fjellstad.org

After months of procrastination, I decided to update my website. One of thing that had been bothering me was that it was getting too hard to update. Not the look. With css, updating the looks are somewhat easy. The problem was more that if I wanted to update, say the menu system, I had to edit a ton of pages. Small changes like updating the copyright just wasn’t happening unless it happened to be on page that I was editing a lot.

At first, I was considering installing a CMS or the very least, just let WordPress manage the site (which is quite capable of). But the software engineer in me doesn’t really like a solution that basically creates static pages dynamically. Waste of resources. Most CMS only forces your pages into their look and feel, and though I could work until I got my look ‘n’ feel, it would be too much work for too little gain.

But what is a CMS, anyways (at least web kind)? Well, it helps managing the files. You create templates, so that you can focus on the content and still get a consistent look’n'feel.

Managing files are easy. Being a software engineer, I’m used to source control systems, so that part was pretty much taken care of. The creating templates isn’t that hard either, if you are on an unix-like system. The scripting support on those systems are superb, so it wouldn’t really take much effort to write a template system to generate the static files.

Since I was going to make this change, I decided to do it in Perl while I was at it. Mostly because I haven’t worked much in Perl, and it would be an interesting challenge. It actually went really well. Took me a couple of hours, mostly because I needed to look up different functions in Perl, but in the end, I think I got the flexibility I wanted.

Almost finished integrating the Gallery into the website. Not very happy with it. The problem is that the way the Gallery theme work is that everything is set up as tables. This is a huge problem if you want to change the layout of the site. Instead of editing the css file, you need to actually change the template. Really silly way to write a webpage in 2007.

Although I changed the code enough to make it integrate somewhat into the site, the code is really ugly, and I have basically decided to write my own theme without the table layout. Shouldn’t be that difficult, just a little too much work.

It’s been awhile since I updated this site. I have done lots of changes, and more to come. I wasn’t happy with the blogging functionality, and was considering writing a more automated system for archiving the blog. Since I was moving the website to a new hosting company, I decided to install WordPress instead. I also installed Gallery2 to take care of my photo managing needs. Took me awhile to figure out the theming for WordPress, and I still need to figure how to change the theme for Gallery2. More to come later…

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been almost 6 months since I updated this site last. Time really flies when life is interesting. Not that I’m going to write much about that here (what do you think this is, MySpace?)

I’m not going to be able to graduate this spring as originally planned, mostly because I didn’t finish one of my required classes. Not fun. Looks like I will be graduating March next year. Oh, well…

I bought a new laptop, when the old one started dying on me (sorry, but a system shouldn’t shut down because of overheating just because I’m compiling the Linux kernel). I’m more or less happy with the buy. It’s a very nice system.

Otherwise, I spent the day today, learning about subversion. In fact, I moved the all the homepage files from CVS to subversion. One of the reason I hadn’t moved to subversion before was because there didn’t seem to be very good support for it in my favorite editor, Emacs. Fortunately, subversion does come with en Emacs extension that lets Emacs manipulate subversion repositories, even though it’s not as nice as the default revision control controls in Emacs (no ctrl v v).

So far, I really like subversion. It does let you do stuff that was hard to do in CVS, like deleting or moving directories or files. On the other hand, subversion does seem to impact your project layout, something that CVS never did (ie. branching and tagging is not meta data in subversion, but rather a copy of your trunk, intersting concept). I need to play with it some more before I know if I really like it, but so far so good.

Updated the webpage to use a special stylesheet when accessed by a handheld device. CSS is pretty sweet.

I finally found the time to rewrite the gallery section of the site. It’s good, but not good enough. I still want to set up a navigation for going through the pictures. Haven’t really seen any navigation code I like, though.

I recently got myself a universal remote, so I don’t have to live with five-six remotes on the table. Really nice. I found that there are two main problems with universal remotes. Either, the remote is touch screen, which really doesn’t give you the tactile sense of the buttons, or it’s a normal looking programmable remote, which means that you lose functionality on your device if you use it.

Fortunately, the good people at Harmony fixed both these problems. I got myself a Harmony 688 (company got bought by Logitech). It’s programmable, and it has assignable buttons on the display, that at the same time give you tactile support and custom buttons for your device. It’s the best of both worlds. I really love my Harmony remote. The programming of the remote is a snap. All you need to do is go to the Logitech website, set of what you want to do and download the new software image to the remote. All automatically.

There are only two downside. One is that it’s currently only for Windows (there is no way to transfer the software image to the remote from Linux, where I am most of the time), and sometimes the timing of the remote is off (as in, I have to push the the button several times for the device to react). The former problem is apparently being worked on, and the latter problem I can problem fix on the website. Just have to get around to it.

All in all, I really like this remote, and would highly recommend it for anyone who is looking for a universal remote.

Wow, time flies when you’re having fun. I felt like it was just yesterday that I wrote my last entry. So much has changed.

I’m currently back in the US, just finished by first quarter as a graduate student at Santa Clara U. It’s been really nice being back in the academia after four years in the business world. It’s nice to have a new perspective on the stuff we talk about in class.

I updated my webpage after looking at the great website at meyerweb.com. He had some great examples on what you can do with (X)HTML and CSS. Unfortunately, that means that older browser, and probably IE won’t render this site properly. Quite frankly, since this is a personal site, I don’t care too much. So, if this site looks funky, update to another browser (or this browser), or just live with it.

Well, that’s have to be it for now.

So, this is my second try at a website. Lost my first website when I changed ISP and didn’t make a private backup. Oh, well. It’s mostly a work in progress at this point. Still haven’t decided on the color scheme, and the menu system still needs some work. Probably want to add some more sections, but I think the organization is good at this point.