Mindstab.net

I’m getting a little frustrated with CSS. It’s supposed to be the answer to layout. Tables are bad. Well, yes they are bad as in they mix formatting with content, and make accessibility harder. I agree. And they do need to be done away with. But CSS doesn’t seem to provide an elegant way of doing some of thing things tables did. Like full height columns. I’ve been reading up on them and to achieve them you seem to need ugly hacks. Ugly. How is this convoluted mess of code which uses esoteric parts of CSS I didn’t know existed the answer to layout. It’s a mess. Just mostly not in the content (although the content is now choker block full of many confusingly layered layers). It’s not an elegant solution. I’m not really pleased about it.

Also, after a cursory look, CSS doesn’t seem to provide a way to subclass. You define a class and that’s that. You get a one shot modification with an id, but that’s it. What if you have a blue box, and then many different types. The only way I’ve seen is to attach all the children names to each parent definition of styles. Again, uglier than needs be. Yes CSS can be made to do just about anything, but it certainly isn’t pretty about it. Table layout can be elegant compared to CSS sometimes, not that I’m happy about it.

CSS is frustrating me today. And I’m thinking about whipping up a quick and simple table layout for a site I’m working on. I’d still use CSS for all the styles and stuff, but it’d simply be ugly and a huge hack to make it do the layout as far as I can see.

So I blew what free time I had this weekend for coding and server work on trying to get Rails, or more specifically FastCGI working on Kvasir, which employs mpm_peruser. Seems it’s a no go. FastCGI is a daemon and hasa socket which is creates mod 700 owned by apache:apache, and this particular rails install was under a peruser processor of dan:dan. So the server couldn’t talk to the FastCGI daemon and so no go. Even if I tweek Apache, Rails won’t work for other users, and it’s a poor plan. So i think I’ll just fall back and do this project in PHP. I at least learned the basics of Rails running through a todo list tuorial on my laptop. Waste of time though.

Well I installed Ruby on Rails and am working through some tutorials. And there’s some pretty cool powerfull stuff gonig on in Rails. I’ve barely scratched the surface and don’t exactly understand everything. Its kind of a big framework in a way. But it feels pretty damn cool already. This should be handy. Create a basic mysql backed todo list in under 1 minute.

Also been been downloading a bunch of videos and TV lately. Poking at some development Gnome apps that look cool in RSS. And with Nika, actually getting some coding done while on the bus and or skytrain and at school. So yeah, everyones a winner. Just very slowly. And even though school and work have kept we reasonably busy, I haven’t put stunning amounts of work into school and also haven’t bombed anthing yet. So over all I’m pretty pleased.

Resurection of Evil (Doom3 expansion) was finally released for Linux. So I’ve started playing that. It certainly took them long enough :/ The game seems good so far and runs fine. The Ion gun seems to me to be a prety big rip off of the one from half life. Still, it’s decently cool.

As for working, I’ve started reading up on xmlrpc for php and python and am going to write a xmlrpc driven ip tracker/dns updater. Thus anyone who wants to use the service can have their computers via cron jobs report their ips to a central repository to be accessed only by their owner with the right password, and optionally have dns configs updated. Should be handy.

I’ve stumbled upon Python Challenge. Looks like fun and given more time I’d like to play it. Presumably though you could do it with any language, although I assume the tasks are suited for python. I’m also slowly renewing my interest in learning ruby. Maybe :P.

I also put up some info on the old primes project and the last release because it is a useful resource if nothing else. http://www.mindstab.net/wiki/index.php/Primes

I just today for the first time viewed the site in IE and noticed some breakage in regards to the side menu. It appears that IE doesn’t want to apply styles to list items. I dropped divs inside of each li and volia, everything looks as it should. So, boo on IE.

I’ve been thinknig about it a little now on and off for about half a year. We have billions of command line text editors, but no command line spread sheet packages. I sort of passed it off as a crazy idea, but then I saw this:

Quatro Pro running under dos box care of planet KDE thanks to the april fools planet gnome and planet kde reverse.

And it reminded me of the good old days of dos. There totally were command line spread sheet packages. Now I really either want to find one for linux, or try my hand at writing a simple one. Spread sheets are handy, and if I could ssh to my home box and work on them as well as all text and code, it’d be that much cooler.

Well, I decided I really want to go ahead with mpm peruser (child of mpm child and sibling(/child?) of mpm mutex) for security reasons, and so I created a second instance of apache that users mpm prefork to handle ssl all by itself. This will work for the interum I think.

Now I’m starting to learn about wordpress theme hacking. I suspect I’ll be setting up several instances of it in the not so distant future so had I better be good at customizing it soon.

Then onto probably wordpress plugin hacking so I can make one big wordpress/gallery site for myself. Unless I need something else for code holding. Haven’t decided quite yet.

As for projects I’m thinking about working on:

• VM 2: The remake
  A new ideally better and faster version of my first toy VM I wrote last fall.
• Shitty physics toys:
  I want to grab some simple equipment and putter about with it, insipered by my physics class. Ideally I ‘d like to build some kind of solinoid magnetic accelerator thingy ala a tiny railgun
• Presence stuff:
  Carrying part of your online presense on a usb stick and having a central online site with the rest of it. Thebon might be interested in this for his ‘learn everything you didn’t want to know about me’ project. ;)
• Verious wordpress related things:
  A proper working spell check plugin for instance ;). Also, look at LJ interoperability. Those are two biggies. Also, investigate wheather wordpress is suitable for hosting other non new content via it’s pages like hosting pagelets on various projects I’m running + code, or for SpaZ, hosting music.
• Hacking on Tomboy:
  I want to see if I can add html export to Tomboy, because it would be cool.

Well, the hosting side of this operation seems to be taking form. biz.mindstab.net is up and running. I may have borrowed a few pieces… But yeah. Go forth and purchase web space! From me…

I’m really pleased with how well the site turned out. It’s coded in sweet and simple xhtml 1.0 strict. And CSS. 100% valid all of it. It rocks. And I was pleasantly surprised that I only had to make one fix when porting it to IE from Firebox. Apparently in IE things like unordered lists and ordered lists can’t have margins. Who knows why not. Didn’t matter. I just moved the margin to the list items them selves, and volia. Perfect site in Firefox and IE. Yeah for standards that keep it simple and yet flexible. I find there’s something quite alluring about nice crisp looking simplicity in a site.

Also, I created the image myself. It’s mix of the results from google image searching for water and neurons. Apply a few Gimp filters, and volia, a logo. I think it adds a nice splash of color to the page. :)