Brian's World

Vacation Continues

So I’m just over halfway done with my week of spring break. It feels like the remainder of the week will be going by much faster than the first half. I have yet to do any of the homework I told myself I was going to catch up on, but thats kinda typical of me on vacation. I’ve kept busy during the day working on some code and computer things. Concerto is coming along. From what I can tell, significant progress continues on the backend. I figured out how to convert ppt files to images, which is good because I feared that would be a major sticking point. The trick is to use open office running in xvfb (a virtual framebuffer). The code will be posted at some point if people care.

Yesterday I started prototyping a new message board solution for SHHS. I was asked to add a page to the old message board system, and look into the ability to change font sizes. I had an idea how to take care of the font size issue, but after I started looking at the code I found adding a new page to be not very pleasant. It has the page a or page b flipping concert very heavily coded into it. It came out to be my fastest development process… a little over a day for both the front end and the backend. I sent the people who use it a link to demo it, so who knows what they will say. They might not like the idea of using a web browser to admin it, but I hope the new features offset that. My hope was to use an implementation of concerto for the project, but it was faster to rewrite everything from scratch.

My shoebox continues to cause me problems. Initially I thought it was the ram. One stick failed memtest86 so I RMA’ed that one. I tried to boot it but Windows XP continued to blue screen. Right now its finishing up testing the hard drive, but I really doubt that’s the problem. I guess this will push the problem to the motherboard or processor, unfortunately the two components I can’t switch out very easily. I’m going to go look at it in a few minutes, maybe something will enlighten me.

I’m almost level 2 in PMOG, which I don’t really understand how to play. I guess I’m suppose to leave things when I visit websites, but I don’t understand the associations I get.. they seem random. Maybe I am just doing it wrong… I do have 2 invites to give out.. lol.

I’m gonna go get a snack and mess around with that computer.