Archive for the 'About' Category
Note: I've reorganized this site to use tags; the category archive remains to support old links.
Only posts prior to April, 2006 are categorized.
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Happy New Year! Two years ago, I tried making some resolutions. Last year, I even gauged my success for the previous year, but I never did get around to posting a new set of resolutions. I’ve never been a big fan of the New Year’s Resolution, but having that list a couple years ago did help me focus on getting some things done. In that spirit, I’ve decided to post a list of resolutions once again. Some of them aren’t traditional resolution fodder, but merely projects I’ve been planning for a while, to do “maybe after the new year, when things slow down.” Hopefully listing them here will encourage me to do them.
Personal
Lose some weight and get in shape. I know this is everyone’s #1 resolution, but I need to focus on this. When I stopped smoking four or five years ago, I was out of shape, but within my ideal weight range. I gained alot of weight in the first year after quitting, and have lowly drifted up the scale in recent years. My goal is to lose 75 pounds by the end of the year… this will put me at the top of my ideal weight range. I know from experience that diets only work for a month or two. Instead, I intend to begin by using the gym at work at least 3 times per week, reducing junk food, and reducing portions at meals. If I don’t see some progress by the end of January, I can get more aggressive.
Early to bed, early to rise. I’ve always been a night owl, and never a morning person. This often has a domino effect of a few days time, and I have more trouble getting up each morning. Fortunately my job allows me some flexibility in when I arrive, but I’d rather be leaving earlier. Also, while on vacation last summer, I somehow got into an altered cycle, getting up every morning around 7am (wicked early for me), and enjoyed being up before everyone.
Write more music. I spent a litte time at the keyboard this past year, and came up with one piece I’m happy with. I’d like to find time to do more this year.
jclark.org
New organization with tags. I’ve been feeling boxed in by my category hierarchy for a while, and tags (like del.icio.us) make much more sense. This will require some planning, since I don’t want to break any old URIs. I’ll use redirects if I have to, but a system that doesn’t need redirects would be even better. This includes story URIs, category URIs, and date archive URIs. I’m considering a switch to Wordpress like Douglas just did. This would also allow for drafts, something I’d really like to have.
New Look and Feel. I’ve been working on this, very on-and-off, for months. I’ve about come to the conclusion I can’t do what I wanted to do, but I may do a scaled down version instead. I’ve got a picture Sean took for me that I’d really like to use.
More Howtos. I’ve written a number of howto articles here over the past few years, and they tend to be among the most popular articles on the site, with lots of search engine visitors. I’ve found that I really enjoy writing them, so I intend to do more of them. I may even make a sub-site to house them.
Post More. I did pretty well for the first half of ‘05, but fell down during the second half. This post is #294, just shy of the 300 post mark I had set as a goal for the end of ‘04. I’m going to target the 400 post mark by year’s end.
Projects
Improve my email. I have a couple of different email addresses that I use; one for companies I spend money with, and one for everyone else. In addition, I’m subscribed to a bunch of mailing lists (which I need to reduce); all together, it’s a real pain to check my mail if I’m not at home on my primary Mac. I’d really like to setup to pop all of my mail into a self-hosted IMAP server. Alternatively, I might consider looking at gmail again, if I can make it work transparently with my jclark.org email address.
Improve my home network. I’ve got a couple of PCs around the house in addition to the iMac and Powerbook, and I’ve never gotten Printer Sharing to work as seemlessly as it should. I’m also currently using my old Desktop PC as little more than a printer share, which is a waste. I want to free up the PC for possible use as a server (see later items), and get the printer shared to all of the machines that need it, seemlessly. I won’t outline the issues I’ve had with this in the past, except to say that I’ll be getting started by upgrading the iMac to Tiger (which I got for Christmas).
Automate Photo Distribution. I’ve been using iPhoto on the iMac to manage pictures from our digital cameras, but this makes it difficult to print them (Due to the issues above, I can’t normally print from the iMac), and for Sherri to access them from her Windows Laptop. I normally have to explicitly export a number of photos to the old Desktop PC (going away, see above), and then she accesses them via a file share. She’d like to have copies of all the pictures on her Laptop, so she can show them when we travel. I’m going to figure out how to automatically publish all pictures in iPhoto’s library to other locations (primarilly her laptop, but possibly also to a file server as a backup). The laptop is often asleep, so it will have to sync when ever it’s awake, automagically. Also, I want to use the iPhoto albums to provide some kind of organization when exporting. Ideas for publishing/syncing include creating an Atom feed and designing a custom aggregator, and/or using rsync. I’m hoping iPhoto’s album data is stored in XML so I can get at it easily. Also, once I upgrade to Tiger, I may find some use from Automator.
Backups & Storage. I need a backup solution badly. If the iMac died today, I’d probably lose some photos, and alot of other data. Same for the other PCs. I’d really like to setup a RAID storage array somewhere on the network, and make backups to it. I’m considering a NAS Raid solution from Infrant, but I’ve also got a couple PCs that could become servers. Big storage on the network could also be helpful for number 5….
Consider dumping TiVo and building a MythTV setup. This one isn’t definate, but I’m certainly considering it. If I do, I’ll probably have 3 to 5 TV sets connected, so it could make for some fun HOWTOs.
Household projects. There’s a number of these which I won’t belabor. The biggies are cleaning and renovating the basement, and renovating the family room.
Secret Project. I can’t say now, it would spoil a surprise for someone. I’ll tell next year, if it gets completed.
So, there they are. In the past, this has been a Monthly Blogging Challenge. I don’t think anyone’s posted one for January yet, so I’ll follow tradition, and challenge everyone to post resolutions/goals for the new year. If you did this last year, be sure to review how you did as well. If you participate, please post a comment here with a link, send a trackback.
Time once again to look at the browser stats on the ol’ weblog. Here’s the final numbers for January:
Browser Hits %age
------- ---- ------
FireFox 49976 40.5 %
Internet Explorer 32787 26.5 %
Safari 12953 10.5 %
Unknown 10642 8.6 %
Mozilla 6224 5.0 %
NetNewsWire 4086 3.3 %
Netscape 2372 1.9 %
Opera 1868 1.5 %
OmniWeb 805 0.6 %
Konqueror 526 0.4 %
Others 1027 0.8 %
As compared with last month, Firefox has crept up slightly (.4%), while IE has lost over 4%, in bits and pieces. For example, NetNewsWire (+0.7%), “Unknown” (+0.7%), and even Netscape(!) (+0.7%). Not sure what it all means.
Of course, the numbers are likely to be skewed due to comment and referer spam; but nearly all of that shows up as IE. I’ve been trying to fight that stuff more actively over the past month, which might explain why IE has fallen off a bit, allowing smaller browsers to increase a bit.
Last month, I posted my browser stats for November 2004. It was so much fun I decided to do it again. No fancy graphs (yet), but maybe one of these days. :
Browser Hits %age
------- ---- ------
FireFox 36593 40.1 %
Internet Explorer 28143 30.8 %
Safari 9464 10.3 %
Unknown 7236 7.9 %
Mozilla 3490 3.8 %
NetNewsWire 2453 2.6 %
Netscape 1106 1.2 %
Opera 936 1.0 %
Konqueror 549 0.6 %
OmniWeb 462 0.5 %
Others 774 0.8 %
Of interest- while Firefox usage is up from 37.9% to 40.1%, IE usage is also (slightly) up, from 30.4% to 30.8%. Safari usage dropped just over 1%, and Camino disappeared. I guess Mac users just get it . However Windows users are still 59% of my December stats.
One caveat- while the above stats don’t include errors (like the 403’s I’m handing out to abusive bots and a few spamtastic IP addresses, they do include all the spam that isn’t IP banned- whether my comment filter catches it or not. Maybe I’ll work on that this month.
Last January 1st, I decided to break with tradition and make a few resolutions. Last night at midnight, time ran out. So how did I do? Let’s check the score. I’ll also give some thoughts for the upcoming year’s resolutions, but that will be a separate post, after I think it out a bit.
Personal
Spend a little extra time with my kids. I don’t think I do too badly at this now, but why not improve anyway?
This one’s an unqualified success.
Have at least one weekend getaway with my wife… and no children. We’ve been planning this forever, and never seem to get it done.
Another success. Sherri and I spent a weekend at a B&B near Lancaster, PA last winter. It was wonderful; we’re hoping to do it again this year.
Play more Chess (and hopefully improve).
A qualified success. I definately played more in the first quarter of the year, and I think I was even starting to improve. Since that time, however I’ve played next to none.
Write some fiction.
Utter failure… never found the time or inspiration. A good goal to keep for this year, however.
Professional
Finish every last piece of the Client Reporting project.
This turned out not to even be plausible, as business needs changed. This was a poor choice of resolution, in the future I’ll keep any professional resolutions project-nuetral.
Make the whole thing obsolete with a ground-up rewrite, using no VB (build directly in XML via Office 2003 native XML formats).
This turned out not to be possible because Micro$oft once again over-promised and under-delivered; this time promising a native XML format for Excel and delivering a crippled XML format with no support for graphs.
jclark.org
Add timestamps and notifications for comments.
Success.
New design. Something a bit less… understated.
Failure. I began work on a new deisgn, but couldn’t decide what I wanted to do. I still want to redesign for this year.
Hit the 300 posts milestone.
70% success. My first post of 2004 was number 100, so I needed to write 200 posts. I managed to deliver 142- in spite of a lengthy blogging hiatus over the summer. Big thanks to dugh for the October Blogging Challenge which helped get me back on track.
Re-organize the categories. Use permanent redirects for moved posts.
Success. For 2005, I want to think about restructuring the blog… moving away from strict categories, and using a ‘tag’ system like del.icio.us uses. This may mean a move away from Blosxom. Also, whatever I do can’t break existing URIs. Still some planning to do.
Add a second, topic specific blog. Potential topics are astronomy, chess, or writing.
I cancelled this one. Having less time for any of my other interests, let alone less time to write for this blog, convinced me of that. Instead, for 2005, I want to start writing some more personal, daily-summary/thoughts posts in addition to the more topical stuff I usually post. More on that idea in another post.
All in all, not a terrible first attempt. Later today, or during the next few days, I’ll post my 2005 list.
In honor of the November official launch of Firefox 1.0, and because I happened to be looking at my site stats tonight, here’s the breakdown of the browser usage for this site, as reported by my stats package, awstats. Unknown is anything the package has never heard of, whereas Others are known browsers, too small to list separately. This includes things like wget and curl, and even 57 hits from a pre-Firefox copy of Firebird. :
Browser Hits %age
------- ---- ------
FireFox 34868 37.9 %
Internet Explorer 28008 30.4 %
Safari 10536 11.4 %
Unknown 6080 6.6 %
Mozilla 4103 4.4 %
NetNewsWire 3253 3.5 %
Opera 1744 1.8 %
Netscape 1525 1.6 %
Camino 518 0.5 %
Konqueror 362 0.3 %
Others 861 0.9 %
I’m very proud of my readers for using Firefox far more than Internet Explorer. As to the 30.4%, and you know who you are, go on. Try it. All the cool kids are doing it.
Yesterday marked the official end of Dugh’s October Blogging Chalenge. I posted at least once per day from last Sunday through yesterday. I’ll let Dugh judge the other participants, but I hereby claim the offered “bragging rights”, since I actually did it. Dugh seems to be a day late with his Saturday entry, but he offered a lame excuse about his ISP being down so we’ll be nice ;) Kidding aside, this challenge was exactly the kick I needed to get more blogging done, so we’ve upped the ante to a month (30 days) of solid blogging, starting last Sunday as well. Thanks for the inspiration, Dugh. Keep an eye on the Calendar boxlet on the top right to see how I’m doing.
As exciting as post number 7 of the original Challenge was yesteray, this post is even better. This is the 200th post to my weblog. I made my 100th post on New Year’s Day, when I resolved to add 200 posts this year. October 10, and halfway there. Oops. Let’s not talk about the other resolutions.
Boy, what a lousy blogger am I. As part of my recent, er, sabatical from blogging, I completely missed my blog’s first Birthday. My first post was on Aug 14, 2003. Happy belated Birthday, Blog o’ mine.
The last couple of nearly-blogging-free months notwithstanding, I guess it’s been a good a first year. Nearly 175 posts in the first year. My current design may never win any awards, but it beats the original, and its successor. Along the way, I’ve added a few alternate stylesheets, upgraded my feed to RSS2.0, got everything (usually) to validate (html, css, rss). I switched from Textile to Markdown, added comments, added Markdown to my comments, and fought comment spammers. Most recently, I finally added a blogroll. I’ve made some new friends and linked to long time friends. Hopefully I’ve even managed to help people here and there - I’m (currently) still the top Google hit for “xemacs fink panther”, and my moreentries plugin for Blosxom has been used by a few people.
Here’s to another year. Thanks for reading.
I’m home now from my (too brief) vacation. Tomorrow I return to work. I’ve decided to end my blogging sabatical, and intend to start posting here again on a regular basis. I’ve got a few interesting things to post from my travels, but my first order of business is to re-enable comments on the site. Before I do, I need to make some changes to help handle the spam comment problem. I have some ideas, but I need to spend a little time on implementation. For now, I have unpacking to finish (sigh), but I’ll be working on the problem over the next few days.
Having been a week since my last blog entry, I thought I’d allay any fears (hopes?) of my demise. Not quite dead, just far too busy. I’ll try to do better next week.
Serendipity check: While thinking of a title for this post (you’ve probably noticed that I fancy myself clever in that department), I considered the old Mark Twain saw “Rumours of my death have been greatly exagerated”. I rejected it for two reasons. First, it’s overused. Second, it seems like I looked up the text for that once before, and it’s not exactly what everyone thinks. Instead I thought of the above quote from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. While Googling to check the exact wording, I stumbled across the (self-proclaimed) world’s most accurate script, a scene-by-scene script of the movie. Much of the dialog is linked to soundbites of the actual dialog. How cool is that? (The quote itself is from scene 15)
The only downside is that all of the dialog is in Real Audio format. Guess it’s time to go download that spyware free Real Audio distro from the BBC.
When I started this blog last August, I knew I’d be just another small voice in a crowded room roughly the size of Utah. I’ve had alot of fun writing my obscure little blog, and I have really enjoyed meeting a few people via emails and comments on the blog.
However, on Friday I arrived. I’m part of the in-crowd now. First, I got an invitation to Orkut, the Hipper-than-thou, invitation-only Friendster / LinkedIn clone that’s loosely associated with Google, from one of my readers (Thanks Chris!… and I haven’t forgotten about the broken comment system). I haven’t decided if I’m going to join yet- I didn’t do Friendster or LinkedIn, and I’ve read some things about the Orkut terms of use- but I sure was surprised to see the invite in my Inbox. Of course, I’m a week behind the real in-crowd, but I’m not proud. :)
The real clincher was a couple of hours later. Talk about feeling special… I got my first comment spam! Incidentally, if anyone happened to view said comment before I deleted it, appologies. It was pretty tasteless. Oh yeah, and not very smart.
You see, the commenter pasted in a very long list of links to “adult” websites. He even used valid HTML. Then he had to scroll down the page to hit the submit button, scrolling right past the notice that my comment system doesn’t accept HTML yet. So even if Google indexed that page in the hour the comment was up, there were no links. Ah, gee, shucks.
Fortunately, I recently upgraded my writebacks plugin by borrowing some code from Fletcher, adding IP tracking and email notification of new comments. So, as soon as I picked up my Powerbook, I got an email pointing me to the new comment. Two minutes later, it was deleted and the IP address was banned. Incidentally, if you’re running a Blosxom blog, check out Fletcher’s updated writebacks plugin. It combines a number of updates to the original, along with features from some other plugins. I haven’t upgraded mine yet, but I’m planning to. I think I have some other custom code in my existing writebacks, and I need to look over my old code first.