Micah's Musings

You can follow me at twitter.com/mcferrill.

Some time ago I built a simple web-based brainstorming tool dubbed "Logician". I hadn't worked on it for about a year when I found a use for it in Indiana. Last night I had a few minutes to spare so I dug up the code on my laptop and worked out a few kinks. It now works pretty well. The only thing I still want is drag and drop of nodes.

Logician is a single web page that you can save to your computer (or anywhere else for that matter) and it will still have your work on it. It branches things out in a tree similar to a directory structure. You can save the entire page to disk and it won't erase any changes. Enjoy!

I signed up for a Facebook account some time ago just to check it out and am now in the process of building my network. Feel free to look me up.

I discovered two days ago that one of my websites is getting nearly 200 visitors (that's people, not hits) every month so I figured I better put out a better design on it than the last one I did.

A while back I'd toyed with a potential redesign with a nifty slide effect for screenshots.

You can check it out on the live site now.

The other design I implemented yesterday was of course for this site. I was... very satisfied at getting the shadow effects down the first time. I'd seen it used hundreds of times (yes, literally) but hadn't ever tried to implement it. It turned out to be pretty simple once I looked into it. I also found another beautiful image for the header (I like misty looks). I also created a page listing some of the software tools I frequently use and a set of site designs (most of which are old or simple).

So... I've been doing some revamping of family / personal technology infrastructure and I ran across some cool technologies I thought I'd share.

Something important to developers is something known as version control. Up until just recently I was using CVS for my needs. I'd heard about subversion before, but I'd never seriously used it. It turns out that it's almost the same as far as using it goes, but it has a ton of more useful features. I've now switched all of my personal projects over to it and I'm thinking about connecting my personal repository to this website.

Not being a particularly wealthy geek I don't own a personal datacenter and therefore have had to run any server software off of my desktop alongside my desktop applications. A while ago I downloaded VMware server. This allowed me to create a virtual machine and set it up with windows server 2003, apache, a CVS (see above) server, and other useful applications. However the performance impact on my desktop was pretty bad and required me to start, stop, and restart the virtual server multiple times. The other day however, I got permission from my Dad to install VMware server on his windows home server. I am now running at 100% with my desktop as my virtual server is now totally independent and free to run 24/7.

Media Center Edition

We've been trying to get a windows media center running for a while now and though we have a machine dedicated for it, we've been having multiple problems with it. It plays audio and prerecorded videos beautifully, we're setting up a network link for media (especially our thousands of digital pictures), but our biggest problem is that though it's admittedly not our slowest computer, it certainly isn't our fastest either. I'm currently working on reinstalling the operating system to clean up some corrupted files.