I was browsing through my hard drive, and found a couple of items which seem now like a vague memory to me. I found a few poems.
I was browsing through my hard drive, and found a couple of items which seem now like a vague memory to me. I found a few poems.
I decided to try out Aperture. Not for any particular reason... I'm not really looking to spend money on the product, and though I take photos, I'm no expert or professional photographer, and thus probably don't need it.
Still, I've managed to have some fun playing around with it. I'm not sure I quite "get" the point yet (though I'm sure I will), as all the editing controls are in Photoshop as well, so I figure it is mostly an organizational application.
It is nice to be organized, but currently I just have a ton of photos separated into a dozen categories in Aperture, and I'm not quite sure what to do with them. Though, I did manage to make some of the images look more... striking, I guess is what you'd call it. I might have overdone it a bit (it's too bright! My eyes! My eyes!), but as I'm in that try everything sort of mood, I figure I can be excused.
This "expression of ideas" thing is going to get a bit repetitive, isn't it? I suppose that's the point.
I was thinking over the flaws in Wikipedia yesterday: it can sometimes be inaccurate. I tried to figure out a possible solution, and, of course, I had to start at the root of the problem.
I have too many ideas, and too often, I do not share them. I refrain from sharing them for many possible reasons, but they all stem from one root emotion: fear. Fear of ridicule, fear of judgement, fear of being wrong, and most importantly, fear of not being heard.
The last fear is justified, I'm afraid, as I usually am not heard. I want to make a difference, I want things to happen, I want people to understand... and too often, no one hears what I say to begin with.
College has just started, and I have gone through the first sessions of three of my four classes: Humanities, C++, and Freshman Composition I.
Finally, a good temporary (and perhaps partially permanent) solution. I finally figured out a way to speed up the site (I think). Though I, of course, have "top-secret" "internal builds" of the website system which do run faster, I do not have time to finalize them, seeing as I am starting college tomorrow. So, I must instead make do with a much quicker and dirtier solution, which, in fact, many other sites use.
Instead of keeping the site always perfectly fresh, I have put a one-hour cache on it. This means that the server won't even try to generate the page at all for most requests! (For editing, I've made a separate site which is not thus cached, and it takes the full amount of time to render - sometimes .15 seconds, other times (if the server is running backups at that time, which uses ~100% CPU) over 20 seconds!).
I am a bit irritated, however, as if the CPU and memory of the server I am using were sufficient I would not be having most of these problems.
It seems I did not test the new caching well enough, and there were several bugs involving updating. At first, updating did not work (or rather, the updated results did not show up as the cache was not dirtied). Then, just today, I found another bug, involving editing working, but the results showing up only in edit mode - which is of course not optimal.
You may (or may not) have noticed that I put my little do-dads of information on the left of the website, instead of the right (as most have it.)
This design choice might be unwise - I am not yet sure. Most readers read items such as websites left-to-right, up-to-down. Putting this relatively unimportant information to the left of the actual content may therefore be a bad decision.
However, I didn't want to fit into the crowd. I wanted the little information, but I didn't want it too look like how everyone else had it. So I compromised. People tend to pay less attention to things that are less visible, so I made my information boxes less visible. If you hover over them, they fade into sharper focus, allowing you to read their contents easily.
I'm still not sure if they are actually transparent enough. I'll probably play around with them a bit.
Unfortunately, my website renders currently somewhere between half a second and one full second.
Google Analytics, I have noticed, can really be quite a drag on page loading speed.
This is quite unfortunate. So, I looked for a solution. Some people host the urchin.js file on their own server, and have an automated task which downloads the current copy a couple of times a day to keep up to date. This solution did not seem proper to me, given that Google specifically states that it should not be, and that I don't really want to set up my server with a component to auto-download the script.
So, on my site, I made the script be loaded on-demand through one of my own Javascript functions. This function, which runs after all of my initialization has completed, adds a new script object to the document, runs a test every tenth of a second to check if it has completed loading, and then runs the urchinTracker() command. It took a bit of doing, but it appeared to work, and there was apparently no waiting for Google's sometimes-slow servers for my site to initialize properly - it only would only wait AFTER everything has initialized.
Unfortunately, this did not work. The Google Analytics code would not call. As I am too busy to figure out why, I have replaced it. However, a few other edits are still in place - the initialization script now calls before the images have loaded, and before Google's code has loaded. This makes things appear much faster.
Since several people have come up with their own ideas for iPhone copy and paste, I thought I'd throw mine in.
Traffic was slow, and we needed to stop driving for a break, so we exited from the highway and stopped at a gas station, hoping to obtain food and have a bathroom break. Unfortunately, in our quest to relieve ourselves we were confronted with a terrible crowd. Apparently others had the same idea as we had.
After waiting in line to go to the bathroom, we were able to go to the bathroom. The males of our group were confronted with a very nasty sight. It was a clogged up urinal. I have a picture, which I have posted - but not in my gallery, as I don't want to inflict that on people. If you wish to view it, you must open this link. It is not a pretty sight.