This week started with a bunch of smaller stuff, and finished with a lot of coding. I think I'm close to done on an effectively complete rework of our knowledegebase system, which will hopefully allow CMS integration and make people happy. Once that's done I just need to figure out how to do automatic correlation of articles with Incidents in our tracking system for likely causes. Should be an interesting next week.

Outside work haven't done much that's exciting. Today I finished up the 3rd disc of Alias Season Three. I think it's better the second time around, but it still seems not nearly as well done as the previous two. For fun stuff, my dad just sent me forward with this content. I thought it was funny.

A parent's primer to computer slang, link courtesy of schdav.

It was a long week. I did a lot of coding, but I'm making a lot of progress on the IncidentBase. I've converted almost all if not all the lists of Incidents to a new format which allows dynamic resorting and per-user context for stuff like visibility. I think the two places in which it will be found most useful are the creation when pulling all the Incidents for the user (which also now only shows 6 months unless selected) and query (which needs a separate overhaul, but I won't get started on that yet). I finished off the week by dropping in a new My Incidents system which replaces the old switchboard viewing other users' preferences with individual customizable views. The column sorts here are also sticky, and they (with the sticky column sort) can be exported as static links which can be sent to people. I'm really liking the consistent look and functions across everything, although I think I'm temporarily confusing people in how to use all the CSS tags properly across them and differentiate between them (hint, I classed everything extensively, and either classes or IDs should do it in most cases).

Toward the end of the week I felt like I was in a time warp thing. I would go and do a bunch of reworking across half the system, and look back at the clock and it'd only be 20 minutes later. I've also been a lot less tired. I'm thinking it may a combination of it's a lot more efficient to do some of this stuff now, and the fact I've apparently been getting enough sleep (can't fall asleep at night, and wake up earlier than I want to in the morning). Oh well, I guess I won't complain too much.

I decided for fun to pull the stats for IncidentBase. So far this month we've pulled some around 2.8GB from it (compared to like 800MB for www.bethel.edu if I'm reading it right). I'm curious how much that'll go up as now with mod_gzip it's snappier and I can afford to send more detailed data in some cases. Plus working towards dynamic views and interactive stuff... The fun part of the stats was browsers. IE on XP was the number one IE browser. It came in at a significant 4th with like 1/3 of the number 2 browser. #1 was Moz on Windows, and #2 was Safari on OS X. #3 was another Safari version, and numbers 5-7 I think were other Mozillas. Guess that shows what the IT group prefers. :)

Today I decided to be ambitious and go through email. After making a handful of Incidents and looking at some other stuff (hey, I was getting under 100ms latency amazingly) I decided that was enough work stuff and started on a fun project. I guess my definition of fun is probably different than that of most people, as I made a virtual magnetboard. You know those little magnets that you cut up and stick to a refridgerator or whiteboard or any other flat surface with sufficient metalic backing and move them to make sentences? Yea, I made one with DHTML and javascript. Then I decided to copy it to a server rather than just being an HTML file on my hard drive, and since I then had a database I decided to make it sticky so I could leave the page and come back and they'd be in the same position. So it makes a call back to the server whenever the mouse is released with the new position. Routinely each user's board goes and checks for updates, so multiple people share the same board too. I also stored which magnets exist in the same place, and reclassed them which combined with a couple mod_rewrite rules means I can easily create an effectively unlimited number of these magnet boards just by saying what words should be on them. Maybe I'll give people the ability to submit a list of words and it'll make a board for them. This could be almost as much fun as the user css. :)

Finished off the day watching Wicker Park. I didn't like it too much during most of the movie, but I did like how they wrapped it up and the ending. They did it in a much better way than most stories with similar styles. I'm sorta curious about the original now.

What's up with the rush on pizza deliveries recently? Such as using a helicopter and a firetruck? Someone needs to reevaluate the need to get the pizza there in a speedy manner. Then there's a good story about why not to drink too much. Ouch. In more fun news, TiVo released the most replayed SuperBowl commercials.

Friday I was working on projects, as well as a lot of planning stuff. It was a long day, especially since I worked on some stuff rather late. Hopefully that'll be done soon though and people will like it. Raadt made a cool theme for IncidentBase too - you'll have to ask about it sometime.

Saturday was a relaxing day. I slept in until sometime in the afternoon, and then did some cleaning up. I made a couple dongles to go from S-Video and dual RCA to STP RJ-45s. Basically to run video and audio over STP CAT5 to upstairs. Much easier than running a bunch of coax and audio patches up. After that was set I watched a couple movies. First was Napoleon Dynamite, which I thought was pretty boring. The soundtrack had some interesting parts, but it's not something I'd go out and buy. The movie itself was boring, with a lot of dumb humor. I guess to each their own, as some people seem to think it's the best movie ever. Second movie was I, Robot. That movie also got split reviews, but I liked it a lot. I liked a lot of the ideas that Asimov brought up, but never really got into his writing style. Something about how they were written just never hooked me in. This movie seems to have done a good job of adapting many of his ideas into a single coherent story. It sorta has a traditional sentient robot plot line, but that hasn't really been done well with any modern movie. For some reason the good stories just seem to be books. Maybe this movie explains why, given there are 3 rendering companies, 2 pre-vis companies, 1 motion capture studio, and 3x the number of stunt people as actors. That can't be cheap, and robots don't exactly draw a mainstream audience (although the two main characters may have helped the draw on this one). Good mix of just good action and a strong plot, and they didn't go and throw in an unnecessary love story. I'd recommend this one. I also find the shape of the USR building in the movie rather funny. Think cable modem...

Sunday was getting up earlier than normal for church. After that was off to the parents' place for lunch, as my dad's birthday was last week. Their Mac Mini arrived as well, so I went with my sister to pick out a keyboard and mouse she'd like (my dad was supposed to order them online 2 weeks ago, but never did so we ended up spending way too much at Best Buy). Plugged it in and it was good to go. Those things are tiny. Seriously, the box my Axim came in was bigger than the one it came in. After that was home to clean up a bit and get ready for people coming over. Last year people showed up at 1, this year it was more like 5:20, although I'm not gonna complain. It was a decent crowd, and I think everyone had fun. Lots of junk food, and Nick showed up but disappointed everyone by not bringing the promised chili. There were two people doing homework, and 4 people on laptops during the thing. Surprisingly schdav left his at home, which is pretty rare for events at my house. :) The funniest part was the Lincoln Fry auction, which sat at a high number (I think it was $99 trillion) after a quick rise. Basically once it passed $1 mil it started getting out of hand. I have the numbers, maybe I should graph it. It was interesting to see companies using the bidder list/high bid name to advertise. Yea, mostly the type you'd expect to see getting links on web sites in that way... There was one very funny one with the picture of the combined Janet Jackson and Paul McCartney... The Internet is a great thing. Everything I looked for online I was able to grab quickly, including videos from the pregame stuff. I'm not sure that the TV people would be that happy about it, but if they don't release it, what do they really expect? The big exception being laughing at godaddy for their site dying for a couple minutes after their commercial. Everyone else I looked into seemed to be using stuff like akadns and akamai, and even yahoo auctions was having noticable performance problems. It's cool that they got it back up quickly though, and seemed to keep it in house at least somewhat. The longer version of their commercial (shot down by Fox) is a lot better than the one that ended up getting aired. It better conveys the message which was basically some of the crazy inconsistencies about what's getting aired and what isn't lately. Also the company CEO has a blog on which he has some interesting arguments and reasoning. Halftime was good, even though we had to educate some people who had never heard of Hey Jude (and shortly after when some commercial had a U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday which they couldn't identify either). There is that whole thing about him being the clean guy after last year and noticing the selection of people on stage. Austin had a great comment on that, and while I don't remember his exact wording some other people expressed the same ideas pretty much perfectly. It is something to think about. As Dave said, he's an old man now so it's OK. Menards takes the cake for the cheapest looking, least interesting, and most annoying commercial. Yea, it's just like their other ones, except it played during the superbowl. It looks like some guy with a camcorder made it.

I stumbled on this interesting article. The PDF is linked, but the text is more readable on their page. I especially like point #3. The part about "what constitutes spam is in the eye of the beholder" is very true, and I hear about it weekly and sometimes daily. It's amazing how many people fail to realize that and just make people want to completely ignore everything from them. Gone are the days where you can hit people with commercials that the vast majority of people see - the whole system is moving towards targeted and "grassroots" or "community-driven" (yea, I know, lack of better terms) marketing. Those who get people pissed at them early on will have an interesting time in the future. The other points in the article are definitely valid as well. A good summary could be to let the consumer make an intelligent choice rather than try to force feed them stuff. A good product or service will sell itself. Consumers are becoming more intelligent and picky, especially with the availability of information on the Internet. The days of being able to sell crap with marketing spin are going away.

So I click over to gmail to archive some stuff. A few hours ago I had 6 invites, just like the past few weeks. Then suddenly it's at 50. I guess they're getting close to release or something.

This week has been interesting. In phasing out some stuff on Monday, I found I apparently missed some stuff the last couple summers and it made a bit of a mess. Oh well, I think it's mostly resolved now. If not I may have to write some scripts to go check stuff. There's been other stuff popping up which has kept me rather busy. Of course it happened right as I started getting into the swing of planning some major projects, so stuff is really piling up. Luckily I got some stuff in place where I just throw everything in my list and don't have to try and remember it. I can even set it up where things will disappear and come back over time so I don't have to think of them until later. I've created a monster that will hopefully just get better as I keep changing it.

Last night there was no Alias because some guy thought he was so important he should be on all the TV channels. I guess he's probably right though. I ended up taking advantage of the extra time to do coding. That coding led to my big announcement of the day, which was user stylesheets for our Incident tracking system. Basically I got sick of dealing with user requests for preference changes, "this would be cool if you highlighted that" and things like that. As I was doing major code cleanup lately I had been ripping out things, pushing them to css, and making the code xhtml. This meant not only a cool new look, but stuff like printstyles as opposed to a printable version, which saves both me and the users from a lot of trouble. Mr. Boyum and I have been sorta chatting over the past few months about the possibility of user defined stylesheets and how cool they'd be. So when redoing comments last night and making some major UI changes, I started tagging a ton of stuff that I didn't necessarily use with classes, made a style to return the "classic" look, changed the header script to include a user css link if the file exists, and an interface for people to change their stylesheet. The thing has turned into something like css Zen Garden. Boyum has his sharp professional look, brooke has an all-uppercase style, schdav has gone dull and boring with a The O.C. picture in the back (seriously, it's devoid of color - everything's white except the text, which is mostly black with a couple shades of grey. No highlights, table borders, link underlines or anything), Nick has a lot of black with some bold colors, and Mike J looks like a bunch of neon paint cans exploded in a nightclub (seriously, it's scary with bright colors and stuff flashing all over). Alyssa currently has a surprisingly pink designed-by-Nick style, which will be interesting to see if she keeps once she sees it (she agreed to have it made for her). I kept the basic for the most part as I need to keep a usable default (although css comments are great). I did however opt for a very light background image of an ocean bay at night with some alpha transparent pngs on all the shaded areas so it's always there. Yea, it doesn't work in IE, but who uses that anyways. :) I think I created a work day with a rather lower than normal work output though. I was joking today that by the end of the week we'll have a department full of CSS experts (I linked them to W3 Schools for the CSS help, and they definitely seem to be learning how to do a lot). Our webmaster joked I should introduce user-defined XSLTs next. I like that idea, although I probably should wait until the novelty of the CSS wears off. Have I discovered the new prefered method of training people in proper web design? :)

Monday's UF

Second movie of the day was Cellular. It was better than I was expecting, partially because of the bad reviews it got. It actually had a better plot than a lot of action movies, and was something different for a change. And how can a movie possibly go wrong featuring and having a soundtrack by G. Love and Special Sauce? I think the best part of the DVD is one of the extras called "Celling Out". Basically it's a brief overview of phones, basically how cell phones came about and how they've changed. A large part of it is how phones originally started to tie people to their desks, and how cell phones have changed that, but the tradeoff is you can't get away anymore. It's rather interesting to hear the guys who were involved in designing the phones and systems rant about how much of a pain they've become.

Third movie of the day was The Village. The best way to watch this DVD is to put the disc in, wait until the Hitchiker's Guide trailer finishes, and then eject it. Yea, I didn't like the movie much at all. I will admit I knew the ending going into it, but it just didn't seem interesting. It was pretty obvious what was going on since they did a poor job of covering it up. I guess I don't really like any of Shyamalan's stuff. Signs was OK but the ending really sucked and wrecked the story. I never bothered actually finishing The Sixth Sense (although I've started it at least 3 times, I always get bored within the first half hour or so - and given some of the movies I've sat through that should say something). He does seem to put a lot of thought into stuff and make the films well, but the stories just seem to suck. Maybe he should consider directing stories from other people?

Other things in the day include some guy making UML diagrams of The O.C. and posting them on slashdot. The predictable responses (basically what everyone but schdav says about it) ensued. One person remarked that it almost looked fully connected. Somewhat of a great disturbance? And then Crucial now has RAM with bling available. Ground effects and everything. Sounds like something those nuts who put windows in their cases would use.

Last week finished off being sorta busy. Wednesday was Alias, which I don't remember much about, other than it was a bit of a disappointment. Next week we don't get one either, because there's something that all the channels decide they have to show rather than just letting one cover it. Thursday was working. I think I was there until around 11. Ross surprised me by stopping by at like 8 because he was working too. Joe also stopped by twice while grabbing his dinner. Friday was Gusday, which was interesting. I think it went quite well, although from my perspective it could have been a bit more technical. One of the ones I went to was really boring, and was more of a teaching thing than a tech one. Oh well, was interesting to chat with some of the other schools and hear about their problems.

After work on Friday Dave and I went over to Nick's place and we recabled his house and set up his TV. He got a new DVD player too, but apparently it has issues so it's going back. Joe and brooke stopped by too, but we sent them away because they wanted to watch a movie and we still had to set up the TV. Saturday I slept in a lot, but then we ended up having a movie night. It was good to have people over again. First movie was A River Runs Through It, which was good but slow. Second movie was Grosse Pointe Blank, which is a funny one. Austin apparently thought it was boring and fell asleep though. Betsy was asking about the big football game and nobody had heard anything about a party so now there's one next weekend. If you haven't heard about it you probably should ask someone so you get in on the news about fun stuff like that and movies.

Today started with church at Salem. Flabre and schdav showed up too. It was rather uneventful other than the lady in front of us stealing the outline/verses sheet from me inadventently. Neither her or her kids seemed to be paying attention very well, and she pulled it off my knee with her elbow without noticing (I was sitting behind her, so I had to be careful not to get hit). After that was putting up the thing about the Superbowl, and then watching Resident Evil: Apocalypse. The commentary with the actors is funny - they start going off about Vaios in the movies but they're Mac people and then they talk about the Airport Extreme... They're rather interesting people. Now I have a couple more movies to watch, so I should probably get to that.