KaiSchaller.com

After a formidable amount of brainstorming I’ve finally put together an acceptable capstone proposal and am only 1 more faculty signature away from approval.

I will be developing a plugin for WordPress that adds mailing list functionality to the interface. The goal is to make it really easy for people with WordPress to create and manage a mailing list without having to deal with database and server-side code creation. This plugin is being developed specifically for our state representatives website, but I think I should be able to submit it to the WordPress Plugin Directory without rewriting any code.

I have until roughly Thanksgiving to get everything completed, wish me luck!

One of the frustrating incompatibilities that still exist between operating systems is which file system you use to format your hard drives. I have a few external hard drives that I use for storing my media, keeping backups, etc. As far as I know FAT32 can be used by both Macs and PCs to read/write, but using it limits your file sizes to less than 4 GB. NTFS and MacOS Extended do the trick for their respective operating systems, but I learned the hard way that OS X couldn’t write to NTFS. I haven’t tested how Windows responds to the MacOS Extended file system, but I would imagine it’s the same if not worse.

Let’s standardize, people! Sadly, this probably won’t happen.

Truly one of the greatest joys a geek can experience is an unboxing.

Girlfriend’s new iPod nano

Turns out CollegePublisher is a nightmare for XHTML/CSS guys like me. On the one hand I can understand that they’re trying to divvy every individual component into its “object”, but having to edit countless, separate boxes full of code isn’t exactly easy when you’re trying to redesign a whole site. The main problem is keeping track of which code is going where. Add into this that there’s object-oriented code everywhere and you’re staring straight into a big mess.

To be fair, I’ve only glanced through the system. I’m still clinging to the hope that I’ll be able to keep track of everything, not to mention be able to do the things I want to do once I have a design to work with.

UPDATE: [Sept. 10, 2007, 8:00 PM] To CP’s credit they responded very quickly to a request I made over the weekend and had a test domain set up and ready to go for me by early Monday. I requested this so I can play around with the system without breaking the live site. Thanks CP! :-)

Ah, I forgot to mention: I’ve been hired by the Index, Truman’s newspaper, as their Online Editor. Should be good fun and a great experience. I’m also supposed to be thinking about a redesign for their current site, but until I can actually login to the College Publisher network and see how everything is set up it’s nigh impossible for me to evaluate the situation. More information as it becomes available.

My dad had his gallbladder removed today. Here’s wishing him a speedy recovery!

I was doodling on the whiteboard this evening and came up with Marvin (the turtle). He is now the companion of Sammy (the giraffe), who I first drew in 4th grade. Enjoy.

I sometimes find it hard to focus on one certain area of technology because I constantly find myself wanting to do everything. Even though my true passion has again and again proved to be web development, I can’t help but want to try my hand at various other facets of modern creation. For example, I dabbled quite a bit in 3D modeling and animation throughout my high school and early college years. These days I want to write software for OS X (it’s just so pretty!).

On the one hand I like that I’m exploring several different skillsets, but at the same time I worry that by not focusing entirely on one thing I’m falling into the trap that the saying “Jack-of-all-trades, master of none” warns us about. The trick here might be finding a way to combine these interests under the same roof of “web development”. I’ve used the 3D know-how in web projects before, and being able to write desktop applications would surely come in handy for certain web-related uses. Guess we’ll see how things turn out — everything should become much clearer once I find a career that has me working in a certain area.

I was browsing Panasonic’s website last night and thought their choice of favicon was a bit odd:

Perhaps a default that didn’t get changed?

I’ve been watching the BBC sitcom My Family lately and came across a lovely little web-related easter egg. Take a look at the following screenshot:

In the episode, Ben (the character looking at the computer screen) claims he is on the website OldPals.com. However, we can clearly see the address bar says “C:\Documents and Settings\Work?\Local Settings\Temp\WebC.tmp\index.html”. (The ‘?’ after “Work” is a character I can’t decipher.) You’ll also notice the scroll bar is at the very bottom of the page; we never see what’s at the top. I thought it was funny how the address bar immediately caught my eye. :-P