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.
I’m approaching my 3-year anniversary here at Microsoft as a full time employee, and even in this short time, I’ve seen many changes, both on my direct team and as an entire company. I received word about this and thought you might be interested in this change in the pipeline. We’re announcing the end of Windows Live OneCare and our move towards a no-cost security solution, code-named “Morro,†that will be available the second half of 2009.
As a Windows Live OneCare user myself, one question that comes to mind is what happens to our current subscriptions. That’s just one of many questions I’m sure many are asking. Rather than try and reiterate information here, you can find out more via Microsoft PressPass [microsoft.com] and at the Windows Live OneCare Team Blog [live.com].
Interesting stuff indeed.
This post is provided “AS IS†without warranty, and confers no rights.
Yesterday I and over 5,000 others gathered in Seattle’s Volunteer Park to rally against California’s passage of Proposition 8 and to support marriage equality. This was just one of many taking place across the country in a huge coordinated effort which had expectations of over 1 million participants. The rallies across the country have roots here in Seattle – it all started here. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels declared yesterday, 15 Nov 2008, “Marriage Equality Day.â€
After a few speeches in the park, we marched down to Broadway and turned onto Pine to end at the downtown Westlake Center. I’m really glad I went and I’m glad my friends invited me to march with them. Two of them are registered under Washington state’s domestic partnership, and I can’t wait for them to one day enjoy marriage equality here and all over the United States.
I took pictures of course – you can find them via the Gallery link in menu at the top.
Published on
November 12, 2008 in
General.
After not attending last year, it was really fun to go to this year’s CoasterMania! event at Cedar Point. You know the drill: exclusive ride time, free lunch, some swag, more exclusive ride time, Q&A with park management – translation: a good time.
I didn’t really take many pictures this time around (just how many pictures of Magnum do I need?). So instead of pictures, here’s a small video of Magnum XL-200 at its first hill and some of the second hill off in the distance. I shot this with my digital camera, so it’s not exactly camcorder quality, but still good for the Internet I think.
I was of course exhausted from this trip. During the day I went back to the hotel room to both grab a nap and to cool off – it was reallllllly hot and humid out! But, that really hot day led up to a nice and comfortable evening and our exclusive ride time on Magnum was absolutely great! Shorts and a t-shirt, just great! And, this year, if there was no one waiting in the row to get in the train, we didn’t have to get out! I went round and round and round and round on the thing, and I loved every minute of it. I hope next year we get more of the same – I’ll definitely be back! 
Ok, one picture. Each year they make signs for CoasterMania! and have them near the rides they open for exclusive ride time. After the event, they throw them away, sooooooo…
You can click that for a larger version.
Like two years ago when I took the sign home with me, Northwest Airlines freaked out when I wanted to check it, thinking it’d be totally destroyed. But, it made it back just fine. I want to hang them in my office, but I haven’t solved how yet. Have some ideas? Let me know in the comments.
Back in May a friend of mine, Jerry, whom I met while making my many trips to Cedar Point, found someone special to spend his life with, and I had the honor and pleasure of going to Holiday World where he wed Leslie. I’ve been to Holiday World [holidayworld.com] before, but this is my first coaster wedding anywhere, and I must say Holiday World is a nice park to go to for a wedding.
Leslie and Jerry were wed on The Voyage, Holiday World’s most recent coaster addition. I’d never been on it before as the last time I was at Holiday World it wasn’t there at all. I think that when they went to build this thing, they made a list of what they could possibly pull of on a wooden coaster, and then decided to do all of them in the same ride. While it’s a great ride, and I enjoyed it very much, it’s not something I can ride over and over again like Magnum, and after a few loops, I just had to stop.
Some other regulars from the Magnum group were at the park as well, and we hung out together both in Holiday World and in Splashin; Safari, the water park there. Weather was very cooperative and it was a great time for all of us. I’m glad I got to be part of Jerry and Leslie’s coaster wedding and I wish them all my best as they journey through life together.
Of course, I took a bunch of pictures, including the wedding, as well as lots of pictures of The Voyage. The park also had its coaster enthusiast event that weekend, which included an opportunity to walk back through Voyage’s track area and take pictures. We also had exclusive ride time on several rides. I’m hoping to attend the event, called Holliwood Nights, again next year.
Check out the pictures up in the Gallery [aaronhulett.com] and if you’re ever near Santa Claus, Indiana, head on over to Holiday World.
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
November 11, 2008 in
General.
On one of the mail groups I’m on, an email came that mentioned a Frontline show that PBS ran some time ago. Its title is, “A Class Divided,†and it talks about teaching third-grade children about discrimination in what I would describe as one of the best ways possible: by letting them experience it. The person sending the email our way mentioned if we hadn’t seen it that it might be of interest, and having seen it now, I completely agree and am sharing it with you. Some time when you have about an hour, visit this Frontline page, click “Watch the Full Program†and start with Section 1 to watch it. I’m curious what you think – feel free to let me know via a post comment.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/
Published on
November 10, 2008 in
General.
MSNBC hosts Countdown with Keith Olbermann, a show that I have set to record via Windows Media Center. He spoke on Prop 8, and I must say, he says what I have trouble saying, but very much think and wonder about. Thanks Keith.
