Version 5 of my web site is underway. I’ve split off everything old, and am completely redesigning from the ground up. The goal is to keep things broken into sections throughout subdomains. So, personal life stuff will be at michael.wallar.net, while my portfolio and job information will be at design.wallar.net.

I’ve also decided to take more of a hold over wallar.net. Instead of it being a blank page, I’ve decided to make it a landing page to my various sites.

Design wise, the personal site will be much like it already is. I feel that layout works just fine, and I don’t want to change it. The other sites will have similar designs when appropriate, but sites such as my design site will have a different look.

I have spent much of the last few days working for a new client of mine, Louis Eros, an Executive Director at Martha’s Kitchen. Martha’s Kitchen is a cherity kitchen in San Jose, California. They are responsible for giving away millions of meals, both to the persons who come into their kitchen, and through exporting their received donations to low-income children, other kitchens, and more.

If you are feeling as if you should donate, then you should take a serious look at such an amazing non-profit kitchen. You can read about them over at their newly designed site, MarthasKitchen.org.

I’ve done some work on my site over the last few days. The “projects” section of the site is pretty much done. I can now add my projects, and link them to the forums and the blog via tags.  I also have a back-end ‘vault’ in my database where I store download locations. Projects can access this, so you get three related sections. The projects page also is searchable, and all “categories” are up-to-date on the side menu.

Indoril Masking, a project I made for Morrowind quite a while ago (not sure if it’s tested thoroughly) has also been added to the projects page. I’ll be adding other projects of mine as work on them continues.

Next I want to work on redesigning my forums to be more in line with the rest of the site. When in board view, it should display each category as seperate content blocks, when in category view, it should show forums as seperate category blocks, etc. until you get posts in their own boxes.

So, I finally got bored/sick/whatever with my old layout, which didn’t lend itself much to expansion. This layout may not look as nice, but I believe it is much more functional.

The home/template page is done. The system is also in place to add more pages easily by just including two new files and editing the link list. I’ll put this into a database at some point and develop a backend to manage pages.

For now, I’m working on reskinning the blog to fit in with the rest of the site. After that, I’ll probably tackle reskinning the forums I want to add (for mod support, or whatever). The software will probably be phpBB3. I’m thinking of adding a “dropbox” (the idea of a public file storage, not DropBox) and a gallery. We’ll see.

Well, back to skinning.

-Michael

So, I’ve worked a bit more on my web site. The front page’s “Latest Updates” is done, and pulls information from Twitter, my blog, projects, and portfolio. I may link in the gallery and file system later, but right now I plan on those being semi-hidden parts of my site. I started work on the portfolio page and database interaction code, but I didn’t finish yesterday.

My current project is with my computer. I finally decided that I’d try out OSX, and turn my computer 1/3 Hackentosh. So, last night I unplugged my primary hard drive, put in my secondary, wiped it, and installed Apple OS 10.5.2 on half of the 160GB drive. I ended up screwing up the install by updating to 10.5.5, but that’s life. So, I tried installing again last night. It didn’t work, though I used the same settings…

So, when I got home today, I wiped the drive again, and started the installation. I got it to install, boot, log in, and update non-kernal patches. Then I plugged back in my primary drive in SATA0, and my secondary into SATA1. Using my Ubuntu 8.10 DVD, I booted into the Linux live CD, and started installation of Ubuntu on the other half of the 160GB hard drive. GRUB recognized both Vista and Ubuntu, but not OSX - but, that was easy enough to fix. Now I have boot options for “Microsoft Windows Vista SP1″, “Ubuntu Linux 8.10″, and “Apple OS 10.5.2″. Pretty cool having access to all three operating systems.

Not that I really use anything other then Vista, except for on my laptop, which runs Ubuntu.

But, now I have 80 gigabytes of wasted space on an OSX install. Maybe I’ll do something with it eventually, or wipe it and install XP. Actually, now that I write that, I may just have to do a quadboot, using Vista, XP, Ubuntu, and OSX… Hrmmm. Next weekend’s project, perhaps.

As a note, I have been using a bit of software called DropBox the last few days. I have it set to sync up to 2.0GB of data between all of my computer, regardless of operating system. A pretty handy little tool. If they come up with a portable version, somehow, then I can use it instead of my thumb drive. As it stands, however, my 8GB USB stick is better for bringing data to/from computers and school.

I suppose that’s all I have to say for now. I’d say that I’m thinking about blogging more often, but I always say that, and it never happens. So, we’ll just have to see.

Back to X-Files Season 1, Disc 4 for me!
-Michael Wallar

Well, I took most of today off from the partner that has become the last couple of weeks of my life. Instead of learning programming languages, doing lots of homework, and being a College student, I decided I’d kick back today with my high school friend, John-Paul, and play some games over Hamachi. Six hours of gaming, over like that! Insane.

Tomorrow I’m back to getting caught up on my math class. Need to start writing an essay that’s due next week in English, too. Other then that, school should be pretty relaxed.

About to head to bed, so I suppose that’s all there is for now.

-Michael

I’m still working on getting my web site up and running. So far the layout works well enough. No issues on scaling, everything fits, and tests in IE7, FireFox 3, Opera 9.5, Chrome, and Safari all turn out pretty much the same. Now I’m working on getting content up and running.

When done, I the site should contain four topics: Blog, Projects, Portfolio, and Links. Each of these should be represented on the front page by a “latest blog post,” “current project,” “random portfolio link,” and a sidebar link to the “Around the Web” section of my links page.
As far as the blog goes, things are pretty much done as they are. Template tweaks may be done from time to time to keep things neat, but otherwise I don’t expect anything fancy from it.
The projects section of my site will hold information of my various school and non-school related projects. For example, IEMI, a project I’m currently working on, will be represented with its page there. Project pages should have links to relevant blog posts, a link to the portfolio view (if inside the portfolio), development notes, downloads (if available), etc., etc.
My portfolio page should behave similarly to how the projects section works. The main difference being that the portfolio tries to display a more professional light, while the projects section is more informative.
Links is pretty simple. It’s just a page of search-able links to sites that I’m involved in, clients I’ve worked for, forums I’ve joined, etc., etc.

Other then that, I finally finished downloading all of the Introduction to Computer Science courses over at Stanford’s School of Engineering. I’m on course 17 of 28 in class CS106a, and have been doing all of the work (excluding the midterm, instead I did the practice midterm) that a normal student would have to do. The differences, of course, are that I’m half way across the United States, the videos were filmed a year ago, I’m not paying a dime (excluding Internet fees), and I’ve done over half the course in just a few days.

Before I go, I want to note one little gem I found that combines Facebook and Pidgin: the Facebook Chat for Pidgin. It will let you chat with your friends on Facebook, without being on Facebook. Handy.

That’s all for now. I’m about to do a couple of sections in my online math class for North Lake, then work some more on the site.

-Michael

Welcome to by Blog, again. This is a filler post, as I have nothing important to say.