A few years ago, I’d migrated from Wordpress to a static site generator for my blog as part of migrating off a shared web host to a VPS. I’d started with Octopress since it had been getting a fair bit of buzz at the time. I was pretty happy with the rendered output, but the underlying software had its flaws. The author (Brandon Mathis) highlighted some of those flaws in his post on the road to Octopress 3.

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Well, it looks like Intel is finally going CMP (@ The Register and Reuters). They’re apparently going to address some of the issues associated with continuing to push for high performance with big monolithic superscalars (namely: power consumption associated with crazy-high clock frequencies, scaling limitations of centralized hardware structures, and the benefits of supporting higher throughput through parallelism instead of only relying on low-latency for sequential code). Pretty exciting if you’re a geek like me… and would love a multiprocessor system.

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So I’ve finally decided the previous color scheme for Malkier was a little too bleak. And I’ve been doing the whole black background thing for a bit too long (started way back in undergrad when everyone had plain grey backgrounds or awful background images and almost no one went black). Hopefully the new scheme is a little more festive… although I’m not quite happy with it yet. And I finally got around to installing my own copy of my blog software (the old stuff was provided by the host and didn’t allow me to customize the comments pages, or really control the blog as much as I would’ve liked).

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So every so often I’ll read through some of the stuff at SysadminCo. It’s a collection of stupid user questions and such send to the sysadmins at some ISP. They have some entertaining stuff sometimes, and have an amusing shell-like interface. Anyway, as I was skimming a bit today, I ran across this one techism that I got a kick out of.

So I realized that IE and Mozilla parse CSS stuff differently. Apparently, Mozilla will interpret everything on a line after # as a comment (at least where appropriate) whereas IE seems to interpret it normally. As a result, my movie db looked absolutely awful in IE since I almost never use it. Anyway, now that I know, I’ve taken care of it. Should looke the same in IE and Mozilla now (at least it does for me in IE6).

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So my movie database continues to evolve. I guess first I should mention what it does at this point. Basically, I feed movie title in, my script searches for it in the IMDB, presents the possible matches, and then fills in all the info from IMDB (title, year, genres, director, stars, etc). Then I can easily edit it as needed. Tonight I added some basic caching of the main page. In other words, if you aren’t doing any sort of special query (ie list everything), it will dump the webpage to a file and simply display that if it’s current, and only recreate it when the database has been updated.

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So early last week, I received the coolest thing from a guy at Altera. It’s called the Cubic Cyclonium, and it makes one heck of a paperweight. In essence, it’s a small system designed around an Altera Cyclone FPGA and includes a bunch of cool stuff (168 LED array, 1MB of SRAM, VGA out), all embedded in a block of clear Lexan plastic. It draws power over a USB cable, includes software to program it to do a variety of neat demos (defaults to displaying time and date, can display a scrolling marquee text message, stock quotes, and several games/screensavers including tetris, pong, life, etc).

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So I don’t think I’ve explicitly mentioned it, but I ended up renaming most of my machines a while back. I decided to switch to a theme as opposed to the random naming scheme I was using before (ie Malaise, Elysium, Nicosia, Sulaco, Aragorn, etc). At this point, most of my stuff is named after characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. My aging Athlon box (Elysium) has been named after Polonius, the doddering old fool.

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Well, I finally did it. I signed myself for an actual, bonafide web hosting service. No more being limited to what will fit on my University server (and having to move that every so often) or running off my Linux box over really slow uplink. I’m still in the process of moving in (which will involve a rework of my website to some extent), but have managed to relocate my blog and start transferring some of the pictures in my gallery.

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So I ran across this site (audioscrobbler.com) that seems kinda cool. The idea is you create an account, install a plugin for your favorite MP3 player software (be it Winamp, XMMS, SLIMP3, etc etc). This thing then aims to track your listening habits/preferences. In theory, after you’ve listened to enough (200 songs I think), it starts suggesting other artists based on your preferences and the preferences of other users who have similar interests.

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