Out there May 13, 2008
What is out there? I looked up at the night sky earlier while taking out the bins and the moon was half hidden behind a strangely beautiful arrangement of clouds. Every time I look up I get the same feeling “what is out there”. There must be something.
They say there is a star for every grain of sand in the world, billions upon billions of them. Each one is an entire solar system. The chances of a planet perfect to contain life that has actually developed life must be huge, almost guaranteed in fact. It’s such a shame we can’t just have a look around.
Cannabis is class B - WTF? May 7, 2008
Class B, class A, class C drugs. They’re all drugs though aren’t they? Why categorize drugs like that, an illegal drug is a drug, they should have just one class for them all. Hold on though, who are the government to tell us what we can and can’t injest? Isn’t that just like smoking or alcohol with different effects?
It would be fair to say, there is strong argument on both (possibly three) sides of the drugs issue in the UK. As for the isn’t it the same as alcohol/smoking argument, I can’t quite decide my position. In a sense, yes, it is, what’s the difference? They both can have long term effects, as well as short term effects. In fact, smoking (tabacco) is probably the safest to others, because it doesn’t effect driving, unlike acohol or other drugs. But it does cost the country huge amounts in terms of healthcare, and passive smoking might have a strong effect on people too. Perhaps we should ban the lot? Alcohol, smoking, drugs, etc… But then what happens? People buy it on the black market/similar, and the government simply looses tax revenue.
In reality, people should be able to enjoy themselves/life without the aid of the booz or their fags or dope, yet people still seem attracted to the temptations of these things. I drink, but I hope never to smoke or take any drugs. Ever.
As for classing the drugs, thats absurd. Regardless of whether or not the drugs should be legal/illegal, they should all sit in one class if illegal. If you break the law, you suffer, or should suffer. Plain and simple. The law needs to tighten up in the UK, it’s pathetic.
Expect a post on prisons (a.k.a: free comforting homes for the homeless) soon 
Sustained visitors and (finally) a new PC May 3, 2008
When I say finally in the title, I mean it. A whole week with no gaming (well, minus the Wii). I guess productivity did rise 400%, and work hours increased 10-fold, but I wasn’t gaming, and that is what counts, I think. So, a new machine for me, but no more money either. For the geeks, here’s the specs:
- Intel Core2Duo E8200 (I think thats the number): 2.66Ghz w/ 6MB L2 Cache
- 4GB 800MHz OCZ value RAM (2×2GB)
- Gigabyte P35 LGA775 Motherboard
- 1x 160GB Hitachi HDD SATAII
- 1x 80GB Seagate HDD SATAII
- 1x 80GB Lacie external HDD (usb)
- nVidia 9600GT ($400 cheaper than 8800, but comparable in speed) 512GB DDR3 RAM
- Cheap low quality case (does it’s job, lots of fans and cooling spaces
- 600W Ebuyer VALUE Power Supply
I’m pretty pleased with it, took a few hours to build it all, then I thought it broke. Of course, I had stupidly forgotten that motherboards actually have two power plugs, the 24pin and the 4pin. *silly me*
AS-Levels are in a few weeks, so it’s work, work and more work at the moment, but I’ll still be around.
In other news, it seems this blog has picked up sustained visitors! It’s off the front page of BestWebGallery (whom gave me 5000+ visits), and the uniques have dropped off significantly, BUT, they now seem to have levelled off at a very nice value of ~200, much more than I’ve ever seen before. Perhaps CSS gallerys can bring returning visitors. We shall see…
What to remember when making a WP theme April 29, 2008
I’ve created many many WordPress themes during my times on the internet. I create them because I have old unused templates, and sometimes specifically to gain popularity (like everyone else I claim it’s “for the community” though). However, I always miss something. In particular, there are three things I missed on this blog. Anyway, here’s a list I threw together:
- Archives pages & category pages. It’s just too easy to create an index.php to fit all of these, but customized pages make a theme more developed and interesting, experimenting with layout on each page always helps too - this is one of the things I missed here, and still haven’t finished (working on it)
- Comments. So easy to forget or neglect. I completely forgot to add them here, linked to the comments, but with no way to add a comment ><. It’s one of the things which most themers will leave till last, and possibly forget. And not only should you include them, they have to be nicely styled too (mine aren’t - yet)
- Feed link. As you can see in my navigation, the feed ling is simply text. This is because I forgot to add it until today, oops! The benefits of having a feed are numerous, and not allowing visitors to view your feed is simply stupid. Personally, I don’t use feeds, and I’m sure quite a few people don’t, but that link is oh-so important. A real image link shall be arriving here soon.
- Archives themselves. Every blog needs an actual archives page, again, something I forgot to add here. In a rush to finish, I didn’t bother, and this lazy attitude has meant I still haven’t bothered. Much like the feed link, an archives page is taken for granted, and it’s a requirement.
I hope the list is helpful, and I’m sorry about the lack of updates, I fried my Windows machine and I’m stuck on a laptop, and all my precious internet time is taken planning a new dos rig.
p.s: Pointless Ramblings now works in IE7 and Firefox, for all those who care…
I give up on gmail April 23, 2008
I’ve had enough of gmail. Sure, the interface is nice, and sure, it’s (almost) guaranteed to be online for my email. Although, since I route a lot of mail through the server, that doesn’t really have an effect (although I use pointlessrambler@gmail.com for emergancies). Anyway, why give up gmail!? Well, I’ll explain:
- Slow, gmail got really slow recently; and, although the speed has picked up a bit, it’s still pretty slow at times
- SPAM, the filter used to be my blessing, it always used to catch everything, thousands of messages a day. And it’s still doing it, but not enough. For some reason, google have failed to block out the clever backscatter method of spam. So now, I’m getting about a hundred (give or take) spam emails a day, how annoying
- Reliable (but then again, so is our server)
OK, so what do I plan to move to and how would I go about doing it? Well, hopefully within the next week (probably this weekend), I’m going to set gmail to forward all mail to nick at kerplunc dot com, but also keep its own copy (security & such), then, instead of having the server route mail to my gmail account (in which case it would just sit being emailed all around the accounts), I will store mail on our server. Take control of my own mail and it’s storage. All I need to do is install the wonderful RoundCube on cPanel so it’s our default webmail client. Lastly I will need to go through the latest gmail and finish tasks etc… Advantages?
- Mail is stored in two places, google and this server. What happens if our hard drive fails? Google has millions of drives, what would happen if one of those failed, and it happened to be our emails? But with the mail in two places, it makes a crash so very unlikely
- I take control, the main email control is within our server, I choose everything
- It’s a whole load faster than gmail
So there we have it, why I’ve given up on good ol’ gmail.
CSS galleries don’t = popularity April 20, 2008
Of course, like any deisgner happy with their work, I submitted this new design to a long list of galleries. What happens? Well, the same as always, loads of hits on the first few days, then almost halving daily until a return to the same old low hits this blog recieves (~10-30 unique/day). Still, I don’t care, the aim of this blog isn’t to have a huge visitor base regularly commenting on articles, it’s to express all the pointless rubbish I think off
Why del.icio.us sucks April 16, 2008
Yup, time for a nice little rant on something thats been annoying me a whole lot for a long time. So, del.icio.us, that wonderful service where we can all dump our links in a huge list for us to share and access anywhere on the web. Hold on, did I say access? I think I may have got my words mixed up there. What I really mean is we can look at our links, in a totally non-accessable way.
A huge list of links in no apparent order is not useful or productive. Neither are tags. When I save a link, I want to stick it in a lovely folder or category, only one. Then I want to look at a page where links are separated by category, not in a great big splurge. The option of the splurge would be nice when I’m feeling like just going through random links, but normally I don’t have time for that. I want to look at a list of folders/categories, pick the target one and find my link, simple and effective.
Not only is the organization a mess, the whole social thing too, whats up with that? Stumbleupon and Digg are for that. Linkrolls too. Now, this is where del.icio.us is useful. It’s not so much a bookmarking tool as it is a linkroll tool.
Perhaps I am the problem, and I’m using del.icio.us for the wrong thing? I want a service to store my bookmarks everywhere, and if it lists everything in one long line as an option, thats very nice, but less important. I actually did a quick mockup of a design which might suit the category/folder layout, view it here. Ignore the top bar about a ‘Kerplunc’ service, because it’s not… yet. It’s really a personal project, but I’m going to tie it in with Kerplunc’s new application framework, just in case anyone else wants something similar. If you really like it or want to make a suggestion, go ahead and comment
I’m a bad blogger April 14, 2008
I really am quite terrible, where are the posts & updates?! I guess I could moan about being busy, but thats pathetic. Normal rambling rubbish shall return soon!
Google know best March 24, 2008
For our next project/idea, we need a server; our own, magnificent computer all for ourselves to play with. No more shared hosting: finally free! Strictly not true because our next project is based upon shared hosting. While looking around hosts, I discovered many of them (most, in fact) boast about their “8 core beasts” with “4GB’s” of RAM. Well, that’s great, but surely that means they just stick more accounts on the server? Resulting in the same performance to a low-end server?
This is where we follow Google’s policy and not the standard policy followed by everyone else. Google use low end servers, core2duos with 2GB’s of RAM, but they have them en mass. Thousands and thousands of them. OK, great, so we are going to use lower-end servers, and simply have less clients on each server, whoop-de-do. But, there are some distinct advantages for everyone:
- Less accounts per server means less chance of someone building a bad php loop or other rogue script and slowing the server down
- Most dedicated servers are connected on a 100Mbit pipe to the internet, with less accounts, the less accounts there are sharing the 100Mbit pipe, increasing the speed of each account
- These days providers sell servers with (normally around) 2TB bandwidth, no matter what spec the server is; this means it’s more bandwidth-efficient for us to have low-end servers en masse
- Google are never wrong, as we can see, their site loads pretty quickly (instantly actually)
So there you have it, I rest my case: low end servers en-masse beats a few high end servers. Period.
Introducing: Sketch March 15, 2008
That’s the name of the new design. Sketch.
I’ve been procrastinating for way to long to get this done, but it’s finally here. Out of all my design work I have ever done, this site has been the most complicated in code and the most taxing in design. I’m not a photoshop geek, in fact I normally skip photoshop in my ‘design’ process. Unfortunately, to create the look I was after, photoshop was needed.
Anyway, this is Sketch, and Sketch is my ‘Sketchpad’ on which I will ramble pointlessly, show of stuff I create and base my personal website. Design wise, I attempted to create something with all the sketchy/grungy/crazy feel I wanted, but without limiting the site or user in any way. The final issue was, of course, load times. I believe the images come to a total of 500kb, although some aren’t optimized and that value could probably be reduced, but is 500kb a lot with broadband speeds rocketing beyond 10mb these days? No, but the better quality images are worth it. The awesome looking writing is a font called ‘Pointy’ which can be found and downloaded free here.
That’s all I can really say on the new design, other than I hope you enjoy it, and, if you find any errors with my WordPress hackery, please tell me!
Pointless Ramblings is back!
About
Hey! I'm Nick Barrett and this is Pointless Ramblings. I work as a freelance web design/developer, student and co-founder of Kerplunc. Read more »
