“Professional service
that won't make you nervous”

News and Updates

September 1, 2001: New address is on the contact page. Phone's still the same.

August 5, 2006: Making some revisions to the site and shuffling some more of the content around to make more sense. Consequently, the home page is now a bit more sparse than it used to be, the idea being less news and more info about the company, while the majority of the older news has been moved to a new page. I've kept these here for now, to fill in a bit, but that will ultimately change.

July 10, 2006: Looks like we had a bit of a server outage there; the webserver had a major hardware failure, and took a couple days to replace. Did you miss me? :-) (this will teach me to have redundant servers one of these days, not to mention a backup) Nothing else new to report other than that we're glad to be back.

June 13, 2006: Well! Looks like someone noticed. Discovered mention of my modulereport script in a HOWTO discussion of “Installing Perl V 5.8.6 and Apache V 2.0.52 under Windows XP”. Maybe I'll get some bugreports back from the Windows crowd finally, which would be nice considering I wrote and edited the script with MacOS (Classic) and Linux in mind.

May 29, 2006: Ran across an interesting article today as I was browsing around on Dan Walsh's LiveJournal blog on SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux) and its relationship to the Linux distro, Fedora Core. It's all new to me; I've largely been ignoring it, giving the heads behind it time to get it sorted out, and the early-adopters time to bruise and bloody themselves on it while they figure it out and report their problems to the people sorting it out, and people like Dan to write about it and explain it to The Rest Of Us. :-) Now that some of that time has passed, I'm educating myself about it gradually and observing its growth and direction in the meantime.

Anyway, if I haven't lost you already, one of Dan's posts had a link to an editorial article entitled “The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security”, which was quite an entertaining and educational read, and which I thought made enough sense that it was worth spreading the memes around. I like things that make sense, don't you? ;-)

And how about that new $1099 Apple MacBook, hm? (ok, $1299 for the 2Ghz version, and $1499 for the 2Ghz model in black) Rather smart of them to charge a little more for the black one -- everyone's gonna want one of those, but it rather pares down the list to those who are more serious and gives Apple a fighting chance to get enough of them into the distribution channel. I had to install a drool pan in front of my keyboard while browsing the site. I still feel sort of weird about there being an Intel processor in there; After all, I've been a Macintosh afficionado since 1987 … it seems almost like sacriledge. But then again I should be used to Apple making insane-seeming maneuvers (like shipping the first iMacs without any floppy drives!) by now. heh. =8)

April 2, 2006: Somewhat important news – I've moved to a new house (nice yard, separate garage, good sized basement... looking forward to this spring/summer...), so please make note of the new address. Not much else going on as I'm still getting reorganized. Further news as it happens.

March 16, 2006: For those WordPress junkies out there, I present to you my first Plugin, which uses a WordPress Page template to list an arbitrary directory of downloadable files. I wasn't able to find anything out there that worked out how I wanted, so I figured it made more sense to design it for general use and release it as such. Enjoy!

Older News

Feb 28, 2006: Added another sample to the table-less form layout demo section, providing a fix hat removes the need for empty clearing divs in the markup.

Been working with WordPress lately, for a client site, and pondering whether I want to add that sort of functionality to my own site. I'm not really much of a chatterbox, and I can't see how drumming up writings about my personal joys and angsts just to fill space and keep a continual update grind is going to help business any, so I'll probably pass on that for now. Still it's interesting to work with, and I may eventually create a WordPress Theme out of my own site design just for fun.

Noticed that OSWD.org no longer exists and had moved to openwebdesign.org, and updated my links to point to the new site

---

Feb 13, 2006: I revised some of the HTML/CSS page, adding new links, updating some of the VIM web shortcuts to add more of them, and uploaded a new css skeleton file with a bit more substance. Also added a demo to the examples section showing how to do table-less aligned forms layouts. Yes, really.

Rather proud of this most recent site makeover I worked on for one of MAD House Graphics' clients, Hire Source... brought it live this afternoon. Care for a peek? Fixed the site so that in the absence of Flash or Javascript, there is still viewable content instead of empty space, and also removed all the tables-based layout in favor of compliant HTML/CSS, which validates nicely, and should assist in improving their search engine ranking. And while it isn't fancy, it does look so damn good... :-)

There's a few more makeovers in the works, as well. I may be hibernating from the cold, but business is still good and my mind still functions.

---

Jan 30, 2006: Finally entering the world of technology about 10 years late, I've managed to acquire a cellphone and am now once more reachable by more than just email. Rejoice, therefore. :-)

Things continue to go very well with the web subcontracting; a number of clients having seen the other more recent work that we've done, and have contacted us for site makeovers, and some have even found the HTML/CSS validation to be an attractive thing and have requested that this be the focus of the makeover. As moving away from tables-based design only makes your site more accessible, and is likely to improve your rank on the search engines without resorting to various trickery, this is a very good thing. I like where this is going. My own google ranking even jumped a point after the makeover, with no change to the information on the site.

Plus, I've always enjoyed this sort of thing – it's fun for me, not work.

Added a couple new things around the site, since my own makeover, mostly minor tweaks and additions to the html/css section.

I gotta tell ya, having been a Macintosh person for 18+ years, it's really strange using Linux now for most of what I do. I'm finding it to be incredibly useful to have all the underlying technology that the web uses, right at my fingertips, but at the moment I can only imagine what it will be like to have the Macintosh front-end (via OS X) in addition, now that MacOS has its UNIX underpinings. All the software. All of it. Macintosh software, Open-Source software, Windows software (under emulation) all running on one box. Soon. The waiting is killing me.

So is waiting for Spring. brrrrrrrr. Hatessss the cold. Hatessss it we doessssss. Sometimes I wish I could hibernate.