Well the CSS Reboot thingy is May 1st, many websites and blogs will be doing some spring cleaning on their designs. Weblogs.us could be one of these sites, just it would be allot of work and I feel that there are too many loose ends to get fixed. Honestly, this very minute JD could take my weblogsus/ directory and set it as the main page, do a few minor adjustments to fix intentionally broken links and all would be good. But it wouldn’t be ‘live’, and all the goodness that I am trying to put into it will be overshadowed for its incompleteness. The crib won’t be getting any drastic design changes either; I’m far too busy working on the Weblogs.us front page and preparing for AP tests. Night time complements the crib better right now than the day header, that’s the explanation for the ‘change’.
-John Havlik
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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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Today, 1 year ago I posted my first entry on this blog, marking my transition from Blogger to WordPress. Much has changed in a year, more frequent posts, a custom layout, a work-in-progress plug-in, and much more. Currently the new layout for Weblogs.us, my awesome blog host, is in the works of being written in xHtml and CSS. Hopefully there will be a super-sneak-preview available in the not so distant future, besides I need to upload it somewhere to get some of the features to work. I have a tad bit more xHtml to write and its styling and I will be done with all non-dynamic design, with the exception of making Internet Exploder listen correctly to my CSS commands.
-John Havlik
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Today someone claiming to be part of the Chase-Security Support Service sent me an e-mail claiming that they ‘discovered’ recent activity on my account and that I had to log-in to my Chase Online account to resolve the issue. Funny how they ‘knew’ that I ‘have’ a Chase card, which I don’t. Hovering over the hyperlink, which they tried to discreetly insert a bit of cover code so the average moron would think it was valid, but instead of going to https://chase.com or some related URL the hyper link pointed to some adsl-numbers link and then the cover http://chase.com/… Knowing that this was definitely a scam, which Thunderbird warned of, I clicked the link. Firefox displayed the link as http://jaew.us/login.htm with additional variable passing in the address, defiantly a scam. I tried the https version, and got an access forbidden. I have taken the liberty of contacting JPMorgan Chase, notifying them of this scammer, which wants your name, credit card number, mother’s name, social security number, and CVV2 (What that is, I have no clue, probably a security feature.). After collecting this information, which I provided fake information such as 123 12 1234 for the social security number, and [Expletive] You Scammer as my ‘name’, I was sent to Chase’s real website, which is semi-vulnerable since it redirects https traffic to it’s http server, a great security risk.
-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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