It has been long since I wrote here at all, especially about the upcoming fourth version of this website.

Two months ago, a prototype design of the Hypro theme for Powervortex.4 was completed. A preview can be found here. Unfortunately, I had to completely ditch this design for now and return to the proverbial drawing board.

Why? For a couple reasons.

1. My current site layout is too bloated and unnecessarily confusing. I mean, the various parts of the “main site” and having the blog on the side somewhat makes sense…but what the heck is up with the “gallery?” The site layout is too un-streamline.
2. Too much text. Everything on this site is pretty much text-based. This is the past. Looking at various other websites, namely Apple.com, websites today are much more visual. And I call myself a web/graphics designer. =D
3. The HTML/CSS/images currently are too heavyweight. On slower connections, the myriad images, especially in the blog, take forever to fully load. And the header strips on the content boxes are hard to read without the background images loading.
4. Hypro, the working title of the prototype PV.4 theme shown above does not at all fix any of the aforementioned problems with this site. More importantly, and more unfortunately, I one day opened the HTML in Internet Explorer and was shocked at how poorly the layout was rendered in IE (I’ll upload a screenshot someday). It displays fine under both Firefox and Webkit-based browsers like Safari and Konqueror, but it is butchered by IE.

As a result, I give you:

Mayfield is the name for the (second) new theme for the fourth version of Powervortex. It will be more minimal, simpler, and will focus on being more user friendly. It will present less reading, more seeing, with more visuals and less text. In addition, I will scrap the three-tier main site/blog/gallery site layout with one that makes more sense, is more streamlined, and is less confusing. However, I will not be joining the table-less sect of CSS design. I will continue to use tables until I eventually get a hang of making layouts completely with DIV tags and CSS. Mayfield will forcus on greater usability, a more streamlined experience, and compatibility with all of the popular browsers, including IE.

As of May 15, 2008, I have switched to the Apple camp. Yes, that is what I mean. Yes, I am now a Mac user. Here are the specs with a few added on specials:

15.4″ MacBook Pro with Multitouch
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU (Penryn)
2 GB PC5300 DDR2 RAM
200 GB Hard Drive
nVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT with 256 MB VRAM

22″ NEC Widescreen display
Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse
Apple Keyboard

Even with the awkwardness of getting used to OS X’s interface, I have found that Apple has indeed made their product remarkably user friendly. Not only is Leopard’s Aqua UI stunningly beautiful, so many processes occur without you knowing when you’re setting stuff up that you almost feel that it knows exactly what you want. Yes, I have had an application crash a few times, but compared to Windows, OS X Leopard is very resilient. Moreover, it does so much for you but it is still so fast. I have installed Quicksilver, the ever-handy keyboard-oriented launcher application, but it does not at all seem to drag the system.

On a small sidenote, I have setup Boot Camp and thus have a OS X Leopard and Windows XP dual-boot setup. Though the ingroup bias extant with being a Mac user is developing quickly, I still need Windows for some purposes. However, I have found that many of the hardware features (like multi-touch and my bluetooth mouse) do not work well with XP. There are certainly at times more steps needed to set up things in Windows when compared to Leopard. But in any case, at least everything works great for the time being.

It is almost amazing how quickly nearly half of a year has gone by. I clearly recall celebrating the new year and imagining, looking ahead, at how 2008 will be like.

We are already nearly halfway through 2008.

To me, May is more than just a prelude to the halfway point of the year. Year after year, May has been a culmination. A culmination of efforts, of struggle through hard times, a time of celebration and reflection. However, this year, May is especially significant. This year, May is the culmination of the last twelve years combined. This year, May is the beginning of a new life for me.

At the end of this month, I will end my high school career, Valedictorian as my class, and embark on an exciting new chapter of my life. The last few months have been extraordinarily exciting, especially as the replies from the admissions offices have returned. I am proud to say that this fall, I will be joining the Yale University Class of 2012 in New Haven. I am very excited by the prospect of the new opportunities that will open to me in the next four years. In the meantime, I will make every minute from now until then memorable and worthwhile. To my reader-base, I thank you greatly for your support, and God Bless.

The gallery has been updated to the latest version of ZenPhoto (version 1.1.5). The update went without a hitch and it appears that the update script has been improved. This new version is definitely more stable than past versions though I have not had a chance to mess around with it that much, which I will start doing eventually as I have a huge amount of photography I have released on DeviantART but have not yet uploaded into the Gallery.

On a sidenote, though I have created a prototype of the Powervortex.4 page design, practicality issues that recently arose during development has required me to return to the proverbial drawing board. However, I have settled on planning to create a theme series that serve as a sequel to the Haiku series, refreshing but not too radical.

As I was creating my previous post, I went to upload the preview for my screenshot. Normally, this would go without a hitch except for the awkward changing of the hyperlink after the upload to the location of my screenshot in PV:Gallery. However, the new Wordpress 2.5 apparently has a new system. The control for uploading media is in the form of a pretty sweet Thickbox modal window and is much more AJAX driven than the old one. However, when uploading the preview image, I hit a brick wall. I was given an error as WP processed the upload that “An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later.”

Trying again later, I was given the same error.

Fortunately, I found a great fix for this small bug. All that it requires is editing the .htaccess file in the Wordpress root folder by adding the following code snippet to the beginning of the file:

After reuploading the .htaccess file, the upload worked like a breeze. Even better, this new interface makes it much easier to change where the image is linked to.

Source: Honkiat

My April desktop. The wallpaper reminds me of my unexpected visit to Darwin, a ghost town in the desert near Death Valley. The feeling of walking into a town that was once full of life but now is only inhabited by the elements and history is quite powerful.

VS: Royale Vista black
Rainlendar: Lucid Smoked

It has been about 5 months since I created a Facebook account and was amazed by the user-friendliness and solid coding of the website, as well as the innovative API that allows for the development of applications by both Facebook and by third parties.

Well, many have seen in the news few months ago that MySpace has implemented a feed that shows you what your friends have done such as updating their profiles. This feature was taken pretty much completely from Facebook; as many may remember the controversy over this action feed sometime last year over concerns of stalking.

But in any case, MySpace has once again started its photocopiers. It, too, is creating an API for applications.

I remember last month seeing a box labeled “Apps” on the right hand side column on the “home page” you get after logging into MySpace. However, when clicking on “get apps” I was presented with the annoying “An unexpected error has occurred.” In any case, now, a beta of the MySpace Apps system is up and running and it is striking similar to that of Facebook’s. The mainly 3rd party applications, which includes Superpoke, are placed on one’s profile, similar in a manner to that of Facebook. Even more so, like Facebook, each application is represented by a little 16×16 icon. Moreover, when you add an application, you get a Facebook-esque AJAX modal window prompting you with a few check boxes about whether to allow the app to access your information.

While I commend MySpace for improving their services and transitioning the website into something truly Web 2.0 grade, it is startling the way they are going about doing this. The new features they have added are blatant ripoffs of innovations that Facebook created. If they are to create a truly excellent service, they themselves need to create something new and innovative. It is even more interesting at how similar the look and feel of the action feed and application systems are on MySpace when compared to the originals on Facebook. Unless there is some behind the scenes agreement between Facebook and MySpace currently regarding these services, I predict at one lawsuit battles quite soon.

I have just upgraded the blog to Wordpress 2.5. This new version has a vastly improved WP-Admin. I really like the new interface. It is very pleasing to the eye and more user friendly than that of previous versions. Upgrade went without a hitch and I was able to get pretty much all the plugins re-activated smoothly (except ZenPhotoPress which is not appearing on the editor).

In any event, I really like the new features in the writing post page, especially the box that is created for tags. I have been trying to clean up the tags on this blog and this new tool makes it much easier.

Anyway, now I need to update ZenPhoto and I’ll get around to that eventually. =D

My March desktop. I decided to call it “Requiem” because of the wallpaper and color scheme and thought that this name would be cool. =D

Anyway:
OS: Windows XP Media Center Edition - my fresh install
VS: VistaXP
Rainlendar: Lucid