It’s been one of those days, it didn’t start all that bad, but the little things that go one just build up. This track season has been mediocre at best for me, which is annoying me to death. I’m just not as fast as I should be, and some of those who are able to achieve the levels of performance that they, and I, should be at have become arrogant. In general their arrogance has become irritating. I found out that I won’t be competing on Friday, which means that I won’t compete for two weeks, as the competition I could participate in next week is on Thursday, which I will be on a road trip down to Texas for the Jeeper’s Jamboree. One of the two fans mounted in the heat sync for my 200GB hard drive is going bad and is generating noises off and on. The AC in my truck isn’t working correctly; it probably needs to be recharged since we didn’t put enough R-134a in when we replaced the compressor. Someone also told me that they are still getting errors when they try to post comments on my blog, which I fixed earlier, or so I though. The next two weeks are going to be hell as AP testing begins, I have the AP Calculus BC exam in one week, and the second week I have three exams.
Besides these problems, it looks like the standard RPC Ping method of displaying blog updates for Weblogs.us on the front page won’t provide enough information for what the new desired look is. This means I need to do allot of coding to make a received RPC Ping prompt a script to read the RSS feed from the blog and extract the information that we need for the front page. There has to be a better way of doing it, but right now it’s the only way I can think of that impacts existing blogs the least, since no additional code is needed for the individual blog. If any one knows of code that already does this, has a better idea, or is able to write this in PHP, then please leave a comment.
PS: I have a semi-working alpha of the new Weblogs.us frontpage located on my blog at mtekk.weblogs.us/weblogsus so check it out.
-John Havlik
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I finished the second mockup for the new Weblogs.us front page, and in the forums everyone seems to love it, so I will modify the code that I’ve already written and finish up coding the new front page. Hopefully I will have a no-thrills xHtml/CSS layout done by the end of the week, with XJAX implementation by the end of next week, and then the backend stuff should be worked on by the next. If all goes well, Weblogs.us can have a May first reload, which is common on the internet. But that is assuming that I can get time to get the coding done ahead of schedule, which should be no problem until I hit the AJAX and PHP coding.
In other news today we had a track meet, not the nicest weather to run in but not terrible. Wind made our times suffer, and I have yet to PR this season. Yesterday the two motherboards that were sent to Gigabyte for RMA service finally arrived back after being gone for 30 days. A chip supposedly had to be replaced, which made it take forever. I wasn’t able to see exactly what chip it was, but I’m guessing it was located near one of the PCI Express 1x slots, since on both boards the chip looked newer than the rest. The computers went back together in about 35 minutes each, and booted correctly on the first attempt to. Meanwhile a made a copy of all the music videos that I have on my hard drive for a friend, which took exactly 10GiB, three DVD4.5 GB disks (two full ones and 1.5GiB on the other), I only need 14 more videos to total 200 music videos in my collection.
-John Havlik
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Ok so this is long over do, I know, but this past week has been hell for the WordPress servers for some reason at Weblogs.us so everyone’s blog has been up and down for the last week. Reliability has to be at about 70% right now. Every time I’ve meant to post something suddenly the blog is down. As I outlined in a quick blog which should have gone out at 1:00 AM today (It didn’t but I edited the time stamp and released it later today), Apache is crashing allot due to what we believe is an improperly coded WordPress plug-in which a Weblogs.us member is using. To help alive the situation I’ve disabled all of my plug-ins other than Bad Behavior to block spam. This means that my blog will be broken until the servers can handle the burden someone is placing on them.
We had a track meet last Wednesday, which was originally scheduled for yesterday but due to forecasted storms, which did take place, the meet was moved up a day. Wednesday was dry, for a spring day, and windy. The entire back straightaway of the track was at times directly into the wind, which made running more difficult than it usually is. Adding to the wind was the absence of uniform tops, since they didn’t arrive until today we had to run in t-shirts which was just great since we didn’t really look like a team with twenty or more different t-shirt designs. I accidentally left my nalgene bottle at my second block class, which left me waterless for the races, which really hampered my performance, but it was the first meet so all is good.
I promise once the new Weblogs.us front page/website design is finished and implemented then I will post a new issue to the critique of Myspace profiles, the new name for the series will be launched at that time. ETA for this event is the second Friday in May. It would be the first Friday, but I’ll be out of town that weekend.
-John Havlik
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Tomorrow this site will not look the same as it usually does. In participating in CSS Naked Day I will be removing my CSS file to demonstrate how this site conforms to xHtml 1.1 standards and degrades gracefully due to standards compliance. Well it seems the leader of this has jumped the gun, or is in Europe, because it isn’t the fifth yet here in the USA.
Our track meet scheduled for Thursday has been rescheduled for tomorrow, to avoid expected foul weather. This is just great since we had a hard workout on Monday and we won’t be fully recovered on Wednesday. It really doesn’t matter as it is the first meet of the season.
-John Havlik
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Chaska’s cross country team placed second at the region 2AA sections meet, just behind defending state champions Wilmer, and will be competing at the MHSL (Minnesota State High School League) State Meet on the non-urbanite Minnesotan’s favorite holiday, deer hunting opener. For the rest of us that is the fifth of November. I couldn’t make it to watch them at the section meet nor will I be able to for state, hunting of course.
Mtekktux is almost completely configured, right now I’m on mtekkxp, I should be able to have it print serving once I get my new keyboard that is on a USB interface so that I don’t have to keep barrowing my brothers keyboard to get it to work and so that I have a working ‘Z’ key. I have php, apache2, and mysql fully configured and functional I believe. Samba, proFTPD and TightVNC are installed, the first two need more configuration so that print serving works and so I can ftp into my apache2 web directory so I can use it for web design/coding/testing.
-John Havlik
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WordCamp NYC
