Woops! Looks like the admin here at freeshell recently made some changes that took our site down. Things have been restored now.
Seems that spammers wanting to sell you all pills and take your money at online blackjack have taken hold in my comments and trackbacks here. I've had to disable them both as I'm currently too busy at my job to code up a solution for this abuse. You people make me sick, you know that?
I've been meaning to do a lot of things around here, but I haven't had the time. Things like fixing the default style sheet to render properly in Firefox, removing a lot of unused content to make space, cutting out crufty backend-code, etc. Unfortunately, I've been way to busy for these things to even register on my radar.
I didn't know until today, but my RSS feed has been broken for a few days. Changes here at Freeshell removed some of the dependencies my script needed to create the feed. Apologies to anyone who uses this feed.
Like an escape tunnel in prison I started from scratch
I just realized that tomorrow, LAB-Y turns one year old. And it still hasn't made me a dollar. ;) I started this site mostly as a place to house old college class content and a project to drive me to learn PHP and Smarty. I posted my first entry on LAB-Y one year ago tomorrow. I've since ditched Smarty and wound up with a content-management system written from scratch in PHP, designed to run on Freeshell, powering the least read blog ever.
Trackbacks at LAB-Y are back, after being disabled since December. I've been very slowly working on rewriting trackback support since then, and it is finally in a state to test out. So somebody please hit me up with a trackback to help test my support!
The tb url for this post is http://dast.freeshell.org/tb/20040321160615 (not linked so Google doesn't follow it). Fire one off in my direction.
Soon, comments will also be hosted here locally at LAB-Y instead of with Squatbox. Soon... Anyone have a script for extracting old comments from the squawk?
Comments are now hosted locally here at LAB-Y on a trial basis. I don't have comments converted over from squatbox yet, as it is a major PITA. I may get around to doing it someday.
If you have any problems with submitting comments or trackbacks, please email me. My email address is (obfuscated) in the footer of every page.
Comments have now been moved over from squatbox. Many validation errors have been fixed too.
LAB-Y has been down for a little while, due to some technical difficulties here at Freeshell. I don't want to get into the details of the problem, but for now, it has forced me to disable PHP sessions. Let's hope it clears up soon. Much love to the admin of freeshell for his hard work.
LAB-Y is now back up after about 40 minutes of unscheduled maintenance. I upgraded to a new version of backend code I've been working on. For the most part, you shouldn't notice anything different, but if anything appears broken, please send a note my way. My email address is "obfuscated" in the footer of every page.
Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for reading LAB-Y.
First off, I have disabled trackbacks here at LAB-Y. As I am on the farthest edge of the blogosphere, probably qualifying mine as the least read blog ever, nobody used the feature anyway.
My reason for deciding to turn it off is due to the recent CGI policy change at Freeshell, giving me more freedom in generating dynamic content. Eventually, I'm going to redo the way I handle trackbacks. Expect the same changes in comments as well, when I decide to get off my lazy ass and get rid of my Squawkbox service.
I noticed a small bug today in my calendar that it seems a few people have fallen victim to recently. The month of December was being linked to in the archives as 'decg' instead of 'dec'. Looks like I fat fingered it and that mistake propagated itself into several different files. Should be fixed. Please mail me if you find any other broken links—my email address is at the bottom of the page, obfuscated against spam.
I've also noticed that someone from Japan has been giving what look like relative paths to my trackback script. Not funny.
I apologize for the technical difficulties around here, recently. I recovered just a few minutes ago from an accidental delete-without-backup scenario (don't you love that?) and I've been suffering from some of the recent CGI changes at freeshell. Hopefully they should be under control now. Please drop me a line if you notice something overtly broken.
I have changed the format of the permalinks used here at LAB-Y. They now reference each entry by title. If you notice any broken permalinks, please post a comment about it or drop me a line so I can fix it. The old format still works but the new URL's are a bit more descriptive.
This past Saturday, I had that IAC valve installed in my car at a Ford place in another city, no worries there. The mechanic also addressed the starting problem and that smell of petroleum in the cabin of the car.
Turns out that Courtesy Ford didn't install my fuel filter properly when they did the 60K mile scheduled maintenance, leaving a dangerous fuel leak in my car. This was the cause of the smell inside my car. So here's a bit of advice, if your fuel efficiency drops about 10-15 mpg and you smell gas inside your car, take it in immediately.
The mechanic at this Ford place was quite courteous (no pun intended) and charged me only a half-hour of maintenance labor to fix the problem. However, Courtesy Ford still left my vehicle and my life in grave danger with their bumbling.
Below is a copy of the letter I faxed them.
September 13, 2003
Courtesy Ford
XXXX XXXXXXXXX St.
XXXXXXXX, XX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXX XXXXXX Ave.
XXXXXX XXXXX, XX XXXXXDear Service Manager:
On September 6th, 2003, I brought my 1999 Ford Escort LX to Courtesy Ford for a scheduled 60,000-mile maintenance and to address a problem with my idle air control valve. As a part of the scheduled maintenance, your mechanics replaced my fuel filter. However, they were unable to replace the idle air control valve because the part was unavailable.
Unfortunately, the fuel filter was installed incorrectly. When I drove the vehicle off of the lot, the cabin smelled of petroleum and the car had difficulty starting. I assumed this was due to some problem related to the IAC valve that was not replaced.
On September 13th, 2003, I brought my Escort to Ford-Lincoln-Mercury to have the IAC valve replaced. At that time, William Wilson, the Service Advisor of XXXXXXX Ford noticed that the fuel filter was incorrectly installed, causing a leak of gasoline. This left my car in a dangerous state, according to Mr. Wilson, that could have resulted a fire causing in "total loss of the vehicle."
With this fax, please find included a copy of the invoice I received from XXXXXX Ford-Lincoln Mercury. They removed and reinstalled the fuel filter of my Escort. I request that Courtesy Ford reimburse me for this cost in the amount of $24.50. This covers one half-hour of maintenance labor—a small sum, considering the danger to my vehicle and my person resulting from the negligence by your mechanic.
If you have any questions or concerns about this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. You can reach me on my cellular phone at (XXX) XXX-XXXX. Please leave a voice-mail message and I will return your call. You can reach Mr. Wilson at XXXXXXX Ford-Lincoln-Mercury at (XXX) XXX-XXXX. He will be happy to explain any of the details that may be unclear.
Sincerely,
Freeshell.org member homepages were having issues but they seem to be back up. Sorry for the inconvenience.
I forgot to add: I spent $65 this weekend to have the IAC valve installed and the fuel filter reinstalled.
Current total: $1285
Courtesy Ford told me over the phone today that they would be happy to reimburse me for the amount I requested. Fucking super.
Something you never want to hear your boss say. But since the company I work for apparently thinks software is free and it takes zero time to write, I didn't get 5 minutes to myself today. But oh well, I don't have to work weekends yet. [Bitch mode off.] I'm glad I have a job.
As you can probably see if you have javascript turned on, I've added support for the free blog comment service from Squawkbox.tv. I know, I know, this is a fucking lame way to provide facilities to comment on blog entries but until I get my own coded up, this will have to suffice.
Since nobody reads this blog, hey, what the hell? Eventually this Squawkbox shit will be removed from my site when I host my own comments. At that point losing only piddly a comment or two isn't a big deal.
I also put up a calendar index into my blog entries. Credits to zend.com for their fantastic article on building a calendar blog index with PHP. The code was simple, elegant, understandable, and easily adaptable to LAB-Y. If you notice any problems with it, please drop a note my way as it is still experimental.
Well boys and girls, I've finished reworking most of the code here at LAB-Y, which now amounts to my own, home-grown, content management system. I've cleaned up all of the old bits of code that were hardwired, hackish, and dirty. The result is a much more elegant, maintainable CMS. I love PHP. Easiest language I've ever tried to learn, it is as powerful as you could ask for. It has a wealth of prewritten code like Perl with clean, understandable syntax like C. The content freeze is over.
I finally got my Sanyo SCP-4900 in the mail and got it activated. So far so good. Next step is getting the data cable and testing that out with my workstation.
A word of advice to anyone dealing with Sprint PCS personnel. The representatives that do nothing but activate phones are foul-mannered sacks of shit. Their general customer service reps are more helpful. They will, however, sign you up for things you don't ask for.
There won't be any more updates here at LAB-Y for a while. I'm holding off on any improvements, new content, or new blog entries until I've finished reworking a majority of the code. Much of it is too hardwired for certain settings and it is in need of some janitorial work. When this is done, I'm going to take it offline for a short period of time to move in the new code.
In the meantime, to everyone here in the US anyway, enjoy the long weekend. I'm taking off the Tuesday after Labor day to have some more car maintenance done—the damn "Service Engine Soon" is on again for the third time in a few months. I suspect I may be having sensor problems. Anyway, enjoy the weekend.
I just finished coding up a new mode for my image galleries, showing long descriptions with image floats. This let me move my POV-Ray art gallery over to the new code and eliminate an old section. You can also view any of the other image galleries in this way. This will work out nicely when I get the photos from my vacation scanned in (nobody took a digital camera) and put up.
I also moved over the image gallery of my car to the new gallery code. Head over to the gallery and check it out.
Updated some links in this entry.
Every blog entry here at LAB-Y now comes with its own, shiny Permalink. Everyone thank PHP for bringing better things to life (I'll probably get sued for saying that). Coming soon: categories!
I'm about to re-up and restructure the case
I've done some restructuring on the back-end, so email me about any broken links. Hopefully the changes should be invisible.
I've posted up some Emacs Lisp code that may be useful to someone out there, released under the GNU GPL . Enjoy.
Updated some links in this entry.
I've been changing around some code and stylesheets here but functionally, you should notice no changes. Unfortunately, none of this has been tested in Internet Explorer, so please drop me a line if things fail to display properly.
For anyone who would find such things interesting, which would be all of nobody but myself and my girlfriend, I just posted some images of the two of us. A couple were from Xmas of last year and a few are from today. At some point, I promised myself that I would whip up some sort of PHP previewer for my images but at the moment, you just have to browse the directory as presented by Apache. Sorry.
Somehow, we always seem to take pictures at the same place--on the couch at my parents' house. What's up with that?
Updated some links in this entry.
Well, more structural work is proceeding here at Lab-Y. Putting back up content is going slowly because of this and I appologize. In the mean time, those of you interested in CSS should check out The CSS tutorials in Simon Willison's Weblog--really great stuff and a great blog in general.
On another note, I'm not really sure what I want to do with this main page "blog", if you can call it that. I have some urge to turn it into more than news about what has been posted up on this site but beyond that, I'm fuzzy on the details.
More work is progressing on the backend of this site. You should now be able to browse the entries that serve as a blog on this main page, using the control down below. Enjoy!
Changes have been progressing on the backend of this site, so please be patient if you experience errors while loading or viewing pages at Lab-Y. They may come and go from time to time but they will eventually clear up, I promise. I'm working to make things more generic and flexible as well as cleaning up code and removing duplication.
This site is under serious construction. Much of the content is not yet up but it is all on the way. It will probably take me a month or two to get everything up that once existed at http://www2.msstate.edu/~cfy1 and then moved to http://www.cs.msstate.edu/~cfy1.
This site relies heavily on CSS2 instead of using tables for layout, so make sure to use a good browser. Internet Explorer 5.x users may experience some rendering faults because IE5.x misimplements the CSS2 box model. Upgrading to IE6 should help solve this problem.
If your browser supports Javascript, click here to have style sheets for this page removed (thanks to Jesse's Bookmarklets site for this trick). Hit reload to refresh the style sheet.
You can use a similar trick to view the style sheets associated with this page by clicking here. Feel free to borrow any techniques used here (or to suggest improvements); this page has been tested in Mozilla 1.0 Linux, Mozilla 1.3 Win32, and IE5.5 Win32.