Moving past WYSIWYG

One thing that I have always loved about owning a domain is the ability to host multiple services at one address. For instance, I could have my blog address at one subdomain, a file server at another, and maybe throw in a tumblr or soup account for fun. At the moment, the only service that I currently have running at this domain is a blog and a catchall email address, which have now just realized hasn't been checked since I created it. Hmm. Anyway. The advantage to having these subdomains is that while they make your site slightly more complicated (which can be easily rectified with a know-how of when to put what links when), they add significant customization options.

While it may not be 100% evident that I'm using Blogger right now (seeing as I've removed the navbar and the only hint is a tiny bit of text at the bottom of each page), it is very much my preferred blogging engine. I'd go with WordPress, but as I've said previously WordPress.com tends to put a price on a lot of basic features that Blogger gives to me for free (thank you, Google Business Model). A nice feature of Blogger is that not only do they let me publish my blog to a specific domain, but they let me specify a missing file server as well. This means that if I request a page to my domain that doesn't exist as per my blogger account, Blogger will defer to the missing file server to see if any other files exist on that specific file path. I'm planning on setting one up soon, just as soon as I finish coding some other stuff first.

What exactly does this give me? Well, for one, it transcends the limitations of a WYSIWYG-nature site like Blogger. WYSIWYG, short for What You See Is What You Get, basically means that I can be sure that the blog post that I am typing right now will indeed appear on my site as these exact words, in the format that I have specified using the toolbar above this text box. Unfortunately, this also means that I can't program in any sort of dynamic content into my site. Let's take a simple PHP script as an example:


What you're currently looking at is not WYSIWYG. If it were, that's exactly what you'd see if you were to query that PHP script from a webserver. Instead, what we simply see is two friendly words: hello world!

Of course, WYSIWYG works in the majority of simple situations. Ironically, WYSIWYG is practically nonexistent on the web; although I am currently typing this post in a text box, there's a script that's going to be called when I hit the "post" button that will automagically format all of this text into the proper HTML equivalents. You're simply viewing this text like this because your browser is interpreting the HTML tags around everything I type and is translating it into something that looks much more attractive to your eyes. Try viewing the source to this page (usually found in the Edit menu, search around on Google to find the appropriate function in your browser). That is what this site really looks like. Hurting your eyes? Try looking at it for hours on end; the code you're seeing is the sweat and blood of many web developers' hard work.

Got my keyboard!!

Hello internet!

My keyboard arrived in the mail, so I decided to make a post out of sheer excitement. It honestly types like a dream, I've never typed on a keyboard more awesome. The give is perfect, and it's completely unmarked, so I really look like a pro while I'm typing. Now on to some real news... or at least, what I consider real news.

I managed to get my club passed after being asked and turned down by 3 faculty sponsors. That was slightly more than I would have expected, but whatever, at least we have a sponsor now! The activity is going to be reviewed over Spring Break by the activities committee, and hopefully they'll approve it. I have a feeling though that, given the amount of faculty sponsors that turned me down, I shouldn't feel too optimistic about the outcome of their decision. One thing's for sure though: if it's passed, it'll be a lot of fun, and the logo looks absolutely kick-ass!!

Also, during cycling practice today (or what little we had), my coach's bike got hit by a car and subsequently ran into 3 members of a team. There was a bit of an accident but everybody was fine. At least it offered us a good chance to get to know the rest of the team; me and my co-captain sat with them on the side of the road and had a fun discussion.

That's kind of it in terms of updates, I'm just geeking out about my new keyboard. I need to come up with a name for it/him/her. I also need to decide s/he/it's gender.

Starting A Club At School

I've thought on the idea for a while, and I think that I've ironed a lot out and I've gotten quite a few people behind me. It's not going to be a club about technology, as many would expect from me, but rather a political club. My old school had a Young Republican's Association, and though my current school doesn't (if I remember correctly), they do have the "Fellowship of Christian Athletes", which basically means the same thing, not to sound too politically charged or anything. Bref! I want to start the Young Proletariat's Union, which is going to be an appropriate euphemism for a Socialist / Communist club.

Now, you might be thinking that I'm planning on staging a mass revolt that's going to take place throughout the entire United States -- I'm not planning an uprising, that would be ridiculous. Instead I'm just providing an experimental environment (assuming that this can get through) where we schedule frequent meetings, discuss current events, and potentially design a system of our own. I was also planning on some historical discussions involving the USSR, the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of North Korea), and the PRC (People's Republic of China), put more simply the first three communist powers that usually come to mind.

If this gets out of hand, I might end up having to shut it down. It's probably not going to pass, and if it does, it might get shut down before I have the chance to do it myself, but the main goal of the club is to soften the American mind to the idea of services provided by the government. Of course a fully communist system would be ridiculous. History has proven that the best system is a mix of these two. And it's for this reason that America needs to become less afraid of the idea of communism. Sure, it's the exact opposite of the current system that we have. Sure, we fought several wars and spent a lot of money to make sure that this never happened. But look at Europe; they felt the effects of these wars far more than we ever did, and yet much of their daily lives are regulated by the government, they're run well, and many of these countries still manage to be within the top 10 economic powers of the world. It's like one of my best friends said back in France: America's great, but it could be so much better! This starts with us opening our minds to new ideas and letting our system change with its changing environment.

Also, on a completely different note, my Das Keyboard is arriving on Wednesay! Super excited. :)

Grounded -- hopefully.

Forgive me in advance for my pathetic grammar, it's early and I'm trying to pass the time by writing a blog post while my kernel compiles.

I have to stop naming my titles ambiguous names. No, I am not grounded. I'm grounded in terms of my distribution-changing madness. It's over. For now. I've settled with Debian, using the GNOME interface. I realize that that's pretty much exactly where I started, but I stuck with Debian instead of Ubuntu because I like to tell myself that I actually got somewhere with this whole thing. Also, I've decided to not go with as much eye candy because it's starting to detract from my need to actually do work.

So Debian it is. And it's very minimal, which I like a lot. The brightness control works (ditched KDE because it didn't support it), and I'm fairly sure that I could get the keyboard backlighting working with some effort. At this precise moment I'm hardening my kernel with grsecurity, a tool that basically fills in a few security holes in the system to prevent intrusions. Lightweight...ness and security are the two things that I'm going for and I intend to achieve them if I can't have anything else. Also, there are a few slight differences between Debian and Ubuntu, and I like a lot of them. My only complaint is that it's not very keen on giving me compositing support, which could be due to the NVIDIA driver that my MacBook Pro uses.

I installed my system as per this guide, and the disk encryption is fantastic. Only hitch is that I deleted the Mac OS X partition that I had installed (oops) for the purpose of installing rEFIt, which is an EFI bootloader designed to not suck as much as Apple's. Thinking that this software would, you know, be written to the bloody EFI partition was apparently too much of an assumption, because it disappeared as soon as I got rid of Leopard. Oh, well. I'm currently just booting off of their handy rEFIt CDROM, which then points the computer to the GRUB partition that I have installed. So that's nice.

Amidst all of this distro panic and exam worries (thankfully I only got one B+, the rest were above!), unfortunately, I wasn't able to work on my PHP project. I'm going to try to explain myself to my teacher tomorrow, hopefully he'll forgive me. I feel pretty guilty about wasting my parents' money for an hour of us sitting around not going over the code that I've written.

On a happier note, if any of you are interested in a screenshot of my new and (hopefully) here to stay system, feast your eyes!!

iPhone and moving.

No, not that kind of moving. Just moving distributions -- yes, that's right, I'm really having a distribution identity crisis at the moment, but the only reason that it's happening is because I'm frustrated with Ubuntu's slowness and lack of customization options. So instead of Xubuntu, which honestly has served me quite well, I'm moving on to Kubuntu instead, because while Xubuntu was nice and fast, I don't have it quite like I want it, the device support is shaky (couldn't get keyboard backlighting to work and apparently sound recording is a nono on any of their machines), and I absolutely love the KDE desktop widget functionality. So KDE it is! For now. If sound recording doesn't work on that I might go berserk.

Speaking of sound recording, my last post was a video whose audio was made possible by my new trusty iPhone, courtesy of a friend of a friend. And while we're (sort of) still on the subject of customization, he jailbroke it for me so that it would work on my carrier (AT&T) without a data plan, so that I wouldn't have to pay $30/month extra to get it to work (although now, funnily enough, I've purchased their 200MB data plan because a friend got me hooked on Foursquare). Wasting no time, I immediately customized everything customizable on the machine, although sadly enough Jobs isn't releasing the 4.0 update to the iPhone 2G, which is the generation that I have, so I can't download most of the things on the Cydia store like tethering or multitasking. Which I actually don't mind, because I only have a 200MB data plan and the iPhone 2G's CPU definitely isn't the fastest thing in the world. With some Locktool and Fontswap magic I was able to completely change my lock screen:

That's the Ubuntu title font combined with the HTC Clock, with the slide to unlock removed (the gesture still unlocks it, the button's just gone). I'm so proud of myself. Also, I installed a terminal app, so I can ssh into my Mac and make it say dirty things. Hehehehe.

First Video Post!1!

I seriously gave hours for publishing this single, 8-minute long clip of me rambling about random stuff that could have much more easily been rambled about in a blog post. So I seriously hope that you enjoy the video below. Lucky me, Xubuntu apparently can't record audio, so I was forced to record my audio with my new iPhone (talked about in video), convert the file to a .wav, convert the video to a .avi, join the two together, export it, and upload it to vimeo. By the way, thanks to the conversion process the video quality is horrible. Just thought I'd warn you ahead of time.

Exams are over. Any good games?

So exams are officially over for me, as of the 4.5 hour AP Chem exam. Not enjoyable, and I really don't think I did well at all, but we'll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, I tried out Minecraft, and the concept looks all right.... the only problem is that it makes my computer go insane. My CPU maxes out at 100% and my memory is 75% occupied. A bit much for just a bunch of cubes, no!? It could be just because I'm trying it out on Linux, but thanks to its intense memory usage it rendered itself and my computer unusable within just a few minutes of playing. So I guess I'll just stick to programming.

Speaking of which, I've decided to rewrite most of my code because it's turned into a bit of a mess already, mostly because we're constantly introducing all of these new ideas and libraries and I'm trying to update it to allow support for the old stuff. So rewriting so far looks like a good idea, and it's going smoothly.

I love Conky

Okay, I realise that this is probably the millionth post on the Internet about Conky, but I just want to shout it out there: I love Conky. Conky is an incredibly customisable system monitor that allows you to display pretty much any value on your system, let it be the current track playing on your xmms2, audacious, or mpd media player, the temperature of various thermal sensors in your computer, the disk i/o, graphs, rings, or bars of your cpu, memory, disk, or network consumption... if they don't provide an option for it natively, you can always devise a method of your own by ways of the ${exec} variable coupled with a custom script. Let me just show you my desktop as of this moment:


In case you're wondering what the font was, I'm a huge fan of the Inconsolata fixed-width font. The weather data comes from a script that I made myself, mostly because I didn't know about the ${weather} option until it was too late... Oops. In any case, what it does is parse out a specific web page on the data from a weather site every 10 minutes. Overkill? Probably. Anyway, here's my .conkyrc:



Also, user chorny has provided me with a bit of help on the Pastebin API. Apparently uploading to pastebin is as simple as installing the App::Nopaste library from CPAN, something that I didn't know anything about. You can also install it as a cli command by running

sudo apt-get install nopaste

on Ubuntu.

I'm also on the market for a new keyboard because I'm really not a very big fan of the one on my Thinkpad, it's a bit cramped. I realise that Thinkpad keyboards are some of the best on the market, but I'm fairly sure that this one was not famed for its keyboard. All kinds of gunk keeps getting stuck between the keys, thankfully whenever I want to do some serious typing I switch over to my MacBook Pro, whose concave keys I find marvelous. I don't think I'd ever want to move to a Unibody model because I love this keyboard so much. Anyway, I'm thinking of buying a Das Keyboard Ultimate Silent for several reasons:

1. A regular Das Keyboard is too loud, I wouldn't be able to do any typing during the wee hours
2. I like the idea of having actual key-switches instead of plastic domes, plastic domes are mushy and feel like pudding
3. It's unmarked, so I get serious geek cred for being able to type on an unmarked keyboard, and I don't have to deal with the OCD stress of using a Dvorak layout with a QWERTY layout marked on my keys.

Alright, back to studying! English exam tomorrow at 8h, AP Chem the day after that at 12h. Wish me luck!

Hardly Workin'

Hey all,

So I've decided to try and make this a daily thing again. I'm typing this up on the car ride home (don't worry, I'm not driving), and I'm pretty much just trying to hang on. All of this excitement about colleges has been making me relax, for some strange reason, and now more than ever I really need to get my head in the game. My college counselor, my parents, and I all met today on where to go, and now that she's tailored my list a bit I have a bit of a better idea on what I'm going to do. Here's my new list of colleges:

- Boston College, Boston University
- Brown
- UC Berkely, UCLA
- Carnegie Mellon University
- U Chicago
- Harvard University
- Haverford College
- Macalester College
- MIT
- McGill University
- Northwestern University
- Pomona College
- Reed College
- University of Rochester
- Swarthmore College
- Trinity College
- Union College
- Washington University in STL
- Wesleyan University

...so yeah. Exhaustingly long list, I know.

Another contributing factor is this freaking Linux obsession that I've been having. I've successfully installed Xubuntu and have compositing working (Gnome-Do and Docky can actually work, huzzah), and yet it's still just not perfect for me. I tried OpenBox but I'm clearly too much of a noob to manage anything remotely non-GUI oriented, although I'm really loving XFCE. The boot and shutdown times are absolutely outstanding, and I got Conky to work with weather services and a Gmail checker. Mutt's installed, and I'm actually writing this post from Nano because I love the Inconsolata fixed-width font so much.

Finals are only in a few days... I'm kind of freaking out, even though I only have 2 exams. The funny part is that only one absolutely terrifies me, and it's AP Chem: everyone (except me, becuase I was in France at the time) got their labs back, and were subsequently moping the entire rest of the day. Apparently it was one of those assignments where getting a good grade is out of the question and you have to just hope that it doesn't hurt your GPA too badly.

Really haven't been able to get developing on PHP lately, I should start working on that again. My teacher's going to be pretty frustrated when we meet on Saturday and all I'll have done is re-written my code to have it be object-oriented. I have ban functionality working (with an awesome image, thanks Vijay!), although it really doesn't look pretty, which bugs me. I wish I didn't specialize in PHP and Perl so that I could actually design a nice frontend for this thing. That said, it didn't stop Zuckerberg... who am I to underperform Zuckerberg!?

Hope finals are going well for everybody. :)

Totally gave up.

Ok, so Gentoo kind of failed miserably. I'm not going to try and save face by hiding the fact that I couldn't get Gentoo to work at all, something about the X server not seeing my displays even though they were in xorg.conf and I had properly run X --configure. I'm irritated that it didn't work, but there really is no way that I'm going to try starting over with that mess all over again, so I'm going to try a different flavor that's actually at least somewhat forgiving. I've been using Zenwalk Openbox for about a day, and while I really think that it's great, it's definitely not my favorite choice. I don't know if it's the Zenwalk or the Openbox, but quite frankly it looks hideous. Despite attempts to fix this with themes and countless .conf files, it's still ugly, and I want to get rid of it. So as I'm typing this post, I just want to let you all know that I'm downloading xubuntu. Hopefully it should be light enough to not run as slowly as normal ubuntu, but it'll also have all of the commands that I'm familiar with. XFCE is annoying, so I'll be trying out Openbox for a little while before giving up completely.

If I ever have the time, I'll try moving back to Gentoo and installing Openbox. I like Openbox a lot, I just don't like not being familiar with any of the commands. I'm not a big fan of Slackware, which is what Zenwalk was based upon, so that settles that. I'll probably check out Gentoo and Openbox next weekend, after I'm done studying for exams and all that jazz. I'm definitely not doing myself any good by putting off studying for all of this Linux crap, and I'm probably wasting time now anyways by installing xubuntu and writing this blog post. But I guess it'll be a little something to do before the studying commences, which I suppose is what I've been telling myself for the past week. Mais bon, whatever. The important part is that I get studying soon, which is exactly what I'm planning on doing. Planning.

I'm also really annoyed because Gentoo took ages to compile, although I happily played along. I then complied GNOME, which took an entire evening, and then, after compiling GNOME, I realized that I hadn't compiled an X server. So I compiled an X server. The amount of time that this consumes is staggering, I never really grasped why installing programs on Gentoo took forever while installing on Ubuntu usually didn't take over a minute for most files. Does Gentoo do some funky compiling thing that I don't know about? Whatever it is, it took freaking forever, and all the time spent on it went to waste because I've erased the disk and installed Zenwalk for the time being. Pretty annoyed.

Anyways, exams are coming up and I'm getting kind of freaked out now that I realize how close they are. I really have to get studying for chem, I guess I can just use the review packet that she gave out. Thankfully I only have 3 exams, though, because I'm taking 4 classes and one of them is a project. Taking English the first day, Chem the next, and French last. Study time!!