Well, I’m finally back.
After a long hiatus I imagine that I’ve probably fallen off the face of Google, but now I can finally focus on getting my e-reputation up into Chuck Norris territory all over again. At least, for the month until I have to conscript myself into the military.
I’ll be back with a (finally) working gallery soon. In the meantime, I’ve just finished my final ‘A’-level exams and with it, set myself on a path of arduous ambiguity, or, as others might say, there is work to be done. In the meantime, I’ve been making a lot of changes, such as finally upgrading my WordPress installation and working on the back-end of things, along with settling on a final design for the About section. I kind of knew I would be wasting my server hosting when I bought it, but whatever. It’s my domain name, and no one else shall have it now.
For now, though, excuse me while I fire up Team Fortress 2, Bioshock, The Witcher, Gears of War and World in Conflict. And I’m not even talking about the Playstation Portable yet. Oh no.
I really hadn’t noticed. Time does seem to fly past when things start to merge into one long, never-ending chain of events, be they good or bad.
In the meantime, though, the site hasn’t really received any makeovers like I had intended to perform right after my Common Tests. Let’s not talk about that, though. Instead, we shall talk about technology.
This occasion is, indeed.
I have only just bid farewell to my faithful host of 2 and a half years, Sitesled.com, in favour of my new host and domain, which, if you managed to find this post, (since all the links on the site are now broken) you’d probably know by now. I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time now, I’ve even mentioned it here a couple of times, but today! Today is the day my new debit card comes into play.
Or view it on a handheld. It’s been specifically tailored for such mediums now, though the beauty of that single attribute, media="handheld". Or print, I really don’t care. I just know my site’s accessibility just took a momentous leap into the highest of rankings.
Though, perhaps, not to the Sony Playstation Portable’s Netfront browser, which will actually be the subject of this post, along with its inherent parent element, the PSP. (Developers, see what I did right there?)
Anyway, I’m pretty much pissed at the state the PSP is in at the moment, with the downgrading and homebrew scene being more active than usual, after the discovery of the GTA: Liberty City Stories exploit that still lingers in firmwares recent. I’m almost appalled by Sony’s hypocrisy, their apparent harsh stand on homebrew being complemented by their pathetic attempts to stem its growth. In fact, I’m seriously considering purchasing a copy of GTA for this very purpose, though the prices for a suitable copy (the unpatched version) kind of range in the extravagant to the are-you-fucking-kidding-me range, the fault of greedy Singaporean capitalists who somehow think charging 70 bucks (about 35 USD) is justified for a game that’s about as old as my mom.
OK, maybe not as old, but you know what I mean.
Back on track. So anyway, if you didn’t know, my own PSP is of a certain shade of ceramic white, and unfortunately, it’s one of the newer ones, meaning the dreaded TA-082 motherboard. In other words, it’s not conducive to being downgraded. Until now, that is.
However, while I am an avid supporter of homebrew development and anything that has to do with open-source, I am not supporting a culture of piracy. While I do look upon Sony’s proprietary UMD format with great distaste, I feel the evils of piracy do have bigger fists.
I am, however, still an avid supporter of common sense, and Sony deciding to brand their product, which can be held in a single hand as a device meant for screen purposes, is not, unfortunately, common sense. Don’t believe me? Try viewing this site on a PDA and a PSP; you will notice the immediate differences almost immediately, barring the visually-challenged. This is, of course, a mere smite compared to the regular fuckups that Sony regularly manages to perpetuate upon its consumers, but as a web developer, I simply fail to understand why, or how Sony can even imagine that their beloved handheld device does not qualify as a handheld, and must instead receive the same rich content that would normally be siphoned to its older brothers and sisters, which, if I daresay, seem to have about 100 times its processing power.
And that’s not even taking into account that the PSP browser crashes when it runs out of RAM, which is not really in abundance, if you know what I mean.
And when my 3-year old XDA can display this site using the proper CSS stylesheet attributed to it and a much-touted “next-gen” console cannot, it gives you pause to think about the branding behind both products. You are then led to conclude that perhaps, the latter of two companies would be completely fucking retarded.
I love my PSP’s games to death, I love the PSP’s potential media capabilites to death, heck, I even love the PSP’s design. I’m even willing to forgo that second analog stick that was omitted from the design, but really, if Sony really doesn’t want me to be one of their customers, I’m going to have to go right with that presumption.
You may find me scouring the streets for an unpatched, un-price-hiked copy of GTA LCS very soon. Short of bricking my PSP, I’ll probably be chucking away those remote controls around the house and using L1 to watch the latest season of House.
Except that we don’t have House anymore since Season 2 ended. But that’s another issue for posts forthcoming.
This country sure is at the forefront of technology. Just like Sony.
Are now available on the About section of this site, specifically, my vCard information and my hResume. What odd names, for incredibly perplexing formats. Even for microformats, as the term goes. Yes, I am aware that the hResume specifcation isn’t exactly finalized yet, but hear this: I henceforth make the bold prediction that it will be.
Bold, isn’t it?
If you have absolutely no idea what that last paragraph of geek-oriented rubbish was about, know this; microformats will change the world as we know it, though maybe not cure the problem of utter stupidity. It’s indeed an interesting proposition, though, and unless you have a good reason to otherwise, it might be wise to click on a few hyperlinks in that paragraph above to venture forth into the unknown and perhaps find out more.
It’s been a little while since I’ve actually made such a humongous change to the actual structure of the site, which kind of shows in the changes to the code, which, if you’ll kindly hit Ctrl-U (Assuming you are, of course, using Firefox), will notice to be more semantic than my usual methods of coding. There’s still a long way to go, of course; I need to change quite a few more CSS classes in the site stylesheet before I’d consider this particular update updated. As it is, I’m through for the weekend, and for the night.
It seems that I still have an Economics tutorial unfinished, alas. I wasn’t exactly planning on trading stocks and shares anyhow.
Anyway, you’ll notice that the sidebar content for some of the pages has changed slightly. Expect more changes to take place as I brainstorm all sorts of different widgets to be placed into positions that might seem aesthetic. Though perhaps not to the average user. More importantly, however, I’ve decided to license this entire site, including all of the works in the gallery under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, which may prove shocking in retrospect, considering this website is a portfolio of sorts, and I doubt people usually think royalty-free and proprietary works go in the same sentence. I am, however, an avid advocate of anything that has to do with the phrase open-source, and as such, such a statement proclaiming it so isn’t really anything new to me, plus it makes the index page look so much sexier.
Besides, all my works on deviantART and Flickr were already being uploaded with the same licensing terms, so I guess this shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Except for Zazzle, of course, but only because they don’t have an option to make it so.
You’ll also notice the addition of a few more icons to the site, which I had previously put forth into vectors but failed to decide on their usage. They are now being used, so look around and rejoice at black-and-white bite-sized icons.
Now I have to focus on the next task at hand: updating my other sites to fit in with this newfound love for web standards. I can already taste the hot dogs I’ll be polishing off while working on it, which has gotten rather bad in the past few days, or weeks, actually. It seems that my solution to these sugar-induced comas of pure madness aren’t exactly working out.
No, I haven’t been working on ReBorn or Hard Life as of late; school’s literally ripping my guts out through every open orifice that my tortured soul provides.
On a job well done indeed; the blog now has a plethora of additional content to bolster its already formidable bank of thoughts, along with a few other cosmetic changes.
Where to begin?
The most obvious change, of course, is the introduction of sans-serif text into the sidebars, which is kind of a slight contradiction to the ideals that I had for this layout. I had intended for the entire site to contain only, and only serif typefaces, but I found that, over time, the readability of such a typeface (Georgia, as a matter of fact) was less than desirable. It has now been changed, and hopefully it will be embraced.
Now about that content. You’ll notice the new search bar, which actually makes use of Google to search through this domain for terms that you deem relevant, and desire to find more of. It’s been a very, very long time since I last dealt with HTML forms, so I hope my attempt at giving it some spice went off well. At least now searching my own blog for stuff will be easier.
You’ll see that posts now have a slightly different template, with a brand-new post footer, complete with an additional permalink to each post. Also, at the very bottom of the entire page, I’ve added the indispensable “Last 10 Most Recent Entries” section, which should help you navigate the site better if you happen to subscribe to this blog via RSS.
I also had to design a few icons to go with the upgrades, as you’d probably have realized by now. Many of them went unused in the end (I had a really great idea for a search bar and submit button before deciding to scrap them in favour of just plain CSS, I still have them on my hard disk though) but the main additions are the new search icon, the permalink icon and the ‘Written By’ icon. Not much, but hey, designing 16 x 16 px stuff isn’t exactly a walk in the park. A couple more may be coming with additional updates.
If you’re thinking that the serif fonts aren’t the only thing that’s changed, you’d be right. I’ve just converted about 75% of this site’s stylesheet to use em units instead of pixels, as I had previously been advocating. They do happen to involve some approximation, which would explain why the site may appear slightly different from what you remember.
I’m still working on getting my labels working; it appears that Blogger sites not published via their own servers are not able to make use of the new ‘Layout’ features that have come with the new Blogger upgrade. I do, however, have an idea for a half-workaround, and I’ll be testing that very shortly. As soon as I get my eyes away from the screen for a couple of minutes for a break; I’ve been doing this for about 4 hours straight now.
You may also be slightly disgusted with the sidebar content on the other pages; I’m working on that. Expect more diversity in those dratted right columns soon.
And yes, this site still validates fine and is cross-browser compliant. Except for the PSP and other handhelds, though; I’m also planning to work on that, along with a print-friendly version.
Amazing just how much effort goes into making a simple template for a site, isn’t it?