trisweb.com

Wordpress 1.5 is officially out! If you’re running anything less (ie. Wordpress 1.2, Movable Type, Textpattern, or any other blogging software ;-)), I highly reccomend upgrading to this new version. It’s running much cleaner, has a wonderful theme system, seems to be mostly bug free, and has a great community backing it. Check it out!

I would personally like to echo what many others have already said and thank the Wordpress Development team for doing such a great job with this release and improving the software in general. I hope I can contribute in some way in the near future to this great project.

If you click the spiffy “photography.snapped” link on the right, it’ll now go to a real live photo gallery. I’ve transferred my albums from my old gallery to it, and hopefully I’ll be adding some new things soon.

It’s powered by PhotoStack, which has some problems but is still a great piece of software, and a much simpler and easier-to-use alternative to the big popular galleries like Gallery and Coppermine. Check it out if you need the same kind of thing. I’ll be fixing a few bugs for them real soon though, so maybe you should hold off downloading it…

I considered paying for pro Flickr instead, but considering I just got this nice new web space, I figured it wasn’t worth it. You can still check out my photostream, but for all the big gallery type stuff you have to come here.

It’s raining here in Berkeley, and as I like to do when it’s raining, I sit down at the piano and improvise some rainy day music. I used my iRiver to make this quick little recording of about 10 minutes (9:57 to be exact) of that, and considering I’ve got all the space and bandwidth in the world now, I thought I’d share it with you.

Note that the recording is decent, but not that good. I basically took an old pair of headphones, plugged them into the stereo mic jack, and placed them inside the piano. It sounds pretty cool. Very ambient.

“Rainy Day Music” by Tristan Harward
30-second mp3 Sample - 352 KB
mp3 - 4.6 MB - 64kbps
Ogg Vorbis - 5.3 MB - Quality 2 (~70 kbps) *

*(The Ogg Vorbis file is about twice the quality of the mp3 version)

Before I heard about the iRiver H320 (hereafter “the iRiver”, also available in a 40GB version, the H340), I wanted an iPod. I didn’t really want one that badly, though, and I thought I got along just find with my CD player and my newly found affinity for little plastic discs. Fortunately for me, I was given an iRiver for Christmas, and I’m sure glad I didn’t get an iPod first.

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I changed the colors back to bluish, and curved the sharp corners on the top. I think it fits the style better; makes it just a little smoother.

I know I’m being pretty incremental and open with the design here, but I don’t have time to make any big changes. Maybe during the summer I’ll work on something new, but until then, this is what you’ll see. I will of course continue to change the photos at the top with the seasons, and I will also try to get some content on the other pages. That’s been bugging me forever.

I love how on American Idiot you get little snippets of melodies and lyrics from other songs in some tracks. It’s a really interesting way of interconnecting the songs, and it works well. I’m starting to really like this album. Not my favorite kind of music in general, but like I always say, good music transcends genre. Check it out.

So I was doing my comp-sci homework this evening, and I had to fit the whole problem set into 4 hours. Well, 3 and a half to be precise. That would usually be fine, except that the last problem was to be written in Python. The problem was that I didn’t know python at the time. Well it turns out that I learned enough in two hours to write a rather complex little text parsing program.

Which brings me to my point: it didn’t feel like two hours, it felt like five. Time seemed to slow down immensely when I was writing the code, I don’t know why. Has anyone ever been so entranced in something that this sort of thing happened? Maybe it was just that I was in a hurry, or that my brain was working overtime with the syntactical subtleties of python, but it felt weird; I kept looking at the clock and it kept saying 10:30-something and I actually wondered if it could be wrong.

Yeah, it’s probably just that my brain is so powerful that it warps space-time when I think.

If you’re looking for a good time-killer (and a great eye-opener) try out 43things.com. You can also take a look at my list.

I’ve moved this site to a brand new server! I have been annoyed and frustrated with the OCF server for too long; it was slow, didn’t have much space, and didn’t even have updated server software most of the time. But it was free. It’s true that you get what you pay for.

I’ve moved to the Websensei Hosting Alliance, which has a dedicated box with lots of space, lots of bandwidth, lots of software, and a lot of power for not a lot of money.

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