I’ll start by explaining my absence. I’ve been very active on Facebook which is the reason for zero blog posts. Facebook is nice in that I can quickly throw a message there and those on my friends list can comment, and while for a bit I was using Twitter to post updates I started avoiding it as it’s set for open viewing rather than friends only like Facebook. And given I was updating Facebook all the time, I left the blog sitting here.
So what now? Well, I need to blog more. I know several people are following me here that aren’t on Facebook (sorry parents, you can’t be my Facebook friend) and I need to get things back on track here. Next, I need to use Twitter more. As part of that, I included my Twitter feed along the sidebar to the right, meaning you can quickly see what I’m up to in between blog posts.
I also updated the blog software and this busted some plug-ins, meaning you might notice a few things here or there that don’t quite work like they did before. If you run into these, please throw a comment in for this post just in case I missed it. I’ll admit, though, that the older the posts are, the higher chance they’re busted. I did work on the Magnum XL-200 video posted in the CoasterMania 2008 blog post, but that might be troublesome for some. Maybe I’ll upload it to YouTube, but I don’t like the idea of my videos being part of a giant pool of videos that just anyone can do whatever with, but, maybe I’m too paranoid and need to take off the tin foil hat.
And the site is no longer valid XHTML (the little W3C image in the sidebar). Translation: the site might not render correctly sometimes. When I get a chance, I’ll dig around and see what needs changing like I did last time I made some major changes. Until then, there might be an oddity here or there, but, I think it’ll be very minimal from the errors I saw called out.
3am – I’m headed for bed. Catch ya later. 
Published on
November 23, 2008 in
Blog.
So far, it seems the changes I made are working – a few people I talked with said the site’s loading quicker and without generating any errors. It’s nice to hear – while I did start fixing it at around 11pm last night after playing Halo 3 online, I didn’t stop until around 5am when I finally got the XHTML 1.0 Transitional check to pass, and I’m glad that work paid off.
What I haven’t mentioned here yet is I also did some background work on the server itself. It’s been emailing me for a while now saying it’s not happy, and initially it was just that and nothing else. Later on it started partially dropping off the web for 5 or 10 minutes and then would return. I say partially as things like web pages wouldn’t open from it (you couldn’t read this blog, for example) but other items kept working, such as email.
For that one, I started around 8pm Friday night and wrapped up around 4am. After a few hours of digging, I pinned it down to two issues. First, up2date (a program that updates some of the software running on here) wasn’t reaching a valid update server, and second, the website managing software that runs on here also wasn’t reaching update servers. The second one was easy – I had an entry in the hosts file that aimed the update process at a specific server, and that server isn’t around anymore. I took that out and it started working just fine.
The first one, however, wasn’t as easy for me to fix, given that up2date is aimed at an update server at The Planet, the company that I have this server at. I opened a trouble ticket explaining that up2date was aimed at a specific server that was responding to pings (a.k.a. it was booted up and listening) but was returning “Internal Server Error†to my update requests. About an hour later they had it reconfigured with updated settings and things were working properly (Yay! Thanks The Planet ). I spent the next few hours getting everything updated and I also adjusted the firewall’s settings a little.
All in all, I think we’re looking good, and it seems those I talked with agree. But do me a favor – knock on wood for me and hope we’ll be problem free for a while. I can’t keep staying up past 3am every night. 
Published on
November 23, 2008 in
Blog.
Going off the post below, I made several changes to the site to help prevent the “Done, but with errors on page†/ “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site…†message. There were two ‘problem areas’ that I discovered. First is the post about this year’s CoasterMania. The video I put in was very badly added in there. The second was the little graphic animation along the right that shows different groups I support. So what was the problem (hopefully)?
The code for both was not XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant. For those that don’t know, there are different standards for placing information on the Internet. At the beginning of a website page’s code, there’s supposed to be information on what standard is in use so that your web browser can properly understand how to show you the web page you’re loading. It’s also designed to help a web page look similar (if not the same) across different web browsers. What happened here is that both the video and the animation parts were hand-coded in, and I didn’t follow this standard exactly right.
You can verify that I’m XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant by clicking this graphic that I can proudly display now.
But that wasn’t the whole problem. Back to that video. The way it was rendered (drawn on your screen) was first some text was placed there – the exact text doesn’t really matter (it was “Magnum XL-200 video†but again not important). Then, some JavaScript (it’s a way to program things, to put it simply) took that text and threw the video on top of it. It was this act of modifying text into an image that I think caused this. It would be ok normally, but again referring to the Microsoft Knowledge Base article on this, I was editing text outside of the child container (I think), which lead to running into the bug.
It is 5 am local time, so at this point, I could be completely wrong on any of this being the cause, but hopefully I’ve fixed things up.
Published on
November 23, 2008 in
Blog.
Some, including myself, notice that when we visit my blog using Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or 8 Beta 2 (I’m running the latter, I think… it’s whatever’s in this Windows 7 build I’m on) that it’ll load the page part way and then end with “Done, but with errors on page,†in the lower-left corner. Sometimes, it’ll flat out not load the page. Sometimes it works just fine. I looked into it a bit, and it seems we’re intermittently hitting this bug in Internet Explorer’s rendering engine:
Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 927917
BUG: Error message when you visit a Web page or interact with a Web application in Internet Explorer: "Operation aborted"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927917/
The gist of it is I’m putting containers in the page and they’re trying to modify outside the container – more specifically, there’s a container that has another container inside it, and that inner container is trying to modify the one it’s in. To put it differently, there’s this set of blog posts running down the page, which is a container, and then I embed videos into them (these are a container). These video containers are trying to do kung-fu of some kind on the main blog container, and hence, we hit the bug. If you hit the bug and only get part of my blog to render, you might notice the last blog post to show up has a video in it – I think Internet Explorer is rendering that video container and then hitting the bug.
I need to look at the code versus XHTML 1.0 Transitional and see what needs fixing. If you go here [w3.org] and see a bunch of errors, you know I haveb’t yet.
Published on
November 12, 2008 in
Blog.
I’ve had a few draft posts in waiting for a while now. Before I start both posting these entries and uploading the images that go with them into the gallery, I ran through and updated the blog code, the gallery code, the theme code and plug-in code. Of course, after that, I have to go back in and rehack in all the changes I made to everything, and after last night and tonight, that’s all done. In the next few days I should be able to get some images from my summer travels uploaded and afterwards post their corresponding entries. Let’s see how much time I have the next few evenings.
Published on
June 3, 2008 in
Blog.
Hi everyone! For those that were trying to get here the last 3 days, you were greeted with a big ol’ “Page Cannot Be Displayed†message of some sort. I rent this web server from The Planet, which is a dedicated server company in Texas. They operate data centers in both Houston and Dallas, with my server being in their H1 data center in Houston. Back on Saturday, an electrical explosion occurred in the underground electrical conduit that feeds H1. This explosion and resulting fire completely destroyed the equipment connecting the building to the electric grid, the underground cabling powering the first floor, as well as the first floor’s main distribution panel and transfer switch and the four walls surrounding the electrical equipment room. Luckily, no one was injured in the explosion.
About 46 hours later, on Monday, a backup generator came online to run the first floor. The building has on-site generators wired into the building, and second-floor servers were back on early Monday from these generators. The explosion rendered the generator hook-up to the first floor unusable, which is why a different generator needed to be brought in. This got the first floor servers back online, but later that night faulty current sensors took that generator offline, meaning the web server was back off again. Another generator was brought over, and things seem to be running ok at this point.
In the foreseeable future here, there might be more intermittent downtime, and at some point the server will need to switch back to main electric power once the electrical room is built and back online. Until then, it’s "Business As Usual" for now.
Published on
May 16, 2008 in
Blog.
I tweaked a few things on the site. First, I’m using Lightbox for images in blog posts. You’ve seen this in the “Random Gallery Image†for some time, but I changed things so that it also works in blog posts, which you’ve also seen recently, such as my last blog post. It’s the thing that allows you to click a picture and it loads a larger version of it in a fancy window on top of the site.
I also added an “I Support…†animated GIF on the right which links to a page mentioning the various organizations I support through financial contributions and/or by participating in their events. Hopefully the rotating image isn’t distracting.
What’cha think? What other changes do you suggest?
Published on
October 10, 2007 in
Blog.
Last night I started on an adventure to update the site, such as the blog software, theme code, and redo the photo gallery. It was a little bumpier than I hoped, but it went decent. WordPress is up to its latest version, the K2 theme is on its latest release candidate, and the Gallery photo gallery is installed and working. Due to the WordPress and K2 updates, I had to change the right side a tiny bit to keep things working, but it shouldn’t appear too much different than before.
One new thing is the Random Gallery Image which picks a random photo from the gallery to show you. If you click it, it’ll open it on top of the blog; no need to load a new page. When you click Close on the image, you’ll be back at the blog. Nifty!
Published on
October 3, 2007 in
Blog.
For the heck of it, I turned off the registration requirement regarding posting comments. Let’s see what happens.
Published on
May 27, 2007 in
Blog.
When I went to Cedar Point opening weekend, I took over 5 dozen photos. From some of those I cropped out sections for the header image at the top of the blog. You’ll rotate through them while you’re browsing the site, or if you just hit refresh. Their presentation is random, so you might see some familiar ones, and then suddenly a new one shows up.
Also, when I switched to the K2 theme, the weather didn’t quite render like I wanted it to. It was a bulleted list. I took a bit to look into getting rid of that, and now the bullets are gone. Looks nicer this way. I think so anyway.
