bit out of control and next thing I was doing a site redesign. And then the redesign I created after about 2 weeks was not really IE-compatible. So I went back to the drawing board and came back with the design you see today. There are still a few tiny things ( uhm, the ‘by month’ archives look terrible ), but I know how to fix them and know that I can get it done quickly, so I’m enjoying the feeling of being in the home stretch. So much has happened since I went new content silent a few weeks ago.

Unable to upgrade to Wordpress 2.2: Not ready or am I missing something?

Mantra: This is why you always make a backup I took a look at my Wordpress blog engine dashboard and noticed that there was a new version out. I applied this upgrade to my local blog copy on my PowerBook and it looked fine. I did the same thing to the site you’re reading and it messed up in a large way, a much larger way than I was interested in hacking on this morning. Issues I had: Repeated appearances of “Warning: Illegal offset” in sidebars Plugin Listing showed the word “Array” all over the place ( i.e. PHP was printing some variable that was an array, versus its contents ).

New Hosting

Hi all, Yesterday’s outage with respect to my domain’s registration ( turning this site into an adwords farm ) has convinced me that I need to be the owner of my domain ( indeed! ) and that I need to find a different host of that content.

Roll of the Tripodometer

According to Wordpress this will be by 1,003rd post which means that like most numerically-significant tripodometer rolls you notice it just a few clicks past the “momentous” moment. I remember when I rolled my old Blazer’s trip past 100K. I was on the lower deck of I-35 headed southbound across the river. I looked to my right and saw the Memorial Stadium, the lit up tower, and the lights of downtown in that 0th mile. It was memorable. But on this site, the 1000th post seems to have been: “One man’s DITMTLOD is anothers, “eh”?”. Well I can’t say that was particularly enlightening reading, but probably par for the course of those that come here.

Trying to come out of hibernation

I’ve not really felt much like writing … mostly because being sick has taken the joy out of it for me. This last week or so has not seen a marked improvement in my condition. Things were getting better after my visit to the Dr. on February 14th, but things stalled out rather around the following Tuesday ( when my steroid shot wore out ). Worried, I chose to book an appointment for this past Thursday figuring that I should see some improvement within a week. Basically the improvement process plateaued. On Thursday morning I received a call and found out that my Dr.

New Layout Test

Greetings. I am writing a new theme for this blog based on Twitter’s Bootstrap styling toolkit. This post is merely a test to help me sample enough of the screen widgets as I style the content arma virumque cano troiae qui primus ab oris italiam fato profugus…. Maybe some Ruby #!/bin/env ruby puts "We love Ruby, yes we Do!" class Razzle def initialize(a) @foo = a @really_long_text = "sometimes when we write ruby we write really long strings, ones that are too long for the pre block to handle properly" end end

Organizing Blog Internals

In preparation for my integration of my extracted Facebook content, I needed to help my blogging platform, hugo, be able to help me test and evaluate the data. I also needed some help in being able to verify dead links in my 18 year archive. I’ve now added the ability to browse posts by year as well as by tag.

Updated Tweet Archive

Recently I was looking through my Twitter archive, and realized that I had failed to port some images and that some of the tweets were really not that interesting. Building off of the work I had completed within the last week, I was able to get some data about which items needed to be culled. Also, while doing that, I found a few posts that had come loose from their images. I remedied that while working on this project.

stevengharms.com twitter archive preview

Now tweets can be visited here.

Additional changes:

Tweets that have an image now have a handy camera icon
I added a year-and-month based navigation

New Blog Section: Long Form

The content in /posts is per se rooted in time, things I said in the past were rooted to their time and moment (commentary on the game show “The Apprentice,” seems woefully anodyne in the early aughts, but today…no). Each “post” can be taken as a message in a bottle and feels “closed” once published.

Yet there are also things that aren’t really rooted in time. They’re things that might need to grow over time or that I might revisit. Ideas like:

Most influential albums of 1994
Favorite poets
What Infinite Jest means
The generation-defining books of my lifetime

To that end, I have created https://stevengharms.com/longform/. As my first “long-form” post, I’ve added a collection of my favorite poems by the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats.