Gh0st_Preacher's Stuff

I forgot to mention that I made more updates to the site's CSS.

I made the template WAY too wide.  Impractically so.  I reduced it by a few hundred pixels, which seems to better suit the content.  I might set a maximum width of around 850px and then make it fluid if the viewport is smaller then that.  Maybe.

I also added borders to separate out the right rail from the main content, and posts from each other.  This seems to make things feel a little more organized.

I still have a desire to add more things to the right rail, but I feel like the Twitter feed is enough for now.  One of these days I'll go back through and tag all of my posts and add a tag cloud, as well as links to my personal favorite posts.

Hello, internets.

It is a Saturday.  That means the following things will take place:

- Liquor
- Games
- Liquor
- Food
- Caffeine
- Liquor
- More games
- Liquor

As you can see, I have a terribly busy schedule on my weekends.

Also, Thnikkalodge.

My terrible ability to design is showing once again in the latest design update!

The large majority of modifications are to the site's CSS.  I still haven't had the desire to go through and actually fix up the core stylesheet's poor organization and overall bloatedness.

I also removed a few things.  The calendar in the upper-right is no longer there, as well as the single ad call.  Since I don't really get any traffic, the ad was totally unnecessary.  And the calendar was totally unneeded because I don't post often enough to necessitate it.  Also, it provided a path to a redundant post listing page that was all ready covered by the Blog Archive.

The page is much wider.  I designed it for 1000px width.

I'm not 100% pleased with the new design, but it's much better than the template before.  Hopefully this one is actually readable, which is the biggest complaint I received about the last template.

The color scheme was driven by my desire to not use as little pure white and black as possible.  It's composed of blues and greys, which turned out well, mostly.

More updates will come, but for now, I'm happy.

Until next time.

Ever since I got quasi-serious about this serverbox, I've been keeping track of a few internet security sites.  They all provide various perspectives to internet security and give a unique look into the state of OMG T3H HAXX0RZ N VIRUSESES.

Many of these sites get at the same point - the internet is insecure in so many ways.  Why don't common folk work to make the effort to learn about security?!  I've found myself of that side of the fence a few times.  "People need to learn and englighten themselves!  They need not live within the dark ages any more!"

But then I thought about all those other industries and how those industries don't expect the same of their "users".

It used to be that, back in ye olde days, if your watch broke, you went to a jeweller and/or watchmaker and had them fix it.  All you knew was that there's a part of it that tells you what time it is, that it needs to be wound up sometimes, and that the watch should tick.  Jewellers didn't berate customers because they didn't know the internals of the watch.  They did the work because, hey, that's their job.

I could point to any number of industries that follows this general rule.  But I think the exceptional embitterment within IT folks is one that's actually quite justified.

See, just as there's the jeweller or watchmaker who'd repair watches, they wouldn't do it for free.  They might give a discounted rate, but it's rude to go to a jeweller friend, give them your watch, and go "This is broken.  Fix?"  This behavior is seen within the IT industry.  Instead, people will call you up and go "Hey, the thing won't go.  How do I make it go?"

This is a poor way to treat that friend of yours who's a "computer person" because, if they work in IT, they've been doing that all day.  You're offering them no incentive to help you out, and giving them plenty of reason to haul off and punch you.

I think this stems from the fact that computer people don't make things that you can hold.  We don't have any sort of metric for our work other then "There is now a website" or "The connection between this production machine and this backend database is now 5% faster".

So how do we fix both ends of this problem?  How do we address the problem of helping users help themselves, and how do we get users to understand that your expertise isn't always free?  Both of these could be tackled any number of ways, but I think it comes down to each side flexing a little bit.

First and foremost, the IT industry needs to make an effort to at least somewhat simplify it's messages about security.  The same stance has been taken for years, and it obviously hasn't worked.  We need to help users understand what the SMB Exploit in Windows 7 means to them.  Remember when the automotive industry had to recall tires on Ford Explorers all those years ago?  All they needed to say was "the tires could explode and the car could crash".  That's it.  People understood that.  Telling people that the SMB exploit could allow remote code execution is a terrible way to assist them in understanding the real problem, which is that remote code execution could mean theft or loss of personal information.  That's talk people understand.

I take my stance here, again, based on observing other industries.  When an electronics company does a recall on stereo amplifiers, they don't say "We recieved a batch of capacitors that under some circumstances generate excessive heat", they say "There is a fire hazard related to some internal components".  People understand that better.

To help users understand why your expertise shouldn't be assumed "free", there needs to be a serious discussion that we are just like watchmakers, automotive engineers, and steel mill workers.  We do what we do because, while we hopefully enjoy it, we need to earn a buck, too.  People need to stop assuming we are always available as tech support.  We'll be there when we can, but let us not be there when we want.

Computers are commonplace enough to the point that I think we ought not hold out any more.  Both sides need to come together and work to understand each other better.  Once we do that, the industry will become a much happier place.

CURRENT BULLSHIT

Okay, so I've completely ignored this site for too long, but it's all good, because I'm slowly getting my motivation back.

Latest News:
- gh0stpreacher[at]gh0stpreacher.com is now a real email address.  So is admin[at]gh0stpreacher.com.  I don't know why, but I'm really stoked about this.  Personalized email?  Yes please.
- I'm going to try to wrap my head around Service records to get XMPP working outside of the domain.

Also, for some strange reason, comment spam has been a problem.  I have no idea why, because nobody ACTUALLY reads this thing.  So what gives?  Either way, I've started blocking the offending IPs.  PWN'D.  Or not.  Whatever.

OTHER THINGS YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT

I've been playing Warhammer Online lately.  Lots of fun.  It's too bad it's failing in the market, because it really is the best EQ-like MMO I've ever seen.  It's PvP is awesome, it's quests are decent, and it's easy to level (sorta).  It's easy to login for an hour or two, hop into some scenarios, run a couple quests, and logoff, feeling like you've accomplished something.  I'm playing a Squig Herder on Darg Crag.  Contact me and I'll give you my in-game name.

I'll give you some real content soon.  Maybe.

Life's been busy.  Here's another useless post!

- Allison has moved to Eureka.
- To to Allison's move, I'm moving to a new place in the south of town.
- I finally registered gh0stpreacher.com.  Finally.  As in, it's finally my domain.  The old domain will stick around for a while, but I'll soon deactivate, if I remember and/or care enough.
- Work is busy.
- Trillian Astra still "OMG ROXX0RZ T3H BIG ONE!!!11111"
- I had to get a new battery and charger for the laptop.

Other than that, my life is pretty decent.  Nothing huge going on.  I've done some reworking of the site.  Mostly padding, margins, widths, and font sizes.  I also did some optimizations, so the site should load a little faster.  I'm planning an entire color palette change, but until then this is what you get.

Until next time.

I got accepted into the Trillian Astra public beta tests.  I didn't know they had any slots open, but I was surprised to see I could download it that instant.

I've used it now for about 2 solid days, and I have quite a few things I've noticed about it that get me, well, excited about using a chat client. Go ahead and reread that last sentence.  I'm excited about a chat client.  That means it does one of two things:
1.) It can cook food, do my laundry, and giggle at my jokes.
2.) It's really good at being a chat client and caters needs I didn't know I had.

I think you know which one I'm referring to here.

Trillian Astra is a follow-up to the Trillian 3.x series.  Why the added "Astra" name?  Because they've completely redesigned the product.  Bottom-up.

I've used Trillian for a little over 5 years now, and in that time I've seen it grow from the nifty multi-protocol client with plugin capabilities to a behemoth, slow, ugly, mean-faced app.  But Astra fixes that.  It fixes it because they've reconsidered how I might actually use the application.  They've probably got a couple people who, during UI designs, probably say things like "how do we allow the user to perform x action in under three clicks of the mouse? what about 1?"

The problem that UI designers get into pretty consistently is visual clutter.  Oh, you want to have access to a bunch of features at a moment's notice?  Okay.  We'll slap a button right here.  And here.  And here.  Ooh, we still have some real estate left.  Etc.  But this isn't very helpful at all, because I really care about having quick access, now RIGHT NOW access.  Think about it: I don't want the "sign off" button immediately visible, because I'm clumsy sometimes.  Give me a buffer to prevent me from accidentally clicking it.  Same thing with my context menus.

Remember when I said that they've completely redesigned the product?  They did something I rarely ever see - they redesigned it so well that all of my old habits still actually work.  Want to access preferences?  Cool, just right-click the titlebar of the contact list and navigate from there.  No biggie.  Those are the important choices in a ground-up redesign: how do I allow old users to still utilize the same actions they're used to, while giving them new ways to accomplish them?

The other thing I've noticed is that it's FAST. Boot-up is significantly improved over the 3.x series, as is just about every other action I could do.  Even opening, closing, and resizing chat windows and the contact list is faster.  That's saying something.  Especially for a beta.  Also, the fact that it properly synced up with the previous installation I had was really nice, because it meant that i didn't have to go changing a bunch of settings.  Everything was as it should be.

There's another feature that's been greatly improved upon since 3.x.  Trillian used to do a sort of auto-match where you could start typing a screen name and it would jump to it, but it was spotty at best.  Their fix?  Just start typing while you have the buddy list selected.  it'll automatically filter down to the screen names that contain that text string.  That's a sweet choice that's all ready been put to good use.

I haven't yet had a chance to test out some of the other funky bells and whistles available.  I have been using the Twitter support, however, and it's almost what I want.  It displays a small timeline that goes back however far you want it, and then spawns a new chat window when you want to send new tweets.  This is now big deal, except that what I really want is the entire thing to display in a single chat window.  Make me feel like I'm almost in a chat room.  The XMPP support Twitter had for a while is almost exactly what I'm thinking of.

The only other gripe I have is that the tabs at the top of the chat window containers are huge.  Seriously huge.  If they were smaller (like they were in previous versions), this would not be an issue, but right now, they're a little large for my tastes.  Then again, it's designed so well that the loss in screen real estate really doesn't seem like that big of a deal any more.

After 2 days of using the Astra Beta, I have to say I'm extremely impressed.  I actually will not return to 3.x like I was expecting to, because this is all ready stable enough, fast enough, and feature-rich enough to replace the old one.

If you want to check out more, go hit up the Trillian astra site.  You can find much more information there.

As always, have a good one!

So here we are again, my little happy ponies (what does that even mean?)

Couple of quick updates:

1.) Blog redesign is going to be in the works some time soon.  Not sure when, but soon.
2.) I'm working of fleshing out a few blog posts.  I have some ideas, but I'm not totally sure how I want to run with them.  To make matters worse, I have a few recurring post ideas I've been tossing around, as well.
3.) I've got a new "rig" post coming up, too.  It's changed a bit, and it'd be nice to update.
4.) Go read everyday journalist.  Seriously.  Because Ally is awesome.

Trying to fix right now.  This is just a test post...

UPDATE:

Finally realized what the problem was.  "Server time offset" does something different than what I thought it did.  Oops!