Spots on a Page

Diminished chords

webleopard — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:55:20 +0000

The diminished chord is a fun toy to play with, because you get 4 chords in one. The below example (Gdim7), is a chord based on each note it contains thus it is really a Gdim7, C#dim7, A#dim7, or a Edim7…. or their relative flat names if you prefer.

A bumpy road, eh?

webleopard — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:45:49 +0000

Yes, after 8 years of getting thumped-in-the-rump by Republicans, we finally get back to sanity.

Quickly, President Obama is trying to undo the catastrophic damage Bush et al has done to America… yay!

Politicians try to restrict internet radio… douchebags!

webleopard — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 16:09:47 +0000

If I haven’t stressed this enough to make my feelings known, then I will make an attempt to do so now; politicians are self-serving douchebags.

As far as I know, there isn’t a more succinct way to state the obvious truth of this statement. Anyways, politicians have decided to introduce a bill intended to restrict recording from sattelite, digital, and internet radio stations.

While the bill may not appear too important, it is when you take a moment to consider why the senators are attempting to introduce legislation to protect the omnipotent, rich, and ever powerful music industry. There are far more important aspects of American society and business that need protection, industries that actually are suffering.

One example is the field of health care. American citizens are now paying more for basic services than ever, and that money is going to insurance companies who are thriving in today’s economy. In fact, many Americans cannot afford health care, and as such do not have any coverage.

What are the senators doing about this?

Aurora Borealis

webleopard — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 19:20:39 +0000

A totally cool natural occurence.

Postnuke: A brief critique

webleopard — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 08:53:11 +0000

I have always enjoyed making websites with Postnuke, and recently I had the chance to make a new site with their latest version 0.764. After completing development of the site, I can honestly say that I am very dissapointed to what has happened to Postnuke.

A little background

Almost two and a half years ago, I was using Postnuke daily to make hobby websites and small production websites and it was by far my favorite tool to use. The developers were promising that the groundbreaking release .800 was going to be released that Summer, and they were hyping all the incredible features it was going to have. The project at that point had incorporated a wildly confusing web-based template management system called ‘Xanthia’, and although the concept was good it had not been implemented very well.

After two years of development Xanthia has not improved at all. The problems it had two years ago still exist, and the Postnuke team does not seem capable or interested in making the changes necessary to fix it.

On the positive side of things, Postnuke developers have slowly been converting all core modules and components to all being ndividually templated, which is exactly what needs to happen.

The current state of affairs

After spending a significant amount of time working with the current release (0.764), I have an excellent grasp of where things need to be improved, or rather where major problems exist in the overall functionality of Postnuke.

The primary concern I have is with the inconsistent components that have templates available for them. One example is having a module that may be using pnRender and having templates, but not all parts of the module. So with module ‘xxyyzz’ it may have the main components templated, but in order to change some parts it is necessary to edit one or more of the related php files. That is a difficult thing to do not just because of the varying skill levels required to perform such an act, but rather because it is hard to keep track of the modification that were (or need to be) made to the php files; in addition to the fact that those files would be wiped out upon any upgrade of Postnuke.

The other problem I had was with their bizarre visual block editor/ block control system, which is beyond frustrating to use and neither does what they are supposed to do properly. In a relatively small to medium site, it takes a long time to properly set up a SINGLE block with their block system if the block uses a unique template.

Also, the colors and settings that get placed into a theme cause a bit of a hassle, which requires hunting through the xaninit.php file to ensure plenty of changes are made in case the theme ever needs to be de-activated, and re-activated.

While I still have fond memories of using Postnuke, I really dislike the block system and feel that the Postnuke team should seriously consider scrapping it altogether and just let people add block tags to the templates exactly where they want them. In addition to this, the Postnuke development and support team is rather hostile and unsupportive in the forums. This leaves very little opportunity for a productive dialogue to occur beteen the developers and *everyone else*. That is sad because the users of the Postnuke community are smart, and have some great ideas.

Removed Stuffit Deluxe from my Mac!

webleopard — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 21:16:12 +0000

I have had Stuffit installed on my Mac for about 9 months now, and I finally decided to remove it because of all the problems it has with crashing. For those who aren’t familiar with it, Stuffit has the following features:

a ton of stupid useless component, like a separate archive viewer (worthless)
a menubar tool which serves absolutely no purpose
unarchives file less reliably than the native OSX app, and slower!
makes archives (again, something tht OSXalready can do)
crashes on tar.gz, and rar archives most of the time

The only thing Stuffit deluxe can do that the native app can’t, is make archives in formats other than .zip — which is completely unimportant. Since I already use UnRarX — then I have no use for Stuffit, so into the trash it goes!

Cross system authentication

webleopard — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 07:41:32 +0000

Here is a field with which I have a lot of problems. I have neglected to deal with cookies, and authentication sessions like they were the plague. Now, I am dusting off the books and trying to learn quickly because I am trying to make a dual log-in for a content system and a forum — something I have never done before, but will.

Ethiopians stomp Islamists like bugs :)

webleopard — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 21:27:23 +0000

It just doesn’t get any better than this! The Ethiopians are doing what needs to be done against these crazy islamic people. Maybe we should ask the Ethiopians to help us in Iraq? The Ethiopians are not concerned with the pollitically correct bull that the US government is.

Whatever the case, this is both amusing, and awesome to watch. Again, I hope the Ethiopians take it beyond just getting the Islamists under control, they need to eliminate them altogether because, like cockroaches, they will try to regroup and start things over again.

Christmas comes, Christmas goes………….you get the point!

webleopard — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 23:56:14 +0000

Every Christmas offers us the privilege to reflect upon the past year and make some important life decisions, and this time I want to follow through. These reflections often manifest themselves an New Years’ resolutions, but I believe those are shallow and are a bit different than a mindslapping observation of the past year.

Personally, I look forward to the new challenges the next year will bring and if we are lucky the war will end and George Bush and Dick Cheney will be stopped from raping our country of its resources politically, and our rights personally. Go, Democrats, go!!

My feelings about content management

webleopard — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 00:01:59 +0000

I like content management systems because they are intended to make the site managers life easier. There are of ways to describe how CMS’s are used, and here is my take on that. The main ways are as follows:

to manage a site
to manage a community
to manage information

Keep in mind that in the traditional sense, the third bullet is what CMS’s were really designed for yet on the grand scale of things many people seem oblivious to this. The concept of information management extends beyond the posting of articles, links, and downloads for others to have access to. It also means that files can be manipulated, versions tracked, and access can be logged.

Over time I have come to experience that there is no one correct way to use a CMS, and that is their beauty. Thinking outside the box will allow developers to advance the state of the web as we know it, and CMS’s play a large roll in that affair. Calendars that can be maintained by multiple users, and files being attached to articles are two good examples of features that have evolved with the creation of content management systems.

Do I still use standard HTML sites? No, I do not. I feel that even the most simple site can quickly outgrow its shoes, and may need room to grow. To the average visitor, the difference is not apparent, and the experienced web designer can make a site in less time in some circumstances as well.

I have used many of the commercial, and open source content management solutions available and I have my preferences. My preferences truly mean nothing though, because we all work differently and like the feel of some products more than another. With that said, I prefer Xaraya, and Postnuke for most applications. There are others such as Plone, Midgard, and Drupal which offer different feature sets, and are the appropriate choice sometimes. This makes the point more apparent, even when people like to compare the different packages available on a ‘my CMS is better than your CMS’ attitude.

I have seen MANY people suggest that Xoops is better than Postnuke, Postnuke is better than Drupal, Drupal is better than Xaraya, Joomla is better than Xoops (on, and on, an on). These people are being unnecessarily confrontational, and ignorant. In my world there is no competition between products, this is because I choose what I like and what works best in my hands.

Xaraya is by far my favorite application, because it allows me to modify the appearance and functionality of the site quite easily. If I want a simple community site with forums, that I can leave in the hands of inexperienced users, I use Postnuke. Joomla has served me well on several occasions for sites with a lot of information, and documents. Exponent CMS, is a truly wonderful application for smaller sites with a lot of static information, and uploaded files. In fact, Exponent is so easy to use, that it requires very little training – even with novice users.

All the above are my feelings about content management.

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