Published on
October 24, 2006 in
General.
Well, the new layout is up and running much faster than I thought it would be. I’m surprised that I was able to finish it so quickly. The new engine seemed to fall into place very nicely. The only bit of trouble that I had was taking care of a few global variables, but that was quickly fixed. As for the design, I still have a bit more to work on, especially in the color department. I also need to replace the J-Tech that runs down the side with something that is a little more interesting. I’m sure that some will like the old style more, so all they would have to do is click “Styles” at the top left corner of any page and then click on Version 5 :: Default or some other one.
Random note: at some point or another, I should try to design a style for WordPress that matches my site.
Published on
October 21, 2006 in
General.
Although I really liked my old layout (version 5), the nested DIVs were a bit bloated. I noticed a small slowdown in scrolling on my laptop, for example. So, I’ve decided to redesign the site with a more friendly layout. I also want to redesign the site because the old stylesheet was horribly inefficient (e.g. redundant declarations of properties). I’m calling this new layout Version 6 not only because it represents a cleaner, more compliant site, but also because I will be making major changes to the engine. What will happen to Version 5? Well, I intend to keep it. After I finish designing the Version 6 layout (it’s nearly done), I plan to rewrite the engine so that it will support both the Version 5 layout and the Version 6 layout (wow, these version numbers seem incredibly inflated). So far, I’ve only tested the layout on Firefox, Internet Explorer 7, and Opera. If anyone who reads this has Internet Explorer 6, I would appreciate it if you could use the link below and report back with a comment here on how it worked (I’m concerned about the transparent PNG image for the stylebox; it seems that IE 6 has horrible support for transparent PNGs).
You can view a test version of the Version 6 layout here:
http://joeyjwc.x3fusion.com/v6/index.html
I also edit this page, updating the layout, so if something looks a little off, wait about 15 minutes and refresh the page.
I hope to have the entire design (new layout and redesigned engine) done by Thanksgiving. More details to come soon…
Edit: Things seem to have been going faster than expected. I should be able to release the entire redesign by the end of today! I’ve already finished the style as well as the new engine. All I need to do now is move everything to its proper location.
See:
http://joeyjwc.x3fusion.com/v6/index.php
One of the things that I don’t like about Windows Vista is that Microsoft has gotten rid of the Standby and Hibernate modes and replaced them with a single Sleep mode. I don’t like to leave my computer on standby for long periods of time, so I usually hibernate it, because even though it can take a little longer to shut down because it has to save a gig of RAM, it is much faster starting up. Thus, it annoys me a bit that Vista doesn’t have a separate Hibernate mode. One way to turn Sleep mode into Hibernate would be to go to Advanced Power Settings and tell it to hibernate after 1 minute. However, then, you wouldn’t be able to put your computer into a Standby-like state. So, in order to fix this problem, I searched for some kind of command-line utility to do the job. I found NirSoft’s NirCMD, a command-line utility to do lots of things. When I discovered that the Standby and Hibernate modes worked with it, I wrote two quick BAT files to take advantage of it. Here’s what to do.
- Download NirCMD from:
http://nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.zip
- Extract it to some place (C:\Program Files\NirCMD\ would probably be the best).
- Download my BAT files:
http://joeyjwc.x3fusion.com/ext/vistapower.zip
- Extract them to the same folder that you extracted NirCMD to.
- Open up that folder and drag Hibernate and Standby to your Start Menu to make shortcuts.
- Run them from the Start Menu.
Hopefully, it will work. 
Standby is noticably slower in Windows Vista than Windows XP for me. However, Hibernate is much faster.
Screenshot:
Published on
October 6, 2006 in
General.
I made some improvements to the testing server that I had set up a while ago. First, I installed a 64mB RAM stick. Originally, I had thought it was incompatible with the 32mB stick already in there, but apparently, I was wrong. With 96mB of RAM, it works pretty well. Next, I installed a 4gB hard drive that I had lying around. There were no problems with installation and I moved all of the server data over to it. Finally, I recompiled PHP with a few more flags that I had forgotten to compile with the last time. I plan to install PostgreSQL soon, too. I installed and configured PostgreSQL and it works fine now. Yep, that’s about it.
