Site updated

My site has been updated:

• I have updated the backend and fixed a security issue that was not effecting me currently but may have in the future.
• I have removed the login panel since I am the only one who needs to login. 

That all for now but don't forget to check out the project I uploaded yesterday.

Makeing the same mistake twice

You know it's bad to make the same mistake twice, but I did. I spent about half an hour trying to get the current vestion of a site up on my machine(as I work on the 'next' release) and was trying to ounce again use the wrong database.

GUI Problems

Sometimes Graphical User Interfaces are made with odd design choices, for example "1 file(s) selected" in Windows 95. The only case in which the s is not used is if there is only 1 file selected, so they could have used an if statement to check how many files where in fact selected. Now this could be a hold over to save CPU cycles from a previous Windows system but is the extra cycle or so really that much of a problem?(maybe?) Also I'm prity sure they left this in the OS until newer systems such as Windows XP.

I created a C# program to demenstright some of the silly and annoying things seen in GUIs which I feel could probably be avoided.  You can download it here: Click here!

TV Attanna Upgrade

I'm listening to a classic music radio station, that may not seem that unusually but the station is a actually being broadcast as part of a over the air TV transmission. Still not that odd in states, the really story is until today I could not receive it. Since today we got a  roof attanna installed.

Lets take a step back, as I said before I don't have cable or satalight, instead i use an attanna for TV and have for years. I use something more suffistatated then rabbit ears but it's the same principle that was used since the 70's if not earlier. The only thing is today, it's all digital.

So this new attanna picks up most of the buffalo stations and all the Toronto ones. So I no longer have to worry about not being able to pick up Canadian stations and can pick up new stations.

Now although the installation was costly, the payment will be less then the price of eqevuelent cable in just 10 months!

Lastly we are all now wired into the same attanna so the same chanals can be recived anywhere in the house.

Here is a picture of what the atanna looks like:

You know you have too many computers when:

 I found this old blog entery I never finshed for some reason. Ok now I finished it. You know you have too many computers when...

• People start telling you this 
• You worry about blowing a fuse
• You don't have enough places to plug them in 
• You have you own personal wireless network in your name.
• You are running out of room on your KVM switch. 

For the record I don't have too many computers but I am getting there, I have:

• A mac running Mac OS X.5
• A old Mac running OS9
• A multimedia tower running Windows 7 
• A Pentium 4 with WindowsME
• A Windows 7 laptop 
• A Linux laptop(Linux mint) 
• My desktop has TWO monitors connected to it. It dual boots Win 7 and Linux.

I also have the following consoles which can be hooked up to the desktop's capture card:

• PS2 
• Xbox (2003) 
• SNES
• N64

 I also have a:

• Wii 
• Dead Xbox 360 
• Sega Genesis

Only one of the consoles can be used at a time.

In my room I also have:

• A trek Antan to revive HDTV through my computer
• A web came
• A KVM switch 

I also own:

• A Wii 
• A Nintendo DS Lite which I hardy use 

responsive design

As some of you know I'm currently working with Shawn Robinson on a web project. We will be adding 'responsive design'(via a template). 'responsive  uses CSS(and JavaScript?) to allow one to make one website that works and displays reasonable regardless of weather the end user is on a desktop, tablet or smart phone. This sounded cool so I updated my website[http://www.jamiemarchant.info] to use a 'responsive' Drupal theme! Check it out! Resize the window and you will notice that text looks reasonable and the site remains usable. I have also learned a couple of things about 'responsive design' while doing this. Here is what I've learned:

• In-line styles can break the 'responsive design' and cause it to no longer be 'responsive'.
• Iframes do the same thing and have they own styles.

Besides the new theme, here are some of things that changed:

• Removed some pages that I didn't need and that where broken due to the above issues. 
• Moved some content form iframes to page content so they would be styled constantly. I used iframes in the first place either as a work around for a bug I only got when the code was 'inbeaded' or since that made the site a but easier to move.(this happened often till I found a suitable host)
• Replaced the embedded PDF of my resume with a link to it. This is probably easier for mobile devices to deal with as they can make it any size they want and are not limited to styles.  Now I know PDF is probably not that mobile friendly(though most smart phones probably have Acrobat now) but I prefer that too HTML as my resume is allways displayed consistently.
• Removed the recreation section. Although the stuff in this section is probably available with a google search, I don't want to it to be on my professional website. It's also not as 'cleaned up' as the site is and I want people to go through the whole site before they see the stuff that was in that section.