As those who follow me on twitter will know, I’ve been doing without my PC for a few days now. Not because I want to, but because my motherboard decided to short out on me. Even though this is not a nice experience, there are some positive sides to it. Granted, I’m not sure I’d see any positives if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve been able to re-purpose my file server to serve as a temporary desktop without too much trouble.

But as I do have my re-purposed file server keeping me connected to the essentials I’ve decided to do a little blog post about the surprising positives I’ve noticed in being cut off from my regular PC. Not that I’d recommend anyone get their mboard shorted out just to experience these…

Item One

I no longer have all the links I’d normally take for granted in my bookmarks, toolbar, and history. This may sound like a weird positive, but I find it is. It’s made me realise just how much of a creature of habit I really am. There are sited I visit regularly, sites I know the address off, which I simply can’t be bothered to go to when I have to actually type that address. Not bothering with those sites has left me the time to do a lot more reading than I had been doing for a while.

Item Two

Another positive thing for me is that lacking my PC has forced me to make some decisions. I’d been thinking about a Magnatune streaming membership for quite a while, but I only got around to actually getting one because I’ve been cut off from all the music that’s stored on my desktop. As a result I’ve listened to, and enjoyed, more new music in the last few days than in the previous month or so.

Item Three

Related to the missing links, but a little different, I’ve found that aside from my browsing habits my routine has also changed a little. Most the changes aren’t massive, I’ve made sure my backup desktop is now running pretty much the same software my PC normally uses, but it has made me reconsider other things – like that large number of RSS feeds I’m subscribed to, even though I mostly click “Mark All Read” because I haven’t the time to read them. I’ve already mentally scheduled a thorough RSS cleanup for when the PC is up and running again.

Looking Back

So what do I feel looking back after a few days? Well I’ll still be glad tomorrow when I can pick up my new board and get my regular PC up and running again. But even so these intervening days haven’t been as bad as I’d first thought they might be. And the replacement I’ve ordered – replacing mboard, proc & memory – is also an upgrade that should put off the need to buy a new PC entirely at least a while longer.

And of course when I do get the (upgraded) PC back up and running I can carry some of the changes to my routine made during the last few days back there. That way the crash may actually have a positive effect in the long term.

It’s been too long since my last update to this blog. I don’t know why, but every time I decide to blog more, I keep it up for a little bit and then drop off again. And my last burst of activity was, of course, no different then the others in the end. And recently there’s been Twitter, which has replaced blogging, at least in some cases. But Twitter is, in a way, also the reason I’m blogging now. Because I’ve been having fun with code again lately, and it’s thanks to Twitter.

I was somewhat intrigued at first by mentions of the Twitter API. And then I started noticing (I must have seen them before, but I’d never actually noticed) some of the various ways people display Twitter statuses on other websites. And while there were some pretty good ones, I ran into the usual problem: none of them did exactly what I wanted them to do, the way I wanted them to do it.

Granted I could have lived with some of them, but I decided it would be more fun to write my own. Which is why I’ve been blowing the dust and rust off my PHP skills recently, working on my first ever wordpress plugin. It’s not done yet, and it’s only seen limited testing, but I’m hoping to take the code public as of version 0.5. Now I just have to figure out what features I want to have in 0.5.

The main problem seems to be one of balance – which I’ve always thought is probably the main trick of life anyway. In this case the balance is between allowing the user to customise the way they want the plugin to appear, and having something that runs without the user having to (virtually) write their own plugin.

I spent quite a bit of time yesterday, as well as most of today so far, playing with code. Some PHP and some javascript. I’ve never done much with the latter until quite recently, so a lot of that is not much further than “Hello World”, but it’s fun.

I’m actually still in two minds about most javascript uses. Or rather in one mind: don’t do it. As a rule I believe sites should use as little javascript as possible. For one thing javascript, like flash and other client side scripts, is somewhat impolite. Rather than using serverpower to present the site you want, you use the processor power of person showing an interest by visiting the site.

Granted there are things that simply can’t be done serverside, and javascript is usually a better way to deal with them than flash. But quite a few sites use javascript even when there are perfectly valid serverside alternatives. In fact there are sites where, even when I’m not doing (or looking at) anything special I can still watch my processor usage spike just from having them open.

I’ve had a look at some more advanced code as well, and I find that it’s getting easier and easier to figure out what’s going on just be reading the code. That should translate into an ability to either adapt or write more advanced pieces of code, which is my real aim: Combining the clientside effects of javascript with the serverside power of PHP through AJAX.

Most of that’s still in the future (though I hope in the near future), but however that may be, I’ve rediscovered something: playing around with code is almost as much fun as writing fiction. My ideal is still to make my living by writing fiction some day, but if I can make some of my money by writing code, that would be good too.

Along with a record number of blogposts – at least for me – and a record number of words this month I’ve just noticed another record. When I checked my site-statistics just now I found I’ve had 505 “unique visitors” this month. With “unique visitor” defined as any IP address listed as making at least one visit.

Going over 500, with nearly a week still to go, means I’ve broken the previous record by some 70 visitors. All other stats are similarly up. True I won’t be competing for traffic with Google and Wikipedia for just a while longer, but still, it’s always nice to see the number go up.

I mentioned in my last post – which will actually be posted at the same time as this one – that after the “in lap” trial I was looking forward to trying my new keyboard in bed. I’m still looking forward to that, but when I wrote that I completely forgot one further trial I had coming: writing on a moving train.

And the good news is: this is definitely possible. In fact the major challenge so far is that the tables the train I’m currently in offers are too high – compared to the chairs – to let me type on one of them comfortably for a longer stretch of time. So I’ve moved to writing in my lap again. That’s not the ideal position to be typing either, but right now it’s more comfortable than having to try to keep my arms up the whole time; wasn’t that used as a form of corporeal punishment at some time past?

Anyway, one other point I’ve not blogged yet, unless I’m much mistaken, is the weird position this keyboard gives to the question mark. That’s been shifted around somehow to make room for the cursor keys, wich isn’t a bad reason to move something. The problem however is that this means I keep hitting Shift + Cursor-up when I mean to hit a question mark, which selects a line and then replaces it with the next thing I type. The undo function has kept this from, costing me any words, but it is just a bit annoying.

Another thing that’s annoying me a little right now are occasional “Demo Version” freezes from my screen rotation app. I’m probably going to get the full version pretty soon though. I was working without the rotation for most of the weekend, which meant keeping the PDA upright, and there’s no great problem with that when you’re working on a nice stable table. It’s not even a big problem when working in your lap on solid ground.

But now, typing on a moving train it does make the whole thing a bit wobbly. So I’ve got the screen rotation back on – long story short I had a backup with it in that seemed broken, but managed to get it working again – and I’m typing on a nice stable PDA. It’s not perfect, given the choice of lap or too high table, but it’s good enough to be getting on with for now. So I think I’ll close this post here and do some more writing.

Obigatory Jane Austen moment: “I hear such different accounts of you as to puzzle me exceedingly.” That’s pretty much where I was when it came to whether or not the new keyboard would be any use in my lap. The reviews I found online ahead of the time rather differed on that point.

It seems to be working pretty well right now, though not quite as well as it would on the table I have to keep my legs together to keep it stable, and even so it’s moving a bit more than it would on a table. That occasionally causes the IR connection to lose lock on but on the whole it’s quite workable.

I’ll probably be doing my main writing on tables anyway. But for an early morning blog entry (I’m writing this at 09:30 not matter when it will be posted) this works quite well. Now then next thing to test, when I get home tonight, is going to be how well it’ll type when I lie down on my bed with it in front of me. That would be the ideal way to work on stuff late at night, although it’ll probably rather up the risk of falling asleep while writing.

I’ve been having some fun with the testing site this morning. And especially with translations. A colleague at work asked about the possibility of me doing a couple of pages in Dutch on this site. And while I may do a couple of pages at some point, I simply don’t have the time (alternative theory: I’m simply to lazy) to translate most of the site. So I decided to muck about with some PHP and come up with some automated translation links.

That led to me playing around with Google Translate and Yahoo’s Babelfish, trying to decide which does a the better job of translating. It’s difficult to say that for sure, since both end up rendering some parts readable and some completely garbled (just never the same parts for some reason).

I had some good laughs at that and decided I couldn’t possibly deny people who don’t read Dutch similar laughs when they read my site. So I came up with a neat little trick to have Google translate Yahoo’s Dutch back into English. Most of that translation is Hilarious enough to start with. But one thing in particular caught my eye.

The place name “Apeldoorn” in this post is translated into English as “Calcutta”. I don’t know where than error came from, but it’s a thing of beauty. On the other hand, maybe I should call my mother to make sure she hasn’t moved without telling me. But then again, why would she tell Google…

Just in case they get that translation fixed any time soon click this link for a screenie of the translation (Calcutta is in the bottom right hand corner on this shot).

Well it’s been in development for quite a while, but the new look is finally active on the site. The one thing that remains sort of unsettled is the link colour. The grey I’ve got on it now (#666666 if you’re interested) seems to be working, but I may do some more experiments there.

I’ll also be doing some browser compatibility testing later. I got most of that out of the way while the site was still in testing, but there can always be another couple of niggling little bugs somewhere. If you spot one of them feel free to comment here. And if you just want to comment on some part of the new look, also feel free to comment here.

I think we’re getting close to a winner here. I’ve put in a two-tone background for the main area, and while that still needs a bit of tweaking here and there, I’m pretty satisfied with the effect. It brings the yellow through into the main area just a bit, and gives the background pattern a bit more body, without screaming too much about it. I do actually want to reduce the yellow slightly from the example shown here, but not by a terrible lot.

Right now I’m actually looking for a filter, or a trick that’ll allow me to delete a certain percentage of somewhat randomly spaced yellow pixels from the top layer of the background image, without simply lowering the opacity for the whole layer, which just doesn’t have quite the same effect. I’d like a quarter, or possibly even a third, of it to be gone. But that’s mainly down to tweaking, the basic design is there now – I think.

One final point: if you compare with the earlier screenies you’ll notice I’ve changed the colour of the top menu-layer to match the background for the main area. The only other tweak I’m currently looking at is the link colour for the main area, which isn’t quite working for me now that it’s more or less blue on blue. Even so, I’ve got a feeling the end of the redesign process may well be in sight. Or at least the end of this round of the redesign process. I’ve sort of given up on the idea of ever being truly satisfied with this site’s look for more than a few months at a time.

Since I have a little time to spare from NaNoWriMo now, having reached 50k, I’m slowly bringing back some other activities in my spare time. One of them is playing around with the design for this site. I’ve got a new layout pretty much worked out, though it has one downside: it doesn’t scale right now.

The only way I’ve found of doing a good scaling design is to use tables for structure. This has been an official W3 no-no for a while now, but the fact of the matter is that tables, because all the cells are linked, are far more forgiving when it comes to scaling than divs will ever be.

Be that as it may, I’ve decided to play nice with the new design (for the time being at least) which means I’m doing it all in divs. That may mean fixed width, but I’ve actually managed to get it to a point where I’m not too unhappy about the way it looks, even if it doesn’t scale all that well.

But while I’m pretty happy with the new layout (and actually have been for a month) there are two things nagging at me. Firstly there’s the fact that the background acts weird when scaling down below about 1000px browser width. This is to do with the fact that I want a non-scrolling background and the only way to have that work in MSIE6 is to lock it to the body element (which of f*cks up the positioning when the window is smaller than the body width).

Now I could probably live with bad scaling, at least for the time begin if there weren’t also another problem: I can’t quite decide on the colour scheme. I’ve been contemplating a switch from black on a light background to white on a dark background for a while now, and have managed to get it to the point where it looks okay.

But the fact remains that most rendering packages tend to get confused when you do this. Rather than making the surrounding pixels lighter to antialias the font they make some of the pixels in the letter darker, which means a light font on a dark background is pretty much guaranteed never to look quite as clear cut as a dark font on a light background.

So I’ve taken some time yesterday and today to experiment with lighter backgrounds and black text again, and I think I may be close to getting a winner. But even so I would like a few more opinions. So as you’ll have noticed the thumbnails linking to the two screenies by now please have a look at both of them and let me know what you think.