January 2004
States I've visited
create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide
CSS: First-line and first-letter Pseudo Selectors
Whitespace has just put up a pretty good explanation of the first-line and first-letter pseudo selectors in CSS.
Check it out if you’re interested in learning more about the power of CSS :)
Huge PC laptop people
I just witnessed a guy spend about 5 minutes getting his laptop and related accessories out, organized, hooked up, ready to go. First he drug out his GIGANTIC, thick laptop, his power adaptor, his mouse, his MOUSE PAD and his wireless card. He then had to walk around and find a power outlet (isn’t the point of a laptop that you don’t need to use the power outlet when you’re out-and-about?), once...
Awesome QTVR of Spirit's Surroundings
Hans Hyberg has created a Quicktime VR of the area around spirit. Looking at this you really get a feeling for how empty and alone a planet like Mars is. Its like standing it middle of a desert except there’s no sand dunes to break up the near horizon. Its just rocks for kilometers and kilometers.
Purdue Alum gets his own Hill on Mars
The Apollo 1 Astronauts were memorialized today with naming of the visible hills on the horizon of the Spirit rover landing site.
One particular Astronaut on the Apollo 1 mission was a Purdue grad and I’ve had classes in Grissom hall :) I thought I’d so a teeny bit of research on Gus and tell everyone a little bit about him.
——
Gus Grissom graduated from Purdue in 1950 with a degree...
My second VB.net app
Weak Encryption
This app simply takes a 4-digit input, adds 7 to each digit and MOD 10’s them. Finally it swaps digit’s 1 and 3 and swaps digits 2 and 4. UNCRACKABLE! Anyways here’s the screenshots. I’m especially proud of my about form (so don’t give me any crap about it!)
Step to me and you’ll get jacked up!
Fantastic Mars Pics - Soil Impressions
Just posted some hi-res pics from the Opportunity lander of those crazy soil impressions made by the airbags on my DailyPhoto sideblog.
There is also a picture of those rocky outcroppings the scientists are excited about.
Webdesign: Definition lists or "what?"
I’d read about definition lists before but they seemed kinda nebulous. However, the more and more I read about them the more they seem kinda useful.
Case in Point: Max Design – Definition lists – misused or misunderstood
Where are definition lists appropriate?
There are two points of view about the use of definition lists. Some people believe that definition lists should only be used for...
Powered by Caffeine
I am a caffeine powered, high efficiency, low maintenance, low intake supercharged coding machine capable to producing sites in record times. Vroom Vroom!
In other words I’ve not been to sleep before 2AM in a while and my stomach is a vile cauldron of caramelized soda water, kitkats, cheetos and pizza. My brain is a floating mishmash of assembly code, PHP, visual basic.NET, C, robots,...
Mars raw pictures page gets a new layout
Looks to be a bit more robust :)
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportunity.html
Maestro, a scaled-down Rover (simulator?)
Jeff pointed me to a very cool Java app that you can run on just about any platform including OS X and Redhat Linux. Maestro is a scaled-down version of the program that NASA scientists use to operate the mars rovers!
During the mission, updates will be released on this site containing real data from Mars that you can add to your copy of Maestro.
Sounds neat! In order to run Maestro on OS X...
I, Robot
I made a dumb little Quicktime movie (960kB) of the wheels of our robot turning. Maybe as we move along on the project I can take little snippets of how we’re doing and this could turn into a video log of the project :)
Just click on the image you see above to watch the movie! I hope this works :)
Awesome new mars pic
The uninformed
The IE Factor is a phenomenon described on Stopdesign that encompasses the totally retarded behavior that Internet Explorer 6 exhibits.
Without a doubt, the biggest challenge I encounter each time is in wrangling Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. This devil does not play fair. It often follows no rules, and its behavior defies all common logic. It will double margins for no apparent reason....
Wrote my first VB.NET program
Yeah I know, ick, but I suppose it was a bit of fun. I learned alot by checking out some code from the net and I figured out a lot of cool ways to do things that should really help me out in ECET 359 in the future.
So without further delay, I give you Super Converter (now with zippy goodness)
It works on my PC, but it might not on yours. I take no responsibility if your computer explodes. ...
Folkore, anecdotes of Macintosh Development
Folklore is a very cool site
Anecdotes about the development of Apple’s original Macintosh computer, and the people who created it. (67 stories)
All written by one of the original developers of the Macintosh computer, Andy Hertzfeld. I’ve spent way too much time readin this site today :)
Megaman-themed Mosaic!
Rich Kyanka, a.k.a Lowtax, proprietor of the Something Awful empire has created an awesome work of art for his wall:
!http://phaedo.cx/images/shadowman-99.jpg 400×295(Tile Mosiac of Shadowman)!
That’s shadowman from Megaman 3. That is also very awesome :)
More stuff from Mars
Asa writes about the new stuff coming down from the second Odyssey pass.
Raw Pancams Raw DIMES Pictures
On Spirit, Pete Theisinger says:
Spirit is still serious but moving toward guarded…[l]et me describe today’s truth. We went through a few resets because of DSN problems. Not the rover’s fault, ours. We got the flash metadata indicating that the flash hardware is fine. File management...
Old electronics and Yet Another Text Editor for OS...
Found these cool pictures of the circuit boards from the nose cone of an old Minuteman missile.
!http://phaedo.cx//images/minuteman02.gif 490×483(Circuity from minuteman missle noscone)! !http://phaedo.cx//images/minuteman01.gif 486×444(minuteman01)!
Looks great and really interesting too.
skEdit looks like it might be a contender to the sub-BBedit market. Features a neat “site” panel on...
Color postcard arrives from opportunity
Amazing stuff! Asa was able to stay up longer than me and cover a few more
pressconferences. The most exciting stuff so far is the rocky outcropping and the very strange texture of the soil (look at the color postcard below). The area is so different that what they’ve seen before!
The only other big suprise is that they believe that they might be inside some sort of smallish crater. That’s...
First Images from the Opportunity Landing Site
Here are all 73 raw images from Opportunity’s first day
!http://phaedo.cx/images/1N128285132EDN0000P1500R0M1_th.jpg 256×256(First shots from opportunity)! one of the rocky outcroppings
!http://phaedo.cx/images/1N128286229EDN0000P1503L0M1-1.jpg 256×256(1N128286229EDN0000P1503L0M1-1)! another (or maybe the same?) rocky outcropping
!http://phaedo.cx/images/1P128287268EFF0000P2303L2M1_th.jpg...
The Odyssey Orbiter Just Contacted Opportunity
Looks like we just pulled down about 20Mbits of data from the opportunity rover which is excellent. The crew is eagerly awaiting engineering data and a few hazcam photos from the front and back, a few more hazcam shots, then some pancam shots to figure out where the sun is and they might even get into the beginning of the first color pancam postcard today (mars time) :)
Edit (4:06am EST):...
Darn, I would really like a Lego Mars Rover
I just saw Sean O’Keefe (director of NASA) receive a lego mars rover kit. Now I want one
News conference is a bit boring, not much new info, just some talk about how successful they’ve been.
!http://phaedo.cx/images/Set384×288us007471.jpg 384×288(Set384×288us007471)!
More cool Mars stuff
I was poking around the Mars Exploration Rover Mission Site (which has become a daily read along with Asa’s Mars Commentary ) today when I found some really cool animations based off the EDL (Entry, Descent, and Landing) data from Spirit.
A illustration of the exact bounce path of the lander (210kB Jpeg)
A high-resolution render of the descent based of actual landing data (5.5MB Mpeg)
A...
Two quick things
I found a cool app today called BinClocken its a neat little binary clock like you might’ve seen for sale at Thinkgeek
Well apparently those things suck:
I was given a ThinkGeek binary clock by a friend (in a not-so-transparent attempt to force me to learn binary math). It sucks. It runs fast, very fast, gaining about 5 minutes per day, making it totally useless. So this is my revenge on the...
Reminder: Opportunity lands tonight!
The next half hour is the most exciting! The Mars Lander opportunity will be landing very soon! I am watching the excitment on NASA TV and Asa is blogging the entire EDL just like last time!
As I write this, Opportunity has just hit the top of the Martian atmosphere!
Edit (12:06): Spacecraft is bouncing on the surface!
Edit (12:11): We’ve got at least 2 minutes of data from the lander...
MT Rebuilding Problems Solved!
Today I upgraded to MT-Blacklist 1.63beta
I also was poking around the MovableType forums looking to see if anything new had cropped up about the problem I was having. Turns out the problem was related to an older version of MT-Blacklist I was running :) So my upgrade was purely coincidental but it solved my problem! I just rebuilt the Monthly and Category indexes and they worked without a...
eSKUel - mySQL Administration
Just for my own reference, but some people who read this might be interested. I read today about a competitor to phpMyAdmin called eSKUel made by the French ;)
The screen shots make it look pretty nice and supposedly the interface is much better than phpMyAdmin. I’ll be giving it a test run soon I hope and if it’s up to snuff I’ll write something about it :)
Spirit starting to perk up?
Asa notes that spirit is acting even weirder than before:
NASA’s Spirit rover did not go to sleep today even after ground controllers sent commands twice for it to do so.
Shortly before noon, controllers were surprised to receive a relay of data from Spirit via the Mars Odyssey orbiter. Spirit sent 73 megabits at a rate of 128 kilobits per second. The transmission included power subsystem...
CSS Rants
D. Keith Robinson, on his blog complains about having to hack up your CSS to get it to look half way decent in IE 6.
I’ve come to truly despise IE. I’m sure all of you who do CSS layouts know the pain involved with that piece of crap. You work and work and work, everything looks great and then you check it in IE 6 and it’s all gone to hell.
Or you design to have it display properly in IE 6,...
Apple Superbowl Ad
In case you didn’t know, Apple and Pepsi are going to be giving away 100 Million free downloads from the iTunes music service throughout the month of february and of course it will be launched during the superbowl.
Details of the ad are just leaking out and I thought they were interesting
USA Today gives details on the upcoming Pepsi/iTunes Superbowl ad campaign which will launch the 100...
Mars rover sends data after being silent for well...
Well unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past two days then you know that the Mars rover “Spirit” has been having a few problems:
From the Mars Rover Mission Blog
NASA Officials confirmed this morning that the Spirit rover has experienced a “very serious anomaly” after several attempts to recover data from Spirit failed, leaving scientists without a clue as to what might be wrong....
Friday Five: What the hell
Bored today ;)
At this moment, what is your favorite…
1. …song?
Probably either “E.Dagger” by Lagwagon or “The Greatest Fall” by Matchbook Romance
2. …food?
Either a Jimmy John’s sub #11 or the Turkey Bacon wrap at the Boiler Market (Purdue)
3. …tv show?
I don’t watch that much. Enterprise is just about all I watch :) I’ve been watching stuff like “Big Fat...
Find the beginning and ending times of the week in...
Something I keep needing every once-in-a-while and I keep forgetting:
$diffday = date("w");
$addday = 7 - date("w");
$start_time=mktime(0,0,0,$month, ($day-$diffday), $year);
$end_time=mktime(0,0,0,$month, ($day+$addday), $year);
This goes from the first second on Sunday to the last second on the next Saturday (first second in the next sunday). (e.g. 12am on 1/18/2004 -> 12am on...
Jacqui got an iSight
Here ya go
Receiving Criticism
Random Thought: I think that there are possibly two distinct types of people in the world. The first are people who seek out criticism, expect mixed results, and use that negative feedback to improve themselves. The second type is a person who appears to be seeking criticism when in fact they’re only looking for people to praise them. If they receive negative comments, they shy away and look...
iTunes Music Store RSS Feeds
You can now create customized iTMS RSS feeds!!!!!! I can’t tell you how happy this makes me :) You can create a customized RSS feed for whatever combinations of genres you like and when Apple adds new music to their collection it should pop up in your aggregator.
Things like this are starting to make me believe that RSS is going to be bigger than I thought ;)
Yay
I got the experimental LiveUser PEAR class Authorization plugin for Pear_Auth to successfully pass login information and authenticate that data against a Unix DES passwd file ;)
The Pear_Auth plugin for LiveUser is very raw, so it wasn’t as easy as it sounds ;)
It's a fact
When you make fun of Dr. Sbaitso to his face, you get the horns.
!http://phaedo.cx//images/96277854.jpg 320×240(horns)!
Spring Semester: Week 2
Well the first week of classes has zoomed by! I’ve been pretty busy and even doing homework way in advance so I can get some quality time in on our main client’s webpage.
Between work at CERIAS, the small site, the large site, our own site and classwork I’ve not had very much time to do anything at http://clintology.com except host pictures there :P
I really want to be able to keep an...
Problems
So I have two annoying things going on lately:
Movabletype is giving me an Internal Server Error 500 (Premature end of script headers: /home2/phaedoc/public_html/cgi-bin/mt.cgi) when rebuilding my Monthly and Category Archives. Individual Archives and Indexes build just fine :P
My iPod reboots and checks its disk abnormally often. It seems like if I take it out the dock, use it for the...
Garageband in my grubby hands
Well today is January 16th, which means that Garageband has arrived.
In celebration I’ve made two little “songs”:
Spacey Song
and
Fluff
Enjoy! :)
Two good sounding bands
Matchbook Romance I have only one song by these guys and its great, its called “The Greatest Fall” and I got it on an Atticus sampler.
Say Anything is a cool band on Doghouse records. You can listen to a lot of their music from I presume their first album here
I have two tracks from Say Anything from a Doghouse sampler, “Woe (the optimist)” and “But a fleeting illness” that are simply...
Basecamp by 37Signals
Basecamp looks to be a beautiful project manager app for web development. Not only does the interface look awesome, it seems almost tailor-fit to a lot of the work I do. The link above links to a page where you can sign up to be notified by email when Basecamp ships (this month sometime) and there are some links to posts that talk about some of the features.
So far 37Signals has talked...
Pear!
Speaking of the Pear libraries. If you’ve never used them, you should! Pear libraries are just about the greatest thing to ever be invented, right behind bacon and computers!
The Pear Repository contains a crapload of PHP Classes that help you do just about anything you can think of! One of the classes that I probably use the most is DB. If you’ve ever dealt with stuff in a DB, you know how...
Mailing Lists galore
Ed showed me this great index of a million mailing lists This site has indexed just about every open-source mailing list out there.
Its searchable too! It came in a big help when researching the Pear class LiveUser which is a really neat Authentication and Permissions package for PHP.
The only problem is that you gotta do some major hackage to make it use something besides XML, DB, or MDB...
Notes, Notes, Notes
Over at my DailyPhoto site I posted up some pics of how I’m taking notes this semester.
!http://www.phaedo.cx/dailyphoto/images/95890196.jpg 320×240(Inside of my notes-book)!
!http://www.phaedo.cx/dailyphoto/images/95890377.jpg 320×240(Shots of my Project’s Notes)!
!http://www.phaedo.cx/dailyphoto/images/95890384.jpg 320×240(Shots of my project notes)!
I’ve been told before that I take...
Enterprise Reminder!
Just in case you’d forgotten, the first new episode of Enterprise this year.
Religious zealots will be hijacking Enterprise and attempting it to use it against the enemies of their faith. Sound like the World Trade Center incident to anyone? :P
CSS Filters and Hacks
The truth of the matter is: If you’re going to be making sites for clients who want them to be accessible to the majority of users, you’re going to have to break down and use one or two CSS filters/hacks at some point.
I found this great site concerning just those topics at Webspiffy
Dean's List
Did I ever post here that I’m now on the Dean’s list here at Purdue? I got a letter in the mail the other day and apparently my CGPA of > 3.0 and my previous semester’s GPA of > 3.5 qualifies me for the honor ;)