The photo gallery is now feature complete. It now has all the basic features a gallery needs to show pictures. You can navigate folders, and view the images in them utilizing thumbnails of the images. I’ll be adding more feaures later, when I have some time, but the basics are now all out of the way. I’ve also corrected some bugs I found in the folder selection code that leads to some nasty errors. I probably need to do some things to make it more robust (would have hidden those bugs), but that will come in time too. Enjoy my thousands of images.

Well, after much searching, reading, and testing I decided I wasn’t going to find a gallery plugin for WordPress that I was going to like. I spent a little too much time trying. Anyway, I decided to go ahead and just write my own. It’s coming along quite quickly. I’m not done yet, but I’ve got most of the framework laid out. I’m sure I’m mostly left with corner cases being errors. Then I need to clean things up and make the interface a little more intuitive. You can already take a look (use the link from the right menu column) and see what I’ve got. No links to the larger versions of the pics yet, but that’s very quick and easy to do. Here are the features I really wanted and yet was unable to find:

• quick and easy additions
• no database required
• fairly standalone unless it’s a WordPress plugin
• no automatic thumbnail generation
• light server load
• decently standards compliant output
• no HTML tables if possible

I’m happy with what I have for how much time I’ve spent coding it (maybe an hour and a half). It won’t take much more to get “enough” functionality that I can leave enhancements for later.

I’ve been working on the site a bit lately. I discovered that IE didn’t show the PNG images very smoothly. So, I replaced some of them with JPEGs. Looks better in IE now. Turns out it’ll save me some bandwidth as well. I need to finish up the rest of the header images and get them rotating again. Then I’ll figure out what I’m going to do about my gallery to get it doing what I want.

So, I took advantage of this wonderful weather we’ve been having. I certainly don’t remember a November with temperatures in the 80F range. Anyway, I took my SP-10 and the RAV-22 out for a spin again. I ran another 500 rounds through the SP-10 and probably 150 through the RAV-22. The SP-10 started acting up again. I had probably 16 FTE’s of the same type I had before. I’m getting real quick at clearing them and getting going again, but I don’t think I should really have to. I realize this action can be a bit finicky, but this is still off. I’ll run the other 500 rounds through it again (hopefully soon) before I decide what to do next. I love the thing, I just wish it ran better. The RAV-22 was a jamm-o-mattic with the Remington High Velocity Hollow Points I tried. I stopped by Walmart and grabbed whatever high velocity ammo I could and this definitely wasn’t what the rifle liked. Something like 60% had problems. Of course it only got worse as it got dirty (.22lr is sure dirty stuff). Some failures were stripping rounds from the mag, FTE’s, and simply dud rounds. I’ll just try something else next time. It’s so cheap I’m not too worried. The RAV-22 has some good going for it. It is quite accurate. I had no problems hitting my target (a bowling pin) at 50 yards off hand. It breaks down well. It’s pretty easy to clean. It also gets a lot of stares. I wonder what kind of .22lr ammo David has in stock. I might head over there this week to try more out. Might as well, as long as the weather holds. Fun stuff. It’s too bad the sun sets so early, though.

It seems we have gotten to that point in the semester where attendance drops off. Some of my classes have gotten frightfully small. In fact, one of my classes has less than 20% regular attendance. I really like it that way. Basically, the people that are left are the ones that care, and most of the idiots are passed out somewhere from partying.

Despite this natural drop-off in student levels, parking is still a mess. This is telling about how badly OSU plans things. Parking has always been abysmal at best, but residential life parking has only gone from bad to worse. I want to know who the genious is that decided building new housing on top of existing parking is a good idea. Sure, they did try to allieviate things by building a few makeshift parking areas and further shuffling of commuter parking, but it is haphazard at best. It’s far from enough. One thing the “powers that be” have pointed out to excuse their mess is the increasing enrollment rate. Well, that’s not happening anymore. Now they don’t make excuses, they just don’t say anything at all. I’m sure this sort of thing isn’t exclusive to OSU, but it’s just another sign to me that this place is rotting from the head on down.

I’d like to thank Oklahoma’s (and by extension, my) Senators Coburn and Inhofe. These two politicians have done us proud recently. Firstly, and probably most visible to the general populace considering what I’ve seen on the national news, is Senator Coburn. He’s been working to cut the pork in Federal spending. It’s exactly what he promised in his campaign and he’s living up to it. We still have some time to see if his efforts are successful, but he is most certainly trying. I was embarrassed by his crossword mishap, but that’s far offset by what he’s presented in session. Secondly, I’m proud of Senator Inhofe’s public statements and pressure he’s put forth regarding the DC ADIZ. See the AOPA site for more. I’m sure it doesn’t mean much to the general public, but the outcome of this situation has grave consequences on everyone. There is almost nothing that isn’t affected by general aviation (think shipping), so this is quite important, even if people don’t realize it. While the DC ADIZ itself doesn’t affect most of the country, its method of implementation is critical. Let’s hope the AOPA is successful and thank you Senator Inhofe for helping.

Well, I saw The Legend of Zorro on Sunday. If you saw the first one and liked it, save your recollection of it and don’t see this one. Basically, it capitalized on familiar actors in familiar characters and threw in a bunch of action. I recall there being a story, but it wasn’t very contiguous, plausible, or even that original. Take my use of the word “story” with a grain of salt, though. Much of the “story” was just to get you from action scene to action scene. It also had inconsistencies that were glaring to me. Let me lay out the two that I have the hardest time forgetting:

**warning, spoiler**
1. There is no way that the cross the priest was wearing would have stopped a round out of that pistol in the way shown.
2. In the final explosion, why didn’t the blast knock over the wall the two protagonists were hiding behind. If the nitro-glycerin is as explosive as in the test blast, why was the blast from a train load of the stuff so much less powerful? Big hole. Big hole.

I could go on, but that says enough.

I don’t intend to post ad’s here, but this is a truely sweet deal. Firing Line is building 100% Bulgarian Krinkovs (SBR) for relatively cheap. Mike (Firing Line owner) made a post about it on his forum.

For those with less gumption to look and/or don’t know what one looks like, here you go:

In two words — it sucks. I can’t believe they spent 7 months and came up with that. Take a look:

To save some bandwidth, I’m only hosting a minimal banner, but a more complete image is viewable at the FreeBSD Logo Contest site. I dunno, maybe I shouldn’t complain simply because I didn’t send in an entry. I’m not a graphic designer, though. I can’t do the quality of work I would expect. If they really wanted to quit using a version of beastie for corporate acceptance reasons, they should have dropped the devil implications all together, not come up with an Aqua-meets-Pokeymon-meets-Beastie symbol. We’ll see how this plays out, but I don’t like it one bit. They should have taken a page from NetBSD and followed their lead.