CmdrTaco's Journal: Our House in the Middle of the Street

CowboyNeal has moved to Ann Arbor. He and Big Rob have rented a place a few minutes away... I like to say "We're getting the band back together" in my very best John Belushi voice whenever possible. Now that all the people moving to A2 are here, we can put all the pieces of the triforce back together again and... oh wait. N/M.

Spam is up. 120 pieces from about 11:30pm until 8:00am. It's pretty sad really.

My menu challange I mentioned a few journals back has essentially gone unmet. Let me repeat it here: The green blob menu on the left hand side is unweldly (The FAQ..HOF menu). I want to consolidate it, remove the less needed items, and perhaps implement a collapsible tree structure (maybe server side, maybe javascript).

Unfortunately everybody who has tried to help has provided helpful criticism like "Just get rid of the side menu" (No. We need a top level menu. It could be horizontal, but we already have a user menu in that space that will be completed in the 2nd step of our menu revamping) to "Don't use JavaScript". Umm... thanks for the help? If we use JS, it will be minimal and backwards compatible simple stuff. But if possible I'd do this server side.

So anyway, the challange still stands... design a left hand menu for Slashdot... My current choice of entries are:

• Login or Username depending on login status
• Journal (If Logged In)
• Subscribe (If Logged In)
• Advertise (It's very important)
• Information
  • About
  • Advertising
  • Supporters
  • Awards
  • Code
  • FAQ
  • Jobs
• Submit Story
• Bug Report
• FAQ (Linking up to the previous FAQ entry 'cuz its important)
• Content
  • Topics
  • Hof
  • Past Polls
  • Past Stories
• Jobs
• Rob's Page

Really what I' thinking is that only 2 of the menu options will be collapsible, but more of the menu items will be dynamic when you are logged in. Right now Journals is confusing when you're AC. What is above is tentative- labels and orders are especially subject to change... but the real idea is to break the top level menu into 3 groups: the most important stuff, content information, and general site information, and make sure that the most appropriate information is available in that spot. If we used JavaScript to pop in and out the 2 sub menus as appropriate, that might work depending on the compatibility of the code. Else the server could serve the appropriate menu according to context.

Several of the menu items are redundant from the submenu to the main menu. I'm flexible on that, but some items are very important and need to always be on the page, even if they fit more appropriately in a submenu. Like Advertising and Bug Reports.

Also worth noting is that the users menu is seriously getting overhauled, so perhaps taking on this challange will make more sense when you see the completed users menu. I'm really pleased with how that is going to work- the users page is a serious mess, but I think in a week or 2 it'll be very clear. After that with any luck we can clean up article.pl which has a lot of messy stuff in it.

Again, this is a really open ended challange, and good ideas will be used if they work. Several people have submitted stuff that shows they have thought about the challange... maybe with this information they'll be able to come up with something ready to use.

Finally, I just wanted to give mad props to all the Apple fans and employees who offered advice, information, support, and in many cases, various discounts to get a Mac. I'm pleased to say that I am now a Mac Owner. I'm going to try to use a powerbook as my primary laptop for a month or 2. As frequent readers of this journal know, I've been flirting with OS X for some time now, and am finally coming into my own. I'm no power user, but I'm functional.

Today's frusteration involves networking: the laptop has an ethernet and a wireless network. I almost always use the wireless network, but last night, while setting it up, I wanted to core dump 25 gigs of data from my other laptop to this one. So I plugged the old laptop into the hub, twiddled ifconfig & route and was on the wired LAN. The mac failed to be so easy. No matter what I did, the wireless lan remained on, and would take priority over the wired lan. The end result is that I was unable to transfer files at 100mbs, and was instead stuck at 10 or so. And if you can do math, you know that I was unable to dump 25 gigs from one box to another last night at that bitrate :)

It seems that the network settings didn't take down the wireless network. And changing "Locations" from one set of network settings to the other didn't seem to work either. I mucked around on the console with ifconfig and route, but then decided to screw it and go to sleep :)

Beyond that, I finally managed to get a hero up to level 9 in a WC3 multiplayer game. Maybe someday Hemos, Nate & I will be able to take on enemies at normal speed :)