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Holiday wishes
Very happy holidays from Belgium to all you fun techpatterns people out there.
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Same to you Minck, sad to say I'm up, had to deal with a major XP sp 2 caused problem on my main box, fun fun, got it fixed, turned out to be, yes, you guessed, it, an MS programming error, a bug, another SP 2 thing, this time not well documented, luckily I found the cause and the solution before I went ahead and reinstalled the OS, see the windows forum for details... \winnt\system32 etc...
time for bed though, have a few nice belgian beers for us out here, or whatever your favorite is, have a good christmas time, wish I was in Europe, even for just a visit. Back to top |
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Youch. I didn't think Christmas was MS compatible.
Today is the 26 and I'm thinking about perhaps rebooting into the new year in Ubuntu. Our corporate headquarters' networking needs are a little more modest than yours - once had Samba up and running, but our network administrator forgot how this had been done and was to lazy to go figure it out again - Surely says something about his abilities and character. On the 23rd, we checked with Acquisitions and Finance, it being the Christmas season and all, time of giving and getting, and got the green light for the (drum roll) purchase of a genuine USB memory key since they were on sale at our local hardware store. Our gopher lept on the company bicycle, only to discover that the 512 meg model was sold out, it was either 128, 256, or - a GIG! Being the high rollers we are, we went for the gig. There were also usb flash memory watches, but that was just a little too outré. Back at headquarters, all the important directories have been wrapped up into bzip archives. Mounting the usb key in debian is a piece of cake, just added an entry in fstab, the instructions that came with it for use with linux ('please execute "fdisk" & "format" commands') weren't even necessary, since it was already formatted vfat. All this 'important stuff' - mail, script downloads, our whole local www directory including all our home-brewed scripts -- totals up to be significantly short of a gig when it's zipped up. And saving the stuff to the USB key is fast, fast fast! Copies made to the XP Pro partition, the windows laptop, the XP Home Celeron clunker downstairs, will check integrity of the home-brew scripts, and then it's time to swipe my beloved Debian partition, and install Ubuntu, or Yoper, or both. USB key will be nice for backups - a little more 'up-to-date' and easier than ftp'ing to our shared hosting webserver, which we'll continue to do every week to have an off-site copy. No messing around setting up RAID, don't have to go boot up the machine on the ground floor. Hopefully the newer distros will have point-n-clicky style setups for the network, since I hope to be able to access the linux webserver with the windows laptop for ie checking without having to reboot. If not, it's diving into Linux networking and all the samba stuff, hopefully using the second network card in this box for the connection to the webserver since the router's on the ground floor and I really don't want to be bothered with the extra cable. Sure did have some nice Belgian beers. I had to sing a bass solo in a Mozart Missa Brevis in our town church yesterday morning, first time I've done a voice solo (it went well), so I sorta indulged a bit afterwords. That afternoon we went to visit the girlfriends' folks, and I'm usually rather quiet around them. Well, this time I wasn't, not by a longshot, and apparently everybody was rather pleased to see that I wasn't always as boring as I usually appear to be. Not planning, though, to use the social lubricant every time I visit them - I really need to learn to get my work out of my head when I'm not working, and switch on the "social mode" with these folks, who are really pretty fun if you poke and pry them enough to wrestle out the little boy / girl in them that really does like to play. Cheers to you all, wish you generous portions of your own favorite social lubricants, look forward to hearing more how you all have been enjoying the holidays. Back to top |
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Hope y'all had a wonderful day, and those not into Christmas, may YOUR seasons be the best you've ever had....
We had probably the best, quietest Christmas Day we've EVER had. It was perfect.... Back to top |
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vkaryl, thanks for the merry wishes, I'll have to work on the happy holidays part, clients asking for work yesterday, I must have spoiled them, Minck, sounds like a great christmas.
If I were you I'd take your network admin, make him ride the company bike, and get him nice and drunk, then explain to him how important it is to keep the company networks in tip top running condition. If he doesn't respond the way you'd like, force him to have a few more beers. By that time I assume you'll be stumbling and unable to put up further arguments, though the people in the pub might look at you slightly oddly, since I assume this would entail you talking to yourself, but just do whatever is necessary to get the point home. I'd recommend using the company bicycle to avoid problems with the law on your way home... note on Yoper, probably not as many packages available, doesn't work with Grub, needs Lilo, try a dual boot, install ubuntu first, that defaults I think to grub, then install yoper, check them both out. Got my christmas presents from Google and Yahoo, top rankings in most categories, especially Yahoo, which seems to have decided this is an authority site ?!?, finally coming out of google sandbox, traffic going up, even during christmas. Vkaryl, you may or may not notice that the forum pages load slightly faster over dialup, I optimized them more, knocked off a few kB from each page, simplified the template pages, got rid of extra tables etc, replaced with css divs except for basic table layouts where it would be stupid to use divs, less stability etc, nothing gained, I'll be knocking more off the css too when I get around to it. Back to top |
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Well, good for you jeffd! That IS a nice set of presents!
I did notice the fast load - yah, yah, milliseconds are so small you aren't supposed to notice, but I do! The only quibble I have with what you've done is that some of the text (any of the stuff on the black parts, that's done in a dark blue-grey) is practically unreadable.... unless it's just moi? Back to top |
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:: Quote :: some of the text (any of the stuff on the black parts, that's done in a dark blue-grey) is practically unreadable.... unless it's just moi?Can you post a screen shot here? Use the img bbcode. That might be a css load time error, there is currently way too much CSS on these pages. I haven't tested these pages over dialup for a while, there could be a problem. There is no text on black parts except when the [ code ] bbcode is used, otherwise it's all on some form of blue, mostly lightblue, but that error I see on Opera 7.5, bottom of page. Actually, you might make sure the CSS refreshed, flush your cache, then check again, I made some pretty large CSS changes yesterday. I did see one problem in Opera 7.50, not present in 6, 7.1, 7.2, but bang, in 7.5, this is why I am no longer supporting Opera, their quality and CSS has gone downhill consistently over the last 2 years, while their market share has never risen much over 0.25%. Losers. The overall load times however over dialup are not milliseconds, I've cut off almost 20 kB per page of HTML from the default tpl templates. That's about 4 seconds over a fast dialup connection. Now to trim down the CSS, that could use a big diet too. I got more trimmed the last few days, all the extra stuff that doesn't need to be there, like border="0" etc. Plus extra tables... one day I might do a set of tpl.s for phpbb, but not for a while. Re Yahoo, do this search, it's very funny, I can't see this lasting, but it's funny for now. By the way, an easy way to knock 1-2.5 kB off the viewtopic page is this [mod to viewtopic_body.tpl]: :: Code :: //Place on top of viewtopic_body.tpl page:
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"> function icq( postrow_icq, postrow_icq_status ){ if ( navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf('mozilla') != -1 && navigator.userAgent.indexOf('5.') == -1 ){document.write(postrow_icq);} else{document.write(postrow_icq + postrow_icq_status);}}</script> // that is, create a function for this repeated javascript that //goes on each members posting, then replace the old javascript thing with //this inside the page topic loop: <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">icq('{postrow.ICQ}','{postrow.ICQ_STATUS}');</script> <noscript>{postrow.ICQ}</noscript> That cuts off about 250 Bytes from each posting. Back to top |
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Flush cache, refresh did the trick. Thanks! The new stuff looks and "feels" REALLY great.
This is the sort of tweaking I need to get up to myself on my fora.... among the list of millions of other things I need to do asap. Edit - added: BTW, what is that hunk of js FOR? Back to top |
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it's a very basic browser detection, if it's not a mozilla type browser or less than version 5, that's all modern ones, it does one thing, if it is, it does something else. I think it's a pretty pointless piece of code, but since I'm not really clear on the icq thing in the first place I figured I'd leave it intact, just condensed.
I haven't checked out the templates for phpbb in a few years, but last I checked they were just awful, horrible CSS, horrible HTML. That's typical for programmer types, but it's very hard to fix, I play with it once in a while, but it would have been better to just do it from scratch rather than reverse engineer it. Back to top |
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jeffd >> lol, wish I had time to get out to the local pub - though your suggestion might be a nice excuse, all for the greater good of well-functioning networks. Oh for the days when I had time evenings to go to the pub and enjoy a good newspaper. New Years' bodes bad for the liver, though - an old Polish friend of mine is celebrating with us, and non - New Years festivities with him are inebriating enough. Fortunately girlfriends will be present to exercise a civilizing influence.
Nice hints here re. php bb templates, I'll probably be putting up a forum in the next few weeks or months, and had thought of using phpBB simply because it's more likely to stick around, be upgradeable, and have moderation features I unexpectably need when I get stuck in some kind of forum social problem. Though it would be so nice to run one of the less-bloated forums like punBB or miniBB - the thought of 'axeing features' usually gets me all excited. You all over here at techpatterns consider lighter-weight alternatives? How 'bout you, vkaryl, you seem to be quite the forum baroness. Really like the way the forums are looking. One very minor gripe: code divs are a bit hard on the eyes with the black / very bright green combo - I changed the green to #34DC34 instead of #34FC34 and it looked quite a bit more legible (less eye-frying). Could be I run my monitor with a higher contrast that you all. Many happy new year wishes, hope you all manage to have a whole lot of fun without breaking bones. Back to top |
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