The Misadventures of Dan
Peer into the mind of Dan as he tries to build an MP3 Player for his PDA and searches for the next thing in his life be it an electrical engineering job or graduate school.
Saturday, November 29, 2003
.:2:28:37 PM:.
A heads up on Internet Explorer...
If there's one thing I wish Blogger had was the ability to show you the permanent link to each blog in the window below where you type your blogs. Right now, you have to search for the post remember the date, then open up your blog and go to that very blog to get the permanent link. That seems a bit of a hassle when all you is an extra link beside the 'edit' link. Hmm.... there's an idea for booklink!
Recent news show that IE 6 has massive flaws. I was surprised by the response of my brother: "Doesn't matter we don't even use IE any more!" I was kind of happy and yet surprised. I didn't realize how much I had changed the programs my brother used. Right now, as great as Firebird is great but there are tons of hurdles before it can become mainstream. The largest problem is its installation. The fact that you have to install mozilla first and then firebird makes it intimidating to people. Despite the great advances in using tabs, CSS, and so much more the first thing people will encounter is installation. If its more than one separate program it can be difficult to track. What I think should happen is Firebird should install mozilla AND itself-but that's my own opinion.
Booklink is so close to being finished I can feel it!!
Friday, November 28, 2003
.:10:48:33 AM:.
God is so good!
His love endures forever!
Thursday, November 27, 2003
.:10:13:07 AM:.
Its not just technical...
There are multiple things to consider when you start running more-than-private websites. A lot of people believe that when you build websites for people your job ends at the completion of "the code" but it goes much further. To be responsible you have to help your clients not only realize the potential uses (and carry them out) but also the consequences. Often overlooked is the whole update factor. Its not realistic to expect everyone to know even basic HTML-but it is realistic to expect changes to happen to a company over the timespan of a year. Who's going to update it? If you use tables to carry out your design good luck explaining to the person where to change the text. There are financial issues-owning a website is not just a one-time deal, there are yearly registration fees-servers breakdown, bugs can show up. What are you going to do then?
Chris installed messenger plus the other night and found out that if he did the automatic installation spyware/adware would be installed. In my mind there are two types of spyware/adware and they're not even categorized by the way they work. I separate them by the company policy, spyware/adware is bad when the company DOESN'T tell you they're installing it. This, unfortunately, is the case with most spyware/adware and its why its hated so often. If you run AVG and use the automatic installation for Messenger Plus AVG will tell you that there's a dropper.swicer.a trojan. After doing multiple searches, I couldn't find much information on the trojan except that it was associated with Messenger Plus. In fact after a lot of searching it turns out to be some kind of adware/spyware. To fix this, update AVG (updates are free) and run a complete scan. This should remove the infected files. Next, click on the custom installation option for Messenger Plus-this way you'll have the opportunity to decide whether or not you want to install third-party software.
I'm not advocating adware/spyware but I do realize that companies need money. Its great for things to be free but people worked hard to make software they should at least give you the option of paying for it. This is what's going through my head about booklink right now. The intent is never to make it a pay-site-but I can foresee operating costs... costs that can quickly balloon out of my budget of $1. I was thinking about having a paypal tip jar for server money... or there's the Amazon Affiliate option. The latter requires even more extensive programming... its easy to find the amazon link for one book, but imagine trying to find it for a ten... or a hundred. If the website makes money-great, if not that's ok but I don't want to lose any money from it.... I guess we'll just have to wait and see and go from there!
Booklink is going great, the book and author searches are done, the shelf-system is now implemented and I just have the inserting book left to do. It's very close!!
Monday, November 24, 2003
.:11:41:25 PM:.
eMi... finally!!
It took much longer than anticipated but after seven different layouts it finally came true! eMi Canada is now online. I hope/pray that it will serve God well.
The transfer of BookLink:ASP to BookLink:PHP (forgive my use of colons :P ) is going quite well- one of the nagging things about the transfer is changing the square brackets [ ] to ` `... this is actually more of an Access SQL to MySQL thing but its all being done at the same time. I finished building the login system and the author index system. This leaves the genre and book index, plus the user main page. I keep on going back and forth on whether to reveal 'the plan' to one of my friends because... well I think its a pretty cool concept but I don't know how good it will be until I have it all together. I mean, I know I'll probably use it-and there might be a few other people who said they were interested but is it really possible that it can take off?
So a friend of mine was asking me about about SFV files. SFV is just a file to tell you whether or not you have all the parts. Lets say some person has a huge file she or he wants to share on the net. Instead of downloading one giant file, she or he chops it up into smaller files-but how do you know if you got all the pieces? How do you know if the pieces themselves are intact? This is where SFV comes in. You use a SFV Checker, during my quick search I found two: WinSFV and QuickSFV. Now after all this hype you'd expect that these things would do everything for you, in other words: check to make sure everything is ok then extract away! WRONG! The checkers just check to make sure everything is there-after that you use whatever it was that compressed it to decompress it. Now my friend had an added challenge, all his files were .001, .002, all the way to .052! There wasn't a .rar, .ace, nor .zip just the SFV and those numbered files. It turns out that all he had to do was use Winrar (or whatever rar extraction program) and decompress it like he would a .rar. Simple neh?
