Glimpses

What is the world coming to? Has anyone been reading Slashdot recently? The number of misinterpreted laws, especially concerning computers, and the blatant over reactions of people, and asinine behavior is staggering.

Well, the homepage is new now! Okay, so it doesn't look to much different, but instead of only showing blog entries it also shows the titles of things like new chapters in books, such as, as new week in the STS book. Yeah, and that took about an hour or so to do, having to write my own/modify others php code to do it. Earlier tonight I decided I wanted to have clean url's, that required getting mod_rewrite to cooperate which required getting the .htacess file just so, else it wouldn't work.

I'm not entirely happy with my current theme. I like it, it looks cool, but it just doesn't fit with everything I'd like to do. I think it shows of my artistic abilities and such, and I don't want to trash it, I'll at least keep it around somewhere so that people can see it. But I'm seriously considering changing to a new theme that is a little more friendly to what I'm wanting to do with drupal. What do you think? Should I get a new theme? I spent a bit of time browsing through existing themes on drupal's site, but I haven't come across one that jumps out at me.

First off, I've created a new book on my Ray Tracing project from Computer Graphics last semester (Fall 2006). It will at first just be a copy of the blog I did about it with a few minor changes. Not all the content has been copied over yet, especially the pictures, which will take a while to do. But look for that to be finished in a couple of weeks. Also I will be moving over my blog on photon-mapping, making a book out of that.

I needed something to pass some of the time I really don't have to waste, but I was really in the mood for gaming. So I looked through all the installed games on my desktop, didn't have what I was looking for. Tried Hitman 2, thought about America's Army but I'm about a million versions behind, well, five, and the update was 2.3GB download. Decided not to wait, so I was flipping through my games that weren't installed and ran across Dawn of War, I wasn't sure if I wanted to wait through the install, but I decided to go ahead and start, I can always read some articles for STS while waiting.

Well, I should read the dates on the web pages I read. I guess I need a Firefox plugin that flashes the original post date in giant text so that I don't miss it. Come to find out the issue I was attempting to fix using the aforementioned fix, was from 2004, yup, three years old. Which would explain why the fix didn't work, lol. After digging a little deeper, I found that it is a different problem, and currently of unknown cause, in the current version of iTunes, I checked the publish dates and the iTunes version to make sure I was getting accurate information this time. However, by disabling the cross-fade option I was able to get rid of the stuttering, at least so far. Now to wait until Apple releases a real fix.

So I finally got fed up with iTunes stuttering at the start of every song. I didn't always do this, its a recent development. I googled it and found that people are saying it happened after the patch. My googling also turned up this blog entry. Its fix was to stop QuickTime from using Direct Sound to do its audio output. Yeah, thats right, QuickTime is using Microsoft Direct Sound to output audio. Weird huh? I sure thought so. So I opened my Quicktime preferences, and unlike the posts, turned off the safe-mode wave-out and then selected the AC95 output device. The stuttering seems to be gone. Want to know what is wacked? I just checked the preferences again, and the safe-mode is back on but the stuttering is gone. So who knows what happened, but as long as my music is smooth I'm happy.

I was wrong. As the writing of the blog post I mentioned in the previous entry, SCPlugin has in fact released their new version. So I quickly grabbed that, installed it and looks like it works. While its not perfect as there are plenty of features not implemented yet, such as initial checkouts of repositories, and a couple of other things. It, in conjunctio

So I set up a Subversion (SVN) repostiory for my software engineering project. I've used svn before in other classes and it was great. Of course I was on windows where we have the amazing program Tortoise SVN which is an explorer plugin giving you access to all the subversion stuff striaght from explorer as well as icon overlays to indicate the status of your working copy. Its sweet, it works great, never had a problem with. Now I wish it was on Mac.

Okay, I just created a new book on Science, Technology, and Society that will contain my thoughts about the material, I've already post the first two weeks of work.

Also, you might notice that weird sidebar on the right with all of those keywords in it? Yeah, thats new, and I want to know if you like it? If not I can move it into a separate page and stick it on the menu. If you don't know what it does, then let me explain. Below the titles of all the pages, blog entries, etc. are a list of keywords about the content, that box on the right is a list of all the keywords with the number of times they've appeared, this way you can just click on one of those to see everything I've posted referencing that particular keyword.