…you know, for a new blog update. I mean, if I really had more time to type things into my website only to have it be publicly criticized, gosh darn, that’s all the motivation I need! I don’t need time, I don’t need to work on linear algebra homework, I can just write in my blog. Because I haven’t done it in a while. Half a year isn’t so bad.

So what’s new? I’ve began dabbling a bit into open source software in my free time (instead of writing in my blog! the blasphemy) and while the project is nothing too glamorous at this point, it is being maintained and updated…in my free time…blog…

Yeah, so the concept of this project was to simply take the existing (and pretty well built) wTorrent project and turn it into something more advanced…like wTorrent Advanced !  yes, very original; it took me all of my non-existent free time to come up with that and the logo.

wTorrent Advanced

Ok, so what is this exactly? Simply put, it is a web interface to a shell based torrent client (rtorrent) that communicates via XMLRPC. This project takes wTorrent’s codebase and improves the general user experience by adding in nifty little controls – file management, expanded admin capabilities, torrent management enhancements via categories/tags/whatever I want to put in. More details can be found at my trac site.

Right now, the project is very bleeding-edge and alpha-phasish, meaning if you want to try it, it’s at your own risk.

Now it’s 10PM and I gotta check woot.

So a month or so back I decided my site needed a bit of a face-lift. Thus, at that point I gathered together what resources I could gather, created a test directory, and started mashing away at a new look. And today I present the first look for the new Austrian Alex site – with theme adequately named “Simplistic Matters”.

So what’s new in this theme?

• A LOT of new optimizations in the CSS code and image files, making the site load faster.
• XHTML 1.0 Strict compliance for all pages, along with validated CSS
• A more professional template with a more simplistic view. Easy to read and standardized.
• Wider layout – optimizing screen real-estate for those bigger monitors.
• No more wide column layout. All pages have a sidebar which simplifies navigation.
• Various bug fixes with coding and images.
• A new logo. That’s actually readable. YAY.
• And some other things I can’t think of at the moment.

All in all the site turned out to be somewhat decent and the web designing part of my head has been fed. The design is not done yet, as I have a few more things in terms of bordering and coloring to add. Gray is good, but it’d be nice to add some vector art here and there and get away from everything rectangular. Or not; it all depends, but I put up a beta version of this template anyways.

So if you’d like to, tell me what you think of the new layout and any improvements you might suggest.

On another note, the gallery template has not been changed, so it’s still using the same old layout. This will be my next item to fix up.

And for further news, I am planning on destroying the Windows Vista OS I am currently running this server on (yeah, you’re probably looking at your monitor in complete shock, but it works great with Apache…) and switching over to some version of Ubuntu (there, happy now? No, I won’t switch over to server software because I need a desktop platform to actually do work at work ). This will happen as soon as I obtain an external hard drive to back up data and such on this computer. There will probably be a day or so of “downtime” (I will move the contents over to another computer and it’ll be hosted there for a while), but I am unsure of the exact date.

My web server has recently undergone maintenance and has moved to a new location. As such, I attempted to have the domain point to a temporary web page while this was all going on.

Now, except for the fact that GoDaddy has now taken my domain hostage to make any changes back to what they were, everything seems to be working dandy. Meaning the main site is back online, but that’s about it. I’m currently working on getting the gallery and private music site online at the moment, but without the DNS propagations, I am currently at a stalemate.

Hopefully things will fix themselves soon enough.

Edit: March 11, 2008

Nar, GoDaddy is still being a brat and isn’t changing my settings correctly. That, and with the recent events of GoDaddy taking down a legitimate website has made me move over to another registrar. Hopefully 1&1 will serve me better than GoDaddy has.

So I was browsing the internet today and checking for latest versions of software (PHP, Apache, etc) and I thought I might as well check on an update for Gallery. I was looking through the page and found that WordPress can be integrated with Gallery through a plugin; how I did not come across this plugin before is beyond me. So of course, the installation of said plugin turned out to be a necessity.

Everything went smoothly, as with any other plugin – it got put into the plugin directory and activated through the WordPress Admin section. Then to editing the options – walking into the first tab under WPG2 presented me with a nice entry about “your Gallery rewrite module has been disabled. Go to the next tab to re-enable.” Alright, I thought to myself, shouldn’t be too hard to get fixed up. The next tab presented me with a mostly white (no CSS) style page that told me that the URL rewrite couldn’t be enabled and to go and re-enable it within Gallery. Odd.

So, I navigated back to the main tab of WPG2 only to find myself staring at an Internal 500 Server error. Great, the plugin broke something on my machine. All of my site (including my Gallery) was filled with Internal 500 Server errors. I couldn’t disable the plugin through the WordPress interface because of this, so I went and tried manually deleting the files from the plugin directory – only to find that something was still locked onto the folder, not letting me delete it. I then proceeded straight to the .htaccess files (since I knew that the error had something to do with rewriting one of these) located in the root directories of my site and found that they hadn’t been touched since the upgrade that I did a few weeks back. Odd, yet again.

Replacing all my files in my site directory with backups didn’t help either; my site was still filled with the 500 error. This plugin couldn’t have messed something up with Apache itself, could it? After all, this wasn’t a malicious plugin of any sort. I went back to my Apache directory and checked folder modification dates to find that the only folders that had been affected recently were those of the logs. Ah, why hadn’t I thought of that yet – check the error log and see what Apache is really complaining about. Sorting through the various data and 404 errors, I came across to the last entries – something about URL rewriting not being able to accept a parameter (edit: specifically “C:\.htaccess: RewriteBase takes one argument, the base URL of the per-directory context”). Interesting. Even more interesting was that Apache was now referring to an .htaccess file that was under C:\. Why in the world would an .htaccess file be written there? Apparently, this was a problem with Gallery itself as the functions that were invoked were from the Gallery coding referenced by the WPG2 plugin (though the plugin could have passed in some bad parameters as well, not really sure here at this point – URL rewriting works perfectly with Gallery, so I assume it’s something with the plugin).

So I deleted the .htaccess file from the “ultimate” root directory and found my site to be back up and running. Well, that’s good, but I still want the plugin to work…so how? Well, if something (either the WPG2 plugin or Gallery) likes writing to C:\.htaccess, let’s make it so it doesn’t. Making a blank .htaccess file and setting the permissions to read-only, I moved it to the C:\ directory and then went back to the WPG2 rewrite tab in the Admin section of WordPress. Needless to say, everything else went quite smoothly from then on. I’m still going to check in on exactly which function call made that .htaccess file in the first place and hopefully fix this need for the blank .htaccess hack.

Edit: (12/12/07) The .htaccess file is only needed the first time you enter into the rewrite tab in the WPG2 options. After initializing the rewrite options through there, I could remove the .htaccess file and have no further problems. So it must be something in the first “set-up” of this plugin that’s causing this problem.

There will be some maintenance on this site’s server tomorrow (Tuesday, December 4, 2007) at around 1-3PM PST. Downtimes could range from 15 minutes to a few hours, depending on how long it will take for me to upgrade the Apache server (and tweak a few other things). If something really goes wrong, I still have a backup server to use, so the site should still be up by around 5PM latest.

Also, this blog now has Akismet installed, therefore all comments should now appear without them being moderated. If your comment doesn’t show up within 5 minutes of you posting it, send me an email, as Akismet might have thought you were a spammer (and if you were, shame on you and your darn cheap viagra).

-Alex

For those who tried reaching my site yesterday from 3PM on, there was a power outage at the Eastern Washington Campus that was caused by a rainstorm (possibly lightning was the cause). All info on this site is safe, however, and daily backups are still being made just in case anything goes too awry. Having my own server to look after actually makes it easier on me when something does go wrong, because I know exactly how to fix it, and in this case, it was as simple as pushing on the power button .

And apparently, even if there was a backup supply, it would’ve needed to last for 20 or more minutes, since that’s how long the outage was. My old supply wouldn’t have lasted me 5 minutes.

I’ve finally acquired my old domain name back which I once used to have (then for free, now for not so free but more customizability). So you can now visit this site by simply going to www.austrianalex.com and you can access the gallery by going to pics.austrianalex.com. Reviews on the new computer are still coming, and I’m currently typing this post out on it.

Now, on setting up my own DNS name server…

Time for an update -

My new computer shall be arriving soon – in pieces; that I will have to build together into one intricate, yet delightfully powerful gaming powerhouse. And this is the whole package deal, with the monitor and everything, since my last computer (and the one I’m currently using) is a laptop. Not many laptop parts fit with regular PC parts, unfortunately. Luckily, I’ll still have a backup/portable computer if something does go awry.

The price was steep, but not as steep as it would’ve been if I purchased everything in a bundled package. Partially, this was because I overestimated the price on some things and decided to go for more quality and faster items/chips. It’ll work out great for me in the long run, with some overclocking here and there. Speaking of overclocking, I can safely do that and have a nice and cool environment, apparently. With 4 fans in the case, plus another few here and there, I’m not sure how loud it’ll be, but the cooling is a definite plus.

I’ll bring more in depth reviews of the products and their price once I get the computer and assemble it. Perhaps I shall write a post on that computer, perhaps not. We shall see.

Camera Blues

In other news, my FujiFilm S700 Digital Camera broke down on me and gave me an infamous “Zoom Error”. I tried all the suggestions, replacing batteries, shaking it up a bit, hitting it against an object (said to work, but it didn’t). The problem was probably due to the two tiny gears inside the camera that controlled the powerful 10x optical zoom that somehow got misaligned. Either way, it was too much of a hassle for me to try anything else, so I returned the camera back to Wal-Mar and it was easily taken back since it was under the 30-day warranty (yeah, it broke down that soon). I took quite a few good pictures with it, though, and you can view the results on my gallery. The other problems I noticed with it were that it blew out highlights like none other and had a few problems with purple fringing (things that you can find out on any camera review site, really). And when taking scenic pictures (of buildings, especially), the picture would get distorted in a bubble fashion, making the object look bloated or curved depending on the picture.

The good part of the camera? The price, being only ~$200, the quality with 10x optical zoom and 7MP pictures, and of course the size was quite manageable. Other things included the camera taking 4 AA’s, an SD or xD card, and having a nice viewing LCD screen.

My next camera will probably be a Canon Powershot or a Canon Digital Rebel; still weighing the options of both.

Well, I am currently in the process of changing the blog’s theme, trying out a few experimental things. If it starts looking like something is way off-center or something is amiss, that would probably be me.

Thing is, however, that changing the default WordPress theme is (or was) quite a challenge. When I thought I had edited the settings for the header, I found out that none of my changes worked, even though the style sheet was loaded up from the site (not cached) each time. I would change a background color only to get the same color over and over. Then I scrolled down a bit more in the stylesheet, only to find a duplicate entry for the class that not only overrides my changes made in the earlier part of the stylesheet, it overrides its own self by default. It got me thinking, just how unoptimized is this technology that I’m working with? Well, hopefully it’s just the template (which I’ll be throwing away anyways and making my own), although I have heard other stories.

Also, this site (from this front page point on) is now “XHTML 1.0 Strict” Validated. Yes, I’m one of those standards people, not just because I like having the little button (although that is a plus) but also because as a programmer, I know why this validation is in place and it can only help save precious time later on in next-generation developments.

Well, it’s been a while, I must admit. So much has happened yet it seems all so normal now. Why haven’t I updated my precious blog? Well, time constraints were just one of the many issues. Laziness was another. But now I’m back, and hopefully I’ll be updating my blog a bit more regularly, now that I have a cause and all. Somewhat.

So, new things, well, firstly, a newly acquired host. Somewhat paid host. It’s free, advanced, and more details can be found on the first news item of austrian.uni.cc. A lot more details there and such. And links to the gallery that I set up can also be found near there.

What else? Well, the new job, of course. I’m actually employed in two places, it’s just one of them never called me in for work quite yet. I’m a web developer at Eastern Washington University, and also a tech-support kinda guy. The second job I have is kind of a sub-job of my primary web-developing job – to be the University Honors Webmaster. It’s a little less glamorous than the title actually sounds. At least it still pays well enough.

Finally finished my freshman year of college – pretty much went through the whole year and got Dean’s List awards from my department (Computer Science). I just find programming to be simple, challenging, and fun. And I just love to see people squint in confusion when I start talking about Euclid’s recursive algorithm.

So, now, for the purpose of this blog, I’ll have it maintain its blog status but I’ll integrate more technical stuff, possibly something like programming tips, or pretty much the stuff I’ve already been putting on here, except not as lame or outdated.

So yeah, there ya go, more to come soon.
-Alex