Todd's Blog

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Have you ever worked on building a web site?  You'll love this video.  Watch and enjoy how fun it is to program with the proper standards!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0qMe7Z3EYg

Ever since CableVision added the National Geographic ("Nat Geo") channel to its HDTV lineup, I've been an avid viewer.  They have some really interesting shows, and I especially enjoy the ones that deal with the universe/natural world.

Last Thursday night I saw a show on Nat Geo that explained how the moon was created, and how it's creation was instrumental in the development of life on this planet as we know it.

The feeling I came away with was that human beings, and perhaps other life forms that are similarly advanced, are not some common occurrence, in that it required an incredible sequence of powerful, complex, yet perfect, series of events in order to bring about Homo sapiens (us).

I'm not going to go down this road today, but I will say that it makes me wonder how anyone can definitively rule out the existence of God, given such an extraordinary recipe, on such a grand scale, that produced human beings.

The TV show is called Naked Science, and it frequently has interesting topics.  The episode I saw was called "Moon Mysteries".  I think it airs again a couple times over the next week.

According to the TV show, the moon was created some billions of years when an asteroid or planet, perhaps as big as Mars, collided with the Earth.  Nobody knows for sure how the moon was created, but this theory is among the most probable.  (Another theory — not mentioned in the show — is that the moon was a large body captured by the Earth's gravity.)

The moon was not always so far away from the Earth.  When it was created, the moon's orbit was maybe just a third of what it is today.  Over the billions of years of its existence, the moon's orbit has slowly been carrying it spiraling away from the Earth.  One day, no doubt billions of years away, the moon will escape the Earth's gravity completely, and we will once again be without a moon.

The other big difference is that the moon's orbit is a lot slower today than when it was young.  Like a spinning ice skater who slows her rate of spin by extending her arms outward, the moon's orbit slows as it grows wider.

As most people know, the tides are one of the clear influences the moon has on the Earth.  The moon's gravity pulls on the Earth's oceans, causing them to bulge upward toward the moon, which to us on the Earth simply looks like the sea has risen in the high tide.

The Earth rotates much faster than the moon moves around it, so from the standpoint of someone on Earth, the sea rises as they rotate toward the position closest to the moon, and then the sea falls as they continue rotating away from the moon.

The constant movement of the ocean caused by the moon's gravity has a mixing, churning effect on the world's oceans.  It also has an effect on the climate and on the winds.  There is a very complex relationship formed between the moon and the Earth.

Now just imagine what that relationship was like when the moon was much closer to the Earth, and had an immensely more powerful gravitational effect on the Earth.

Scientists estimate that the tides were hundreds of feet in height.  The climate effect was also profound, as it likely caused hurricane-like winds constantly.  When we see a hurricane today it comes and goes within a day, but when the moon was young the hurricane winds would rarely go away.

To one on the surface of the planet it was a violent time, to say the least.

But, according to scientists, it may well have been the period of time where life as we know it was formed.  The movement of the oceans so far inland during each high tide, followed by its retreat at low tide, scrubbed the land of minerals and nutrients and brought them into the sea, in an intense mixing of the world's oceans.  The moon would have continued to have this effect for millions of years, radically changing the face of the Earth, and bringing together the unique set of minerals, nutrients, and conditions essential for life.  They say that even the twisted strands of DNA — the basis for all living things — was greatly influenced.

The Nat Geo show no doubt explains things much better than I could, and gives a full appreciation of the subject.

It's just one example of the caliber of TV programs available, and a good example of why I enjoy watching it.

I was able to locate a 2-minute video clip that highlights the beginning of the show, explaining the theory about how the moon was formed.  You'd have to catch the show on TV to see the rest.

Moon Mysteries clip

Today Apple released version 3.1 of their Safari Web browser, and I like what I see so far!

I'll give you the highlights and some insight, followed by download/install instructions. 

•  The new version appears to have fixed some minor nagging display issues that were in the last version.
  
• The whole browser seems to have gotten a nice performance boost, particularly the performance of JavaScripts and dynamic, moving objects on a page.  For example, dragging one of the Lottery Post popup windows around the page is pretty zippy, and the drop-down menus are really quick.  Both are heavy users of JavaScript and dynamic objects (DHTML).
• The old Lottery Post text editor, which is still used to post a blog entry and change your signature, is a little glitchy in Safari, but that's a known issue with the old editor, and I am working on replacing all  the text editors used throughout Lottery Post with the latest and greatest version (3.0.5).  The versions used right now are 2.1.3 (used in the forums and private messages) and 2.0 (used in blogs and signatures).  In perhaps as little as a week or two, all of them will be moved to version 3.0.5, which involves more work than it might seem.  It is a big step.
• Apple continues to push Safari to the latest web standards, even before they are officially ratified.  To this end, Safari 3.1 is compatible with HTML 5, which is a very big leap.  Granted, there are no HTML 5 sites out there, but it's comforting to use a web browser in which the developer is so concerned with meeting Web standards.  Safari also incorporates all the CSS 2.1 standards (which IE7 does not even do, and which IE8 will finally meet once its released), and if memory serves, it also meets the CSS 3.0 standards and passes the ACID 2 test.  (I'm not sure if it passes ACID 3, but then again I'm not sure any web browser does that yet.)

To download and install the new version of Safari, let me start by saying that I recommend downloading and installing it from a different(non-Safari) brand of Web browser.  That's because if you try to install Safari from within a Safari browser, the installer cannot update the browser while it is running, and you will be forced to reboot afterwards.

To download/install Safari 3.1:

1. Go to http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
2. Unless you really want the QuickTime movie player, stick with the version that does not include QuickTime.
3. You do not need to enter an e-mail address.  Leave it blank.
4. Click the download button, then click the button to run/open the executable when prompted.
5. When installing, un-check the option for the Google toolbar.  No reason to install more unnecessary junk.
6. Un-check the option for the Bonjour service.  Useless waste of your computer's resources.
7. Everything else is self-explanatory.

WOW is all I can say after using the new beta of Firefox 3.

That comment is directed at:

• Performance (INCREDIBLE performance)
• User interface
• Did I say performance?

This is absolutely the fastest web browser I've ever used.  It's got to be twice as fast as Firefox 2 and faster than IE (by far), Opera, and Safari.

I'm sure performance will vary by how powerful your PC is, but no matter what, you should experience similar proportional speed-ups to what I'm describing.

However, there are still bugs.  Things don't finish loading on some pages, there are horizontal scroll bars on some pages (meaning that it is rendering some things in the wrong place), and other miscellaneous glitches.  But the future looks bright for Firefox!

I installed and tried out the new IE8 beta, which was released to developers today.  IMHO, it was pushed out the door too quickly — even for a beta.

I would call it more of an "alpha".  Case in point: Microsoft's own site crashed the browser.

Normally I'll leave a beta browser on my computer for at least a couple/few days to give it a fair shake, but IE8 was so unusable that I had to uninstall it within an hour.  Yup, that bad.

I am very excited about their pledge to support all the current web development standards, but frankly I have a hard time seeing how they can even test standards support at the moment, because so many things just plain render wrong.

JavaScript is very slow — which is expected in a beta browser — but I wouldn't expect it to be that slow.  In JavaScript-heavy sites (like LP), the browser would periodically freeze for a few seconds, and interaction was sluggish.

This is not a slam on IE8.  I commend the direction Microsoft is taking.  This is more a commentary on delivering something too soon.  I do not think it is valuable to report bugs for a beta product in which just about everything has some kind of problem.

I think the fact that Firefox 3 is now in its third beta pushed Microsoft to act a little too quickly.

If you're considering installing the IE8 beta, I'd recommend not doing it, and waiting at least until they release a second beta.

This is a pretty cool stunt!

http://www.maniacworld.com/frozen-in-grand-central-station.html

 

I just spent four days in Kentucky (Louisville area), and I wanted to mention to all the members from that state what a nice place it is.

The people were very friendly, and the weather even cooperated.  (I left just before the snow hit on Monday.)

Seems like a nice place to live.

Day by day I continue making progress on the Lottery Post Web server, in my attempt to restore things back to normal.

(For those who weren't aware of the issue, I'd suggest reading this post first.)

It's been a very long week since this whole thing started, so I guess I'll just start by giving some insight into the problem, and then talk about where we're at.

Last Monday the primary Lottery Post web server died right before my eyes.  Normally problems happen when I'm off doing something else and I discover it several minutes later, but this time was unique in that I was right in the middle of working on something on the server, and ..... blink ..... it stopped working.

I called the data center and asked them to help me cycle the power on the machine, and when it didn't start back up I knew something was wrong, in a bad way.  Even if the server had blue-screened (crashed) a power cycle would at least bring it back up.

So my first course of action was to bring up the site (and a bunch of other sites that I host on the same server) on a backup server.  Fortunately, I have been keeping a "warm spare" ready ever since the site had some problems a few months ago, so it wasn't quite as daunting as it could have been.

All told, between the time it took at various attempts restarting the primary web server, bringing up fresh code on the backup, and a bunch of tasks required to get it operational, Lottery Post was down for about two hours.  Not too bad, all things considered.  It could have been much worse.

After that, I spent a couple days trying to diagnose exactly what went wrong, forming a plan to get everything fixed and back in original condition, and continuing work with the backup server to get additional sites running and as many parts of Lottery Post operational as possible.  It's at times like this when I realize just how gargantuan and complex this site is.  There are so many working pieces that you can't really consider them all at once — you need to tackle them piece by piece.

By Wednesday I decided that this problem would require a trip to the data center, which is much more involved than some people would think.  Many assume that Lottery Post is run on a computer that I can walk across the room to get to, but in reality Lottery Post is hosted on a series of computers located in a data center in a different part of the country from me.  It's a major trip (and expense) for me to go there, so I avoid it except when it's really necessary.

Also on Wednesday I determined the root cause of the failure: two-thirds of the hard disks in the web server's RAID-5 array went bad.  It's something with minuscule odds of ever happening — having two of three hard drives failing simultaneously — so my guess is that one drive failed and then the other drive failed soon after.  Maybe the subsequent failures happened when the remaining drives were picking up the load from the first failed drive.

RAID-5 arrays are great things to have, because they allow a server to survive without interruption if up to one-third of the hard drives fail.  (For example, in a 9-drive array, up to three drives can fail without causing a problem.)  Hard drives rarely fail anyway, so having the ability for one drive out of three to fail means you can theoretically go without ever having a server die from hard drive failure.

Of course, theory is one thing, and reality is another.

So I caught and early Thursday morning flight, and by the afternoon I was in the data center.  (I'll avoid saying exactly where the data center is located.)  I spent the next 48 hours working with the existing servers, installing another new server, and taking the opportunity to install some new equipment that should help me to remotely diagnose and fix problems in the future much quicker than I can today.

Things went as planned in the data center, and everything is in good shape there.

The one big missing piece in all of this is the RAID-5 array from the primary web server — the disks that failed.  I sent the disks to a data recovery company, which spent several days diagnosing them.  Apparently at least one of the disks actually had something mechanically wrong with it — not just a failed sector or two.  The analysis took longer than expected because they had to remove the platters from the drive and place them in a different housing, and then they do very detailed sector-by-sector analysis on each disk.

By Monday (yesterday) I finally got an answer from them.  They believe they will be able to extract all, or nearly all, of the files on the disks.  I don't expect that any member who uploaded files to the server will lose any of them.  That's the good news.

The bad news (at least for me) is that extraction will take a couple weeks and comes at a very steep price.  So while I'm happy that I'll probably be able to set everything straight within a couple weeks, I could literally buy a few extra servers with the cost of recovering the data.  There's no "company" that pays for it — I do.  To say it is painful is an understatement.

There were some other twists and turns that made things interesting this week — like when I found over the weekend that the network interface cards in the new web server were malfunctioning and causing crashes.  I guess the new server didn't want to get left out of the action.

If you noticed (up until this afternoon) that Lottery Post was freezing up every now and then, that was the network card crashing the server.  I was able to get a new NIC (network interface card) shipped to the data center and installed by this afternoon, and so far everything is running well since then.

So that's my update, for anyone who may be wondering what's going on.  Things should be relatively stable for the next couple weeks, and then I hope to get everyone's uploaded files from the data recovery folks, and re-loaded to the server.

If anyone has questions pertaining to their individual situation, please send me a PM.  Let's keep specific questions like that in private, and off the forums and blogs.  If there are general or larger questions and/or comments, feel free to leave a comment here.

I would urge any person who values watching movies at home to sign the petition linked below!

Warner Brothers is the world's largest movie company, and has to-date been a huge supporter of HD-DVD. Right after Christmas was over, they annouced that in May they would stop supporting HD-DVD, and only support Blu-Ray disc.

Warner pulling out of HD-DVD may just spell the end of the format, unless they can be convinced to change their mind. Stranger things have happened, so it's worth a shot.

For those who don't know, Blu-Ray was created by Sony, and is a competitor to HD-DVD. In my opinion, HD-DVD offers consumers a MUCH BETTER product, in terms of both price and features. The one, single advantage that Blu-Ray offers is slightly larger disc capacity, but the average consumer would never know the difference, because both formats hold PLENTY of space.

HD-DVD offers features like picture-in-picture comentary, web-enabled features (you can download extras right off the web), and is about half the price of Blu-Ray.

What does Blu-Ray offer? Some more disc space (which has very little impact, since both formats have plenty of room on a disc) and ... that's all. Along with that, you get charged twice as much money for it. That's crazy!

Again, if you enjoy watching movie at home Please take one minute and sign the petition. Please provide your real e-mail address, so they can count you as a real vote! E-mail addresses are kept private by them.

Here's the link: http://www.petitiononline.com/SAVEHDD/petition.html

The reason I say "if you enjoy watching movies at home, sign it" is because HD-DVD represents a way for average price-conscience consumers to get a real HD player at home. Do you want to spend a minimum of $300 for a Blu-Ray player, or a minimum of $99 for an HD-DVD player, keeping in mind that both have identical quality on the screen, and HD-DVD offers more interactive features?

I sent a Lottery Post member some tips on cleaning out lots of "junk" installed on their computer over the course of a few years.  I thought it maybe useful advice for anyone in the same situation, so I'll post it here too.

It's amazing how much junk accumulates on a PC, especially from someone who downloads a lot of stuff.  After a while all that junk clogs up a PC, making it slower and slower.

I hope this can benefit someone in the same boat.

Cleaning out old junk from a PC

First off, if you really want to clean an old PC, format the hard disk and do a fresh install of Windows.  (Or format the hard disk and use the CDs that came with your computer to restore it to the way you got it.)

However, that's extreme, and requires you to back up all the files you want to keep.  So for the purposes of this discussion, we'll assume you're not going to do a clean install of Windows.

Start by uninstalling programs using the Control Panel Add/Remove Programs.  Don't delete programs/applications by deleting the folder in the Program Files folder, because that will leave tons of junk on there, such as registry entries and files the program stores elsewhere on your hard disk.

After you've deleted as much as you can (and you should really try to strip it bare), you can do a few more things:

1. Run Windows Update to make sure you have downloaded and installed all the Microsoft updates and security patches. Keep running Windows Update until there are no more updates. (After installing a round of updates, run it again, even if all the options were checked. Sometimes there will be additional updates waiting.)
2. Delete all temporary files using the Windows Disk Cleaner tool (comes with Windows). If it's a regular desktop computer, delete the hibernation file (if prompted) because it's only used if you put the computer to sleep (typically only laptops). Check most of the other options too, especially temporary files and log files. Be careful about stuff you have no idea about.
3. Get a good registry cleaner tool. I recommend one called "Registry Clean Expert". You can get it from download.com, but if you're going to go with my recommendation, be sure you find that exact name (there are many). I liked it so much I purchased the real thing (something like 30 bucks.) It is easy to use, and seems to have gotten rid of all the junk in the registry.  A bloated registry is a tremendous resource hog, and will greatly slow down your PC.
4. After cleaning the registry, do a defrag of your hard disk, using the built-in Windows defrag software.  This re-organizes the way the files are stored on your hard disk to make them more efficient.  It does not free up additional space, but it should make it faster.  Let the defrag software run overnight.

After the smashing success of the three Lord of the Rings movies, all the talk of Hollywood was that Peter Jackson (who directed the three movies) would go on to make one or two movies based on The Hobbit.  (The events in The Hobbit take place before the Lord of the Rings trilogy.)

The talk was that because of the length of the story, it would be necessary to break the movie into two parts.  Plus they could make much more money that way.  ;-)

However, a dispute soon broke out between Peter Jackson and the studio, and the Hobbit movie(s) were put on hold indefinitely.  Then at some point Peter Jackson made a statement that he would not be making the movies, and that the studio would be looking for someone else to make the movies.

Boy was I disappointed when I hear that!  As a huge fan of the three Lord of the Rings movies, I was really looking forward to seeing The Hobbit get the same premier treatment.

(After seeing the huge spider scene in Return of the King, can you imagine how cool the scene in The Hobbit would be with a whole army of giant spiders?!)

Well, today I just read a news story stating that New Line Cinema and Peter Jackson have come to terms on their past dispute, and that Peter Jackson will be creating the two Hobbit movies after all!  (As Executive Producer.)

The first film will come out in 2010, and the second in 2011.  If they hold the same pattern as the Lord of the Rings movies, the films will come out in December of each year.

That's still a long way off, but truly good news!

Source: http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/questex/hom123007/index.php?startpage=9

The Netscape web browser will officially die on February 1, 2008.

In the Microsoft vs. Netscape browser wars, that makes Microsoft the official victor.

Not that many people are even aware of Netscape's existence at this point, since it currently commands a mere 0.6% of the browser market.

For me, it's neither here nor there, since Netscape pretty much works if Lottery Post functions well with Firefox, because Netscape is basically just a re-branded version of Firefox at this point.

Checking the Lottery Post active users page, one can usually find one or two Netscape users surfing the site at any one point, so I'm sure some of you will be upset about this announcement.

Here is the source article, for all the details:

A Sad Milestone: AOL To Discontinue Netscape Browser Development

Please observe a moment of silence for the Netscape browser. Netscape Navigator, the browser that launched the commercial Internet in October 1994, will die on February 1, 2008. AOL, which acquired Netscape in November 1998 for $4.2 billion, will announce today that they will discontinue development of the browser, currently on version 9.

In an email exchange yesterday with Tom Drapeau, Director of AOL/Netscape development, he said that only a handful of AOL engineers are still tasked with keeping the browser updated. Most of their efforts have been aimed at creating a Netscape-skinned version of Firefox with the Netscape look and feel.

The team has been unable to gain any significant market share against Microsoft Internet Explorer. In fact, recent surveys suggest that Netscape currently has only 0.6% market share among browsers, compared to IE's 77.35% and Firefox's 16.01%. This, of course, is the same browser that once claimed more than 90 percent of the market, sparking the browser wars of the 1990s and the subsequent Microsoft antitrust trial.

Drapeau says AOL's transition into an ad-supported web business leaves little room for any real effort at maintaining and evolving the Netscape Browser.

He also points to the success of the non-profit Mozilla foundation, which spun off of Netscape in February 1998 with $2 million in funding from Netscape and an additional $300,000 from Mitch Kapor. Firefox, which is part of Mozilla, brought in nearly $70 million in 2006 revenues, mostly from a search deal with Google. In a sense, Netscape lives on through the open-source efforts of Mozilla and Firefox.

Support for existing versions of Netscape Navigator will cease on February 1, 2008. After that, users can visit the UFAQ and the Netscape Community Forum for support.

AOL is also setting up a Netscape Archive where users will be able to download old versions of Netscape, without any support.

I sadly place the first browser I ever used into the TechCrunch DeadPool.

Source: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/28/a-sad-milestone-aol-to-discontinue-netscape-browser-development/

I saw the movie "I am Legend" last week.  What a great movie!

I was really puzzled by the number of negative reviews.  What are these people thinking? 

Even though it is a story that has been made into a movie at least two times before, I am Legend is a very different sort of movie.

I think the thing I liked most about it is that it took its sweet time.  It was not in a rush to get the the gory parts or to the showdown with an alien or something.  It dwelled on the everyday life of someone in a very unique situation, like a character study.

Following a normal person around is not very interesting, unless that person is the last survivor on Earth.  Then we want to see everything, and that's where this movie delivers.

The very surprising aspect of I Am Legend is that religion is treated as a positive thing in the movie.  What an unexpected treat to watch a movie that does not bash Christians or ram atheism down the audience's throat. 

What a concept -- that God is actually a positive force in the universe.  It's not a religious movie, but to see even one tiny part that treats religion as a positive thing is nice.

Hmmm.... come the think of it, that's probably why several reviewers gave it a negative review.  The majority of movie reviewers are liberal elitists, and we all know that religion to a liberal elitist is like garlic to a vampire.  So even one small mention would send their puny heads into a spiral.

Microsoft release an update to its JavaScript engine ("JScript"), which will give a performance boost to any IE6 user.

Since Lottery Post relies upon lots and lots of JavaScript code, this should help every Lottery Post user who still uses IE6.

It will eventually be released as an automatic update through the Microsoft Update service, but you can download it right now if you don't want to wait.

Here's the blog post announcing the download:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/11/29/jscript-performance-update-for-ie6-users.aspx