Well... that didn't take long. After discovering my website Chrome/Safari (WebKit) woes earlier this week (although only making that blog post last night), I fixed the menu bar rendering issues last night, and then fixed the Twitter script issues just now.

For those technical minded amongst you, the culprit was in the following lines of JavaScript which used script.aculo.us, a JavaScript library for cool effects/animations (like the sliding fade-in effect of the Twitter items on the right-hand side). I use script.aculo.us's Builder class which is handy for inserting HTML elements into a document, like the Twitter feed:

twitterdiv.appendChild(Builder.node('script', {
  src: 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/u1traq.json?' +
       'callback=twitter.callback&count=5',
  type: 'text/javascript'
}));

Chrome just didn't like the Builder.node() function in this case (I use it in a bunch of other places without issues), maybe because it was trying to insert a <script/> node, I dunno. But by replacing it with standard DOM functions, it did the trick:

scriptnode = document.createElement('script');
scriptnode.setAttribute('type', 'text/javascript');
scriptnode.setAttribute('src', 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/u1traq.json?' +
  'callback=twitter.callback&count=5');
twitterdiv.appendChild(scriptnode);

Now all those browsers are happy, and so am I.

Earlier this week I finally got to see what my site looks like in Google Chrome. I was just showing someone (the same inquisitive someone who asked me what my mum is like), during our first guitar session/get-together, some of the older space pics I've done (well, they're all old ones since I haven't created anything new on that front since mid-2008) and noticed that something wasn't rendering correctly!

*gasp*

I had a mate of mine check it with Safari on his Mac (since Chrome and Safari both use something called WebKit to render web pages) and got the same result:

This makes me cry

That wasn't the only problem: the Twitter feed on the right-hand sidebar seems to be stuck on 'Loading...' in Chrome/Safari, but otherwise fine in Firefox and IE7/8.

So I downloaded and installed Chrome, attempted to fix these little issues, and only got so far as to fix the layout of the menu. As for the Twitter feed, I've taken it down in the interim.

Continuing the computer-ish theme for the week, earlier tonight I was asked to install Skype by a friend from overseas (the one I called the neck-licker in this old BEDA '09 post, who has unfortunately been sent back to their home country because they couldn't stay in New Zealand). I thought it a bit funny that, before this week, I had never touched Skype - not even with the electronic equivalent of a barge pole - but for the first time this Monday I was involved in a Skype call from inquisitive guitar girl's end, had my friend the hug nazi mention it because her netbook has a built-in webcam, and am now being asked to install it.

As I was downloading the program, at around the 50% mark a realization hit me: I don't have a webcam... or a microphone. I told the overseas neck-licker as much, and they replied in kind:

what kind of ASIAN COMPUTERSPECIALIST are you?

Good question.

As one of the IT guys in my group of friends, I don't even have some of what is now basic hardware that is so run-of-the-mill that many computers and devices come with these things attached or built-in. I have a million cables lying spare, more computer screws than you can shake a stick at, and even more twist ties from all those wires that I could create some sort of contemporary art piece and break a Guinness World Record in the process! But, a webcam and microphone are nowhere to be found.

At least I'm still more feature-complete than the iPad.

(The first real test for my can-update-this-blog-from-anywhere update. Fingers crossed...)

I've just come back from a ceroc weekend in a city not too far from my own. I was going to write a bit about it, but I noticed I had the stuff below on backlog. I thought I posted it before I left, but it seems I didn't. Silly me.

Well, I'll get that one out of the way first, then maybe write something about "making it big" in Palmerston North ;)

---
On my way to work on Friday morning, I was walking alongside a little girl and her mother. As we approached a crossing at an intersection, the little girl pressed the button to light-up the Walk / Don't Walk lights on the opposite side of the road. The girl was then reminded by her mother to wait by her side until the "green man" (Walk light) lit up.

The traffic in either direction was non-existent at that time. I could've walked lazily across the road without encountering so much as a gust of wind, but I stood my ground. When several others who were walking behind us reached the intersection, they continued forward, jaywalking onto the path of incoming nothings. Tempted to follow them, I continued to hold my ground.

I was rooted to the footpath by a resolution I made with myself several years ago...

The streets can be rough

During my high school years I often walked with some of my friends after school - they had to board a train at a station which was on the way home for me. After one such walk, I said goodbye as their train was approaching and continued on to a crossing some hundred metres away where the railway barriers were down and the bells were warning of an incoming train. Across the tracks from me were a bunch of kindergarten children being held-back from the tracks both by the loud bell noises and by the instructions given to them from their kindergarten teacher.

Now the train was visibly stopped at the train station, so I thought it safe to cross the tracks. So I did, in-front of all those little kids, in obvious defiance of what their teacher just told them.

After crossing, I looked back at the train and was surprised to see my friends walking my way. Curious as to why they weren't on the train, I half-ran back across the tracks to meet them, then we all ran across the tracks again before the train had a chance to accelerate.

"Geez Em," one of my friends said, "you just crossed the tracks 3 times, and in-front of all those children! What kind of example are you setting?" he joked.

Not a good one I reckon. There I was, blatantly defying what the kindergarten teacher had just told her charges. Their little minds must've been brimming with the unfairness of the situation. I could imagine their questions to their teacher:

Little kid: "You said we shouldn't cross the tracks. Why did that guy just cross the tracks over and over?"
Teacher: "Because he's a bad person and he's going to hell."

OK, so immediately jumping to calling some stranger hell-bound might be a bit of a stretch, but it's the simpler choice when the alternative is having to explain to sub-5-year-old minds the concepts of depth perception, velocity, and perceived risk.

Still, I felt guilty. One of the last thing I want on my mind is the knowledge that some of the numbers in the next generation's pedestrian injuries/fatalities statistics may have been caused by my terrible example.

As an episode of Joan of Arcadia once taught me, "it's not enough to feel guilty. The guilt has to be accompanied by change." And so my change was this:

At designated red/green man crossings, and when children are present, to not cross the road until the green man is lit.

It's not exactly New Year's Resolution material, but it's stuck with me for years; so long now that some friends and family think I'm coy when it comes to crossing the road and are actually getting quite impatient with me.

So there I was that Friday morning on my way to work, waiting for the light to turn green and being responsible for young lives, simply by being more responsible with my own. It made me feel very grown-up.

It's only been 3 weeks since my last post, but already I feel as if I haven't written as much as I should have. What's been happening is that I've been working on some behind-the-scenes site updates (ie: programming) to make the blog much easier to update, and updatable from a computer that isn't my own.

All this time I've been updating the site using a rather manual process which can only be done from my own PC. It's worked for me so far, but throughout BEDA and the last month I found myself in situations where I wanted to write something but was very far away from my computer. Other computers were on hand which I could've used, but the way things were, it just wasn't possible.

I had hoped to implement these changes rather quickly, but as history has proved again and again, any updates I want to make are never completed quickly. Some of the updates are in effect, but there are still a lot of kinks that need to be worked out. So for this seemingly-apologetic post, I've continued to use the old way of posting.

And, for the remainder of the week, I'll write-up several posts about the many things I wanted to write about from the last couple of weeks, but kept holding-off on doing because I wanted to write them after I had updated the site.

BRB

Gonna take a break from the business blogging tips for today to just mention some site updates that have finally kicked-in.

Firstly, the SEO-friendly URLs are now in place. That is, no more URLs that look like: Content?Page=Blah&Thingy=Blah. They now make a bit more sense to both people (more human-readable) and search engine spiders/bots that crawl the web.

Secondly, I removed that fancy overlay effect from the Artwork and Writing pages because it actually prevented someone from middle-clicking the links to open them in a new tab. Whoops. So a big fat usability blunder on my part.

So what's left on the 2009-redesign-to-do list? Automatic updates.

Updates to this blog are actually reflected in Facebook, but for me to get them to show up I have to go to Facebook and give it a kick in the guts to let it know that a new blog post is up. It's a small annoyance, but one that I've been meaning to remedy for a while now.

More site updates:

• JavaScript effects are now in place
• Twitter feed is now displayed to your right...

...or so it should be if you're using Firefox.

I've recently installed the Google Chrome browser to see how my site fares using it (and because of some 'OMG Google Chrome pwns' rants from my brother), and let's just say that the site experience isn't exactly great in it:

• background images at times were missing
• PNGs with CSS opacity don't display correctly (this is a known bug with Chrome)
• and Scriptaculous - the JavaScript library I'm using for the effects - either runs slow or not at all

Although if one of my earlier posts is anything to go by, cross-browser compatibility isn't my greatest concern at the moment. I'm really just having fun messing-around with all this new stuff!

Some minor site updates:

• splash page removed for now, tracker moved to main layout
• CSS fixed up on some buggy pages (but still not IE tested)

My hosting service does provide me web statistics, so I really should get rid of that old site counter, but I noticed that the hosting service stats don't include URL query strings - the stuff after the ? character in a URL. Since my site is kind of built around the query string, this kind of skews the stats and doesn't give me a very good picture. It's been on the To-Do list for a while to get rid of ?-based URLs on this site, 2 reasons:

• having URLs like artwork/name_of_artwork seem to be more the norm around the internet
• URLs like that are more SEO-friendly

And we all like being SEO-friendly so that Google and the like can put us at the top of everybody's search results ;)

In other news, the last couple of weeks have seen some Red Horizon related queries *gasp* Yes, that's right, stuff has happened on the old Red Horizon front, but not programming progress I'm afraid.

Firstly, Nyerguds (Google his name, it'll come up in a lot of C&C circles) asked for the latest Red Horizon: Utilities stuff so he could refer another C&C modder to it - YAY, people are using my stuff!

Secondly, rm5248 (another C&C fan who frequented the now-defunct CNCTechCenter site where I used to put the development thread of this project) asked to take a look at the code to see if he could do something with it. The idea that I'm losing a tiny bit of ownership on my code did make me hesitate in his request, but it's not like the code was doing anything better sitting on my computer and not going anywhere. I will continue the project, but with the way things are with me now, not anytime soon. So I gave him the code in its current state - which is to say error-ridden and doesn't compile - and I wish him luck in whatever he wants to do with it.

So I've finally finished the site redesign... almost. What you see now is a fully-functional version of what the final product is supposed to look like... provided your browser renders it a lot like what Firefox 3 does. Yeah, I haven't even tested it in IE yet.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be adding the fancier features like showing display items (like artwork, stories, etc) as overlays instead of going to a whole new page which had the potential downside of losing navigation. I might also have to change the splash page to match the new look - or get rid of it altogether.

I haven't written anything up here since before Christmas '08, so I felt compelled to put something up here just to fill the silence and pre-emptively dispell any rumours about my death. Now it's pretty much Valentines Day... cripes.

So what have I been up to in the month-and-a-half since my holidays? Working on a website redesign.

It's a new year, it's time for a new look I thought. And so, what was supposed to be a new look for 2009 which was supposed to come out in mid-Jan, is now looking at being more of an early-March thing. Or, if I wanted to be more sarcastic (or more realistic), an Easter thing.

I've been trying to add a bunch of new tricks I've learned since the last makeover (circa 2007). One of these things is something fairly new to me: Twitter. OK, so that thing has been around for a long time, but only recently, through listening/watching other podcasts of other members of the IT industry plugging their own Twitter URLs, have I felt compelled to join up. I'll be working on adding my tweets to my website (another sidebar?!?!), likely integrate it with my Facebook as well, and start getting into the micro-blogging habit.

So you can find me at http://twitter.com/u1traq (note the 1 instead of an L. 'Ultraq' was already taken, under the guise of ultraQ... bastards), and apart from updating the world with whatever inane activity I'm doing at certain points in time, I think it might actually be useful for site-related mini updates, particularly when I get back to working on Red Horizon.

Tweet tweet.

One thing I foolishly thought that I'd have more of when I moved into my own place, was time. Oh how wrong I was.

When I was younger, I had this habit of finding waaay too many hobbies and messing around with waaay too many different things. Maybe it's just the thing to do during those teenage years; experimenting to find out who the heck you are and who the heck you want to be. Only a handful of hobbies from that era have survived - drawing and playing the piano (whereas digital art, writing, playing the guitar, and computer programming could be considered post-high-school pursuits) - and yet I haven't yet found the time to improve on a single one.
OK, so it doesn't help that when I moved-in, I went and bought an Xbox 360 and Halo 3, and since then Devil May Cry 4 and I've borrowed Gears of War from a workmate. Now I'm contemplating Guitar Hero 3, although the smarter part of me is telling me to curb the spending.

Despite the new distraction/s, I've found that most of my time is getting lost to cooking. Yes, cooking.

Slightly motivated by a story I heard of a family friend who moved back home because they missed the real homemade stuff their mother made, I've been stocking my fridge and cabinets with raw ingredients and making genuine attempts to recreate the meals that I grew-up with and then some. The good thing is I've found I'm not a total failure when it comes to cooking, and have even had a friend who lives nearby over several times to eat the leftovers. The bad thing however is that there are always leftovers because I'm not yet used to cooking for just myself, and so always end-up with this elaborate meal for a family of 4.

Food aside, there is one hobby I've managed to progress, but only because I've hit a bit of a lull at work: the RSS feed for the Writing section is now done (unlike the other feeds, I couldn't fit entire stories into the feed because they all rely on special formatting which you can only get by visiting the page), hurrah.

And on the back of the last post, I have extended the RSS capabilities to the artwork page as well. Not only that, but I've incorporated Media RSS into so that it can be used with flashy apps like the Firefox plugin CoolIris.

With CoolIris, you can now browse my gallery in sweet 3D:

Pretty eh?

And now, for the writing section.

After the last site entry, I was trying to see if there was a way to integrate these posts into my Facebook profile so that friends and passers-by could read about my rants and thoughts straight from Facebook. A quick look through available Facebook apps gave me the usual Wordpress and LiveJournal ones, but those require accounts and blogs at their respective sites. Further down the page of results was a standalone feed reader/aggregator that I could add to my profile, but it required some sort of feed from my site, whether it be RSS or Atom. So, looks like it was about time I added a feed to my site.

With the current design of the MooCow engine, it was really easy to program a new RSS component into it. Everything is already in XML which really helped, and there are tonnes of examples of RSS in use throughout the Internet. One example I kept coming back to was the one run by my friends' own site (although I suspect that the SilverStripe CMS is behind much of the magic of that site to begin with).

I know I'm not the fastest programmer in the world, but the code changes required to add RSS only took 2 days of my spare time! That's really fast by my standards.

This was only for getting the Home/blog section up and running with RSS. I'm really not yet sure if I want to RSS-ify the other sections of my site (and even if I do, it'll only be for the Artwork and Writing sections), but if I head down that path that should only take me an additional day.

Now, time to get this post showing-up on my Facebook profile...

A few posts ago I said I was gonna try create a new theme for the site to test how flexible the new HTML code was. After almost a month, the new theme is finally done! Note, that the theme is still experimental, and currently only works for a small subset of people: those with the latest browsers and a screen resolution with roughly 800 pixels vertically within the browser's viewing area. Cookies are also required to have the theme 'stick' after the initial switch.

So if despite that disclaimer you wish to forge ahead, clicky clicky: Click! To switch back to the original theme, you can click here, or clear out the cookies from this site. I have the theme-switching mechanism available on the About page (until I find a place where I think it's better suited), where I'll be listing all (2) available themes and a small blurb about them.

If you've clicked the theme-switching link and don't know what's going on, what happened is that I've changed the stylesheet file that your browser requests when it views the site, but the rest of the HTML code stays exactly the same. This is similar to the sort of thing you'll find at the CSS Zen Garden. I've cheated a little here, in that each theme can also have an accompanying custom script. This is so that I can sneak in some Ajax stuff into the site, which if you didn't know is one of the technologies responsible for making many of your favourite Web 2.0 sites feel more responsive and dynamic. I want to add some Ajax to the display pages so that an entirely new layout doesn't have to be loaded when you click to view one of my pictures or writings, thus creating a more seamless transition.

Well, that's what I'm hoping for anyway.

Update: multiple themes no longer exist.

In the past week I've finally decided to go all CSS Zen Garden on my site and remove the last vestiges of layout information from the XHTML code, thus shifting it all presentation information to the stylesheet (the CSS file). For the most part, the site should look and act exactly the same as it did before. Minor non-CSS/XHTML changes include the movement of the About page to it's own section and the update of that page's content, and the re-tagging of news posts.

If you don't know what the CSS Zen Garden is, check out that link above. My take on it is that it's a site aimed to promote CSS-based page design and the separation of presentation info from the page code. This puts all of the design information of a page exclusively into CSS files, and with that you can let web designers go wild. Take a look at some of the 200+ user-submitted designs for the CSS Zen Garden. If you look closely (or just read what the page says), you'll see that the HTML code stays exactly the same from design to design; all that changes is the stylesheet file (and images) applied to the page. Pretty cool eh? What, no? Damn, I thought it was.

I'm not gonna go and start creating multiple stylesheets for my site, but I am aiming to make at least one, just to make sure that I did the whole thing properly. And if I like what I created, I'll make that stylesheet available as an option... somewhere.

...something borrowed, something blue.

So after a month of on-again off-again development, I've finally completed the new layout of site of which you see before you. I've taken a more blog-like approach to the presentation of elements, with proper datestamps on news, artwork, and writings. Accompanying the datestamps are categories or tags for these items, as well as a right-hand navigation menu allowing you to filter items by date or category. The option to sort by the original categories I had for these items has remained and is still the recommended way for viewing anything here.

Much of what you see here is still experimental, so expect things here and there to change over the coming weeks. The splash page will also need re-doing as it's look is very closely tied with previous layout.