AC Capehart capehart

OK, I’ve known CSS is cool and powerfull. And I’ve tried to start to make the shift (including for this blog itself). Some links have come across the Neon Guildfor which I was apprciative. (I’ve collected them in my wiki.) But I was blown away by the CSS Zen Garden. All of the CSS stuff that I’ve done has still required that the things I want designedto have special s or s or whatever.

Joe, the author of Dadblog— one of the 2 blogs that I read where I don’t know the author — wrote to me today. Apparently, he was looking through his web log analysis software, and saw a referrer he didn’t recognize (my blog). He checked me out and correctly deduced that we have a common friend in Clinton. This spurred me to check my own logs. Almost everything was as I expected but for 2 things:

The universe doesn’t want me to tell you about my motorcycling. Now, for the second time, I’ve started a post about my history motorcycling only to have the process fail unrecoverably. The first time, submitting the completed post to Blogger, I got a server error page. Pressing the back button, I was faced with an empty page. This time, I was looking for a web image of a Suzuki GS 550 ES (the first bike I bought), and clicking back in a separate tab caused FIREFOX on LINUX to just disappear.

Every now and again, I’d been seeing little bits of Spanish on the web. But it didn’t occur to me as to whyuntil I was publishing my last blog entry. There is a designer in the Neon Guild1who is proposing to do a site for a client. The designer talked to Jack about doing internationalization for the client. Jack talked to me. I experimented with it (here) to make sure I knew what I’d do.

So, I started playing around more with Ruby on Rails (RoR) recently. I’m seriously impressed. There’s an excellenttutorial available that walks you through making a todo list applicationvia rails. I’ve done a fair amount of CGI programming in Python. And a good bit of Java servlet application programming. Neither feels as natural as RoR. I feel like once I actually have a better handle on both the Ruby language itself, and the Rails framework, I’ll be able to pump out database-supported web applications quickly and with a minimum of fuss.

I bought it because I was sure I would love it. A Bluetooth headset so I could use my cell phone hands free, and without wires. Only I pretty much never use it. It’s off, or inaccessible, or I’ve got to pair it again, or… it’s always something. And given the choice between that, and some cold, hard cash in my paypal account… I’m going for the dough. So, treat yourself to a Bluetooth headset.

[file under geeky. Why doesn’t blogger have categories for cryin’ out loud? It’s not like most of you want to read this junk.] Well, that was frustrating. After my friend was cracked, I decided that it would be smart to keep my web content in a revision control system. That way, when some malicious cracker replaced all of my index files with self-congratulatory tripe, all I’d really need to do would be to restore from the repository.

This morning, I was feeling pretty good about myself. I was reviewing a Java Web Services Tutorialand it was making sense. I tried the examples, and with a little bit of classpath fudging, I got them to work. I tried a quote generator I found on xmethods.comand got it to work. I was impressed with myself. Then I looked through the “additional resources” section at the end and found my way to a book on XML-RPC.

On a lighter note, I applied for Google AdSense ads today for the blog. I have no idea if they’ll take it, and I’m sure I don’t have the readership to actually generate enough money to care about. But, I thought I’d try it. I mention this partly because I think it’s noteworthy. But what cracked me up was when I found the online version of the Wired print article concerning the postal monopolyfor my previous blog entry, I saw that the wired article also had Google AdSense ads.

I’m writing this after the fact (by a couple of days) instead of as it was intended (by a couple of hours). Still interesting (to me). I’m on a vacation of sorts, in Southern Maryland, or SOMD as I’ve taken to calling it1. I decided not to bring my laptop because I had a certain confidence there would be no Internet connectivity where we were staying. My cell phone broke, so today, I’m really disconnected.