Wesley's Tool-Box

This is a long overdue story. It began exactly 7 months ago, on January 11, 2005.

At Macworld Expo San Francisco, Steve Jobs announced a small form factor Macintosh computer called 'Mac mini'. Right up to that point, I had almost no interest at all in using a Mac. Why, my AthlonXP desktop computer was working fine. I had no need to use a largely incompatible and expensive computer that wasn't even small. But the moment I saw that Mac mini, I was absolutely shocked. A supposedly decent performing computer that has a mainboard that probably measures only about 15cm on each side, and fully operational unit costing as low as $499.

Interestingly, I already owned a computer smaller than this: Sony VAIO VGN-U50, an ultraportable notebook computer the size of a normal 3.5" hard disk. Hadn't I already filled the 'own a tiny computer' need? Apparently not. I saw the potential for replacing my desktop computer in Mac mini. VGN-U50 would still be the 'second unit', a portable device I would continuously carry around with to fill my needs. I needed something small that can be kept sitting around the house. Mac mini was it, I envisioned.

I've done some encoding tests with various settings using PSP Video 9 and altShiiva. I had originally intended to use altShiiva for encoding, but then after encoding one file, I noticed that it would hog my main system's resources for an extended period of time. Therefore I decided to look at alternatives, and chose PSP Video 9. This runs on Windows platform; my backup system has Athlon 64 3000+ for the CPU and runs Windows XP 64-bit Edition and can serve as an encoding workstation.

The new router seems to work well. I had the connection tested by several people and they all seem to agree that the website is quite accessible.

I'm changing the router this evening. The website may not be accessible for a while some time between now and midnight.

There have been several improvements to the site design.

I've been meaning to fill the empty space to the right of the text on each of the sidebar items since, well, it felt empty. So I've now made some icons and put them there. It should blend in nicely with the existing design.

While I was on that, I also made the blue arrows to replace the default ones which are currently visible on the calendar. Speaking of calendar, I adjusted the year/month display method to make it look okay on both English and Korean version of the website. The margins between each rows were changed so that the numbers don't stick so close together.

The problems with width element I had with the design had been pretty much fixed now. It was that some articles (mostly the ones from the old website) were prone to stretch the width of the content pane slightly. Also, on Mozilla-based web browsers, the article view often resulted in incorrect width adjustment, making the page a lot wider than intended. The website stylesheet has been adjusted to remedy these anomalies.