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Well, just thought I'd wish everyone a


I would also like to mention that I have finally brought the majority of my pages into conformance with xhtml 1.0 strict through the use of Altova XMLSpy 2005 Home Edition (w/ sp1). Although I love MED for programming and the lack of additional tags it adds to anything I am working on, XMLSpy is simply more powerful and will likely be my html editor of choice going forward. The automatic validation of the html against a dtd/schema everytime you save or open a file should prove to be invaluable for keeping the majority of my pages strictly valid xhtml and help insure that they will render the way I want in the majority of newer, standards compliant browsers.

Yes, I know the site hasn't had an entry for quite some time. I've been pretty busy but I finally got fed up with sitemeter. It's not like I have any measurable traffic anyway and the query to the site slowed down my first page load time noticeably. Additionally, most of what they tracked was traffic from me which really doesn't count. Since I am discontinuing my use of sitemeter I would again like to reiterate my desire for visitors to sign the guestbook and leave their thoughts about the site, computers, astronomy, or technology in general.

Eventually, I intend to shorten up the main menu on the left. It really doesn't do to well in 800 x 600 settings. Other projects are, at least for the time being, on hold while real life impinges on my creative time and energy.

As often happens events beyond my control have happened in the last 2 weeks that resulted in the site being down an extended period of time. The first event was hurricane Francis which resulted in the server losing power for 3+ days and then last week I decided to change ISP's because I felt I was being mistreated financially by Bellsouth. I have gone from $53/month and 120kBps downloads to $40/month and 150kBps downloads by switching to Earthlink. In case you don't see it, bandwidth wise I am paying $.27/kBps (as opposed to $.44/kBps for Bellsouth), a significant difference, at least in my humble opinion. Unfortunately, as a result of having the Earthlink DSL line activated, which resulted in the loss of my Bellsouth connection, prior to receiving my new modem, I was without an "always on" connection for roughly 4 days. Barring any more unforseen or logical, fiscally responsible decisions the site should be up 24/7 for the forseeable future. I apologize if this caused any hardship for my loyal visitors.

Well over the last week I managed to get a semblance of a .NET webserver, not IIS, and tomcat to run on my machine. This means that at least the underlying structure required to get an ASP.NET and a JSP page served from my site is now in place. I am not particularly happy with my current .NET server solution but given the numerous issues with security IIS has I feel safer using something else. Additionally, the proxy pass through I am using on Apache to get to the Tomcat server is having issues. As I address the issues I will share my solutions so that should anyone else wish to pursue one or more of my solutions they will have enough information to do so.

As sometimes happens, a mistake was made in upgrading/cleaning up the system this week and for a while the Forum, Guestbook, and Horde interfaces were disabled. While I have recovered the interfaces for Horde, and the Guestbook, in the midst of upgrading and restoring the Forum I managed to screw up the old installation thus upgrading became impossible. Any messages posted to the Forum prior to today are currently lost. I don't believe this is a huge loss as I was the only one who had posted to them but it may be possible to recover them at some later date as the database entries are still present. The context may however be lost. Since this is an experimental site for my benefit and the benefit of others I like to think of these problems more as a learning experience than a fatal failing. Let me know what you think via the usual methods.

It is also worth noting that the Forum upgrade is reasonably complete. The interface may appear to be a bit different than it was previously because I decided against any customizations this time. The default interface colors are pretty nice and the fewer customizations one makes the easier it is to upgrade down the road.

Just FYI the problems encountered were due almost entirely to the removal of old MySQL versions from the system. When I restored the most current version I had lost all the users for the respective applications (not the individual application users but the MySQL database access users). Once I had restored the users for the 2 apps I didn't upgrade they worked fine. The problem was I tried to do both the application upgrade and the user restoral on the Forum in an interweaved fashion instead of restoring the user first then upgrading. Obviously this was a serious mistake in logic so I think I will attempt to avoid this type of thinking in the future. Logically, ensuring and application works correctly before upgrading is the wisest course of action for pretty much any upgrade process. Lesson learned.

Inspired by a retail site's search result screen navigation, the name of which I cannot recall now, I have made a few improvements to my Neighborhood page. My youngest brother also made some significant contributions to the final design and is now including a derivative of the design on his own site.

I have not forgotten about the Articles page, but it is still a long ways from completion. I may be able to get a bit done on it shortly but I am not making any promises.

Finally, with a little more input from my brother, I have changed the Links page. The friends and family pages are now both under the Webpages tab.

If you visit the site regularly, you'll notice a few changes on the navigation menu. The shorter pages that contained essentially nothing but links have been moved to the Links page which is really just me having more fun with CSS. My brother's and sister's sites are both available through there as well. More changes are coming. The top navigation available on the Links pages can be found at the CSS Tabs page. My thanks to the author. I really like the look and the simplicity.

As an interesting note, Firefox seems to have problems with multiple html link tags in the header. It would seem that it only reads the first one and skips the rest. This necesitated the use of the import statement to make IE and Firefox act the same way. Just thought this might help someone in the future.

I spent a large portion of today playing with the site. I still have an issue with the picture of Ben Browder and Claudia Black for people with high resolution in the 17 Nov 2003 entry but otherwise I have moved to a wholely external Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) and removed all the table elements from my WTLB/T page and the Home page. I believe this should allow the page to load slightly more quickly since there are far fewer elements to load now than before. It also makes new entries far easier to make since I don't have to copy multiple lines of html to render my entries anymore and my basic html file is far easier to read. To see for yourself right click on the frame and select view (page/frame) source.

I would add that there are a few "browsers" that will have problems with this site even though the pages are XHTML 1.1 compliant. PDA browsers are practically guaranteed to have problems with the frames this site uses and I am reasonably certain the same can be said of text only browsers. I have tested the pages against Opera (7.52), Firefox (0.9.1), IE (6.0), Maxthon (1.0), Konqueror (3.2), Epiphany (1.2), Netscape (7.1), Mozilla (1.6). None of the tested browsers exhibited any unpleasant problems with the two pages tested. I should point out that the tested versions of Netscape, Firefox, Mozilla, and Epiphany all use the Mozilla 5.0 engine and are not likely to have rendering differences anyway.

Finally, you may notice the site counter is rather low again. I decided that counting my own visits (especially when each refresh and browser test increments the counter) is far too misleading. Therefore, I have disabled my IP address from registering and reset it. This allows me to more easily detemine when someone else has actually visited my site. If you are visiting and reading this then I thankyou and I hope you find something useful and/or interesting on the site while you are here.

Ok, again I've been fiddling with things and I have made a change to my server. It is not something that will be at all visible to anyone viewing the site but I have changed mail servers. JAMES has some issues I was becoming increasingly intolerant of. Mainly, I wanted IMAP access so that I could more readily manipulate my e-mail from pretty much anywhere. JAMES is great if you just want POP and SMTP but I have been wanting more. Therefore, after a couple of attempts fiddling with it I have moved to the hMailServer. I was having a lot of difficulty logging on to it because the login id is actually the username and domain vice just the username. The documentation is a little weak but it works ok so far and has a nice, VERY SIMPLE, admin interface. I have also added a link for it to the Software page if you are interested. It is Windows only and written in C++ instead of JAVA (JAMES) but it's open source, ie FREE, and it seems to do everything I want at the moment.

Groove on this if you will, I spent a bit of the morning bringing the Home page into compliance with XHTML 1.1. That is just this frame not the whole site. Not only did I bring it into compliance but I did so using a dtd module that allows me to continue using the onclick="window.open(this.href); return false;" in XHTML 1.1. "How is this?" you may ask. Well it seems that XHTML isn't entirely evil as some of the posts would have you believe. A compliant module actually exists that allows you to use the target attribute even in 1.1. I learned about this on Accessify.com. Schway cool. I would also like to point out that I have tested this page in Firefox 0.9.1, IE 6.0, MyIE2 0.9.27.68, and Maxthon (the 1.0.0.170 version of MyIE2) and all the browsers handle it ideally. The page has also been tested in Epiphany 1.2.4, Konqueror 3.2.2-4, Mozilla 1.6, and Firefox 0.8 on Fedora Linux quite successfully.

Added a link to Zone Alarm to the Software page. It works really well and has won abundant praise for its effectiveness. Plus it's free, at least the basic version is.

Well, my brother has seemingly given up on frames already and decided to go with a mixture of javascript and CSS instead. Though I could put it back in my frame layout I think it would be best to leave it separate. It is still in development and he can be rather fickle about things sometimes. So for now it still opens in a new window and I have set it to autoredirect to his new home page directly off my link. For some reason he has chosen not to name his home page index.html so I altered his index page slightly to redirect to his new home page automagically rather than having that silly here link. Especially, when there is no further explanation of what here does. I guess he felt it was somewhat similar to eat me and drink me from Alice in Wonderland just to say here vice something a bit more explanatory. But that is entirely speculative on my part since he did not explain his motivations.

It's not something you can really see but I made some improvements to my WTLB/T page yesterday as far as the CSS is concerned.

My brother also made some changes to his site, Crankshaft. Since he is now using frames as well I am launching his page in a new window, otherwise the navigation would be too confusing.

I have been reading about usability and CSS and have the hope that I will eventually be able to render my pages using CSS vice frames. An example of what I would like to do is at Web Style Sheets CSS tips and tricks. Unfortunately, the behavior I seek only works in CSS capable browsers and IE is only partially capable. The effect this page demonstrates is only visible in the newer Mozilla family browsers at the moment. If you have a recent version of Firefox (previously Firebird) or Mozilla copy the link into it (assuming you aren't already using it) and notice that the menu on the right hand side does not move while the rest of the page does. In IE the menu moves right along with the page which is exactly why I use frames. When Microsoft FINALLY fixes this grievous error in their browser, then I will move to a CSS based menu. I am fully aware of the problems with frames, I even toyed around with a collapsible menu but it doesn't work that well in all browsers, especially with Microsoft's newest security features (though it did work on earlier versions of IE), plus it means coding for javascript enabled browsers as well as those that aren't enabled and I REALLY don't want to deal with that hassle. Until I find a method I really like better, the frames will simply have to be tolerated.

I have been reading about site design and layout. Jakob Nielsen says that an ideal space distribution for a site is roughly 80%, that is 80% devoted to content and the remaining 20% to navigation, ads, and white space. After some careful evaluation I decided my site needed a little "tweaking". So after having my sister design the new logo in the upper left I have removed the top banner from the site. I never felt it was a great use of space and now I think I was right. Let me know what you think of the new design and the new logo via the usual methods.

Because I have noticed that the image does not always load with the Neighborhood page I added a refresh link to the page as well. A quick and easy and, unfortunately, necessary fix. Like I said, please let me know what you think about that page or anything else via e-mail, the Guestbook, or the Forum.

Casini's arrival at Saturn's moon Phoebe this week has left us with at least one very decent image which has been added to the Neighborhood page. The name of the image is h_cassini_phoebe_0612_02.jpg. Since I like to add images every now and then to the page and I wouldn't want to have to go through a bunch of pics I've already seen just to see one I haven't, I will, sometime in the not too distant future, have them ordered by "modified" date vice thier current alphabetical order. I may actually do a bit more but that is the plan for now.

As it turns out, today I was avoiding studying for my midterm and, as usually happens when I am avoiding something I don't really want to do, I worked on my site. Low and behold the Neighborhood page now allows sorting by date added ("modified") and name in both ascending and descending order. Please check it out and let me know what you think via e-mail, the Guestbook, or the Forum. Thanks and enjoy.

In honor of this week's Venus transit I have added a several images to the Neighborhood page of both the Venus transit this week and the Mercury transit last year. In addition, I have added one composite picture of Phoebe, one of Saturn's smallest moons, and a map of Colorado. The composite was made for the sake of size comparison.

I added some pop-up text to the Software page. It doesn't seem like much but it took a long time to do. Haven't accomplished anything more with the Articles page yet but I haven't forgotten about it either. Obviously, this page will need to have some modification eventually as well since it is already VERY long and getting longer. But it's mostly all text and still shouldn't take too long to load.

Just a quick update. I am actually working on the ASP page for the Articles page but, since I am not too sure about what I want and how to go about it, it is going VERY slowly.

I was also reading a bit about printing web pages because I am constantly printing pages where the right side is getting cut off. For a more thorough explanation of what causes this and some hints on how to fix the problem you can check out O'Reilly's Site. I will probably add this page to the Information page at a later date. In case you are wondering, I am reasonably certain this page will not suffer from the printing problem if you select print the "selected frame only". Frames usually cause printing issues if you attempt to print all the frames at once but it seems reasonable to expect visitors to only print the material they have some interest in and not the navigation links that are in the surrounding frames. I agree that some novice users may not be aware of the option but I do know that IE and MyIE both offer to print the "selected frame only" if the visitor takes the time to read the print dialog pop-up or use the print preview option. A quick note about the "selected frame only" option is called for, the option may not appear by default. If this is the case, it can usually be induced to become available by clicking in the frame the user wishes to print then selecting the print option again. I would caution against using the IE print button on framed pages as well. This assumes defaults and does not bring up the dialog box. On a framed page this will nearly always print results that are not what the user/visitor intended.

Firebird acts a bit differently but I think if the user is using firebird they are probably knowledgable enough to figure out how to print their desired output.

Having recently been employed in the "real" world and having been VERY busy with school I, unfortunately, have very little time to add much to the site but I am not abandoning the project. It just may take more time. That being said I thought I would share a personal observation of mine about just how unfair life REALLY is, and I don't want to hear the lemon/lemonade BS.

In what has got to be the biggest injustice of ALL time, some guy through an arranged marriage is going to wed a woman for whom I would spend a lifetime "...wallowing in freakish misery..." {The Princess Bride}. And he is going to have the lifelong joy of her companionship simply through chance/fate. If that is not the definition of injustice I don't know what is. I suppose had he won her heart as most of the rest of us have to do when pursuing the woman of our dreams I would not begrudge him the unbelievable honor being bestowed upon him. But somehow this just doesn't seem right.

Along the same lines I have decided to add yet another link to the left side frame called Words To Live By/Truisms, WTLB/T. If anyone has any proverbs/sayings that they feel are deserving enough to be added, please feel free to suggest them in the Forum, the Guestbook, or via E-mail and I will give them careful consideration. If I deem them worthy, I will be sure to add your name, if you so desire, along with your saying/proverb to the WTLB/T page. I would ask that you include the source for your proverb/saying if you know it. If I have one or more proverbs/sayings without a source on the page or the source cited is incorrect and you know the exact reference please let me know via one of the aforementioned means.

Just a quick note. The WTLB/T page is my first foray into CSS, embedded. It's not a full blown external style sheet but it is kindof a neat feature that lets me change a lot of the page's look with very easy edits.

Although it doesn't have much impact on the site or how it is rendered I made a few behind the scenes upgrades to the software the site is using. I went from Apache 2.0.48 to 2.0.49, PHP 4.3.4 to 4.3.5 to 4.3.6RC1, and, on Horde, from Kronolith 1.1.1 to 1.1.2. The PHP change happened twice this past week with the upgrade to 4.3.6RC1 today and the other two upgrades were today only. Thus if you tried to visit the site earlier today and got that it was not found that is why. If the site had more traffic I might consider being a little more judicious in how and when I made upgrades but given the lack of traffic I don't feel obligated to announce in advance when the site will be down for maintenance and upgrades. I do, however, apologize if you tried to visit the site earlier today and got an error.
On a different topic, I have decided that I will refrain from placing my political opinions on this page and instead post them to the forums where visitors can post their own views, opposing or otherwise, as well. I will try to stick to the basis of this site's existence which is to offer insight into computer science and science in general as I come across facts and examples that I feel would be of some interest and/or benefit to others.

Thanks to some recent feedback I have altered the site slightly to give visitors some insight as to what some of the links on the left side of this page do. I intend to add such information to some of the other pages as well but for now the main links are all that have been completed. Simply allow your mouse to hover over the links on the left and a VERY brief description of what is on the other end of the link should show in your browser. I tested this in recent versions of IE and Mozilla and they seem to work fine but I make no guarantees for other web browsers.

Thanks to a VERY generous family benefactor my site has become significantly faster due to the fact that the machine serving the site is no longer the machine I do most of my work on. I hope that the need for rebooting the machine and the significant slow downs experienced while I was doing other activities will now be a thing of the past. I am also experimenting with the new menu and have a test page you can try out and give me your opinion on. The test page is here. It has some problems but if you check it out please let me know what YOU think.

I don't normally do this but I am going to stoop to talking about world events for a moment.

I offer the following snippet from FoxNews that proves people don't want peace they just hate the US

"About 500 anti-Iraq war protesters who tried to push their way to the U.S. Embassy in the Philippine capital briefly scuffled with riot police. After some pushing and shoving, the demonstrators hurled stones at the security personnel, who responded with water cannons as the protesters locked arms and stood their ground."

They seem to believe peace through violence is justified yet they condemn everyone else for having the same beliefs. Hypocrites all!!! I don't recall there being protests while Hussein mowed down his dissidents from helicopters or gassed the Kurds and Iranians, or when Milosovic killed thousands of his countrymen. These are the same type of people who said, "...let Hitler have Poland. We can all just sit by and do nothing while first hundreds then thousands then hundreds of thousands and finally millions perish at the hands of a ruthless satanic figure." He who stands by and does nothing while others suffer have no right to protest when someone else intervenes on their behalf. I truly believe if these people saw one person beating another they would protest if a third person tried to break it up. They are like the cameramen on "When Animals Attack". They will sit back and watch a person get mauled to death instead of trying to lend some aid. The hypocrisy of it all is staggering.

And again I added ANOTHER link to the left side frame. I happen to believe forums are a good means of carrying on conversations and reporting problems where everyone can come in, in the middle of a conversation, and catch up easily. That is they are good tools for software and website feedback. Please check out my Forum page and, if it's not too much trouble, leave your thoughts about the site or just a message to the web page authors in the Guestbook. Thanks.

I added yet another link to the left side frame. A revision to that aspect of my site will have to be done eventually since, even I think, that frame is getting a little out of control. But for now take a look at my Guestbook page and, if it's not too much trouble, leave your thoughts about the site as well.

Once again I am avoiding something so I finally got my Neigborhood page working the way I want, via PHP. Well nearly so at least. I still have one or two more little features I MIGHT add. I am reasonably pleased with it now and would invite you to check it out. If you would like the code for it I am always willing to share. Essentially, to add any pics to it at all, all I have to do is drop them in a selected folder and they are automatically added to the page. Just an "isn't that odd", rendering less-than, <, and greater-than, >, correctly in IE and Mozilla is really a pain in the butt. The greater-than worked just using &gt but the less than wouldn't render correctly using &lt in Mozilla even though it did in IE. I may have just missed the ; but I ended up going with the unicode values < for less-than and > for greater-than.

Made a few small changes to the layout of the Software page and added links for PHP, James, MySQL, DBDesigner, and Horde. Feel free to look around and check them out as you like.
As proof that there is some small justice in the world, I offer this good news Eolas has lost his/their patent. And, though I would have preferred to hold off on adding any more to that particular page, I have added the Register article "Eolas' Web Patent Nullified" to the Articles page simply because this is such an important event.

After months of fiddling with it for a few minutes at a time I finally was avoiding something so severely that I managed to get Horde to work on my website, running on XP with, PHP 4.3.4, MySQL 4.0.17-nt, Apache 2.0.48, and Apache James 2.2.0a15 on Sun Java 1.4.2_03b02, all freeware, except of course, XP. Not that it means anything to anyone but me but still it's a nice sense of accomplishment to FINALLY get it working. Horde has serious issues with PHP version 5 so I had to go back to version 4. After that it just took a lot of reading and playing with the database a bit to get it working. It's odd that I had problems using the md5 method/function/procedure when I was trying to insert into the database but that I had no problems when I updated it??? Very strange indeed.

My next project will either be to change the Neighborhood page to work more the way I envision or to get the Articles page rewritten to take advantage of the database, possibly using an ASP.NET page. Further down the road I'd like to try a JSP page as well just to see how well it works out and how easy/difficult it is to code but for now the only two pages planned are a PHP page (the Neighborhood page) and an ASP page (the Articles page utilizing a MySQL database).

Added two more links to the Information page. One of them is for "Group Policy Management Console with Service Pack 1" and the other is for "Configuring User Group Policy Settings". The first is the location to get the download from and the second tells you a little about it. It's not really all that special but the management console has some interesting capabilities. I also discovered some broken links in the information page article "Disable Login Prompt in Windows XP Pro" I have repaired those links and added the images that go with them.

Just added a new link for "Beyond Lethargic" to the WebPages. The site is not very developed yet but I know the site owner so I figured it would be appropriate to share a link to it. Check it out when you have a minute or two. I also added two more information links to the Information page "Windows XP- cisvc.exe takes over cpu (XP OS)" and "Controlling Users with the Registry". I also have a large number of articles to add to the Articles page as well but it is beginning to get a bit difficult to manage and so I am trying to come up with a more manageable way to keep it updated without requiring me to rewrite several pages over and over again, plus I would like to be able to sort them by date, category, author, and source. I believe I will eventually use a database running on MySQL to do it but as yet that has not happened. I'll try to keep the site updated as things progress. Finally, I added three more developer links to the Software page, "Bloodshed", "SableCC", and "JavaCC". If you have any interest in these feel free to check them out.

Not that I have any reason to believe it has had any impact on those two people that have actually visited my site, but it would appear that after installing IIS on my machine, my Apache James mail server stopped working. After many attempts to repair the problem, I finally discovered that IIS includes an SMTP server as well and that both servers were trying to bind to the same port. Obviously, this can't happen so my e-mail server had been down for a while. It appears to be back up now. So if anyone wants to send me an e-mail it should get through now. Since I can't recall when I installed IIS I can't say with any certainty how long it has been down but I believe it has been at least a month if not more. I am hopeful that it will not happen again but I wouldn't bet the bank on it.

I am giving serious consideration to trying a new web page editor that was written by the same person that wrote the Citrus Alarm Clock. The program is called Araneae and it is VERY similar to Med with one small difference, it lets you preview the page with a built in button. This is only going to be a trial, however, because Med is extremely capable and page previewing isn't really all that diffficult the way I have been doing it up until now. If you are interested in trying it, it can be found through the "Citrus Alarm Clock" link on the Software page.

As one of my FAVORITE movies and a uniquely American (USian) holiday, unique in that they call it Candlemas and use a hedgehog in Europe, I feel obliged to point you to the website of the official groundhog of the US. Please visit Groundhog.org and have a safe and joyous Groundhog Day.

To learn more about groundhogs and the holiday visit MSN.com for an interesting and somewhat amusing article from the Microsoft Encarta website.

I added an article called "Hide the Last User Name (All Windows)" to the Information page. It's from www.winguides.com It's just a way to keep the user name of the last user to login out of the login prompt. I also would like to announce that the Garden page(s) are finally beginning to take shape. They still are under construction and will require some refinement but they are up. They have been authored by someone other than myself, as is the Crankshaft page, and are quite graphics intensive thus may take some time to load. Please check it out.

Just realized I misspelled irreparable on 28 November 2003 so I corrected it. Since I didn't receive any e-mail on it I feel reasonably certain that my site is getting 0 traffic or my visitors don't know how to spell either but then I didn't really build it for other people to take advantage of. It's mostly just for my benefit. And I added a few pages by a different author under Crankshaft page. Enjoy

Just added one more useful little tool to the Software page called Citrus Alarm Clock. It just starts a user determined A/V file at the specified time. I use it regularly and recommend it. It runs in the system tray, has a small footprint, and uses the default application for the file (including m3u/playlists so it can start a cd as well)

It's not much but I finally got php installed and have my first php page working. It's not exactly what I want yet but it works ok for now. Just check out the Neighborhood page to see the current result. It's not like you can really tell that it's php other than the extension but it has some promise. I also added a link for PHP.net to the Information page

I have more to do but I just changed the Software page to remove the links to quite a few pieces of software that I don't feel warrant my endorsement, tacit or explicit, and I added a few pieces that are more worthy. More changes are forthcoming but for now that's what I have. I will also be adding quite a few new articles to the Articles page and have some top pics to add to a new page that will be available soon that will portray some great composite photos from our cosmic Neighborhood and beyond.