hermiene.net

The explosives experts had known their job, as is highly desirable that explosives experts should.

— A Fall of Moondust

March 2003

Oh yeah! My host decided to host the E-mail account I've always wanted. You can use any of the two you'd like, though I'd prefer you use the new one, which is pho@dataportalen.com now havard.skjaeveland@gmail.com. I have updated the About me page to reflect this new fact. See, I take care of the pages around here.

I have made a totally irrelevant web page today; the Test Page (now dead). This should only be relevant to you if you're me or insane. Or both.

I got around to see Men in Black II today. Finally: A Sequel That Didn't Suck. Pretty much everything about this movie was superb; very nice CG, the acting was not bad, and it didn't overly rely on the prequel to carry on its good name. A few good elements were ported from MiB, but as I said, they didn't overly do so. They struck a very nice balance.

On my mental to-do list for the weekend, is finishing up the essay on graphs & functions. I've been slacking.

Random rant: Some web site authors (no names mentioned) invariably write "resume" when referring to their resumé.

I have changed the background color of all the pages. Hopefully, this background will make the text more readable than the white one.

I've made a cube, an octahedron and an icosahedron following the instructions on STL's Origami Polyhedra page. I've yet to photograph them. I tried, but the picture was very unclear, since they are so small. Let me just read the manual for the camera, and see if I can figure something out.

I've been busy. I've totally revamped the navigation bar, and two new pages have been made; the Archived News page and the Colophon page, where various more or less interesting facts about my web site resides. Also, there is a small sub-section of this page where I try to detail each of the pages here. Scroll to the very bottom. Of course, this no longer applies since this post has since been moved to the archive.

All my HTML documents returned VALID from the W3C MarkUp Validation Service. They are now officially HTML 4.01 Transitional documents. Oh, happy day!

My essay on graphs & functions is coming along very nicely. There was much more to cover on it than I had originally expected, so it might be delayed. Fear not, for those who wait for something good, don't wait in vain. ;-)

I discovered today a Norwegian word that is spelled exactly the same way as the English one; irreversible. Wow.

I also stumbled upon this utterly cool program called MathGV, which I will use to make the images for my graphs & functions essay. It is a program for making graphs, both Cartesian, polar and 3D Cartesian. Completely amazing. Its features are of tremendous proportions, and hence, I won't write them here. Go and read them for yourself, ya lazy bum! And download that program. Now. The only negative thing I can say about their web site is that they use GIFs and Comic Sans MS.

Two new mp3.com artists made it to pho's List of Honor; Raymond Wave and Paul Spaeth.

I put my navigation bar into a table, which makes them align better, and I made them small. I removed the elma page. Too stale and unprofessional. Yuck. My recs are still on the Files page though. (Files page is gone.)

Happy news, no more GIFs on my page, only PNG (and JPG where appropriate; basically, use PNG for computer generated pictures and JPG for naturalistic pictures, like a photograph). Here is why PNG is so great. Be sure to download pngrewrite and pngcrush, two nifty programs that'll reduce the size of the PNG files even more. They're in a ZIP bundle on STL's download page.

The graphs & functions essay is moving along. Perhaps 4-5 more days?

I removed the link to Uy's document, because it'll give people the wrong impression of me, and (mainly) because his views on the matter completely differs from my own. I'll elaborate about it in the About Me page when I find the time. Now, the file itself is still there, but the link is gone. If anyone really wants it though, they'll have to figure out the address for themselves.

I specified a font for all my pages today. Yay! It's called Palatino Linotype, and I'm quite happy with it. See, I told you I'd fix up some esthetics. ;-)

My web site is hosted by dataportalen.com ("dataportalen" means "the computer portal"), and I've added a small notation to the bottom of each page to recognize this fact. And I'm seriously thinking about making a background image for my site. And overhaul it a bit with respects to graphics esthetics.

I'm thinking of making a lengthy essay on graphs & functions. Expect it... shortly.

I added a little news item search "system" today. Using my elite HTML skills, I made it so that you are able to jump to whichever news item you wish. Nifty! Just add #ddmmyyyy after the .shtml in the address bar. If you wanted the news item from 10.03.2003, the full URL would be http://www.dataportalen.com/pho/full-archive.php#10032003. Go ahead, try! If no news item exists for the particular date you're looking for, nothing will happen. I doubt it will be very useful, but it's still there. (Uhh, that's the way it used to be. Now you have to add n (for "news update") before the date; n10032003. This because of XHTML.) Since I've switched to ISO 8601, it's now #2003-03-10. In other words, #YYYY-MM-DD.

In shameful pity, I hereby remove my ASCII table, and point you to R. Harvey's web site. Here, you may download ASCIIcat; an invaluable tool, as it comprises many useful features.

On a funny note, Even and I discussed today what numbers higher than Googolplex should be called. For those who don't know what a Googol is, fear not, for I shall explain it. A Googol is 10100, which is the number one with 100 zeros succeeding it. Googolplex is 10Googol, which is the number one with Googol zeros succeeding it. So:

10100 = Googol

10Googol = Googolplex

But what next? Beware, the following were just invented for fun by me and Even, and probably aren't real at all.

10Googolplex = Googel

10Googel = Googelplex

10Googelplex = Googul

10Googul = Googulplex

10Googulplex = Googyl

Just keep substituting that one letter. Tada! :-)

There are 12 posts for March 2003.