Archive of

Sound and Beauty

Many, many years ago I used to dream of owning a true audiophile listening system.  Suffice to say that the unlimited financial resources required for such a venture have never materialized and likely never will.  But if they ever do, I can say with certainty that such a setup will most definately include some of the absolutely beautiful work by electron luv.  Not only are these works of art, it would appear that they are sonic marvels.

Lost in Place

Just enjoying a few days of R&R while my parents are in town visiting me and my family.  Last week was brutally long and arduous, but well worth it…I've accepted a position at Synacor as a "Code Review Engineer" beginning November 8th.  Thus I notified my current employer, Choice One Communications that November 5th will be my last day there.  In my new position I will initially be working with the different programming groups to learn their system.  After a couple of months I will be responsible for making sure these groups all stay on the same page and do things in a consistent and compatible manner.  Quite an exciting new challenge for me and I'm very much looking forward to it.

We had a very nice weekend and went out to Becker Farms on Saturday to pick pumpkins.  This has sort of become a tradition for Mary Lou and I and it was especially nice to have my parents along with us this year.  Sunday was largely spent lounging around whereby I've either cracked, broke or did something awful to my ribs just left of my sternum.  I was wrestling with Colin and he was pushing against them with his feet when I felt this rather unpleasant "POP"!  It's not slowing me down too much, but it is rather uncomfortable and occasionally painful if it gets squeezed at all.

And tomorrow it's back to the working world again.

Sushi USB Drive

I've had the lust, but not the cash for a USB Drive for quite a while.  But these sushi drives are truly lust-worthy at any price, although apparently they are only available in 32MB or 128MB sizes (at this time I would assume).  A 256MB or larger drive would be better, but gift purchases are gladly accepted!

PolarBlog V1.2 Roadmap

PolarBlog V1.2 will contain the following new features:

  • Ping-O-Matic! Support
  • Improved Entry Index/Archive List
  • Preview Popup
  • Double Entry Prevention
The Ping-O-Matic support has been integrated and is currently running successfully on this site.  If you are interested in the technical details, please see the Implementing Pingers entry.

The Entry Index looked nice when I originally implemented it.  At this point I think it just looks shitty and inefficient.  Sure they match the entry style, but they just waste a lot of space and have too much fluff.  Thus this will be changing to a more basic listing of entries separated into months, still in reverse chronological order.

One of the features from PWL that I had no use for was the entry preview display.  My answer to this was the display/no display option.  That fulfilled my preview needs while also adding the ability to save partial entries that could be finished later without being displayed in the meantime.  Some of you disagree and seem to miss the preview option.  Because of the way saving and displaying of entries works in PolarBlog, the best way for me to add an entry preview option is with a popup preview window.  This will have configuration options so you can set the size roughly the same as the main entry panel display area.  This is necessary because when using the left navigation option, the display area in significantly smaller.

There have been reports of duplicates when creating new entries.  The only way I know this could happen is if you use your browser's back button after creating a new entry.  Currently when you create a new entry if you use your browser's back button to backup and edit the entry, when you resubmit it, a duplicate entry is created.  This is because PolarBlog doesn't know that you've used the back button to (effectively) edit a (now) existing entry.  Thus it see this as a new entry and treats it as such.  But it really isn't, it's an edit of an existing entry.

I will be looking into adding a token value to the submission form.  This value will also be stored in your login session until the entry is created.  At that time it will be removed from the session so subsequent submission will not be excepted.  In the meantime (and always actually), once you create an entry you should only use the "Edit Entry" link to edit your entries.

Looking towards the future, here's some other features that are on the "desirable" list that may see the light of day in PolarBlog at some point:
  • I18N (Internationalization) - This will be the major focus of V1.3
  • Trackback Support
  • Pingback Support
  • Entry Posting via email
If you have other features you would like to see added, please forward them to me for consideration.

10/17/2004
I've updated the entry index to display entries by month and year in reverse chronological order.  You can see it in action on my entry index.  The devfault value for the DEFAULT_ARCHIVE_CNT configuration directive has been changed from 20 to 100 to better support the new index page.