Rinsefirst

Life has been pretty good to me lately. Amber and I are doing great after going to a Twin\’s game last night (which they won). It was good for us to get out and do something by ourselves, away from home. Work has been going good. Invoices are set to go out Friday. Our clients are pretty well caught up with, and life in general is just going good.

I thought I would share this story because it\’s just a cool thing to do: www.news.com.au

It would be interesting if we could live virtually forever on this technique. Think about it… You have some very bad illness like aids, so what do they do, they put you in a chamber that can hold you until they have a cure. It\’s perfect. It\’s a little scary that you might be able to bring someone basically forward through time a couple hundred years, but still, very cool.

In other news, well, it seems like 5 of you have found a way to use Rinsemarks, which is good. I\’m glad your getting use out of them. I\’ve been hearing that many of you don\’t like the little popup, so I\’ve been considering removing it from showing, and/or putting it in the status bar. We shall see.

Nebraska for me is only a few days away… Gotta love laying pipe (not).

I feel like I have some other things to share, but I know not what they are. Amy is getting a laptop today which should be good for my computer usage at home. It will probably be bad for my bandwidth though. Well, at this point I feel I\’m updating for the sake of updating, so I leave you be.

I have lots to post about, mostly cool stuff, some interesting stuff, etc. Ok so here\’s what I got from the massive number of comments that was posted on the last post. I think people are willing to pay to keep Justin\’s service going. I don\’t know why, when they can get free stuff other places, but non the less… Maybe it has something to do with the services Justins offers, and his ability to make everyone happy (ok, so probably not).

Needless to say, here\’s what I decided to do. July 1st, if your name is on the list to the right you will more than likely get an automated email that says something about pay your site will be shut down. This is of course optional. It\’s an optional 5 dollars for your blog. It won\’t let you pay more than 5. It won\’t let you pay less than 5. The fact of the matter is, if you want to pay for your services, it will simply let you pay 5. For what it\’s worth, it will also tell you your bandwidth usage, and allow you to create email addresses for your account.

Again, I would like to reiterate: Services will not be discontinued if you choose not to pay. This is more a trial thing to see how it goes. If you have a problem with this system: please leave a comment. If you think it\’s a good idea, again, please leave a comment. If you have something else to talk about, please leave a comment.

In other news, I have fallen in love with a Microsoft Product called Virtual PC. It used to be owned by Connectix, but I never tried it then. Virtual PC 2004 is an PC emulator for PC\’s. That means, that from inside windows, you can run more linux, freebsd, or even more windows. They act just like an additional computer being right next to you, except it eats the machines processor power on the machine your on.

So far, this has turned out to be brilliant. I\’ve installed debian on my windows box, which I have then in turn installed oxwaf onto it. Not only does this allow me to do real world development away from a net connection, but it lets me demo our product away from a net connection. Both are very very cool prospects. And for those of you who think it might be slow or have some hardware issues: It doesn\’t. The thing is dang near seemless.

If you want to see a screenshot, IM me and I\’ll send it to you.

In other news, BananaMonkey has moved into Oxwaf with a brand new design. It\’s pretty sharp, although personally I think the fonts need some work. There\’s also an RSS feed and comments now, so be sure to check it out (afterall, it would be wrong of me not to plug my girlfriend). Lastly, I added a few more links to some additional people I host. Be sure to check them out and then harrass them if you don\’t like their sites.

Simple enough eh?

I could go one of two routes with this post. I could make it really short, making it sound like it was a very long, uneventful day. For the most part, that would be true, but I thought I would post a few things to see what the world has to say about them. Let\’s start with Joe\’s comments since it\’s the first thing on my mind.

Begin Topic 1:

Ok, so let\’s talk technically. The extension was written by someone else. It was designed to work with FTP and WebDAV, but FTP was buggy with me because of our passive mode restrictions, so I said it was time to give WebDAV a whirl. I had been hearing about it for some time now, and thought it would be an interesting trial.

For those of you who don\’t know, WebDAV is an extension to the HTTP protocol that adds support for file transfers. Apache has module you can easily install to make it work, and I have to admit, it\’s pretty cool. There are clients out there (much like FTP clients) that you can use to connect to it that way. So far I have it pretty restrictive on my account, mainly because it poses a security risk. If you want to try it Joe, let me know, we\’ll get it going on your account.

The toolbar uses webdav to store it\’s XML XBEL document. If you want learn more about what XBEL is, I suggest Googling it. From there, I use oxwaf\’s amazing xml parsing abilities to turn the XML into a nice page using XSL and some formatting.

I should note some things on the backend as well while I\’m at it. There\’s some trickyness to how I got all the authentication to work. Upon getting an account here, a folder is setup for your account. That folder is given password protection using .htaccess and mod_mysql. Mod_mysql allows me to tie the oxwaf user system to apache http auth so that I can protect the webDav shares. Ok, I feel that didn\’t make any sense what so-ever, so to help out a little, I\’m going to diagram the process with words:

1) User Creates Account In Oxwaf

2) Server Creates a read-only folder, blank write-access bookmark file, and a read only .htaccess file for that folder.

3) User installs bookmarks extension and uploads first set of bookmarks.

4) Webdav authenticates based on .htaccess and oxwaf at the same time, webDav uploads the file to the server.

5) Bookmarks are served up and downloaded using Oxwaf.

Ok, hope that answers a few questions for ya Joe. There are still a few bugs in it that I hope to resolve at some point. I think most of the security stuff has been taken care of, but if you find something, please let me know.

So Topic 1 is finished.

Topic 2: Some cool software I\’ve installed.

I recently installed what is now Microsoft\’s Virtual PC 2004. Very cool program and definently worth the price if you need to run more than one operating system at the same time on the same machine. So far, I\’ve been able to boot into the linux installer and get it going. My Fedora Core CD is a little bad, so the install failed, but I\’m sure it will work as soon as I get a work CD. I hope to get you all some screen shots at some point. It\’s really cool seeing linux in a window on a windows box.

I hope this means I can do webdev work on my local box from windows. I prefer to work in windows over linux so to test I would need a properly configured linux box. Of course, a properly configured linux box would either have to be my laptop or this box. I don\’t know, it just didn\’t seem possible til I got VPC. Very cool though, I\’ll have to let you know how it works in the end.

Topic 2 was short and sweet, let\’s jump to the last topic for tonight.

Topic 3: Money.

I\’m curious to hear from the people who have blogs on my site how much per month they would be willing to pay to continue the service. No, I\’m not asking you to pay (not yet) nor do I think I would ever require you to pay. It\’s just that JR has been having some cash flow issues (no we aren\’t going under, it\’s just sometimes bills are due before we get paid for work.) I think hosting fees could definently help with the burden but again, I love you all that when it comes to blogs, I often find it more worth while to be hosting them myself and reading them here, than letting you go off somewhere else and get your blog hosted for free.

Just curious as to what you all would have to say on the topic, any comments on the subject would be nice.

End Topic 3. End Todays Post.

Right now, my arms are sore, my fingers are sore, but mainly, my thumbs are sore. I just spent the last 3 hours playing 1 game of Tetris… Yes, that\’s correct, the last 3 hours playing 1 game of Tetris. That\’s a new Tetris highscore on my N64 game at 8,726 lines. Wowsers. Earlier today I also set a new ultra mode record at 150 lines in exactly 1 minute. For what it\’s worth, I don\’t think I\’ve played tetris before this weekend since at christmas time, if not sonshine last year when I set my gameboy record.

I have another long drive, but for what it\’s worth:

Today was great.

Got Pizza Burgers for lunch

Got Woodhouse for Dinner

Did more work than I should, but at least it got done. (for the most part).

I drive back tomorrow and should be in before 5. So, cya then!

I\’m not going to write long, but I felt that because I am in North Dakota, I should write a post saying that I\’m in North Dakota. Why? Because I think I have never written a post from here before. I think I\’ve written one from Nebraska, and maybe even Arizona… But not North Dakota…

Most of the day was spent driving, so not much to say about that.

The rest of the day was spent eating, talking, and playing tetris with Kavin, and the rest of the Dvoraks. I feel like I haven\’t been the best house guest, so I\’ll try to do better tomorrow. For now… I sleep.

I\’m a pretty much go with the flow, take things in stride kind of guy. I don\’t plan to much stuff ahead of time, and I don\’t think any one thing is going to destroy my life. Sure, somethings in life are very inconvient, and other things just plain suck, bur really… In the end, it will all work out. I will die and go to be with my Godly father in heaven. That will be cool.

So let\’s talk about the adaptation to today. I woke up this morning dead tired from the drive in. Some family was over so I said hi to them and called Amber to see what was going down. We worked out a plan for the grad parties of today, and such and went forward with it.

We hit Geoff Boyd\’s grad party first. That was cool, I played a little hacky sack which I of course managed to suck up. Also had some good talking. We then headed to Kristina\’s where we also talked and ate. Tacos were good, thank you both for the parties.

Aftwards I met Marty back at my house for various reasons. He picked up a table and chairs as well as some files I had for him. He left me with some data to use as well, so we\’re all good.

The rest of the day was spent working on a new design for Amber, talking about Amy\’s new computer that we have to order soon, as well as the thing that just kind of popped up. I\’m going to North Dakota tomorrow for 3 days (I\’ll be back Tuesday night.) I\’ll have my laptop, so it will seem to some people like I never really left because I have plans on doing a good amount of coding.

Other than that, that\’s all I have to say. I should look up the race time and radio stations I can listen to for on the way tomorrow. Laterz.