Tag Archives: Technical Notes

I’m learning how to do various fun things with CSS and html for work, so today’s entry is going to be all about that sort of thing… Feel free to nod off anytime.
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I made a few behind-the-scenes changes around here that should, hopefully, be completely invisible to the casual reader… The most visible thing is that Quizzes now have their own category. I realized that I’d posted enough links to internet surveys and such that they deserved a category of their own. So, if you feel the need to find out what Sci-Fi Character you are, or what They Might Be Giants album best fits you, you’ll find the links over there on the navigation bar.
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You know, I could have sworn I’d written this already, but I did a quick search for “Microsoft” and “Famine” in my previous entries and nothing came up, so it’s probably just something that I’d been intending to write for a while and just hadn’t gotten around to. Anyway, I’m about to go off on a rant about technology for a while, so if that bugs you don’t bother to read the rest of this…
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Sometimes I think the folks over at Snopes should be required reading. I’ve gotten three e-mail messages from folks talking about Captain Kangaroo’s stunning military career. Trouble is, they’re all wrong. He wasn’t a sergeant. He didn’t fight on Iwo Jima. He didn’t earn the Navy Cross.

Also, just for the record, Mr. Rogers was not a Navy SEAL. And John Denver wasn’t a sniper in Vietnam.

I wonder if someone could write an e-mail filter that checks for keywords and cross references them to Snopes articles…

Just doing a bit of mucking around behind the scenes here… If all goes well, you should be able to see the contents of the comments on the archive pages without having to click on anything. We’ll see if it works and I’ll try making it prettier later.

UPDATED: So far so good… You should now be able to see any comments after entries everywhere but here on the main page. Again, if I’ve broken anything, let me know by leaving a comment here…

Ok, I’ve made some changes to the site… Added a few bits of functionality with MovableType plugins (Brad Choate’s OnThisDay is the only one so far, but I’ve got a couple others I’m going to add as time allows…), and managed to totally mangle the style sheet for the site while trying to add better navigation to the archive pages. I think it had something to do with mixing percentage widths and pixel widths… The entire navigation bar there on the right dropped down so that the top was below the blog entries. If that’s still the case when you’re looking at the site, try reloading. If that doesn’t work, try making your browser window a bit wider…

If it still doesn’t work, leave a note in the comments and I’ll try banging my head against the wall for another couple of hours to fix it again.
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Earlier this year we got some 200 GB ATA 133 hard drives for one of our older machine. It was having a slow noisy head crash, sounding a little more like a dentist’s drill every day. It was only a matter of time before everything on its hard drive went away for good, so we backed it up to the server, slapped the new drives in, formatted them, and copied everything back.

In the process, we discovered that the machine we had put the drives into only had an ATA 66 interface. It could still use the drives, but only 137 GB or so of the total 200 would be visible. Kind of a waste, but better than having a drive that was slowly shaving itself down to aluminum confetti to the tune of Aphex Twin’s “Ventolin”.
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Ok, this is proof that I’m a geek… We’re looking at Windows emulation software here, for a number of reasons. Most importantly, it’s a way of making our website testing more portable.

If you’ve done web design, you know that things tend to look different depending on what platform you’re on and what browser you’re using. At work, we’ve got both Macs and PC’s to make it easy to test things out. We can just move over to a handy PC when needed. Thing is you can’t easily do that when you’re working from home on a laptop… Fortunately, with a good emulator, you can just launch a program that pretends to be a Windows machine and look at it that way.
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No.

The network card doesn’t play nice with the old machine… Pity, too. I’d come across a set of really nice instructions on AFP548.com on how to set up an OS X server with a spare network card so that it could act as a router with NAT services…

Maybe some other time.