Systems

This post ends the time that this blog was being created for a systems class I was taking. I originally planned to discuss RFID technology and its implications for the library world. I was also going to talk about some benefits and problems of digitization projects in archives, museums, and special collections. As you may have noticed I never discussed either of these. I got side tracked by the technology side of blogger. I ran into 'little' problems that I thought I could fix quickly and spent more time than expected on it. Before this project if you asked me to make some changes to some XML I would have said I couldn't do it but now I realize it is much closer to HTML than I thought so I can do an okay job with certain changes.
This whole things has shown me that no matter how lofty your goals are you need to take care of the technology side of your problem but it has also shown me that you should not get distracted by the tech side to the point that you don't reach your goal. I tend to get distracted by technology so I need to remember that it is being used for a specific purpose and to ensure that the goal is being reached.

Finally

Through a lot of playing around with the template code and everything I've done to the blog I finally got Mozilla to show everything right...I'm not exactly sure how I did it but I did.

Netscape works with my blog

I just installed the Netscape browser and checked my blog and it works fine on it. So that leave Mozilla Firefox as the only browser that's giving me problems. I can't figure out why it is not working. It isn't even like it is a code problem. The jpg and bmp don't show up at all and I can't figure out why.

This stuff is crazy!

Google search

I just added a Google search to my sidebar. I followed the directions on askdavetaylor.com except that I replaced "sitesearch value" to tomastirade.blogspot.com but after testing that it didn't work so i changed it to blogspot.com and it now works to search all blogs on Blogger.

It's sort of fixed.

I had an XML object in the side bar that displayed the map from http://www.die.net/earth/ but it seems that it caused a major break down of Mozilla. It seems it is what caused Mozilla to do what happened in my previous post. Once I removed it Mozilla shows the blog properly again except that it doesn't display any pictures I have on it correctly. Time to see if I can figure out what's causing that.

I just broke Mozilla

I decided I was going adjust the template I was using to make it a little wider. I found that the space it allowed me was far too small to use graphics within.
To adjust the template I needed to delve into it's code. The code is XML which is similar to HTML but enough different to cause me problems. I had learned HTML code from scratch back in 1995 but things have changed a lot since then. It took me a while to figure out how to adjust the width correctly. Once I did that I found out that the parchment background did not cover the new expanded width so I needed to set the parchment background to repeat so it would cover the space. Once I did all this I was feeling very proud of myself...that is until I opened Mozilla Firefox. It now looks like this on Mozilla.

Go Ann!

Tagzania: Items by annfoster

I just saw this on Ann's blog and thought it was cool so I wanted to se if I could toss it into the body of a post.

PDA blogging?

I just tried to post my next entry by using my PDA and found out that I can't. I can view my blog but I can't sign in to it. This is unfortunate but I'm not sure if it is something that Blogger could fix easily or if it is the fault of Internet Explorer Mobile. I guess I can't get too angry because Blogger does have the ability to add a post by email.

PDAs on campus

The university I attend has a wireless network on the campus that is meant to allow students to access the internet for their studies. In theory this works fine for notebooks but the university has decided for some reason that they will not support PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). When I approached University Computer Services I was told that they did not support PDAs but they knew a program I could buy online for $75 (US) that might work. Of course even if I did buy the program and it did happen to work now it is very likely that a future update to the wireless system would stop the program from working. I commented that it was ridiculous that they did not support PDAs and was surprised they did not have more demand for it. I was told they have lots of demand but they just haven't done it. They annoying thing is that it is just a software issue. The program they don't have is the VPN client (an over grown password program). They have VPNs for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux but they decided not to get the two for PDAs (Windows Mobile and Palm).

My quandary

I have a dilemma. Some of my future posts will be about technology at the university I am currently attending. Anyone who knows me will know what university I am talking about, but I don't feel comfortable naming the university for some reason. I guess I'm still too new at this whole blog thing, but I'm just not comfortable with it. I have no problem telling someone if they ask me. I have even voiced my problems, concerns, and worries to various tech departments on campus so I have no problems voicing my opinions, but I just don't feel comfortable using the name of the university in my blog. For that reason I will only refer to it as the university.

ASCII

My last post raised some questions from a couple of people. The main one was how do you make á. One option is to simply copy and paste it from here into whatever you are typing. Another is to go into a program like Word, go to the Insert menu, select Symbols and then chose the one you want and insert it into the document (if you wanted it in a different program you then do the copy/paste bit). Or you could do it the geek way: ASCII keys. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. For me to make an á with ASCII I hold down the Alt key and type 160 on the number pad, then release the Alt key. If this doesn't work right for you, hit the Num Lock key and try again. If you want to know what other characters you can make with ASCII this site has a good chart: http://www.asciitable.com/

In The Beginning...

Hello World!
This is my new blog. This is a place for me to rant about technology.
My first rant is about programs that don't allow me to use my name properly. You may have noticed that the title of the blog and the URL are not the same. Blogger does not allow me to use either á or ' in my URL. Personally I don't really care about the apostrophe but I get really annoyed when systems won't allow me to use á. I understand that most English words don't use accents but it is rather egocentric to ignore the many other languages in the world.
Wow...that rant went a little further than I expected.