Articles by Steven

This is probably one of the sillier experiments I’ve done. I’ve put together a dynamic userbar that displays the current Pay Per View (PPV) offerings on DISH Network.

Having never owned a Mac, mostly due to cost, the new MacBooks look pretty nice. All aluminum body, new graphics, new glass multi-touch trackpad, it all adds up to some nice looking notebook computers.

I got around to upgrading IE8 to the latest beta 2 today. Mostly, I wanted to see if they had fixed the float issues. Well, they had — at least the float that was also broke on Microsoft’s own site now worked. However, my site still had a problem. Well, I tracked it down to a very odd behavior with the   entity. Unlike most browers, IE8 breaks lines oddly with   and messes up CSS width. Unlike other browers, when this happens, IE8 drops the float to the bottom instead of letting it just break the width. Considering that this is the only browser with this behavior, it will be interesting to see if it makes it into the final version.

I don’t normally do two posts in one night, but I put together a new Dynamic Userbar and I just have to share!

Well, iTunes 8.0.1 is out and purports to fix a few bugs and improve performance. It also cleans up Genius a bit — including simulations play and create Genius playlists. I’m hoping for an update to include Genius in my G3 nano. I can wish right?

Cow’s Blog has an update to Reflection.js to version 2.0. I’ve wasted no time in updating my site and, surprise, I don’t notice any difference! However, if you use the new Google! Chrome browser or IE8, things should look a bit better. Great bit of code and worth a try.

My foray into music formats was the WAV (waveform audio format). If you rip a CD into the WAV format you are getting an uncompressed, lossless, and very large audio file. When I was using this format, and considering hard drives were pretty small in the late ‘90s, I didn’t rip many CD’s.

Okay, I was never a big fan of Apple. I made a decision over 6 years ago to use Microsoft’s Windows Media to encode and listen to my music and it worked well for me. That was, until my daughter wanted an iPod Nano (3G) for her birthday. Okay, that was what she wanted and they were on sale, so why not. Sad to say, I was hooked — and it wasn’t even my iPod.

Sad to say, but I’ve deactivated the Who’s Amung Us map widget I had been using. They’ve changed the way the pins are saved and it is pretty much useless to me now. I enjoyed seeing where I received visits from. Unfortunately, I typically only would have a few pins on the map, including myself. I still have the widget installed in case they ever change it, but for now the map itself is disabled.

I’ve been building web sites for over 13 years and have been escaping HTML for years. You know, converting & to & or " to ". Easy stuff, right? Then why did I completely forget that you have to do the same within attributes? Perhaps I just never had a need or realized that it was required. It is.

I noticed a few errors with my 360voice Dynamic Userbars today, so I decided I should probably fix them. One was with my watched list. I limit the list to 20, but it wasn’t actually working properly for users not watching anyone. The other bug was in challenges where it would stop displaying members after it found the callers gamertag. Fortunately, both were easy fixes.

Well, after I broke one of the strings on my guitar trying to reattach the amp connector, I decided it would be a good time to restring it. I hadn’t played it in so long that it wasn’t in tune anyway. Since the family isn’t home, I’m pretty free to sing and not get heckled too much. The dogs still growled a bit at me.

Well, it took a bit longer this time around to get 25000. Seems all the games I’ve been playing aren’t giving up much in points. Of course, it doesn’t help that I’ve mostly been playing Halo 3 during this time. In any case, I made it to 25K!

It’s been busy of late. I’d been on vacation for almost 3 weeks with just a few days of work in between. My parents were in town (hi Mom) a couple of weeks ago. Then I was out of town for my wife’s family. That wasn’t really a vacation, though. But I’m back in town and finally getting around to checking my site and doing a little a blogging. So, here are some random thoughts for the day!

While my parents are in town this week we were reminiscing about old places we’ve lived. I’d been trying to remember where we used to live in Oslo, Norway. I remembered the street name, but my attempts in the past to find it didn’t find the street. I was pretty sure I just didn’t know how to spell it. I thought my luck had ran out.

Ran across this interesting site in my feeds and thought I’d share. Getty Images has combined their stock images with their audio stock to create what they call Moodstreams. They are billing it as a brainstorming tool, remember they are trying to sell photography and audio. The brainstorming concept sounded interesting, but I was skeptical. I gave it a try and it is actually pretty interesting.

I was searching for some pov-ray liquid routines and ran into an interesting article on The Lorenz Attractor In 3D. The Lorenz Attractor is an interesting equation and surprisingly beautiful. Since there was a sample pov-ray macro on the site, I thought it would be fun to generate some pictures. I don't have much yet, but I think these look pretty cool. In some ways, these look like galaxies colliding. What do you think?

I haven’t been updating much on the site lately. Mostly it is because I’ve been busy with other activities. My daughter’s Softball games still dominate most of my evenings. Between games, the youngest had a school concert on Tuesday. I’ve been trying squeeze in some GTAIV or HALO3 in the later evenings, but that doesn’t always work out.

Well, I had a weird power outage here at the house today. Once of those drops that goes down a couple times before staying off. Seems most of my electronics made it through okay. However, my daughter’s computer took a powder. It wouldn’t turn on and the LED on the back was blinking. Ugh.

If you hadn’t noticed, in addition to adding reflections, I’ve been updating the images I use for my articles. I did this once before, but I added a silly highlight that just didn’t look right. I decided I need to make some changes.

When I added that visitor map yesterday, I wasn’t all that concerned that it used an embed object. That is, I wasn’t concerned till I tried to validate my site. It isn’t something I do that often, but I’d made enough changes that I thought it would be a good idea. I expected a few validation errors, I tend to forget to encode the ampersands in URL’s, but I was surprised about all the errors around the embed tag. I don’t tend to play with plug-in’s myself, so I was blissfully unaware that the standards based tag is object. Although I’m not a big standards freak, I do like to see my pages validate. I was on a mission.

A number of other sites that I frequent are using a visitor counter service called Who's Amung Us. The site is easy to start using, just request the url, select a style and add to your site. Bingo, all done.

I never thought I’d change browsers again, but I’ve found myself using Safari full time now. I really enjoyed using IE7, but a few of Firefox’s features had me hooked on it. The problem is, I’ve always had memory issues and, lately anyway, frequent hangs and crashes. I tried Firefox 3 beta, but it wasn’t much better and the plugins I used hadn’t been converted yet. IE8 is horrible, more alpha then beta. So, I decided to give Safari a try again. I haven’t regretted it.

Sad to say, but Arthur C. Clarke died to today. I enjoyed reading Authur's books and following his career, but it was his movie, 2001, that I enjoyed the most. Watching that movie as a kid, in re-runs of course, really got me excited about space, science fiction, and computers.

In playing around with iTunes, I really like the way the CoverFlow looks, especially the reflections. So, I started searching around to see if there was something similar for Vista. I didn’t find any finders, but I did run into a few javascript scripts that had some neat features.