trisweb.com

30 Days is a reality show unlike all others – it actually feels real. It deals with real issues, real people, and real problems. Tonight’s episode sent a guy from West Virginia to the largest Muslim-American community in the US to live as a Muslim for 30 days, and it was a great show. I learned a lot about the culture and the religion and the people of Islam, and about people in general. It’s something that every American should watch. Highly reccomended. FX, Wednesdays, 7PM PST.

Comments and navigation are done! Zenphoto is now very functional, and I’m probably going to move the photos site on this page over to it pretty soon (as soon as I do some image/album metadata editing, which just needs the forms).

Check out the demo gallery and test it thouroughly.

0.2 Demo Gallery

You can leave test comments there (and please do), but leave any meaningful comments here so I don’t have to search for them. I’m looking for ideas for the admin interface now that you’ve seen the public face of the gallery (which is, remember, fully customizable—this is only a test theme), so let me know how you want it to work. I’m leaning toward an intuitive “admin mode” which would let you browse the gallery with special actions available (like editing titles, descriptions, and comments on the fly with AJAX), plus a few extra panes for mass-title/description-editing and uploading. I’ve said this before, but think flickr. Same idea. Sound good?

And yes, I’ll make the comment info cookied sooner or later. I didn’t want to get into javascript tonight

My dad told one of his coworkers about zenphoto and how I’m developing it—in an open transparent process, on the blog, encouraging user feedback and comments (and I do! keep on commenting!)—and I was surprised that this guy thought it was a revolutionary way to develop software.

I read Michael Heilemann’s post about how blogs are revolutionizing the world, and it didn’t really make sense to me until today. I thought, “Gee, this really is different.” I mean, how else would you—a complete stranger, the proverbial and mythical “user” proprietary developers talk about—actually have a direct link to the developer of the software you might use someday.

I think this is revolutionary. Tell me I’m wrong.

I’m going to try to explain this in a succint and clear manner, without writing an essay.

Good designers use web standards because it’s stupid not to. Literally. HTML without CSS layout and design is like C without functions. It’s a perfect analogy—without functions, programmers would have to repeat code that does the same thing over and over again, and get it the same each time it was repeated to remain consistent and avoid errors. Without CSS, designers would have to repeat code for everything, and they’d have to make sure everything remains consistent manually. It’s a horrible thought not to have functions in any programming language—it’s the same with HTML.

CSS is just the natural evolution of web coding. Before, the web didn’t have abstraction. Now it does, and smart people use it. It’s stupid not to. So why all the hype? Because people who understand it really get how important it is. It finally made the web codable. It dissolved the need for middleman design tools. It made web code comprehensible. It’s just the right way to do it.

This is why we need standards support from all major browsers; because once you give people a taste of what’s right, they can’t go back to doing things the wrong way.

Why am I writing this? Because I’m sick of working on this damn project that has 18 nested tables for every piece of text. I’m sure glad we’re moving away from that…

First, homosexuality might be linked to genetic traits, as Swedish researchers have experimented with pheremones and the biological response of straight men and women and gay men and women (straight people attract opposites, gay people attract likes).

Second, If this were true, and a “gay gene” was found, a genetic marker test could be developed to find it, and these tests could be done very early on in a person’s life. Like, in the womb.

When that happens, watch as republicans suddenly become okay with abortion.

Something to turn your head the country upside-down.

It wasn’t actually a virus that infected my mom’s hard drive, but some bad chips were overheating and causing everything to go haywire. The problems I had on my drive (that I tried to boot it with) were probably because of scrambled signals on the IDE line or something like that.

I’ll get to the point: we found a way to read the data, and remarkably well too. According to several places on the internet (which I always trust) you can put the hard drive in the freezer for a few hours to make it cool enough to copy some files (and it turns out this actually works). Rinse lather repeat until you’ve got everything.

That was a bit slow for us. We had to copy a 350MB MS Outlook datastore (don’t get me started) and it was overheating and failing before it could finish. So we came up with this:

A hard disk, on the rocks. It’s triple-bagged inside a bag of ice, and we had to press the ice up against the PCB side of the disk to keep it going. It would error as soon as we took the pressure off.

It’s hard not to laugh—it actually worked! Combined with Knoppix, we copied all the important files to my 20GB iRiver (which automounted; did I mention the new version of Knoppix is awesome?). Tomorrow we’ll figure out a better solution, probably including dry ice, to try to get the less important things off (pictures and music).

My hard drive is fine (not the failed one, but caught a bug from the one that did), I just have to rebuild the partition table. Checked in Knoppix and the data is still good. So all ended well. Just remember the freezer trick

My mom’s computer froze and wouldn’t boot today, so of course, I was sent in to try to fix it. I tried fixing the MBR, running scandisk, accessing from knoppix, etc. Nothing worked. It even crashed knoppix.

Being the genius that I am, I though I’d put it as slave in my desktop.

Genius. I now have 2 dead hard drives.

They might still be recoverable. I’m looking in the direction of the CIH virus… it’s the only one I’ve found with effects like that. I’ll see what I can do.

Fortunately, I keep diligent backups, so this doesn’t affect my data much. Nor zenphoto. No worries. And I have a laptop, so I can still work. I just hope my music and video library on the 2nd partition is okay…

It friggin pisses me off though!! Ahhrrrrgh!

Update: The data on my is completely intact, so it’s just a matter of rebuilding partition tables. I’m so relieved. So very relieved. Thank you Knoppix!

Another Update: It wasn’t actually a virus, but a hard drive logic board failure. See my post on how I got the data above. And my hard disk is perfectly fine, must have just been confused.

/zp/Space/image/400/iss.jpg:

/zp/Space/image/300/iss.jpg:

/zp/Space/image/200/iss.jpg:

/zp/Space/image/100/iss.jpg:

/zp/Space/image/thumb/iss.jpg:

The point: You’ll never have to resize images again.

0.11 Demo Gallery

Feel free to play with the URLs and make your own sizes, but please, don’t request every pixel size from 1 to ten thousand until I’ve made some way to limit the cache… thanks.