Halcyon | flow

Calm and peaceful; tranquil | Continuity and smoothness of appearance

American Heritage Dictionary 4th. Ed.

As you can see, updates have become a bit scarce (understatement) lately. I've been busy with my new job, and with moving into an apartment. I think things are finally starting to settle down though, so I can spend a little time working on other things.

First of all, my PSP game project is dead in the water. It's too much of a time sink for me to work on now, so it gets the boot. Not to worry though, PSP fans still have plenty to look forward to. I'm currently playing Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, which is a very good game; definitely a strong MGS game even compared to the console releases. Silent Hill: Origins is also coming out soon. Can you tell I'm a Konami fan yet?

I will continue working on the website (including both news updates and site design), although progress will be slower now. The gallery page could use a re-write, and there are still other issues to be fixed. I also have some ideas for new content, including a music section. I should mention that the mp3s in said music section would be free/public domain stuff like the vocal trance mixes I've been listening to lately. Best to get that out in the open now, before the RIAA sends a hit squad to my apartment. I'm also toying with ideas for a new story, but none of them have really grabbed my attention yet. Also if I can do something about the framerate problems, I'll try to get some videos of Neverwinter Nights 2 up.

Also, Don't expect to see any more Ragnarok Online videos, at least not anytime soon. AnimaRO was having severe lag issues for a good long while, and it stopped being fun when it started lag spiking every 10 seconds. So now what do I do for MMORPG goodness? Get back into City of Heroes, or should I say, City of This Patch Makes Your Tank A Big Fat Ninny? Or maybe devote my life to World of Warcraft like everyone else? It's a shame that Asheron's Call 2 turned out to be such a crappy game. The original is still going strong. Hmm...

No, I haven't died or moved to Mexico; I've been somewhat distracted lately. The lack of updates is mainly due to my attention being focused on preparing for my new job. That's right: about four months after graduating, I am now gainfully employed! I had an interview with CGI Federal in Lebanon, VA on August 30th, and recently received and accepted an offer to work for them as a Crystal Reports designer. I have also been preparing to move out and find an apartment in the Lebanon area, so my mind has been occupied by things other than this website for the past few weeks.

Now for something completely different: AnimaRO. This is a free Ragnarok Online server that I have been playing around on recently, and it's quite a lot of fun. The game isn't ground breaking in terms of visuals or sound design, but it is addictive in pretty much all the ways any good MMORPG can be. I've posted a couple short videos of the game in action on the Gallery page, with more to come soon.

My PSP game development is temporarily on hold until I'm settled into my newly employed life. It's the sort of project that requires total focus, and I can't give it that right now with all of the other things I have to deal with. At least I will be coming back to it later with a fresh perspective to go with the new graphics engine.

The website has also been on hold, although I hope to get back to work on it sooner. I have most of the credits and other info for the About page ready; I just have to track down some more links. I also have changes and improvements to make; too many to list here, in fact. A major back-end rewrite may be in the cards soon. Stay tuned for details.

"Real life" has intruded upon my various personal projects and activities, but that's a good thing in this case. At the very least I'll be able to buy myself a keyboard that isn't held together by Scotch tape and a prayer. This one will be put into service as part of my next project: a dedicated Ubuntu Linux box. Why build a linux box, you ask? Just because.

The entire website now renders properly in IE6. The last major problem - the wrecked Gallery page - was solved with two fixes. I discovered the first through trial and error: placing clear:both divs immediately before each image category. This corrected the layout, but the category divs were still not rendering.

After two days of failed attempts , webben of #web on irc.freenode.net hit on the cause of the second problem. Internet Explorer has a hasLayout boolean value that is true if a particular element is said to "have layout" in which case it renders normally. Apparently, when this value is false, strange things happen. webben linked me to this article, which describes the concept of "having layout" in IE in detail. The article lists CSS properties that force an element to have layout; display: inline-block is the one that fixed the remaining problem on the Gallery page. Huge thanks to webben for finding this for me.

At some point I'm going to do an in-depth writeup of the various tweaks and fixes I had to implement in order to get this website working in IE6. It's really amazing how much of this just works in Firefox and Opera, yet explodes in Microsoft's little browser.

However, my next step is to finish the About page and get a proper credits section in it. I have been aided by a number of useful websites and helpful people during the development of this website, and I'm going to see that they get recognition for it. Thanks!

IE6 compatibility has progressed now to the point that I can be satisified with the look of this website in Firefox and IE6. There is still some inconsistency in amounts of whitespace between IE6 and Firefox due to each browser's handling of floated elements, but it doesn't detract significantly from the design.

Right now only the Software page reflects these changes; I will be updating the other content pages tomorrow with the fixes. Following that, I'm going to complete the About page and see about getting some more interesting items on the content pages themselves.

Thanks to the generous help of some folks in #web on irc.freenode.net, I was able to correct the width and height problems with the website layout in IE6+. They also helped me get started on fixing the content box rendering problems on the Software, Game Mods, and Writing pages, although they're still a bit of a mess. Hopefully I can get everything rendering properly in IE soon.

I'm currently working on getting the website IE6 compatible, which is an act akin to fitting a square peg into a round hole. While I'm working on this, some parts of the website might look a bit funny. Hopefully I'll get everything worked out soon.