Rants, Remembrances, and Ruminations

Jeffrey Williams 2.0, PASSED OVER.

Ok, lemme explain.

When I first set up my personal web site, I wanted it to be as minimalist as possible. So the design went up with some obligatory text and aside from my photoshopping and blogging, not much was developed with it.

I began work on the redesign and came across a number of things.

1. Table-less design does work with a little more practice


2. A lot of the content I would produce can actually be handled by MT. I feel dumb.


3. 1024 and 1280 are old and busted. Centering the design focus and repping out the edges is the new direction


4. I needed a more original design. My alpha is too much a rip of Spoono for me to feel comfortable with it. So I'm ditching it and starting over, but I did want to show it to people first, especially in Firefox and IE side-by-side(the Firefox version is MUCH prettier, I might add). I just wanted to see if it could be done...
   

So as soon as I figure how to use iframes in MT. I'm redesigning the blog. Wheee! JW.O v3, here we come!

I have been having a very bad day.

from Another 48 Hours

Reggie Hammond: All right, knock this shit off! I HAVE BEEN HAVING A VERY BAD DAY! I just got out of jail this morning! Already I've been shot at, I was on a bus that flipped over seventeen times, bitch tried to stab me in the back room, and somebody blew up my Porsche! I am in a BAD goddamn mood! Now I usually don't step in on things like this, but this man Jack Cates is gonna help me straighten out the rest of my day! So I suggest you all back up, and let us go about our business!

Ever had one of those days where the moment you look at your computer at work that you know that the whole day is going to be hell? I do now. Ol' Eddie Murphy, though, he knows exactly how to express what I feel.

Beam Me Up, Scotty. (James Doohan 1920-2005)

from the BBC

Karl Rove

from CNN

I'm no Capitol Hill player, nor am I a peanut farmer. However, this looks to be something Rove will get himself out of at the cost of an aide or two. Maybe I'm wrong and Rove will get sacked, but my gut says that Rove stays.

I think that he leaked the information out or had a sufficient role in it to warrant dismissal. At any rate, Rove and Tim LaHaye, Jerry B. Jenkins scare me enough where they are that they ought to be out of capitol hill, period. Just something about those guys gives me the creeps.

Especially Rove, look at this man.

The guy looks to be perfectly content to eat my liver in front of me... Or do a rather uncanny impression of the stay-puft marshmallow man, who is also an agent of Dozer.

Pirates' Ownage(ninjas);

This is for Woody and all the other pirates out there.

...We'll see how long this lasts before the C&D...

The world grew a little smaller today.

from the BBC

A series of bomb attacks on London's transport network has killed more than 30 people and injured about 350 others. There were three explosions on the Underground - which police said left 33 dead - and one on a double-decker bus in which an unknown number died.

For me, it used to be that wars happened on television. B&W film of the world wars, colorized Korean and vibrant Vietnam. The Gulf War went straight to video and the latest have all been streaming the internet. But each time, it was on a screen of someplace I've never been.

This morning, a place where I have been, a tube I took several times was bombed in London between Kings Cross and Russel Square.

Today, for me, the world just got a lot smaller.

Instructions?! Me on Eclipse 3.1

Instructions? I ain't got no need for `em! I don't need no Instructions! I don't have to read your stinking instructions!

I know I'm not the only one around who hardly ever reads the instructions for software nowadays, and I think there's a good reason. A lot of the documentation these days makes the assumption that you've come out of your WWII fallout shelter for the first time in 50-60 years and the first thing you want to do is use photoshop.
And for a while, things were good.

Then I installed the new Eclipse 3.1. I started a new java project, added a file, did the obligatory "hello world" application. and tried to run the app.

But the run function wasn't where I thought it would be. Aroo? This window shows me what programs it would use to run it, but it's not running?! My gut reflex was "Well, this sucks, I'm uninstalling." followed immediately by, "wait, give up on something just because it doesn't work the way I thought it would, when I haven't read a thing about it since it was in first beta?"

So I sat down, started with one of it's tutorials of running with it, and in no time, "Hello World" was glaring at me from the console tab within the program.

Neat!

The Java IDE's I've used in the past were kludgy, often written in Java, memory instensive, and wouldn't do what MSVS could for it's languages with half the overhead.

Today's Eclipse is much, much better. "Code proofing" while you type, preformatting as you go, a lot of what Eclipse does for you is quite slick, and the overhead is not as bad percentage-wise as older IDE's were(At least it didn't require me to install Apache or IIS unlike other IDE's I can think of).

The only catch was that I needed to learn a little about "planet Eclipse"(to paraphrase a former co-worker) before I dived into it. But if you do any coding using Java or C++(which I haven't tried yet), I really recommend it. The price is nice as well.