That pretty much sums up Kirstin’s day. She’s been pretty mellow (read: sleeping) or fussy throughout the day. Tis the side effect of vaccinations. 🙂 She’s getting progressively more active as the day goes on, so she’s feeling better. That’s a good thing.

The picture today is from the 2007 One-Act; probably one of my more favorite moments in the show where #2 is breeching. Good material. I’ve not yet uploaded pictures as I write this, so I needed to pick a random picture from the collection.

Speaking of random, I received word today that a guy I once knew died as a result of injuries sustained in a plane crash. Crazy. For the ultimately curious, this is the information I have about the incident.

I continued working today on some pretty major refactoring of a particular portion of application code that’s used pretty much anywhere we do image I/O with the database. It was a shared library of sorts (although it wasn’t a separate library from the application), and over time there was some significant duplication going on. Long story short, just today I was able to go through it all and remove over 600 lines of duplicate code. The official line count was 616 lines, but it’s closer to 660 lines because I added several carriage returns (blank lines) in the refactored code between sections (to make them easier to find in the future). Now, 650 lines isn’t that much when you’re talking a few hundred thousand, but this particular unit only started with about 2350. It’s now in the 1600 line range.

So that was a good productive bit today.

I’m relatively sure I’ve taken care of Beth’s computer problem that popped up earlier this week. Her computer would randomly (and by itself) gracefully shut down. After about 8 minutes of being up. It was quite strange, and I ended up tracking it down to be the UPS service that was incorrectly receiving a signal from the UPS unit indicating the computer was on battery power. So after five minutes of that state, it would shut down.

Well, disconnecting the UPS serial cable and disabling the UPS service seems to have resolved the problem. At first I thought it was a power supply problem…and it even occurred to me that it may be some sort of virus or malware…but thanks to the system logs I quickly discovered the real problem.

I’ve been toying with the idea for some time, but I finally decided last night that I’m going to be doing some pretty serious website work at some point in time during the future. I’ve had the mzonline.com domain now for just about 10 years. In fact, it will be officially 10 years on August 6, 2007. Seeing as how the last major change in design and scope for the domain and a few of its sub-sites was in 2003, it’s time to freshen things up a bit. Okay, a lot.

Right now I’m just focusing on the conceptual work, and I’m tossing a lot of random ideas around in my head. I’m hoping to work on this some in the next few weeks. If I do it right, it shouldn’t take terribly long to implement. But I want to move most of it to PHP for speed and modify the layout templates a bit. Ideally, I’d move into some neat CSS business, but we’ll see about that.

I’m doing a little random scouring for design and color scheme ideas, but my real focus is on organization and layout. I’m not sure yet if I’ll tackle the transition of the Python Repository, but that will be a fairly intense project, because any changes I make there will be database-driven in regards to content, so there’s more work involved.

And that’s about all there is tonight. So until next time…

“Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research.”
– Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)

–MZ