In a fit of last-moment planning and improvisation, we’ve decided to attempt to do a live video broadcast of our wedding ceremony from the beach in Kauai, Saturday 9/12/2009, 2pm local time (5pm Pacific, 6pm Mountain, 7pm Central, 8pm Eastern, 9pm Atlantic… and a half hour later in Newfoundland ).

If you want to check it out, go to the Ustream.tv page for the event.

The video should come up automatically when we start broadcasting.

The odds that we’ll actually pull this off are not great, hence the following disclaimers:

• The ceremony may be delayed in case of rain;
• The video broadcast stream may falter, or halt entirely; in the absence of a reliable Wi-Fi connection I’m doing this by connecting my laptop to the Internet through a tethered 3G data connection on my iPhone; the brief test I did yesterday showed it could work but who knows?
• The camera work will probably be not good (pointing the built-in camera in my laptop without being able to see the screen may prove problematic);
• The audio will probably be even worse (there’s wind, lots and lots of wind);
• Even if everything else works, Ustream.tv has been known to fall on its face for no good reason.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope this works!

AOL has put in more anti-Trillian countermeasures. Latest news is that a fix has been implemented and a new version of Trillian is forthcoming. (For those not familiar with the Trillian vs. AIM saga, see the story at CNET News.com.)

I think I would be willing to put up with ads if it would make AOL happy with Trillian. I mean, prior to Trillian the ads never bothered me much; my two main motivations for using Trillian are:

1. Using one IM client instead of four (AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN).
2. It’s not ICQ. ICQ is the most bug-ridden, poorly-designed piece of bloatware I’ve ever used (second only maybe to Lotus Notes). Unfortunately it’s what most of my friends use so I have to connect to it.

Fixed up some of the style definitions that had been causing the problems I’d noted below with Internet Explorer. Specifically if I set the height property of the div element for the sidebar to “100%” then IE (but not Opera 6 nor Netscape 6.2) doesn’t display the sidebar’s background image. That’s one IE bug; the other bug is that moving the <!DOCTYPE> tag to the second line of the file causes IE not to recognize the document type as HTML 4.01, so it doesn’t apply the stricter compliant layout rules.

Long story short, this website now looks great under Internet Explorer 5.x/6.x, Opera 6.x, Netscape Navigator 6.x, and Lynx. (Okay, I wouldn’t say anything looks “great” under Lynx, but it looks fine.)

I’m not an HTML/CSS purist or snob as I may seem; since I only redesign my web site once every 3-5 years, I just want to get it right.

Just tried my hand at “Googlewhacking“. Basically it’s a game or challenge that involves finding a two-word search that turns up exactly one match on Google’s search engine. Harder than you think!

Googlewhacks so far:

• mitochondrial teetotaling
• polysyllabic flamencos
• anticonstitutional raven
• polyurethanes lexicography

I was starting to think it was easy but after re-checking the Googlewhacking rules I found out four of my “whacks” didn’t count (one matched a page that was a list of words, the other three had words that weren’t in dictionary.com‘s database).

Or not, such as the case may be. Anyway, here’s an interesting write-up of the holiday’s history, from the History Channel.

“That’s all I have to say about that.”

A UCSD study found that people who sleep less live longer (I know that’s a gross oversimplification). One thing for sure is that you gain more time just by virtue of not spending it sleeping.

Sleep is overrated. Now if only I could keep my eyes open…

The problem with having a heap of eletronic components is you end up with an equally big heap of remote controls. Remote controls that inevitably get lost, albeit temporarily—but always at the most inconvenient moment.

Using a universal remote doesn’t really help either. Sure, it’s convenient, but it never entirely subsumes other remotes… and so it just adds to the heap o’ remotes.

I wish I could just control all my electronics by voice, or thought. Or maybe I should just chain all my remotes to my coffee table… which I still haven’t gotten around to getting.

Wrote my first piece of PHP code today to implement the Archives section. PHP is cool—writing CGI scripts in C/C++ (or Perl, if I had known it) was always a big security challenge.

There was a time when I was on the leading-bleeding edge when it came to Web development… Okay, so maybe that time was around 1995. After I did the previous redesign of my home page (in 1997) I kinda let things slide with regards to “Web technology”. I did a bunch of stuff for mathNEWS when I started the site and during the five or so years I was webmaster, but the thing about (mostly) running a bi-weekly ‘zine website (and going to school, etc.) was that it didn’t leave much time for actually improving the site’s technology. In fact, it looks to be pretty much the same way I left it two years ago (plus new content).