sensory output » blog

Anew

Kyle Rove — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:00:23 +0000

So, it has been quite some time since my last post in this space. In the last month or so, I ached to get this back up and running. In spite of working 80+ hours a week and getting little sleep and flying all around the country, I have done it. While this post, again, is a post about posting/blogging/self-served, it is a new beginning. Of though, emotion, travails, successes, and failures.

Here it comes!

Insight

Kyle Rove — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 01:37:28 +0000

I have not written much in this space lately. Whether because of lack of anything important to say or just being downright busy all the time, I’m not really sure. Either way, I was recently thinking how a blog provides skewed insight into a persona (in this case, mine). In so many cases, we human beings attempt to encapsulate the objects of our attention into manageable, discrete packages, such that we might better understand said objects. Too often though, we fall into the trap of over-simplifying an idea, a thing, or worse, a person.

While weblogs are supposed to allow anybody to publish his or her thoughts to the world at large (or anybody willing to Google your name), the medium necessarily encapsulates only one part of its author: that which he is willing to share. No more than I do not shout from the roof tops my most personal of phantasmagoria, this space does not transmit that which I would not otherwise share with complete strangers out browsing the tubes. Each author finds the appropriate balance with which he or she is comfortable, and I believe I have found mine. In the larger sense, though, this purposeful subset may inadvertantly steer you, dear readers, into the false notion that all you discover here is me.

Please know that it is not.

Titan

Kyle Rove — Fri, 05 May 2006 20:24:08 +0000

Maybe the music in the background set me thinking, but do these images strike anyone else as breathtaking? We put a man-made object onto another heavenly body that looks surprisingly Earth-like. Granted, Titan is much colder than Earth (as can be gleaned from the mention of “water ice rocks” near the end). How cool will it be when, sometime in the next hundred years or so, man sets foot on one or more of these planets or moons in our solar system.

To further set the mood, someone from the Huygens Probe team produced a piece of cool music to go along with the descent and the applause it was awarded by the team upon learning of its success. “Listen to it here.”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/downloads/huygens_titan_descent.mp3

Reborn

Kyle Rove — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 04:05:57 +0000

After one and half years, sensory output has been given a fresh new look. Infused with “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org/ v1.5 and a customized “Hemingway”:http://warpspire.com/hemingway theme by “Kyle Neath”:http://warspire.com/, I can put my mind at ease for a while, basking in simplicity and a hint of panache. Granted, I did have a new version of the sensory output when I moved from my custom-rolled WordPress theme to “Michael Heilemann’s”:http://binarybonsai.com/ infamous “K2″:http://binarybonsai.com/wordpress/k2/, but it never sat very well with me as I think it tries to do too much for too many people.

While on the surface, you see a new look, much more was done deep in the underbelly of the beast that is the WordPress database. You see, long, long ago, -in a land far, far away- in the MySQL database, I did not understand the intersection between PHP’s inability to handle Unicode, the MySQL database and WordPress’s latent, hidden abilities to make up for PHP’s lackings. Per this miscommunication, I set the encodings of my database (every database, table and field) to unicode in the hopes of achieving geeky nirvana. In this dastardly moment, all of my rich postings (i.e. all the wonderful Unicode characters that Mac OS X’s character palette makes so readily available) to this blog were slightly altered, as if my database were switched with one of an alternate universe.

To undo this, I used my knowledge of various sci-fi flicks to swap out the evil, alternate universe version of my database for the one and only belonging to this reality, effectively undoing most of the catastrophic warpings of my words. Still, as I was pondering the inner workings of the database, I went further still, and I removed silly HTML and other oddities, converting posts to Textile-only. This was a lot of work despite the paltry archives, my fingers swiftly removing @@ and @@ tags.

After that fine work, I set out to implement Kyle Neath’s great theme. It lacked a few basic items: blog roll, pages listing, and other bits of CSS. Overall, however, it is performing swimmingly and far and above my wildest expectations. Granted, I have not yet figured out what the deal is with WordPress functions like @is_page()@, @is_archives()@, or @is_home()@, but I routed around that minor issue.

Then, I overhauled the secondary pages on my site, namely my “portfolio”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/portfolio/, “projects”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/projects/ and “fun”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/portfolio/ pages. All of these pages are now true WordPress pages, formatted with Textile and a little custom CSS thrown into the Hemingway theme stylesheet.

Finally, I implemented a few necessary plugins, namely:

“Extended Live Archives”:http://www.sonsofskadi.net/extended-live-archive/
“Related Posts”:http://www.w-a-s-a-b-i.com/
“Del.icio.us Cached”:http://www.w-a-s-a-b-i.com/
and “Dunstan’s Time Since”:http://binarybonsai.com/wordpress/timesince

Whew. Maybe this is just the impetus I need to get back to writing more regularly. I certainly do have a _long_ list of topics to explore, including network neutrality, political rancor, and most near and dear to my heart of late, medicine.

New comment after post?

Kyle Rove — Sat, 26 Jun 2004 21:58:53 +0000

Somehow, when I post a new blog entry, a comment appears on my very first article, “First Post”:http://www.lindsayrove.com/wordpress/archives/2004/06/20/first-post/.

What is going on? This posting is serving to inform those who have found their way here across the vastness of the internet to my humble establishment and to test whether this happens all the time.

Portfolio

Kyle Rove — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 19:59:57 +0000

Ahh, I am slowly completing the sub-pages for this site. “My portfolio”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/portfolio/ is ready for your perusal.

[update #1] I hate IE(Internet Explorer). :mad:

[update #2] Well, took care of that.

Calendar

Kyle Rove — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 07:17:26 +0000

I love my little calendar. It is made entirely using divs: in other words, no tables, and much greater control over the styling, IMHO.

I will admit, however, that the calendar does not look nearly as spiffy in WinIE as is does in either: Safari, Firefox, Camino, or Opera (all on OS X, of course). The fonts are shitty, do not center (maybe an inheiritance problem), and IE will not parse transparent PNGs (as most of us were already aware). I fixed the last issue by placing the background color into the PNG, also making changing the color scheme in the future more difficult. The first issue I cannot help.

Here we are, 20 years after the advent of WYSIWYG(what you see is what you get), graphical interfaces, simple on-screen anti-aliasing of fonts in Windows is still not an out-of-the-box solutions. Geez, we even had on-screen anti-aliasing of all fonts back in the 90s on the Mac, courtesey of an Adobe type product. Sheesh…

:roll:

Oh, I do plan to release the calendar function as a WordPress plugin soon, so stay tuned.

Compatibility

Kyle Rove — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 01:51:30 +0000

For the most part, I’ve looked at my site in Safari (1.2.2), Opera (7.5.1), Firefox (0.8), Camino (0.8), and Netscape (7.1). I imagine that compatibility with other Gecko-based browsers is in order. There is a clearing issue on the #content div when the content takes up less room than the #menu stuff, but I don’t see that as an issue as long as I have plenty of verbosity with respect to the former.

I tried to implement a quick solution for IE5 Mac, but it needs more work. For now, no compatibility with IE5 Mac.

Lastly, I have yet to check Sensory Output in IE Win, any version. I need to re-install Virtual PC before I can do this, so give me time. I’m pretty sure the box hack is in order for the calendar and nav bar. I’ll get those fixed ASAP(as soon as possible).

Finally, I certainly do not advocate this site as “best viewed in XXX,” as that defeats the purpose of open standards. I can say, however, that given their support for some CSS3 (transparency, text shadows, etc.) and excellent typography rendering, that I prefer to use Safari, OmniWeb, or Camino on Mac OS X.

Uh oh.

Kyle Rove — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 22:43:15 +0000

Well, I’m afriad I might be infringing the copyrights of the neuron in the header. I found the image lurking on my hard drive and liked it a lot. Unfortunately, I do not know its author or where it came from.

Hmm…what to do.

Sean Louis = New Job?

Kyle Rove — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 21:19:03 +0000

Hmm… at first I was confused that my brother, Sean Louis, had started a new job. My first mistake, however, was not realizing that it is only June and not July. My second mistake was mixing up the month and day in the posting date of his blog entries. Oops.

Looks like he needs to update his blog. Also, he should switch to WordPress 1.2, which I think offers better features than b2.

[update] Somehow, this post was deleted. Thanks to Google’s wonderful caching technology, I found it. I’m not sure how this happened. A mystery, to say the least.