i had a great post started. except the success of what i was writing hinged on my ability to upgrade the linux kernel on my debian box. so i could get usb support. yeah, i know. your typical friday night.
i tried compiling the 2.6 kernel (a 20 minute endeavor on my little mini-itx baby)–several times. and each time booting with the new kernel i got the following error:
Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(3,1)
4 hours of that and i figured screw it.
so i tried to update to the latest kernel available (2.4) via debian’s dselect utility. well, that worked, the system booted, except without being able to talk to the internet–not so great for a webserver. being a little rusty on using ifconfig, i just wanted to get back to a working machine and be done with it.
so finally i got back to a 2.2 kernel with dselect. back to where i was when i started. the machine boots. and it can talk to the internet. what a waste.
i’ve been up to a lot of reading and thinking and not much doing.
xmlhttprequest is, since google suggest came out in the fall, about the hottest thing since sliced bread. i love reading people’s blogs saying, “why the fuss, this has been available circa 2001, people.” well maybe not exactly. xml over http has been available. but that’s no good unless you’ve got an html client with good xml and dom support. microsoft innovated here, creating xmlhttprequest for i’m not sure what version of ie, and mozilla followed. of course mozilla/firefox has the javascript edge (brendan eich of mozilla created it) and all the passionate users and web developers.
google is no longer about search. they are about making everyone that doesn’t work for them feel bad. i mean, google suggest was awesome. blew my mind. it was like magic. we now know that was only a warning shot. then they blew everything out of the water with google maps. but now the rest of us, who fancy ourselves web developers, just feel bad. like now i’ve got to go back to school and get a proper education. or find something else to do.
i understand the architecture, but i’m not sure how/where/if i’d want to implement it. i love flickr’s implementation, where you can click on a photo name or caption, which turns it into an html form, and when you click submit, it sends the information to flickr’s api via xmlhttprequest. all this happens without a single page load. so you can go back and or forward without tripping over previous form edits.
makes me wonder why i haven’t seen any implementation of a blog commenting system that uses xmlhttprequest. i don’t have the time or inkling to work on a project like that, so i’m just putting it out there, a lazy web idea free for the taking.
today i wrote a stripped down html generator (in php, of course). there’s got a be a jazzier word than generator. you know something that’s the opposite of a parser. something that models and spits out a tree.
it has the ability to generate a single HTML tag with attributes and optionally some content and an end tag. like this:
<acronym title="mainstream media">msm</acronym>
or this:
<img src="some_image.jpg" />
that’s it. in all its glory. seems totally worthless, huh? but the beauty is that it can represent any tag (element actually) with any attributes (in other words it will create well-formed but not valid html). so it’s pretty flexible.
and the contents (“msm” in the first example above) can be either text and/or other elements which can in turn contain text and/or other elements. so i can use it to model a whole webpage, since every webpage is at the root composed of a single html element:
<html>justin <em>blathering</em> about some techie junk</html>
it’s kind of modeled on my rudimentary understanding of the dom with a much simpler/cleaner interface. it doesn’t have any fancy tree traversing methods yet but i’m getting there.
anyway, here’s the code: HTMLElement.phps.
update: in php 5, the new dom functions should accomplish what i’ve intended with my code.
back in the day, jason, jean, marianne and i would discuss what we thought were the “rules of blogging.” then we’d poke fun at ourselves and others for breaking them.
as a result of talking about these rules, i sometimes get chidded for the unintended burden they impose on others. so i thought i’d just list them out–which was harder than i thought. turns out there are several kinds.
things that i blog about
- i blog about events, news, music, food, projects, thoughts, ideas, technology, etc., involving or of interest to me
- i don’t blog about blogging (with exceptions), my current emotional state, my job/coworkers, or my love life
- i don’t feel obligated to blog when i have nothing to say
- i try to include photos and other images with posts
- i keep posts short with 3 to 4 sentences per paragraph separated by full line breaks
generally accepted tenets of blogging
- post regularly
- title each post
- link to things on the web
- provide each post with its own url (permalink)
- allow full access to archived posts
- allow comments
- identify updated content with an appropriate label (such as “update” or “correction”)
- provide a feed (rss, atom, etc)
some proposed ethical standards for blogging
- respond to comments
- don’t blog about blogging
- don’t quote content without citing a url
- don’t post to communicate indirectly with another person
- don’t obfuscate a post with overly abstract language
- respect the privacy of other people you blog about
- don’t assume everyone irl has already read your latest post
- don’t advertise a new blog–let it be discovered
it should go without saying that knowing the rules of a new medium or a new place is integral to being a good and conscientious participant. on one hand, ferreting out these rules helps to better understand the constraints people put on themselves and other members of the community. on the other hand, knowing the rules helps in knowing which might need to be broken.
responses
To recap the saga from $895 of PAIN:
after doing some research into the guts of my laptop, i discovered LCDS 4 LESS had the screen for my laptop at a much reduced though still painful cost of $495. they also said it only takes about 15 minutes to install. so i’m going to do it myself, and then probably put up the busted but working LCD panel on ebay.
yesterday i finally had some uninterrupted time to sit down and take my laptop apart to replace the cracked lcd panel. i found a t40-series maintenance manual online which basically said take the whole laptop apart before doing anything. yeah right.
i skipped all that and unscrewed the 11 tiny screws that held the front plastic bezel in place, which i couldn’t do without first removing the 11 small black plastic stickers on top of the screws (see image below). eventually i got the bezel off (not an easy task), and then had to figure out how to unscrew the lcd screen from the support braces that held it in place. 6 screws later and the whole display unit is starting to fall apart in my hands. this is when i realize removing the whole lcd display unit from the base of the laptop might have been prudent.
i switch out the lcd screens, and suddenly find two hands are far too few when putting something back together. so jane held things in place at various angles as i tried to remember how everything fit back together.
before putting the persnickety plastic bezel back on, i powered the laptop up, and voila! 1400×1050 pixels of brilliance, not one dead or cracked. so the bezel goes back on, screws and stickers back in place, and i sit back, feeling quite smug that i saved $400 by replacing it myself in a little over an hour.
i take a break from the laptop, and when i come back to it 30 minutes later, i “wake” it from its sleeping state, it wakes, and then the whole computer just shuts off. i wonder to myself whether that battery had any charge. when i go to turn it back on, it begins starting up but immediately shuts off before getting to the IBM ThinkPad logo. “cruel gods!” at this point i’m too tired/frustrated to do anything more.
tonight, i decided to take the whole thing apart again (just to see), but this time with the speed and precision of a laptop disassembling pro. after the bezel comes off, i notice that the two wires that i thought supplied power to the lcd panel look crimped. i wiggled them, powered the laptop back on, and the screen started working, sort of.
at first it only stayed lit when i moved the trackpoint (mouse), then later (after logging in–with my fingerprint) it stayed lit permanently. i couldn’t determine a direct relationship between the wiggling of the wires and the functioning of the lcd panel. it’s almost like it took time for the power to flow all the way through the system.
anyway, it’s been working for the last fews hours without issue. i’ve restarted it, i’ve put it to sleep. the front bezel is back on, but not screwed in yet. whatever might have been wrong (any thoughts?) appears to have resolved itself in a very un-electronics like way.