I just had a rambling underway, but then the power decided to go out for five straight seconds, taking everything down. Bzzzt! Thunder. Lightning.

Argo came back up the quickest, breezing through the fscking disk checks. Illian took a bit longer, bringing the connection to the outside world back up. Dagobah took the longest, making twiddle my thumbs for several minutes as I waited impatiently to begin the rambling again. And.... here we are.

I spent some Sunday afternoon web development time refining the look of Bitscape's Lounge. Just as the power outage happened, I was getting through saying that the spaghetti.pl version of this page is probably going to be retired sometime in the near future. (The script itself will probably stick around for the foreseeable future, but the link from the front page will be removed.) Before this happens, though, I need to make sure all the information that was accessable under it is viewable through the new version. (I need to think of a name better than devel_crap.pl too.)

For example, the movielog info needs to be shown. Links. I'm not sure about the static stuff. I might just through some links to the full-page versions of those. We'll see.

This all started this afternoon when I downloaded my Debian updates, which included Gimp 1.1.24, and I decided it was past time to be putting it to some use. I can't use a slow machine as an excuse not to get the graphics right anymore. ;)

So, I opened up the much-more-polished-looking-than-before development version of the glorious image editor, and contemplated what to make. Then I looked at my web page, and realized it had problems that really couldn't going to be fixed with better graphics. Just little things. The fonts... the table spacings... hard to describe.

So, I got into working with one of my less glamorous web development tools (but never surpassed in usefulness): vim!

And now, I will repeat the sentence that I used to begin the rambling before the tragic outage: I'd just like to take this opportunity to say that Netscape Navigator 4.x sucks rocks. I know I've expressed such a sentiment before, but it bears repeating. Again.

Here's the deal: You make a stylesheet to set the font. Perfectly normal. 100% within w3c specs. Mozilla M17 renders it fine, and the page looks beautiful. And what does Navigator 4 spit out? A hideous blob of pixels that look like they've become the victim of the goat snot virus.

(Just in case anyone's wondering: I actually still don't have NN4 installed on Argo, but for Lounge testing purposes, I can run it remotely off Dagobah.)

I so wish we could all just trash that POS browser, and never have to worry about its broken behavior again. But, for the short term, at least a minimal amount of attention must be paid to it, cause let's be realistic: A significant number of people are probably still using it. (Perhaps I should read my logs, if for no other purpose than to find out.)

But here's the good part: Under Mozilla, playing with the stylesheet properties is an utter joy. You do something right, and it actually displays accordingly! Hit Reload, and it refreshes the page, the stylesheet, and all the relevant info! It's just... fun!

Well, I did make a few compromises in order to get it to at least look somewhat less retarded in 4. My current philosophy: First design in compliance with w3c specs, test with Mozilla. When it's how I like it, then check that we at least have some semblence of working-ness under Navigator 4. If it don't work in four, a little scaling back may be required. (IE users are left to fend for themselves. However, given that I don't design with a lot of off-the-wall proprietary crap tags or JavaScript, things should at least be viewable. Especially considering that recent versions of IE are closer to being w3c compliant than NN4.)

Blah blah blah.

In other news, Bitscape did spend some time rearranging the mess yesterday. Unfortunately, a rearranged mess is still a mess. I think part of the problem is that I just have too much stuff to cram into this little room. It's time to either have a miniature garage sale, throw some things away, or get busy on a certain one of my New Year's resolutions. Let's not go in depth on that now though.

Alrighty. Maybe now I'll do some Gimp-ing. The obvious question: Should I go totally crazy with the alpha-channel pngs, or should I have some pitty on those still stuck with legacy browsers? Hmmm.. I shall ponder.