I’m restless, especially when it comes to web design. In the past few years, my site has undergone more major revisions than I care to count. Most recently, versions 5.5 and 6 even supported a template system (which was mainly designed out of boredom). Looking back at my old designs, I can definitely see that I have improved (or, I would like to see that I have improved). I know that I still have a long way to go, especially in the way of building new snazzy AJAX stuff. As I continued to design pages for Version 6, I realized that the engine was a bit of a mess. So, I began work on a new engine with the goal of keeping structure and syntax as clean as possible.
Monthly Archive for January, 2008
I have updated my site to the next version, Version 7. This is the first major update since October of 2006, when Version 6 was implemented. The new version sports all kinds of awesome features, both internal and external. For example, the new menu system not only makes it easier to access my projects, but it also makes adding new menu items much easier.
The new design is far from complete, though. There are still plenty of bugs and glitches that I need to fix. However, these problems are minor and will probably be eliminated within the coming week or so.
I am now using my blog to track site news. The latest news is displayed on my homepage. Enjoy Version 7! (The matching blog style is coming.)
I’m transferring the new site over right now. Expect some minor problems during this transition.
It is taking me longer than I had anticipated to convert all of the pages over to the new engine that I designed. I decided to revamp almost all of the pages to get rid of the awkward English and to fix a lot of HTML errors (it’s nice to have the W3C Validator bound to CTRL+Shift+H on Firefox with Web Developer Tools). Although I ported some functions over to support backwards comparability, I most likely won’t use them.
The new engine takes advantage of arrays. For example, the link box (which is no longer in the upper righthand corner, where nobody could see it) is now drawn by calling this function:
draw_linkbox(array(“Name” => “URI”, “Name2″ => “URI2″));
So, I decided to bite the bullet and install KDE-svn via Portage after seeing how well a binary build worked on my testing box. Things are not going as smoothly as I had hoped, but at least I’m making some sort of progress.
I have found some bugs that need to be fixed before it compiles correctly. I was too lazy to do proper diffs.
Package: kdenetwork Rev: 761328
File: kget/transfer-plugins/mirrorsearch
Before last line, add:
void DlgSettingsWidget::enableButtonApply()
{
m_parent->enableButtonApply(true);
}
Package: kdenetwork Rev: 761328
File: kopete/plugins/CMakeLists.txt
Remove the stuff about the pipes plugin. It’s currently very broken.
I’m sure there will be more.
Edit: Well, there weren’t any more, but KDE won’t start up. It looks like there’s something wrong with D-Bus.
Here are a few screenshots of my latest Compiz Fusion configuration. Since I have two monitors with two different resolutions (1280×1024 and 1440×900), there are a few glitches by scrot, the software I used to take the shots. I designed two wrapper scripts for scrot that make it easy to create an “album”. The first, takescreenshot makes a small file called .count in the current directory. This file just stores a number. It then instructs scrot to take a screenshot, and increases .count by 1. dellastscreenshot allows me to delete the last screenshot taken (and decrease .count by 1). If anybody would like these scripts, I’d be glad to put them up.
http://jwcxz.com/pictures/desktop_old/?m=08-01
Notes about my desktop:
- The background is homemade, so that’s why it looks so horrible. One of the cool things that I have been able to do with it, though, is to get the left and right bars to match up so that when I spin the hexagonal prism, the desktop background looks seamless.
- This window decoration scheme is also homemade (but it uses elements from various other schemes). I’m still working on it.
- I have two docks; both of them autohide. The one on the left (not shown in any pictures) has my system tray, application menu, etc. The one on the bottom holds my window list, most commonly used apps, and my clock.
- I tend to overdo the transparency effects. Konsole has support for real transparency now.
- I used to use a skydome, but I have now decided to remove it. The black background makes the reflection look pretty cool in my opinion. Combined with the transparent prism, the background darkens it, highlighting the windows really well.
- The widgets are controlled by Screenlets. The integrated desktop terminal is XFCE’s terminal, combined with a few rules in the Window Rules plugin.
- Thumbnails are really nice, when they work. For some reason, they only work after I minimize and unminimize a window.
- By the way, that page is a little custom script that I wrote to display Compiz Fusion screenshots from different albums, so long as they have #.png and t#.png (the thumbnail).
Enjoy!
I hope everyone had a good New Year’s Day. Now it’s time to get back to work. 
Anyways, to make a long story really short, I have a BlackBerry 8320 now, and I absolutely love it. The included WiFi receiver allows me to connect to my wireless network quickly and painlessly. I ordered a 4GB MicroSDHC card from NewEgg to store my music, photos, and videos. I decided against buying an 8GB card because (1) they are extremely expensive, (2) they won’t be supported until OS 4.3 comes out for the Curve sometime next month, and (3) my music collection is tiny, anyways.
The card goes in the back of the device, underneath the battery. Fortunately, the BlackBerry device has no problem acting like a generic mass storage device, so I can access the memory card from my computer, through it. I essentially followed this guide to putting my music collection onto my BlackBerry. However, I have a few extra notes that might be important:
- The Quick and Dirty Transcoder (dirtyxcode) needs just a bit of modification to run properly if you have GStreamer 0.10. Go to the Script Manager, right-click dirtyxcode, and select Edit. This should bring up an instance of KWrite. Go to line 163 (the line that has the actual gst-launch command) and remove just the two characters “-p”. gst-launch now requires the -p argument (in this case, it’s filesrc), so the -p option should be removed.
- dirtyxcode calls gst-launch, but on my system, it’s gst-launch-0.10. You can choose to either change the reference on line 163 or you can symlink gst-launch-0.10 to gst-launch. I chose the latter.
- On Gentoo, besides the base GStreamer packages, you will need gst-plugins-lame and gst-plugins-taglib for encoding, and various plugins for decoding. I use AAC a lot, so I installed gst-plugins-faac and gst-plugins-faad.
Transcoding was very slow on my system. It took quite a while to sync my music collection for that reason. But, it was worth it. 
In other news, I managed to add another 160GB to my system without paying a penny. I have a 320GB external drive, but it’s just an internal drive encased in aluminum and connected with a USB interface. Swapping my secondary 160GB drive for this 320GB one was extremely easy. Now, I need to transfer all of my files back to the new drive and I will be fine.
