All I ask from anyone who reads this today is to look at their backup strategy. I thought I had mine down. I have an original iMac with a big hardrive that serves as my backup server at my house. I have a .mac account with Apple, so I used (past tense) Backup for my backup software. I back up all my documents, preferences, photos, purtchased music, etc. Without getting into details, I lost some data, and was forced to take a good hard look at my backup strategy…you know, what you say to yourself, but fail to actually look at it because everything is fine now. I am just asking you to look at your current strategy, and if it is not working or non-existent, do yourself a favor and tkae the 5-10 minutes it takes to plan it, and then some time this weekend to implement it. For me, I am going to start using rsync at home, as I do at work with my web servers. I can easily set up a cron job, and have everything run in the background, only updating what needs to be updated. (see my past rsync post) I am also going to start keeping off site backups of my photos and documents (music is pretty much on my iPod already). Don’t delay, please…get a working backup strategy before it is too late.
Archive for January, 2005
All posts written in January, 2005.
random randomness.
Well. I often find myself looking for one thing on the web and ending up with finding multiple cool things that I ordinarily would not find otherwise. Here is a taste:
- Satan’s Landromat A really cool photo log.
- Chicago Uncommon Really cool pictures of and around Chicago.
- FileExt A web site that has a database full of file extensions and what they are and what application will open documents with those extensions.
- Bubble Sort help. (I needed it for my perl training)
- Napoleon Dynamite web site (I needed something fun after doing the bubble sort)
- RSS tracking for your packages (put your tracking numbers where the “@” signs are)
- Crazy new Volvo
- Dashboard Wigets are CSS compatible! My set up will be super awesome!
The Decent Thing To Do
After a confusing day filled with follies of all sorts…I have to ask someone (because my answer is biased): do standards (both technical and personal) and hard work really matter? The day started off by me losing the last spot in my normal train parking lot to someone that I waved in front of me so they could make the turn (it was easier for me to do it, so I thought I would give them a break. Little did I know, they would take a quick turn into my parking lot and take the last spot causing me to miss my train and park much further away than I am accustomed to park.
As the day went on, I was reminded that double standards seem to be the standard. How is it that the others, who do the bare minimum (hopefully soon to be featured on thebareminimum.com (what you wonder why it is still at the bare minimum…it is called redoing the CSS and design for this site)), and seem to be stress and worry free, yet content to live like that while I am stressed out and produce quality solutions? (and then are the same people who complain about things that do not seem to be up to their standard) (which is well above their own in comparison)? (can you tell I like brackets?)
To follow things up, how is it possible I get the “are you fucking serious?” look from Mr. 1990 who is taking up 2 seats on the train and makes me ask him twice if he would please move his stuff so I could sit on the only empty seat that I have found in the past two train cars. PS Mr. 1990s, taking off your lame boots to itch your foot (with a sock with holes) is not very attractive.
To top it all off, as I was driving home, I have to cross the tracks, and as I was at a red light, tracks behind me, some jack ass decided to pull up, and wait on the tracks while we were waiting for the light to turn. So my final questions…what is the thought process with these people? Do they not care? Will I ever be appreciated because I do care?
never trust a computer you can't lift.
Steve Jobs at his finest, and in a tux! Happy belated birthday (yesterday) Macintosh!. Without further rambles: the ever-so-wonderful mac video.
operation Sarah Connor.
Well I got the call last night. One of my good friends (Ben you know who) called to tell me she is getting married in October…and that I am going to be a bridesmaid. (Yes, Doug you can have a picture). So today, I am officially start my training for Operation Sarah Connor: get fit. Since my Apple tattoo is going to get displayed with the dress, my arms have to be buff and I have to be buff too. If you do not know who Sarah Connor is and you are reading this…you are officially banned from this web site until you sit down and watch Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day. For extra credit, you can not watch Terminator 3. (not even worthy of a link) I will keep an update of how Operation Sarah Connor is going every few weeks or months. This will be a good thing especially with a three wedding summer coming up and a tenth high school reunion on top of it all.
cheers! windows applications without windows.
This weekend, in between validatint my code, football, and SoCom II, I ran into a cool project that I think is worth mentioning: Darwine. For people like me that do not always have access to a PC but believes in QA for multiple browsers/platforms, there are times when all I need is IE for Windows. I do not want to buy a PC or super slow Virtual PC…I just need to open a window or two in IE, look at it, make adjustments to my code and get on with my day. Enter: Darwine. Darwine is an open source project/port of Wine for Darwin/Mac OS X. Darwine (and Wine) provide users like me who only need to use an application or two the abilty to do so without using Windows. Very cool. The project is still in the early stages, but something to watch in the next few months.
Clean Code With Tidy
When I first started creating web pages with using SimpleText or BBEdit, my code was super clean…it might not have been as complicated as it now, but everything was in it’s place and it was damn impressive to look at. Enter in GoLive CyberStudio (now Adobe GoLive). Lots of great features and awesome site management, but my god, the code is nasty. Since I decided to design my pages using CSS instead of tables, I have once again found myself coding web pages in text editors or in GoLive’s source code editor. I am a much cleaner coder than Adobe GoLive, but I still make mistakes, and sometimes forget to properly code something, making my pages not compliant with the W3C’s standards. So what do I do? Enter Tidy. I use the command line version, but there is also a cocoa implementation of Tidy that is also pretty cool. So, no more excuses for nasty, non-compliant code.
firefox plugin: web developer
When designing web sites and then performing QA/validating I have found the Firefox plugin “web developer” to be invaluable. (I am finishing up jappler.com and my validation this weekend). You can easily view all your CSS elements, validate your CSS, outline tables, view page information, even view a page’s speed report. I would highly recommend this for anyone that does any web development.
Day 3: Panic, Day 4: Done.
Well, yesterday after hours of frustration and CSS style sheet number three, I started thinking that what I wanted was not possible…not even close. Thoughts entered my mind like : “maybe I will forward all IE users to a nice web site on standards” and “maybe I could pdf my web site and make users do that.” These thoughts were the desperation speaking. I dreamt all night about CSS classes, divs, and elements and woke up determined to find something that would work. Enter my new hero: Tonico Strasser who authored an awesome layout which I based my design on. I have learned so much about CSS…and this experience has been an education. I am still not a fan of IE, but it is something we have to deal with and I have dealt with it. I have a few spacing issues with IE still, but everything looks pretty good. Sixty plus hours worth it? Yes. Standards are important.
day 2, style sheet 2.
Well well. Who says you should settle? I decided to completely re-write my style sheet and I have almost everything down for both IE and Netscape (FireFox, Safari, Netscape) browsers. Some things I still need to look at are the bulleted lists on the right (blog) and some other details. I again feel like I have taken CSS to another level.
So why did I switch style sheets? I went over to a friend’s house last night and saw the horror of my web site in IE for Windows. I came home and made some adjustments, but then got frustrated and knew there had to be another way…here I am.
What I have learned…well for one, IE is not pleasant to work with, time to get a “get Firefox” logo for this web site. IE does not play nice in so many ways, but the killer is it does not like min/max-width, and that is very important to this design. All other browsers that I have tested obey the min/max-width, but not IE…this was the major reason I had to start from scratch again. I decided that being able to stretch it for IE was better than the absolute mess I saw before. I am hoping I can find a fix somewhere, but for now I am ok with that…I suppose.
Other than that, this whole design has been a great learning opportunity and I am excited to figure out these last few bugs so I can enjoy the design instead of working on it…well at least for a few weeks. So, if you see something weird, believe me, I am aware of it…and am on the case.
[tags]CSS[/tags]
