Multimedia and Tech Blog

Some of you guys are probably saying, hey, where did the site go over Thanksgiving? I know I was. To simplify everything else I'm about to say in this blog post for the non technical viewers / people with social lives: I redesigned the back-end structure of the site. I've spent many days doing it. You will notice no changes to the site except a few more things are broken now. "What?!" you say inbrededly, "I am disgusted!" Well to explain exactly what's going on, I need to get kind of technical. So feel free to skip the rest of this blog entry.

I've always wanted to make this site object-oriented in design, A because it's the cool thing to do in the programming world, and B because I want to expand my PHP development skills. So I started researching object oriented code paradigms for websites, and I learned for the very first time about something called the "model view controller" architecture. MVC is an abstract design structure that is apparently the hippest buzzword for web development nerds these days. I don't really do a lot of thinking for myself so I jumped on the MVC bandwagon and started to rebuild the site from scratch. To teach you more about this delightful architecture, here's some Apple guy with a guitar:

Model View Controller Song


I've been exploiting my inordinate amount of free time during Thanksgiving break to work on the site. I've been coding for about four days straight now. I forget to eat sometimes. I woke up at four PM today and I don't know when I will fall asleep again. Much of this process has been a bitch to implement with random and numerous pitfalls along the way. However, this whole system has introduced some very nice code solutions. For example, all of the pages now have automatic administrator handling, making it much easier for me to perform maintenance on the site. The music page for example is exactly ONE line of code, which renders the entire page and wires up all the entries for administrative privileged editing. This is all thanks to the modularity of the MVC design. The controller for the music page grabs the music data from the database wrapper (model) through a query, then sends that data to the template (view), which renders it following certain guidelines provided by the controller, such as page title.

Because of Apache regex rewrite problems, if you want to access the forum or Bubble's Revenge, you have to specify the index pages of those files. These will work:
Valid links for: Bubble's Revenge and the forum.
Those shenanigans should all be cleared up eventually, but use those links for now. The photography viewing page will be down for a while because I want to implement a new interface for it.

The technical stuff is mostly over. The main reason I was able to do all this work on the site over break is because RIT gives us two weeks off for Thanksgiving break. This is a neat plan that was brewed up two years ago and unfortunately hasn't rotted, died and fallen off the academic body yet. The problem is that the second week of Thanksgiving break is severed from the last week of Christmas break, so our Christmas break is too short and our Thanksgiving break is too long. This schedule is the institute's solution to the international student complaint that they don't have enough time to go home over Thanksgiving if the break is only a week long. This is certainly a valid complaint, but I submit that if there was extra time on Christmas and Thanksgiving break were shorter it would work out better for everyone. Firstly, international families don't celebrate Thanksgiving, so it's unlikely that all family members will be home or even have time off from life and jobs. I'm not saying that the families all celebrate Christmas either, but it's a more globally accepted holiday, and with a longer break over Christmas there will be more quality time. Then the rest of us kids who live in the states can stop complaining that the schedule is broken and doesn't line up with any of our friends' school schedules! That's my solution with the little information about the situation that I have. Go back to the way it was. Works for every other school in the states.

I'm signing off for the night. Don't forget to keep buying those Schrodinger and Riemann t-shirts! It keeps me fed.

As usual I haven't updated in a while, and this time it's because I've been busy ordering / building my new computer. Technical stuff: Core 2 Duo e6750, 2gb RAM, NVIDIA 8800GT 512MB Superclocked, 500GB Western Digital, Logitech THX Z-5300e 5.1 surround speakers, Windows Vista and twenty-two inch widescreen display plus my old seventeen inch to the right of it. The sound card doesn't come until Monday though, even though I ordered two day ground shipping on Wednesday. That's silly. The picture to the right is my entire bachelor pad.

From left to right it's oldest to newest; my old desktop, my work laptop, and my new computer is the two monitors on the far right. I love the monitor, and it plays movies and games at a beautiful resolution. I tested it with Day of Defeat and it ran at 1680x1050 with max settings on everything except anti-aliasing and it maintained at least a constant 70 FPS, maxing out at 200+. It's running well so far, hopefully installing all my programs won't slow it down. It's nice not to have a three minute boot time anymore.

Friday marked the last day of my full time employment at my co-op up here in Rochester. I have my Winter class schedule all ready to go, and I'll also be doing part time work on top of classes. Feel free to take bets on how long it will take until I drop out of college from too much work. At least right now I have a break; there's two weeks starting today that I'm taking off for Thanksgiving.

Now back to lounging around.

I'm taking a break from writing / drawing the comic for this update. Keeping up the production value is a little strenuous right now so I'm putting in some nice little site news. The response to Schrodinger and Riemann has been moderately good so far. I'm not expecting much from just six comics so I'm probably going to give it more time for them to come into their own. We'll see where we are by comic ten.

The first piece of news is a long overdue addition to the web portfolio http://www.naomimccolloch.com/. I actually completed this in the early summer, but I haven't had time to put it up until now. More specifically: I hadn't finished building my site's update form until now. It's still a little broken but it updates the right areas of the site now.

In school news, my co-op is coming to an end soon (during Thanksgiving break) and school starts up again for me in the winter. I recently put together my new schedule for classes with enough free time to allow me to still work part-time at my job. I found out in the process that I can actually graduate from RIT within four years and a quarter, which is less than the five years I had originally calculated. At least I think I can get out of here in four years, I'm pretty bad at simple math so my estimate could be all wonky.