csquared.org

I just finished the final cover for Rodger Olsen's The Empire of Texas.

The full image is a 1.5MB jpg, so scaled down and optimzed for your viewing enjoyment, here it is:

I listen to music at work. A lot. With my handy-dandy 20GB Rio Karma, I can drown out my cube neighbors with the soothing sounds of Project Pitchfork, Sisters of Mercy, and Funker Vogt. When I heard about [Yahoo! Music], I thought this would be an ideal way to fill up my Rio on the cheap. They had stuff I purchased on __vinyl__ for God's sake! Since the Rio supported my Napster DRM downloads, I ass-u-me'd that it would work for Yahoo! Music as well. Au contraire, mon frere. The DRM that Yahoo! uses is exceptionally limited. You can't burn, sync, or otherwise manipulate your downloads. I don't have a problem with ''renting'' music, but dammit, I shouldn't be forced to shell out a couple of hundred bucks to purchase a new audio jukebox that supports it. My poor wife is equally hosed. Without jumping through hoops, we can't burn a CD with the ~~crap~~ country and pop goodness she prefers. In the event you __do__ want to do these things, you need to shell out an additional $0.79 per track. I fully appreciate the problems file swapping poses to the music industry, but until there's a better way to allow honest individuals to listen to music however, whenever, and wherever they want, I'll pass.

I completed designing my second book cover the other night.

At 11"x17" and 300dpi, it was freakin' massive -- just under 17mb.

Anyway, scaled down for your viewing enjoyment, here it is:

While looking for Drupal templates, I stumbled upon a nifty utility to generate anti-aliased rounded corners via JavaScript.

Check it out on Steven Witten's blog at acko.net.

In a word -- wow.

After messing about with GoDaddy.com's hosting, this is like heaven. I was up and running in exceptionally short order -- even the domain was propagated in no time flat. I did run into a bit of a problem with adding on the ciulla.org domain, but this stems more from my impatience than anything else as I tend to forget that propogation takes time.

While it's tempting to completely dog GoDaddy's service offering, they do a great job for their target audience -- folks new to web hosting.

Once I get all of the old content off of ciulla.org, I'm definitely cancelling GoDaddy's hosting service.

I'm now a character in a Science Fiction novel...

I'm using Mambo to revamp a small software company's website.

Naturally, there's quite a few product screenshots. To help manage them, I installed Gallery 2 and the Mambo/Gallery2 integration stuff.

On the Mambo side, I needed to add a trailing slash to the component's "Full Path to Gallery G2" and enable the mod_gallery_block.

After getting a "ERROR_CONFIGURATION_REQUIRED", I found that I needed to install and activate the "Image Block" module on the Gallery 2 side.

I was in business... Almost.

When I clicked on the mod_gallery_block on the site, I got a lot of "headers already sent" errors. After searching the web to no avail, I took matters into my own hands. I edited Mambo's index.php and moved lines 194 through 198 to line 9.

Success!

Now, to work on getting the embedded Gallery 2 content to look like it's part of the site...

Like a lot of programmers, I'm very... meticulous... when it comes to writing code. I detest looking at malformed code, and will reformat it -- if not refactor completely -- at the first opportunity. But, like a lot of geeks, I'm lazy efficient, so I use a class of utilities called beautifiers to help maintain my code (well, other's code, but let's not get snarky).

I've used HTML Tidy to clean up gnarly web pages...

I've used Jalopy to clean up mangled Java code...

I've even used a relatively ancient Visual Basic 3.0 one back in the day. The name escapes me, but it was in 1995 and I remember I paid $100 bucks for it. Given the nature of the code I was working with, it was worth it.

After googling awhile, I stumbled across a yacc version and a couple of on-line versions here and here. The former on-line one has some Delphi source available for download -- too bad I haven't used Delphi for years.

So, why is it so difficult to find an open source SQL beautifier similar to Jalopy or HTML Tidy?

When I get an opportunity, I'll have to knock one out.

One of the truly cool things about blogging is that you can help someone out just by knocking out a quick description of the problem, how you solved it, then blogging it.

Sometimes people you've helped don't take the time to say, "Not only have I read your entry on X, it helped me out. Thanks."

Ron Miller helped me out with a particularly annoying issue between RoboForm and Firefox 1.06, but he didn't realize it.

For that, thanks Ron.

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Snopes comes to the rescue again!