Adventures with Computers
Archive for June 2000
gimpster.com is in the middle of a move to another server at Netsite. I’m moving because of the very poor security there is on a Cobolt RaQ. On the new server I’ll be able to use PHP4 — I can’t wait to check out the new session-management-stuff they have added.
I’ve made a page for PHP Shell — right now all
you’ll find is the README-file. But at least it should be easier to find
now.
Today I’ve tried the new 3D Accelerated-X driver from Xi Graphics for my Matrox G400. And I can confirm that it works.
I was able to get a picture on two 17″ monitors at the same time, using both heads on my card. Splendid. The only problem is, that it costs 129$ for the driver — that’s more that I paid for the card!
But on the bright side: by using both heads of my card, I could buy two 19″ monitors instead of one 21″ monitor. Here’s a quick comparison between the viewable-area of the screen and the diagonal:
| Diagonal | Area | Price | $/Sqr inch |
|---|---|---|---|
| 14″ | 94 Sqr inch | 200$ | 2.13 $/Sqr inch |
| 16″ | 123 Sqr inch | 425$ | 3.46 $/Sqr inch |
| 18″ | 156 Sqr inch | 550$ | 3.53 $/Sqr inch |
| 20″ | 192 Sqr inch | 1175$ | 6.12 $/Sqr inch |
As you can see, a 15″ monitor is actually the cheapest one, if you only look at how much screen real-estate you get for your money. But you can also see, that by buying two 19″ you get 312 Sqr inch for the same price that you’ll pay for one 21″ monitor with a viewable screen-area of “only” 192 Sqr inch.
It’s a difficult decision — and there’s a lot of money involved …
I’ve removed the javascript-popup-menus, and replaced them with normal links. The links are generated automatically — of cause, since I’m using PHP.
Although I liked the popup-menus there were several problems with them:
They popped up whenever you placed your mouse over the text — this confused some, since they tried to click on the text behind the menus.
The menus popped up again, if you moved your mouse off the text, and then back in. The most annoying part of this was, that you menus kind of followed your pointer when you moved it along the text.
Although they had been designed to be as compatible as possible, they didn’t work in all browsers. They didn’t work in Mozilla, Netscapes next-generation browser. I believe that’s because they haven’t implemented javascript completely. They didn’t work in Lynx either.
I’m felt that I had to keep an alternative way of navigating my site. Thats why there’s these small notices on the top of most pages, where I’ve tried to put links to all my pages. The new system eliminates the need for those.
I’m not sure that the spiders that have come to visit my site could understand the links. They properly just followed the normal links.
I hope that’ll explain why I removed them.
You can now watch the battle between Microsoft and Netscape, by looking at my stats-pages. Down at the bottom, there is a table called “Top xx of xx Total User Agents”. Thanks to the superb Webalizers fully-documented configuration-file I’ve been able to group all the different versions of Microsofts and Netscapes browsers. This gives a clear picture of what’s going on.
And yes … I do know that “There are lies, dammed lies and statistics!” :-)