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IRAGINATION blog

Goodbye Geocities

October 27th, 2009 IRA

I was expecting to make this post yesterday but nothing happened.

Today I checked out randomly. It didn’t happen instantly. Some pages were accessible, others were not. I guess that’s how it was planned. Slowly, sections were taken down from time to time. The process was started, ant it was a matter of time to witness the final result.

So today, somewhere between commuting and dinner, Fire Man Lives and the whole Geocities where shutdown for good.

Well, as simple as expect the content of your Gmail inbox be there forever, Geocities was one of those things that you could naively say would be there for good for no other reason than it’s been there for as long as you can remember.

When I read about its closure, I couldn’t help to ponder about it and make some retrospective. After all my first websites and the ones from many friends were hosted there. Good times.

With this, a link of the past is broken. For the Tweeter generation, probably this went unnoticed. For me, embarrassingly enough, I could not let go. So I backed it up.

For nostalgia sake, Fire Man Lives will be stored here for as long as I can.

Um, update your links?

I was expecting to make this post yesterday but nothing happened.

Today I checked out briefly between breaks. It didn’t happen instantly. Some pages were accessible, others were not. I guess that’s how it was planned. Slowly, sections were taken down from time to time. The process was started, and it was a matter of time to witness the final result.

So today, somewhere between commuting and dinner, Fire Man Lives and the whole Geocities where shutdown for good.

When I read about its closure, I couldn’t help to ponder about it and make some retrospective. After all my first websites and the ones from many friends were hosted there. Good times.

With this, a link of the past is broken. For the Tweeter generation, probably this went unnoticed. For me, embarrassingly enough, I could not let go. So I backed it up.

For nostalgia sake, Fire Man Lives will be stored here for as long as I can. This is close to 10 years old content, so don’t be too harsh.

Um, update your links?

Posted in IRAGINATION | No comments »

Progress so far

September 16th, 2009 IRA

Although I’m very satisfied with the progress so far with Bass Abyss, I’m still unable to release a new version. I’m getting closer, but fixing the code has been too entertaining. It’s an endless feedback cycle. The ideas I get in my job get applied in the game, and the ideas I get from the game just happen to solve some problem in my job.

The milestone version 1.0 should be something special, and not just another maintenance update. I’ve done some major revamps in many sections, stuff to be really proud of. But after a few days the hype is over and it just doesn’t look like it was such a big deal, even less worth an update. Probably it was, but I’m too used to not look back and be already very concerned with the new stuff I’m doing.

The only pressure I have when I stop to think of it is “well, maybe this is taking too long”.

September is almost over. I really want to have something for October, even if it is an unexciting maintenance update. To achieve that I guess I’ll have to come to terms with the high bars I’ve been setting.

Oh well. I just took a little break to write something. In the mean time, have a cute short hair Balandra sketch.

The only pressure I have when I stop to think of it is “well, maybe this is taking too long”.

Oh well. I just took a little break to write something. In the mean time, have a cute short hair Balandra sketch.

Posted in Game Development, IRAGINATION, Ilustración | 4 comments »

Broken URL gallery tags

August 10th, 2009 IRA

I don’t know what’s wrong with Coppermine’s url tags but it’s not rendering properly the url that I entered in the description of my last pictures.

Until I find out, here’s the credit of the Mega Man Zero style X I’ve been drawing:

http://harvestwks.blog59.fc2.com/blog-entry-162.html

Bonus sketch:

Posted in Ilustración | No comments »

Trobuleshooting Firefox 3.5

July 7th, 2009 IRA

The upgrade didn’t go that smoothly. I installed Firefox 3.5 in two PCs. After install Firefox detected my plugins, updated some ones like Firebug, and disabled the incompatible ones. Pretty standard procedure.

Then I experienced the following bizarre behavior:

The vertical scroll bar went to the left side. This is by far the strangest behavior.
The search box wouldn’t accept the Enter key.
Links in pages wouldn’t work.
Black text on white background would be rendered white, therefore unreadable.
On Firebug, the console wouldn’t work.
Many other annoyances that just rendered the browser unusable.

How did I solve it? Start Firefox in safe mode.

firefox-safe-mode

Hit ok in the popup window. Then go to Tools->Add-ons. Uninstall/Disable everything you can. Unfortunately I don’t have the time to do an individual testing, so I have to go for the broadest option.

Exit and start Firefox again. Everything should be ok. Then install again the add-ons you really need and are supported by Firefox 3.5.

This is the first time I experienced this problem with Firefox products. I’m still testing it but I think it’s worth the bother.

Hope this saves you some time.

Posted in General | No comments »

Now sporting a table-less design

July 5th, 2009 IRA

If for some reason the site looks weird, please clear your browser cache. I did a heavy rewrite of the layout and now I’m using a table-less, css, div-based (or whatever is the buzzword) design.

After clearing the cache and if I did everything right, you should see no major difference. That means everything went well.

I’m tinkering some applications in my work and they require a similar process, so as usual I try to apply the experience gained and use it here. This should make easier for spiders and similar machines to index my site, by being presented a more semantic layout.

I took the time to support as back as Internet Explorer 6. Considering the magnitude of the markup change, I kind of take pride that the site looks good even on it. Hack free. As soon as I’m done with other tasks, I might look at Internet Explorer 5 and older, if feasible, but don’t expect it soon. Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all look nice on Windows. Yeah, it’s a pleasure to work with those browsers but I just can’t neglet the majority of visitors that browse with IE. Hopefully they’ll migrate to IE8 and I won’t have to look back at IE6 again. I have no access to a Mac system anymore so I’ll have to think positive and trust it looks ok on it.

And if you use Chrome, Safari or Firefox 3.5 you can enjoy nice drop-shadows.

I’m still not done with this process, probably 95% of the site that uses the main layout has been reviewed and cleaned up. There are some tables I won’t be able to get rid off on a reasonable amount of time as the ones in the Illustrations section. That markup is generated by the gallery software it is based on, Coppermine. On a side note, it’s a turn off that that project seems kind of stale but I’ll keep using it for now hoping they release some big update that lures me to use it more often. Wordpress, the software I use for the news front page and this blog, has seen many major upgrades in the same time period, and that kind of motivated me to do some research on its tool-set and related technologies available.

On the horizon there are the mobile browsers, the console browsers. There are so many customizations I’d have to make to support them, but rest assure they’re in my road-map/wish-list.

Now evaluating forum software.

Posted in IRAGINATION | No comments »

Terminator Salvation

June 17th, 2009 IRA

I just saw Terminator Salvation and as a fan of the Terminator series was extremely pleased with it.

Now I’ll go to the IMDB forums were the hardcore fans will shove in my face all the plot holes and inconsistencies that I missed because I was too busy enjoying the movie.

On a side note it was hilarious the guy next to me didn’t have any idea of why John’s Connor father was younger, or who the hell was Arnold.

Posted in General | No comments »

Cleaning up the links

June 11th, 2009 IRA

I did some clean up on the links section removing sites that met this criteria:

Sites not found (404 error).
Sites that present the host’s default error page, usually sites hosted on Tripod or Geocities.
Sites that redirect to other sites. If possible I’ve added links to the new site if the content is still related.
Sites that admittedly report to have closed and left no content.
Sites that have no accessible content unless logged in.
Sites that are abandoned and broken or unusable.
Revamped sites that have content no longer related with my site.
Sites that are only forums (at least be kind enough to link back to me).
Myspace sites or similar crap.

This time I didn’t mind if the site has been abandoned. As long as it is there and has some content with some sort of uniqueness, I can keep links to it, for historic purposes at least.

To my surprise many sites of some favorite artist of mine are gone.

As for the many Mega Man sites gone, well, considering the current state of the web, the old format of mega man site that everybody seemed to copy years ago is no longer appealing. Even back then I couldn’t help to wonder what’s the point of this or that site? On the other side, I’ve been surprised to see many old sites still working and maintained with new content and activities. Kudos!

I even looked for sites that I knew they still were there but had old links pointing to them.

It only took me around ten years to sit down and do this clean up, so don’t expect me to do it again any time sooner.

If you think your site has been unfairly removed, just let me know. Probably I couldn’t find it.

Posted in IRAGINATION | No comments »