Chris’ Blog

Well, as you can see, I can’t sleep. Been lying in bed for an hour now, and just can’t get to the zzz… But I did read some from a book I got from the library a little while back. Its Don Norman’s book called “The Design of Everyday Things”. Its actually really entertaining Anyway, So this past weekend I spent about 45 hours on a networking project building a chat lab. I really enjoyed it actually. I learned TONS about socket programming, and everything. Basically I created (well started with some help) a basic web server with PHP that opened a socket and allowed connections to it. Then I edited the code so that it would actually be a chat room. Its not working, but I’ll get it up here shortly. You’ll be able to get to it at http://hess.selfip.com:9020/talk.html - check it out if you get a min. It’s really poor coding, and not real nice looking, but it was fun to do! Anyway, I’m hoping I’ll be able to sleep here in a little while, so maybe I’ll head back to bed… EDIT: Chat is now operable…

Well I thought I would share this little tidbit with all of those who might read this. It’s called Pandora.com - I learned about it on someone else’s blog, and figure why not pass the information on. It takes a bit of getting use to the design of how it works, but basically you go and register there. Then you create a “Station” where you add music you like to listen to. Then they find similar songs, and add them to your playlist - as songs play, you mark them as good or bad and then it keeps finding more songs like those that you like. If you get tired of hearing a song, you can even mark it and it will keep it in your list, but “put it on the shelf” for a month so you don’t have to hear it. It’s really pretty cool, and after a little while, almost all the music that you listen to you like! Real neat stuff Thats my note for the day!

YAY my internet works! After 3 weeks of bumming off my neighbor’s wireless, I finally was here when Comcast came by to look at it. Apparently the guy was surprised it ever worked at all because they are coming over the next couple of days to completely rewire the whole line up to the building. They want to bring in 4 lines so that our connection should be better! YAY! So anyway, thats my great news for the day!

Well… My hope was to praise things that I like in this tech blog, but I have found something that I don’t like. It’s called the Smarty Compiler (http://smarty.php.net/) The idea behind it seems great but I just don’t like how I can’t work with it. Maybe its just that the Bblog software is already written, and I’m just trying to edit it. Maybe some day I’ll give it another try… but for now… this blog is up until I find time to implement something better - which would involve moving all my posts over, and that doesn’t sound like fun… So I’ll stick with this for now, but your stuck with the way it looks because it’s a pain to change… And just think, all I wanted were some breadcrumbs…

So I decided maybe I would write a little note here every couple of days of neat things that I have starting doing, or tricks I found having to do with technology. We will see how long it lasts. But I guess first off… I have been having fun working with this website stuff. I think I would suggest to anyone looking to host multiple domains to get a reseller account because it really makes it easy to divide all of the sites up and keep them separate. I guess they can’t share files that way, but it makes it so you don’t mess up one site when working on another. I really love the Cpanel, and WHM pages, and I’m starting to learn what I’m doing. We will see what happens!

So we counted the days left of school today. Something like 50… Too many if you ask me. Physics is killing me, as is this huge relate project they have me working on at work! Today actually started last night in a meeting when George handed me a paper and said - “Figure out why the numbers are wrong!” So today was completing that task. Well the short answer was that the numbers were wrong because George was looking at the entire thing, and not just the final section. The interesting thing came when I noticed that NONE of the new section was even filled out, and even worse yet, the data that was displaying out to the web page that the office was using to send out incentives, it wasn’t even right! Oh boy… we are in for a fun time here… So basically all the work that was done with the study is gonna take TONS of time to figure out. To top it all off, I have physics to do, a lab due at 5pm tomorrow, and a midterm exam due at midnight… On a more happy note, I purchased a domain name (www.cjhess.com) and reseller hosting from www.webhostingbuzz.com, and I am out to make a name for myself. Well, ok the site isn’t up yet, and my first goal is to get KLTSalesAndService.com moved over so I can get the $4 a month for that thus making my $5 I just spent only $24 for 2 years, and not $120. It will be good though, I now have 5 GB of space, and the possibility of unlimited domains that I can host there (starting with cjhess.com- my personal site, HessWebServices.com(My hosting site which I can move over next week and Setup), KLTSalesAndService.com, and some family web sites like HessFamilyPage.com and TurnbowFamilyPage.com or something…) So there, I’m up to what like 5 pages already, even though only one has content and thats KLT and I won’t move that until I’m sure its stable… Oh well… I guess I’ll move this blog over there… We will see!