bburky.com

Well, it seems I've almost abandoned my website here. I never even finished the pages for the projects category, wow. I really should do something with this site. I'll probably actually do something with this site over the summer, though I do have a couple of other website projects I'm tentatively planing for the summer: a redesign of my scout troop's site and a small wiki-ish/database-ish web app for robotics.

The last time I was going to try to post to this blog, my phone ate the post. Well, it was surprising that I had internet at all. Yeah, there's a story there. I was at the Education Service Center for one reason or another, and I thought "Hey, do they have wifi here?" So I went ahead and actually managed to connect my phone to the network by using settings somewhat similar to the following (this is from memory):

• WEP with "automatically provided key"
• PEAP selected in the 802.1x settings (I think. It was whatever it automatically asked me for a password with)
• The normal TPS user/pass/domain info was entered as "me\wasstudent" for the username and the normal password
• Maybe because I wasn't using an MSIE based browser, I had to put http://bluecoat.tulsaschools.org:8080/ as my proxy. I don't remember now, but it likely also required authentication. I also don't remember if this hypothetical authentication needed the domain specified either, but I'm guessing not.

After using all those settings, I managed to get a perfectly normal connection to the TPS network and its connection to the internet. Well "perfectly normal" as far as Bluecoat's filtering of the internet is normal at all.

This was fairly surprising, considering at school, where we are supposed to be able to connect to the wifi, I can't get further than a US Robotics captive web portal.

I should have been actually able to post to this blog the first time I tried, I think I managed to crash Windows Mobile on my phone or something. (Windows Mobile crashing is not particularly uncommon).

Right now Dylan, myself and a few other people are working on a webpage for our school's robotics team and the FIRST robotics competition. It was due yesterday or something, but we're still working on it. Currently we're still working on it, so you can see it at the temporary page. The page we submitted to FIRST is somewhere inside TU's website. About once every couple of days we're coping the page over to that URL.

Yeah, school. Well it started.

So this website is gonna sit here. I really should do something with it and all. But I probably won't. Maybe I'll try to do something with it this weekend. It is a three day weekend.

I made a theme for my website now. Well not really, it’s actually a somwhat modified version of scribbish. I based my theme off scribbish because it was very simple and plain while still looking pretty nice. Actually the only parts I modified were the header and the sidebar. It’s really just scribbish with a different layout. I like it.

The header at the top is handwritten. It took a while. I did it with a calligraphy pen. It’s weird how my handwriting can be normally terrible and can actually do calligraphy somewhat. The writing styles that still bear some resemblance to normal handwriting still suck though, like the cursive one in particular. I considered adding a “.com” to one of the bburkys but I ran out of space. It’s still okay though I guess. I also drew the line/rule that is separating the sidebar and the main content of the page.

I’ll probably modify the layout a bit more before I’m done with it. For example, I may actually put something in the sidebar aside from the search field: the only thing there at the moment. I also may recreate some of the pages that were on my old site.

My site

So now Ruby on Rails is officially the coolest web programming language. It's great for quickly making sites while being very powerful too. It definitely beats PHP, which is crap. It's database independent and other cool stuff too.

Currently this blog has whatever Mephisto's default theme is. Mephisto is also pretty cool it seems. It's like the Rails equivalent of Wordpress, except it's on Rails so its better. I need to make or steal a theme for this site. I'd rather make one. It'll be two weeks at least when that happens. I'm leaving for Philmont tomorrow. Ya know, that Boy Scout camp place in New Mexico where you hike up and down mountains more than it's probably good for you? Yeah, that place.

Church site

I also updated my church's site yesterday. It's using the Gullery photo gallery. It's quite possibly the simplest photo gallery system ever, while still being quite cool. The admin pages are all AJAX and cool. You just click the description at the top and it turns into a text field, you type some stuff, click save, and it updates it; the page never fully reloaded. It's all asynchronous and all that stuff that AJAX is. Go check out the photo gallery I set up, or the rest of the site too which was also somewhat updated too.