Every once in a while I hop on that rabbit trail known as “the net”. Today’s trail started on twitter. Seeing that I’m a fan of Cali Lewis on GeekBrief.tv, I wondered who she follows. Nosing around, I decided that maybe I should add some more people to follow.
On a whim I put “trader” in the search box, a couple of squirrel revolutions later, and out pops a list with a name I couldn’t pass up — TradingGoddess. Jump to her blog, spin the mouse wheel and out pops the gem below.
Ages and ages ago some friends and I were able to get the lol.com domain and have kept it all these years. A couple of years ago, when advertising started coming back, my business partner John Munsch and I started talking about how we could make it more than just a dead site and an email trap.
A little over a year ago, we brought up a very simple site with a very limited set of jokes. We opened up a gmail account to accept jokes to place on the site, but it was too hard to keep up with the submissions, format them all, and get them live on the site. After the site had been up for a while, it became apparent that there was growth potential and it was worth getting an interactive site up and running.
So for the last year or so John and I have been working to bring our initial vision to life. John has done most of the development for this site, I’ve done most of the IT. We have released version 2.0 of LOL.
We’re proud of our baby. If you have some time stop by and give it a look.
It’s been ages since I’ve posted anything to the blog on my site, because I just got fed up with the data entry. Today, on a whim, I decided to see how much effort it would be to take my old blog from www.donthorp.net and move it to a wordpress blog.
The export from Moveable Type and import into WordPress went smoothly. It took me a moment to figure out why my posts weren’t showing up. It’s because a WordPress import brings the articles in as drafts. Once I figured that out, I went through and published each post.
It wasn’t completely flawless, because I still need to fix up some URLs that used root relative URLs from my original site (e.g. /gallery instead of http://www.donthorp.net/gallery). I may also install WordPress on my system and then it’ll be less of an issue.
A co-worker dropped in and picked up one of my O’Reilly books and mused outloud about a cover with an alligator on it. It took a little bit of digging, but I finally found The Animal Menagerie, a listing of all the books and their animals.
In case you’re wondering, the book with an alligator is Java Examples in a Nutshell. It’s not one that I have in my personal library. I’m at the point where adding many more books would require an addition on the house.
We recently returned from a trip to Mexico and I’ve started organizing the pictures from the trip.
Since that will take a while, I decided to post some panorama’s of the ruins of Tulum. Click on
the smaller images to see a larger version.
Today was the official launch of Credant Technologies.
For those of you who don’t know, this is the company I went to work for after leaving the last one.
The “coming out” press release is entitled CREDANT TECHNOLOGIES ™ First to Deliver Trusted Computing for Mobile Enterprises.
So for those of you have been wondering what the heck I’m working on, some information is now available.
Every once in a while, you find an article on Microsoft’s knowledge base that actually helps answer questions you’ve had for a long time. While researching why a process was eating up so much of my CPU I found the following article - A Description of Svchost.exe in Windows XP (Q314056).
For years I’ve wondered how to find out what tasks were behind svchost.exe; this article shows you how. At a command prompt simply type tasklist /svc.
Believe it or not, the lack of updates does not signal my demise. Life has
been really hectic lately and getting updates to the website has just been
close to impossible.
I have ton of resource links that I need to get added, but I’m going to
hold off for a little while, until John finished is experiment with OPML.
I already keep my resource list in xml form, but I’m open to using a standard
that has tools available.
Today I was reading on Meerkat and found an interesting topic on using
XML-RPC to manage your weblog on Blogger and another product called
Free Conversant.
I haven’t read through it, but first glance seems to indicate that it comes
in a open form that we could run on our own servers.
I also happened upon this XML-RPC accessible spell checker. This might make
it simple to provide spell checking on a website or with other tools.
The reason I found these interesting is that the main reason I don’t update
my page more is that it takes time to modify the source and publish it.
I would prefer an easier method of “posting” entries. John is tackling this
with a tools that he is specing out now, but it will be a while before
something big comes out of it.
It has been a long time since I’ve been able to post anything. It is amazing
where your time goes once summer gets here. Over the weekend I spent WAY to
much time helping fix my youngest brother’s computer. Not only did I have
to reinstall Win98 on it, the motherboard’s keyboard port freaked out
requiring me to replace the motherboard. As
with most hardware based problems, this one ended up costing me 8+ hours on
Saturday.
Ever since becoming addicted to using my Palm III, I’ve developed a stronger
interest in new handheld computing devices. I was an early
adopter of the Franklin eBookMan (I’m still waiting for the MS Reader
software if anyone from Franklin is listening) and still use it for
reading. It appears that one of the Linux contenders
Agenda is finally
getting a product out the door. A great review
The Agenda VR3: Real Linux in a PDA,
written by Chris Halsall, is available on the Linux Devcenter of the
O’Reilly Network. Not having played with one yet, this device sounds like it
might have longterm viability if the software quality can approach that of
the Palm platform.
I’ve been slowly adding to my Python skills everytime I get the need to
write a new script. It is still slow going, but I do feel like I’m getting
better. As with most languages, the difficulty is in learning the libraries
not the language. While putting a script together I ran across a great
tool provided by ActiveState,
“
The Python Cookbook“. I was able to quickly find a couple of helpful routines
to accelerate writing the script. It also looks like a place to pick up
hints on using classes and cross-platform Python.
I updated the resource listing for NetBeans to include information on wheel
mouse support. I also fix scaling bugs in the style sheet so that all of the
text will scale properly.
