Simon Dvorak.com

I woke up at 4:00am today. Not, “I dragged my ass out of bed…”, but I just woke up. Like I had slept all night. Not tired…my brain just said “We’ve had enough of this sleep shit for one night.” That kinda sucks because I usually cherish sleeping in as late as possible. I suppose that is what I get for going to bed at the reasonable hour of 10:45. 6 hours is my usual norm and I about clocked that. The good side of this is that I will get to work SUPER early and get to go home just as early…it being Friday and all.

But that leads me to the weekend which has me finishing tiling my kitchen and master bathroom….woohoo!

I’d rather sit around and play Painkiller especially now that I’m running with a 3GHz Prescott chip! I was forced to upgrade when my efforts to squeeze 2.9 GHz from my 2.4GHz Northwood ended in a fried L2 cache and that big beautiful screen o’ blue. The message, as always, was extremely informative and helpful: “Machine_Check_Exception.” Microsoft’s KB article was just as helpfull. Seems, according to them, that “…specific diagnosis of machine check exceptions is difficult, and there is no general solution.” SWEET!

Luckily I found some information about using Prime95 to stress test the system. This program is very nice in that it has specific routines that tax different parts of the system. You can choose to run functions that use the CPU mainly or primarily RAM or both. This and Microsoft’s Memory Diagnostic Tool let me rule out RAM as an issue. So I bit the bullet and went to Fry’s and came home with Señor Prescott! (speaking of Fry’s, I recently realized that I am a major geek when I, visiting Las Vegas, was thinking about how I could better spend my money at Fry’s than gambling..)

A couple of things about Señor Prescott.

1. He’s a bit hot under the collar: around 50°C at idle
2. 1 MB of cache comes in handy for games, but not much else as far as I can tell.

Let me also point out that if you have made it this far in this post, you either have A) nothing better to do, B) Believe good things come to those that wait, C) Are a really big geek too or D) All of the above.

What is up with comment spam? I’ve been getting hit pretty hard lately. It really doesn’t make any sense to me. It is supposed to be some sort of advertising? Does someone really think I’m gonna be like, “Gee, ‘big fat ass’ says that I can get viagra from him cheap. Sounds GREAT! click.”

I’m not sure what to do about this. I added some referer checking to my wp-comments-post file, but I know that isn’t a foolproof solution. Any other ideas out there?

I just got a new Wired magazine and was excited to see that it include a CD full of great tunes. The most exciting part is that they are all under a Creative Commons licence. That make it fully legal for me to offer all of them to you to download if you’d like to hear them.

I’ve encode them as 320kbps mp3s so they should work with any player out there (except old Sony units)…enjoy!

Update: Here’s a mp3 playlist file if you care to stream the whole CD instead. Since the files are encoded at 320kbps you may experience some stuttering on a slow connection (even on a fast one too ). Increasing the amount of preloading in your media player should help.

Happy Halloween (a bit early) to everyone. Hope you enjoy my new super spooky layout. I will be adding some more surprises and things that go bump in the night as Halloween approaches.

Be afraid…be very afraid!

This topic has been discussed everywhere. However, some of the solutions aren’t much better than a table. Such as:


<div class="row">
<div class="left">
<label for="fname">First Name</label>
</div>
<div class="right">
<input name="fname" id="fname" type="text" />
</div>
</div>

Which is then styled with something like:

.row{
clear:both;
width:300px;
}
.left{
display:block;
float:left;
width:100px;
text-align:right;
}
.right{
display:block;
float:right;
width:180px;
text-align:left;
}


Looks like a table in disguise to me.

So what’s another option? Well, I use something very similar, however I choose to use the elements that are already available. Using the form element in place of the row class used above and seperating form inputs by <p> tags we end up with something like this for the CSS…

And this for XHTML…

<form name="myform" id="myform" action="submitpage.htm" method="post">
<p>
<label for="fname">First Name</label>
<input name="fname" type="text" id="fname" size="20" />
</p>
<p>
<label for="lname">Last Name</label>
<input name="lname" id="lname" type="text" />
</p>
<p id="controls">
<input name="Reset" id="submit" type="reset" value="Reset" />
<input name="submit" id="submit" type="submit" value="submit" />
</p>
</form>


I threw in an extra class for the last paragraph to make the buttons line up on the right side of the form. Works for me. How about you?