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Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Website updates for november
I've got enough website news to warrant its own post I think. I'll talk about this stuff first so the post will sink to the bottom.Well the big news is aphelionsites.net, my former webdomain expired, as planned. Not too big of a deal since I don't use it much. What this means is some hotlinked images might not show up. I tried to look through my history and correct these errors, but some may still exist. The DGS site was the only website still using the domain, so that's been moved to http://www.darkmercury.net/dgs. If you can't or don't want to remember that you can find the link in my featured section. While I was messing with that I also embedded the quakecon video into the related DGS and DarkMercury pages, so it can be watched without downloading the whole thing.
Next up is the "Categories" selection at the top left of the site. You can click there or on the category image to a page showing all my website categories. From there, click on any you want to read about.. say Flying posts.. and voila! You're now seeing only Flying related website entries. That's pretty neat. A simple feature but long missing.
And the Friends page update...Every time I post I say it's the last time I'm gonna change it. It's kind of ended up full circle. The old versions showed only one post, but you got to see what was going on in all my friend's lives at a glance. If someone posted multiple times quickly, I wouldn't see any but the latest post. I was overjoyed to prove the concept of creating a Livejournal emulation from just RSS links, but that led to a lot of posts from one or two people at the top and everyone else lost at the bottom. I changed it to unlimited posts for 24 hours (so I wont miss any) and after that it just shows your latest entry. All sorted by date of post and I think I like it this way. It's kinda come back to where it was before. I also chopped the time off the post, leaving just the date. It looks cleaner. Anyways I'll see how I like it this way. I still have my LJ style proof of concept at http://www.darkmercury.net/friendsunlimited.php.
News Page opens links in a new window by default now...I removed the comment word bubbles that I was experimenting with this morning. I think that's it.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
D-Link DSL-2320B How I loathe you.
The subject of today's rant is my old D-Link DSL-2320B modem/router. It's hard to hate something that you bought for only $10 off craigslist, but this thing drove me crazy for months. It wasn't broken equipment, DLink just made sure to cripple it for who knows why. Oh sure, on the outside it looks like a very standard piece of equipment. It's got a port for the phone line, an ethernet port, usb, reset switch etc... But to be honest this piece of junk would have worked better if it was an empty box. I run a very standard internet setup in my apartment. There is no cable internet service, so we have DSL through Grande Communications in Texas. Despite charging us for premium service and only providing basic internet bandwith since January (now resolved), I've been pretty satisfied with their service. So I need a DSL modem which plugs into my apple airport extreme router (I know, apple what a surprise, right? Well it has a USB port I can plug our printer into so I dont need a print server). My desktop plugs into the router via cat5, all other computers/ps3 are wireless N. Giggity. What I look for in a DSL modem is simplicity. Like UNIX, do one thing and do it well. Seems like DLink's strategy is to attempt to do many things, but utterly fail at everything. Come on D-Link! It's not a complex mission I bought you for:
1:) Connect router to Grande network
2:) ???
3:) Profit!
Because I'm a hacker like yash, I decompiled the source code to the modem which is ironically written in basic:
10 Assign 192.168.1.1 to self
20 Connect to grande
30 Assign WAN IP to everything
40 COMPLETELY FUCK UP DHCP
50 Disconnect from Grande
60 Goto 10
This modem refuses to play nice with the most standard router setups. My old modem before it broke had a DHCP server - that's fine with me, I put the router in bridge mode and the dsl modem gives my computers IP addresses and interwebs. Not my preferred way, but it works. It croaked, hence me getting DLINK SPAWN OF SATAN off craigslist. DLINK also assigns itself 192.168.1.1 but won't give connected computers internal LAN IPs. It tries to give every computer connected the WAN IP and it fucks up. The only way I got it to work was basically double NAT, the router assigning DHCP fighting with DLINK on another subnet. Ugh squared.
But that's not even the worst part! The absolutely useless web interface gave me no info other than WAN IP and the fact that itself was 1.1. After installing the modem for the first time Alison and I found we couldn't reach certain websites like yahoo and my work website. A little google digging revealed that the MTU, or Max Transmission Unit was to blame. Basically when you transfer info over the internet the info is broken into little pieces called packets and the MTU is the largest size in bytes each packet can be. For ethernet/cable internet the MTU is 1500 bytes, which computers use standard. For DSL connections, depending on your provider, it is 1492 bytes. Normally your DSL modem will tell your computer you're connected with an MTU of 1492, but not DLINK, no way... That's way too helpful. You would think a DSL Modem would connect at a DSL MTU. There's no setting, nowhere on the unit where you can connect at an MTU of 1492. DLINK thinks it's easier and more obvious to dig through the registry to change it on your computer itself. Windows is nicer about it, and stores the registry key, but on OSX (3 out of 4 computers in my apt.) you have to change the MTU manually, via the console, every single time you reboot. Good riddance...goodbye DLINK I won't miss you.
Jo gave me his old Motorola Netopia 2210 DSL modem when I was last in OH and yesterday I replaced Satanlink with it. It's more of a dumb modem where I can have the router store the connection info and just use the box to dial out over PPPoE. Exactly what I was looking for. Easy, fast, stable. Do one thing and do it well. Thank you Jo.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock
don’t say I never try anything
Okay, I will never pick up on WoW no matter how often everyone else posts about it. But everyone has such a good time playing and talking about Guitar Hero / Rock Band, I figured it was worth a look. After all, I did enjoy DDR a lot, and I was good at it without taking too long to get good at it. With the recent release of Guitar Hero 4, I was able to pick up the game and two Les Paul Controllers for about $75. GH3 is a welcome addition to my PS3 game collection which is growing very slowly on account of available moneys and lack of games.God what a hopeless idiot I am for not knowing GH3 and Rock Band are not the same companies anymore, right? I guess there is a lot of drama between red octane and harmonix and activision, but oh well. This game was cheap, I have two guitars for it so I can play with Alison, and I'm enjoying the game. A recent update to the PS3 will allow my controllers to work with rock band should I decide to get it anyways. After about a week I am around the hard-medium-to-easy-hard stage. I can beat the normal tracks in medium with about 95% notes hit, and I can play one or two hard songs, but difficult songs mess me up on medium and I'm trying to play the harder songs to get my note recognition faster before really moving on. Overall I like the game and how it is similar to DDR, but what annoyed me is the career mode. I don't really care to battle guitars. I don't care about winning money or custom characters. I don't want to fight to unlock songs. And I want to play co-op with Alison which forced us through another career mode but oh well. I just want to play a guitar, play any of the songs I want to, and be a rock hero wooo! Pretty much immediately I was putting in the cheat code to unlock all songs, and much prefer it this way. I don't know a lot of the songs but they are fun to play. Has anyone played the new one? What tips are there for stepping up from medium to hard?
Doh! Forgot to mention my favorite song: Paint It, Black by The Rolling Stones in 1966. I can't believe it's that old of a song.
Monday, November 17, 2008
KSU Flight Team Video
Found this on the KSU newspaper website, a nice video about KSU’s first place finish in october. The first guy interviewed was my student for about 6 months who I helped get his commercial certificate. The second is a student I flew some multi time with too. Both great guys and current instructors themselves now.
Monday, November 17, 2008
LA Trip
Lately I've been going to Los Angeles for work, but recently Alison and I decided to go for fun and to visit my grandma on the 11th-14th. We took advantage of benefits from both our jobs, tried to keep the cost down, and still have a lot of fun.If you have benefits, use them! It's part of your salary and if you are not using them it's almost as if you're agreeing to work for them for less. We started our trip using my travel benefits, of course. Alison and I can travel together almost anywhere in the world for almost free. Starting 2009 I can get other people reduced fares but you will have to travel low-priority standby. Anyways we were lucky enough to score two first class tickets for the 3 hour flight to LAX. This was the first time I had ever gone first class, and it was quite impressive! The seats were very comfortable and reclined fully. We had breakfast served, drinks served in an actual glass, pillows, blankets, great service, etc.. It was amazing. I felt very out of place as the only one there without a Wall Street Journal newspaper.
Once we got to LA, it was Alison's turn. She works here in Dallas at the Hyatt Regency as a cook if you didn't know. She booked the Hyatt Century Plaza using her benefits, and they bumped us up to....the penthouse floor! They were so nice and courteous there, I couldn't believe it. I go to a lot of hotels when flying and this was a super nice place. They gave us free room and 50% off the restaurant. So we enjoyed a very nice fillet dinner there. We are trying to save money for a sofa bed in the living room, but it's been a while since we dressed up and went to a fancy restaurant. And for 50% off you just can't beat it.
The free hotel was great, but it wasn't terribly close to Arcadia, CA; an LA suburb. So we had to take a bus to go to the metro station and ride to the end of the line where we could get picked up by my grandma. All in all the trip to Arcadia took about 2 hours each way. It was great to see my grandma and I know she can't drive all the way out to where we were staying, but 4 hours commuting a day really took it out on us. We tried to take a taxi instead of the bus one way, but it didn't save more than 10 min and cost us three times as much to get there (then having to pay metro fare anyways for the train).
The day before we left, the 13th we had to ourselves. We contemplated going to disneyland and universal studios but they are soo expensive. We ended up sightseeing and visiting a cool farmer's market with some really great food. We got cheesecake and eclairs for treats and it was awesome to have something more homemade and not mass produced. Walked around downtown after that, and we visited Hollywood too. It is not the glamorous place it seems. We spent the last evening in Santa Monica at the beach watching the sunset and just being together. It was the best part of the trip for me.
When travelling standby you need to give yourself as many chances to get home as possible, since you only get a seat if there are any left over. So we got to LAX for the first flight out, at 6:00am. Luckily for us we got on the plane, even first class again for the flight home! Now I'm going to be spoiled forever... All in all, a great time.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Dark Mercury 4.0
Welcome to the 4th edition of my website. This version is based on my twitter page and powered by Expression Engine. EE is the successor to PMachine, which powered my old site. I know I just did an update to my site in August so you’re probably thinking, why another major update so soon? Well, the short answer is that I have plenty of time these days. I’ve been running the same old pmachine website for over 5 years and had the color scheme for a year before that. So sometimes you just feel like a refresh is in order. While the August update was an evolution, this update is a revolution. It is hopefully the answer to many problems I have come across in the last 5 years with the old site. Rick was talking about drupal limitations when I offered up Expression Engine as an alternative CMS to both Drupal and Wordpress. I think at one point EE cost money for all but a demo, but these days you can download the core version of the site for free as long as you don’t use it for commercial use. I had a default installation on my site but hadn’t touched it in months. Well about a week ago I went back and reinstalled with the latest version and set out to see what the successor to pmachine could do for me.
Importing my posts from Pmachine was the most important and also the easiest thing to do. While I’m sure tools exist to import wordpress, moveable type, ets blogs, the pmachine convert utility was built right in and easy. From there I had to modify a template for a good design and usability. Thanks go out to Jo, Rick, and Alison for design feedback, ideas, and tips.
A severe limitation of my pmachine site was that each post could only be put in one category. EE allows me to put posts in multiple categories and is one of the biggest reasons I stuck with the upgrade. EE seems a lot more flexible than pmachine too. On the old site the menu on the left kept getting shorter and shorter. I liked the collapsible sections on the side, but to keep them across all the other pages I had to use a function that prevented me from showing posts by months and other tasty features, so the new install gives me that capability.
Another huge improvement is the URLs. While some people may not care, I like the new readable URLs way more than the old way. An old link to a post I made might show up as:
http://www.darkmercury.net/comments.php?id=23_0_1_0_C
WTF is that link about? Now The same post is represented by:
http://www.darkmercury.net/site/Six_Flags_Worlds_of_Pain/.
Likewise http://www.darkmercury.net/index.php?id=C0_5_1
can be shown as
http://www.darkmercury.net/site/category/rants/.
I’m pleased with how well my friends and news pages integrated with the new site as well. I stopped using colors for consistency. Each entry on the friends page looks very similar to a post if I made it, except it will have your RSS image in place of my categories, the title is clickable, and a link to your site is at the bottom. Once again if you don’t set your RSS icon, it will default to one I pick for you. If you want help changing it ask me, its quite easy. Last time I’m talking about that.
My pages that load in an iframe, such as my calendar and gallery are a little quirky but usable. There was some sort of permission error with my old gallery so I reinstalled from scratch. Pics will go up as I have time.
If you want, the old site is available at http://www.darkmercury.net/3.0/
I’m looking at getting even older backups of my site archived with the help of Jo sometime. Guess that’s all for now
Saturday, November 29, 2008
7 Reasons Christopher Elliot is Un-American
I’m sorry to have to do this to you, but you’ll have to read this first:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27241574/ | (Local Backup)
In one of his latest epic travesties as a columnist, Christopher Elliot (yes the same guy as before) has the nerve to tell me (by definition part of the air travel industry) that I am un-American. I’m glad the first word he wrote, in all caps in red text is OPINION. Well here’s my opinion, Christopher Elliot: You are not a columnist, you are a script kiddie who takes cheap shots at the airline industry because it’s the cool and hip thing to do. Is your next column going to feature “What’s the deal with airline food? Have you heard this one?”. So when you call me a flying traitor, forgive me if I don’t think you have much credibility. Obviously by the points you make, you don’t try to learn any history about air travel; just keep insisting that we should give you royalty status for free and maybe someday it’ll happen.
What’s so fair about flying? EVERYTHING. As you yourself say, “Everyone on a commercial air carrier — from the triple-titanium elite flier to the prisoner shackled to the back row of economy class — shares a plane”. And as you’ve probably pointed out before in another post, all those people have paid a different amount to be there. You can buy a Lexus or a Pinto and both will get you from A to B, but you pay more for the comfort. So if you think it’s not fair that you’re squished in the back, put up the money and you’ll be riding in style up front just like the real media journalists. You say you don’t have a problem with the pay-more-get-more model, but then completely reverse yourself with your next statement, “It’s the idea that the good people sitting in steerage class asked for less — or even deserve less ” Of course you deserve less! You didn’t pay for first class! Your options are: More money for more service, or Less money for less service. And throughout the years customers have always demonstrated that they would rather have less service and pay less. They show this by buying the cheap tickets. It’s why Southwest and RyanAir are doing so well. People ask for that level of service by choosing that airline, by using their dollars. If you want service to change, you’re going to have to ask people to pay for it. But you’re not going to be able to do that, are you?
“This is how I see it: On the one hand, airlines have added perks for their best customers. For example, American Airlines earlier this fall introduced priority check-in, priority screening lanes and special boarding lanes for its best passengers, following the lead of several other big airlines. Maybe you’d expect that from a legacy carrier like American. But when Southwest Airlines followed suit a few days later and added priority security lanes for its frequent fliers, it prompted my colleague Janice Hough to invoke George Orwell’s classic “Animal Farm” and conclude that some passengers were more equal than others on a one-class airline like Southwest. I’m inclined to agree”
Some people are willing to pay more. They get the service they pay for. That is the essence of capitalism, the American Free Market, and you call us traitors and un-American? You’d prefer a system where everyone is treated the same for the same price? COMMUNIST 
“Many travelers use highly addictive frequent flier miles to pay for upgrades. Airline loyalty programs, as everyone who reads this column already knows, is the greatest fraud perpetrated on the traveling public. Ever.”
Plz explain. You must have evidence for this claim. Should people not be rewarded for loyalty? They’ve paid more into the airline through their loyalty and I have no problem rewarding those who do.
“There’s good news for these coddled airline passengers who disagree with my perfectly reasonable arguments. There is no shortage of bloggers, journalists and airline experts who sincerely believe it’s your right to be treated like royalty when you fly while the masses behind the curtain suffer unspeakable indignities. Why not read their puff pieces instead of my column?”
Believe me I wish I could. But someone must stand for truth.
Oh Christopher Elliot you should have stopped while you were ahe- well while you were less behind. Let’s take a look at the three “violations” of your rights. First you lead with: “You have the right to sit down and shut up “, explaining that there’s no freedom of press in the air. Well after your article I wish there was no freedom of press down here too! Put you behind bars for your baseless drivel you call an article. Anyways, in many cases it has been shown that while you have rights to assemble, freedom of speech and press, you can’t do it on my property without my permission. That’s right! An airplane isn’t public property! You don’t own it! You don’t pay for it with your taxes! It’s private property and therefore buy purchasing the ticket, by boarding the airplane, you are agreeing to that airline’s contract of carriage which may state that you can’t film on board the plane. If you don’t like it, fly another airline. No one has forced you to fly on this plane! You boarded of your own free will!
Your laptop — and the data on it — is ours
Oh rip on the TSA for bonus points, as much as everyone hates the airlines, we all hate security even more, right? Score some more points with your target audience: idiots. But here’s the kicker: the TSA is a government agency (separate from a commercial airline by the way), which means that you (through your elected officials) made it this way! So if you want something done about it, have your elected officials do something about it. Or vote them out. Also, “Airlines want to block certain Web sites that contain objectionable material.” I assume you’re talking about wireless internet service starting to appear on airlines. Of course they have to put a filter on the internet or people will spend the flight looking at pr0n! So on the one hand the airlines have Christopher Elliot saying “Oh I should be allowed to use your private network as I see fit” and on the other hand they have whiny mothers saying “Wont someone PLEASE think of the children”. As always, no way out for airlines. But the fact that your blog was blocked means something is working right.
“It’s only a matter of time before airports start barring access sites with content they disagree with”
YOU’VE GOT A LOT TO WORRY ABOUT HERE CHRISTOPHER ELLIOT!!! Always fighting against that liberal hippie airport agenda!
And the last abomination you spout out is that “They wouldn’t even treat animals like this” and how “prisoners of war are often treated better than airline passengers.” Yeah right. Give someone who’s been in Guantanamo Bay for 7 years the jump at a commercial flight. Maybe you can take his place in jail without being accused of a crime. You’d both be happy, and I would be happy. Everyone wins! “The Federal Aviation Administration has strict guidelines about the transportation of live animals but is strangely quiet when it comes to the comfort of human passengers.” Christopher Elliot, I’d be happy to let you ride in the cargo compartment if the FAA said I could! I’d even let you smoke back there but don’t set off the fire alarm or I’ll fire those halon bottles and force all the oxygen out! Or maybe you’d like to be crammed under the seat instead of sitting on it. I think you’d be happy for the room coach gives you when that happens.
“But there ought to be minimum standards set by the government that require air carriers to treat their customers better than cargo.”
There were, but then you got rid of them on October 24, 1978, through the Airline Deregulation Act.
Christopher Elliot, I know you think ripping on the airlines is a great way for you to cheat your way into becoming a legitimate columnist. You can spread all the lies and deception you want with no responsibility because you wrote “Opinion” at the top! But I stand for something: The truth! And I won’t let your horrible words go by unnoticed.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Who do we bailout?
This was originally going to be a reply to Adam’s post titled The sky is falling and Congress doesn’t see it., but it grew way too big. Before the election he was on board with the socialism buzz word and I asked him if he really thought people were going to just stop working and mooch off the system. I asked if we had the moral responsibility to protect people. No one likes seeing people live for free while others struggle.
Adam says the United Auto Workers of America must be to blame for ongoing talks of auto industry bailouts. That everyone just wants them to go bankrupt, “reduce cost” by lowering wages and wipe the slate clean. Obviously the union is fighting it - that’s what unions do. Remember that no unionized company/industry was created that way.
You can’t speak so callously of union workers refusing to give up their wages for the good of the company! These workers are the ones who go into work every day and on weekends. They don’t get to chose the cars they make, SUV or hybrid, etc.. But they will be the ones to bear the failures of their management. They will be the ones not able to pay their mortgages, loans, and living on unemployment and welfare. The very people Adam himself said we have a responsibility to help.
Take a lesson from the airline industry. In September of 2001 all of a sudden people stopped flying. Airlines had to pay salary without any income. Pretty similar situation to today. All the legacies went into bankruptcy except American. Thanks to our lovely bankruptcy laws, airlines were able to throw pilot contracts into the garbage. American pilots gave up 1.6 billion in salary, benefits, and pensions…so same thing, put 2000 of their own pilots on the street. Pilots are skilled workers just like the UAW, and it wasn’t the pilots that made people stop flying. But the pilots and the other “lower class” employees took the brunt.
Several years later the airlines are just starting to turn around again, and how has American given back to those employees who gave up their future, their kids futures (everyone loves the little emotional burst you get by mentioning kids), those who gave up their livelihood so management could keep trying? By giving $21 million in bonuses to top level executives! By giving the CEO a $6,600,000 bonus on top of his $581,000 salary for a total of $7,181,000 not including stock. Other airlines are all the same. Pilot salaries are down 66% since 1978 while these executives hand out pat on the backs to themselves. So forgive me for not having any sympathy.
What will happen if we bailout the auto industry? I want to say let them fail but bankruptcy will just do to them what it did to the airlines. The executives responsible will just lower the pay of the workers to cut costs and then it’s business as usual again. What we need is some way to hold those accountable…accountable.
Again a look at history proves this isn’t the first time we’ve bailed out Chrysler anyways. In 1979 we bailed them out for $1.5 billion dollars. There were many strings attached just as there should be many strings attached now. But the point is, they paid it back!
“Under the leadership of Lee Iacocca, Chrysler doubled its corporate average miles-per-gallon (CAFE). In 1978, Chrysler introduced the first domestically produced front-wheel drive small cars: the Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon. In 1983, Chrysler paid off the loans that had been guaranteed by US taxpayers. The Treasury was also $350 million richer. “
I’m not an economist or even that good at money stuff, but I do know that this stuff is all connected. Demand is down because people cant afford to buy things because we’re all scared we are losing our homes. Probably wouldn’t be half as bad without the media telling us how we should feel, but we are officially in a recession, so demand is down. Prices will fall until everything evens out, and then values will grow again. It stands to reason that the government can make interest off the bailouts just as it did with Chrysler.
American cars suck. They all look the same. I just recently bought a German car, after shopping around. American cars, don’t care which brand, are all big, gas guzzling, square-looking bricks. Gas prices have been rising for years and they failed to deliver higher mpg vehicles. It’s management’s fault, not the union. So I say bailout the auto workers, not management. Give the money to the company, but not to the executives.
By “Spreading the wealth”, Obama didn’t mean stealing your money from your bank and giving it to poor people. He meant rebuilding the middle class. Let the CEOs live with their failures, kick them out and let those who actually work get the pay! Congress should be scared shitless! They should get what’s coming to them!
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Is it time to give up?
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Simple Network Layout
made that for macrumors but you can have it too…
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Slipping the surly bonds of Earth
A little video I made about flying
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds, and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless falls of air…
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor e’er eagle flew-
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
John Gillespie McGee
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Almost ready to go back to work
Eclipse: you know after 3 months even the internet gets boringkrhainos: does the internet include youtube?
Eclipse: yes
krhainos: you mean ... you've ... you've watched all of youtube?
Eclipse: yes
Eclipse: ive finished the internet
Eclipse: its long
krhainos: don't spoil the ending
krhainos: i haven't gotten there yet
Eclipse: i wont
Eclipse: but it is epic
krhainos: does gaeta make out with hoshi?
Eclipse: like i said, i wont ruin it
Eclipse: but thats the start of the last chapter
krhainos: OH NO I'M NEAR THE END OF THE INTERNET?
krhainos: but it's so good, i don't want it to end
Eclipse: they leave it open for a sequel
krhainos: what's after the internet?
Eclipse: internet2
Monday, December 29, 2008
Website Tinkering
I made a few changes around the site. If I spent half the time making actual posts that I spend instead worrying about tiny little issues, I would have several epic novels already. Well it’s easier to play with the site now than when I start working again soon. My little change involves the archives. My old site didn’t put much work into the archives, or “history” as it was called. It pretty much generated a huge list of post titles that you could click to take you to the entry. That’s great if I have a good descriptive title, which is maybe 20% of the time. Your other option was to simply keep clicking “Older Entries” at the bottom of each page and read through my life backwards. It’s a little confusing to read everything in reverse, but reverse chronological order is the best and standard way of promoting new content so that’s how it is. You’ll see my new History section on the right of all my pages by year. It takes you to January of each year and reads in chronological order, different than before. Reads a little better this way. Yearly seems to work for now, but I may change it to chapters like: “whiny freshman in college”, “internship”, “flight instructor”, “eagle first officer” if I want. Who knows…
The other change is pretty big and affects, you guessed it, the friends page. Yes, I still mess around with it a lot even though I haven’t made any major changes for a long while. The page was working great, looked great, and I even installed a filter to stop Jo’s Tweets for Today (which he stopped after I mentioned it), but one problem still remained: Without the cache, it took a long time to load. Sometimes over 60 seconds just for the server to generate the page. It had to connect to each friends’ site and download the feed. That’s what takes the longest. It does apply logic and runs through algorithms to generate the final page but that’s milliseconds. My solution involved emailing the folks at site5.com, my service hosts, and getting permission to use wget on the server. I can now run a cron job that downloads my friends page once an hour and stores that page for the user. So now when you click friends you’re grabbing a cached html file instead of running the php script and it loads significantly faster. So even if it still takes 30 seconds for the php script to run its deal, who cares because it’s not the page you’re downloading anymore.
The old php script is the same url as always, http://www.darkmercury.net/site/friends/
and the new faster stored cache page is http://www.darkmercury.net/friends/
I don’t know if anyone else actually uses the page, but I think it’s a good way to keep up with everyone’s websites. I like reading them and commenting, even if no one else does.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Christmas 08
I’m mad because I already had this post typed out and firefox ate it. I guess I didn’t quite have the text box highlighted and I hit backspace which killed the lengthy post. Anyways, Christmas was good this year. I spent it in Dallas with Alison, and my mom and Tim flew down on the 23rd. It was a good year for giving gifts that people didn’t expect. I didn’t ask anyone what they wanted for christmas and did a good job I think. I got Alison a bluetooth mighty mouse for her iMac, and a music stand she had mentioned she needed. I like to listen to her play her flute and anything I can do to get her to play more is good. 
For my dad, I got him a digital picture frame since he likes electronic toys to play with. My mom was happy with her gift; a USB phonograph that she can use to convert her old vinyl records to mp3 and burn them on CD or put on her ipod. She was very happy with it. I stumbled across it at Macy’s while Alison shopped for something else. Probably would have never thought of it had I done all my shopping online (*nudge rick*). And for Tim, I got him a Fry’s gift card to force him out of my computer room and away from world of warcraft and come hang out with me for the day.
It was a very big year for me in terms of my video and games collection… I got the Die Hard trilogy, Austin Powers Spy who shagged me, Bladerunner, Blades of glory, Star trek 3, Tommy Boy, When we left earth on blurray, and Mirrors Edge and Lego Batman for the PS3. I also got a charging station for my ps3 controllers, a digital pic frame of my own, a Logitech G5 mouse, and a nice watch.
It was nice having them over for the week. It was the first time my mom’s been to Dallas. We went to the JFK museum, and had an okay time braving crowds for shopping. Alison and my mom and even me (but mostly alison) made a great turkey dinner and cookies and pies and we’ll be eating well for a while. I’m glad they came over. Looking forward to starting ATR training on the 5th of January.
Monday, January 05, 2009
Fuego!
Box contains both fire and theft.
Monday, January 05, 2009
School House Rock
happy new year if you’re not chinese
Well for the first time since mid October, I have to go to work today.
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Saturday, January 31, 2009
Moving Soon!
Since Alison took the new job at the DFW Grand Hyatt at the airport, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to stay in our current apartment. It’s about 25 min away from the airport in good conditions, and if there is any kind of traffic it can easily take over an hour. To get to work we often have to leave way before work starts, and it’s expensive to commute. We have been looking at new apartments closer to the airport, and found one called Norstar at Bear Creek. It’s a nice area with a lot of apartments, and a little cheaper than what we are paying now. It’s right next to the Bear Creek parks, so we can take our bikes out often, and close enough to the airport that we don’t have to take any highways. It’s a nice place on the third floor and in the corner of the building so it should be quiet too. We’re pretty excited about moving although it’s a pretty busy time for us with my training so moving is a little stressful. Right after my airplane training I should have a good chance to move everything to the new place and it should work out nicely.
New Location:
Friday, February 20, 2009
After Landing Checklist Please!
So right now I feel like Luke Skywalker just after blowing up the death star.
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