Blog is now running WordPress 2.7. As always, please let me know if any weird things pop up with the theme. I managed to get all of the ajax stuff into the actual theme this time, so there shouldn’t be anything weird… but you never know.

I’m getting really close to re-enabling registered-only comments or at least a captcha; I’ve had an issue lately with some spam comments getting through that aren’t easily caught by Akismet.

We’ll see how it goes the next couple of days.

So, I’d kind of like to incorporate a few “widgets” into the design… just a few little icons, like the current weather, a Minnesota scoreboard, maybe something with World of Warcraft… I’m just having trouble figuring out where to stick them without ruining the design.

There is a bug in the comment AJAX; some change between 2.5.1 and 2.6.2 changed the location of a file. I’m looking into it; be aware that comments ARE coming through, the view just isn’t updating correctly.

//edit: Fixed. I enabled permalinks, apparently in 2.6.2 if permalinks are enabled it refuses to read a standard query string when deciding what post to read. I’ll work on getting permalinks back with working comments.

//edit2: Fixed the template to figure out the actual permalink address to read from. Wouldn’t you know it if WordPress doesn’t have a template tag to return a relative permalink. I may have to put in a ticket for that. In any case, permalinks and comments are now working in relative harmony.

I now have unlimited space and bandwidth from Dreamhost!

Yes, there is a catch. Dreamhost is completely overhauling their server farm. They offered anybody who was willing to be an “early adopter” (translation: put up with the bugs and possible outages) unlimited space and bandwidth for the life of their account. I’ve always been an early adopter, so I figured what the heck?

So, I apologize if there’s intermittent downtime in the next [insert time interval here]. All part of the process.

Updated Wordpress to 2.6.2, and in the process did a WHOLE lot of cleanup to make the procedure easier in the future. Please inform if you come across any problems.

It’s been awhile since I made an update on my programming, mostly because I haven’t had the time or energy to devote to it lately. However, I have started to get the bug again recently, and have been working.

StudioMan is sitting on the sidelines for the moment. I got a ways into it and realized that the interface still wasn’t as useful as it needed to be. I keep struggling with that in that program. I learned a lot working on it, and when I can come up with a UI design that I’m happy with I’m going to give it another shot.

Beyond StudioMan, I’ve begun work on two other projects. The first is a weather application for iPhone. Currently Weatherbug is the best thing available, and it’s… well… blah. My plan is to make it a nice, clean, standard interface, with a list of locations at the top of which is your current location. For each location there will be current data, forecasts, radar, and watches/warnings. I plan to put warning notifications in also; i doubt I’ll have a release before Apple implements that as I’m still learning the iPhone ropes.

The second project is a NES emulator written from the ground up in Objective-C and Cocoa. This stemmed from my new hobby that I’m going to write about in a subsequent post, but it’s been a real fun challenge. A few days ago I finished a rudimentary 6502 core in Java. It steps through and correctly executes instructions, and reads and writes memory. However, it’s not a cycle-perfect core; it just takes the opcode and the data, does what it needs to do, and puts the data where it needs to be without regard to how many clock cycles the real chip takes. I’m going to need to dig even deeper into the guts of this to figure out how each instruction is executed in a clock-for-clock basis, as there are some very exact timing issues on the NES. I’ll go into more detail in a later post. In addition to the challenge of figuring out the guts of the NES, I’m also learning new things on the modern side; I’m definitely going to need to learn about multithreading to keep the emulator running without binding up the user interface, and more about graphics and input devices. It should be a very good project to learn from.

I’ve created the first page with some basic information on each project that will be updated as time goes on. If you hadn’t guessed by my decision to use “Pages” as one of the main headers at the top, my intention is to make even more pertaining to my various interests.

Some more fixes…

• Archives, categories, etc. are now viewable. Crazy Wordpress and it’s 50 different template files… who needs that much customization anyway?
• I’ve added Century Gothic to the fonts list for Windows users. Century Gothic is included with Microsoft Office (and also Windows 98), so most of you Windows users out there should be able to see it. According to font surveys, it’s the most common font available that’s similar to Futura.

I did some experiments today with font embedding using @font-face, to see if I could get Futura to you Windows users without making it blatantly illegal (or a process, for that matter). It kind of worked in Safari; Safari refused to recognize the small-caps variant, so any place that I had put the regular font in showed as Futura, and any place I specified small-caps went back to the default. Mozilla has put some tryout builds out with font embedding, maybe we’ll see it with Firefox 3.1. In the meantime, hopefully this should make things look a little bit closer to correct.

A few bug fixes…

• Implemented hard IE lockout. It’s really messed up in IE… I can’t believe how much different it looks there compared to all the compliant browsers. Try it in IE or set your user agent to see my shameless advertising.
• Fixed a minor bug causing the title to appear incorrectly when viewing a single post–thanks Burton!
• Fixed a huge, enormous, showstopper bug–I forgot to put in the quotes! Fear not, loyal readers, your reload-fixation has returned! I need to get my view count up somehow…

Be vewwy vewwy quiet… I’m hunting wabbits.

And it’s only a cowincidence that the wabbits is named bugs. If you happen to find bugs, pwease teww me. Quietwy.

And… let me know what you think. Personally I’m rather proud of this design, I frankly think it’s the best one I’ve come up with, and we’re on about the tenth or twelfth design revision since I started this site. I’m especially glad at how the artwork turned out; usually Photoshop fails me and I have to go looking for outside help.

And, as usual, sorry IE folken, your browser’s bass-ackwards rendering of web standards keeps you out of this page yet again. It should work in Firefox (though I’m trying to figure out a bug where the stupid float for the post category drops down to the next line… if you want to see how it’s supposed to look, check it out in Chrome or Safari. If you know what’s going on and how to fix it, please share the love).

This design makes extensive use of the Futura font. As soon as I find a suitable generally-available alternative in Windows I’ll update the font-family styles; the one Windows Vista picks actually doesn’t look too bad, but I’m not sure about XP, I haven’t tried it out in XP yet. As always, if you’re on a Mac you shouldn’t have a problem as Futura is including with Mac OS X.