July 2005 in the Life of Ben (Blog)
My Company’s Website Goes Live! (27th July 2005)
After nearly two months of domain registration delays, my site is finally online at SiteSurgeon.co.uk but is not fully operation yet. The CSS skilled amongst you will notice that there is a Google search feature which has been hidden. I cannot set this search feature up until Google has been able to spider through the site and add the pages to its index. There isn’t much content on it so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem for the time being.
I am thinking of using a green/blue colour scheme to push the medical analogy a bit more directly. Good idea? Might help the branding of the site.
Project Cerbera Now Printable (27th July 2005)
I have constructed a printable CSS file so that the tutorials, guides and editor lists can be printed. If you want it changed, by all mean use my contact details to let me know. Using a different font size such as 12pt instead of the browser’s default size is something which I might switch to. However, most browsers seem to use a printable font size as their default so this might not be necessary.
I have added this feature so that things like my complete guide to installing GTA 3 and GTA Vice City vehicles can be printed off. By doing this, people could have the guide by their computer and refer to it during the installation process without having to remember where they found it. c{8¬)
Summer Holiday (27th July 2005)
I am starting realise what an endless amount of work goes into the everyday maintenence of a house - especially since we have a set of guinea pigs. We actually have three more than when my parents left since one was pregnant. Two out of the three are alive after a couple of days, which is pretty good going since rodents tend to have a very high infant mortality rate. Was actually quite upsetting having to dispose of the one who didn’t make it.
Summer Holiday (18th July 2005)
My parents will be leaving for their vacation in the Republic of Ireland somewhen around 2005-07-20 to 2005-07-25. They will be gone for about three weeks and I will be looking after the house, my mother’s guinea pigs and myself. If only I had some friends to invite around for a party, lol.
Markup Updated (18th July 2005)
After a lot of Replace All functions being run through my TextStudio program across the entire site I have squashed a load more bugs, particularly focusing on incorrect paragraph markup. I have also rebuilt the header so it now lets you navigate back up through the sections are are inside. This is called a breadcrumbs trail since using these links is like following a line of breadcrumbs you have left behind while walking through the site. It’s a very cool technical term which has been around for years; I didn’t make it up.
Website Design Company (18th July 2005)
After a complete fiasco with the domain registrar who neglected to mention to my host that the domain I asked him to purchase was already taken, I have picked a new domain. After running queries through the central domain name register, I am pretty sure it has not been taken so I have asked my host to register it for me - via a different registrar company! Hopefully it will come through in a timely fashion and the tweaking I have been doing to the design will now be public.
Once the website goes live, I will be concentrating on sending letters to the various companies I have identified as being able to benefit from my services and follow this up by phoning them and trying to secure a meeting. I will start with 15 of the 30+ companies I have found and see how it goes.
GTA San Andreas Handling Experiments (12th July 2005)
There are a great many values in the handling.cfg file which control acceleration a top speed in this edition. I am currently working on a complete study of all these values to see exactly what they do and how they work together. Thanks to the excellent speedometer mod for GTA San Andreas by Spooky, my results have been pretty accurate. I will publish my findings in the GTA San Andreas Handling: Acceleration page when the results are complete.
Summer Holiday (12th July 2005)
My mum and dad are planning on taking a two or three week vacation this Summer. I will be staying at home looking after our guinea pigs and spending every waking hour working on my computery projects. It will be the longest that I have been home alone, so if you feel like giving me some company you can contact me in many ways. If lots of people contact me for pointless chatting this invitation will be removed!
Project Cerbera Updates (12th July 2005)
There seem to be many errors in the page code of Project Cerbera, despite my best efforts. When I introduced proper paragraph coding with the <p> by running replacement operations through the site pages with TextStudio, I made some mistakes. This has caused many paragraphs to be spaced incorrectly from other paragraphs and page elements and I will be trying to fix them all. If you find any bugs, no matter how small, please report them to me!
Some links were broken and so I have fixed them. I am desperate to ensure my links always work, especially internal links that send you around Project Cerbera. If you find any broken ones, again, please report them!
Birthday And GTA San Andreas (1st July 2005)
My family (mum, dad and sister) went to a restaurant for a meal and that’s where I opened my cards and presents. My sister gave me Nirvana’s Unplugged In New York album which I have wanted to get for many years. My parents gave me GTA San Andreas for the PC and after three days of playing it seems like a brilliant addition to the series.
Unfortunately, GTA San Andreas does not run at all well on this PC. Evan at 800×600×16 resolution and Low detail it struggles and the sound often stops plays. There are various threads offering possible fixes and I’ve tried a couple with only a little sucess. It’s just staggering that Rockstar, who are supposed to be one of the world’s greatest games developers (thanks to them developing GTA) cannot make games which work correctly. GTA 3 and GTA Vice City also had serious problems and Rockstar had to release a patch for them soon after their release.
CFG Studio (1st July 2005)
Because playing through and exploring the features of GTA San Andreas has been my priority over the past few days, very little has been done to my programs. However, I started working on a dynamic View Arrange Rows menu which will allow the handling to be listed according to the values in any column you choose from that menu. This means menu items have to be added and deleted when you change between data views or open a new file, plus they have to be stored between data views. It will probably take a week or so before I have it fully refined.
Turning this into a full-blown editor of all the text data files from GTA 3, GTA Vice City and GTA San Andreas would be a massive undertaking because there are so many complex file formats in the editions. The differences between some of these files is quite subtle so the code which automatically detected the type of data being opened would need to be really sophisticated. However, it is a challenge that I really would like to take on.