me•Alpha-Geek•com

This site was prototyped using the venerable Textwrangler¹ on a Macbook Pro and scrutinized in the Firefox web browser. The site is hosted on Textdrive… specifically, on a computer whose host name is Burnaby, which is a town in the British Columbia province of Canada. I guess that makes this site Canadian.²

The site runs on a highly customized³ version of Movable Type, primarily because I am too lazy to move to another tool (so long as Six Apart keeps the cost down to something I would reasonably spend at a bar on a Saturday night⁴). The database backing everything up is MySQL.

The color scheme⁵ was deduced with the help of EasyRGB . I spent 4 hours there nit-picking color schemes and getting frustrated before finally spitting on my monitor and picking⁶ some colors with perl -e 'print int rand()*255, "\n" for(0..2)'.

To finalize the margins and padded pixels, I used this grid layout as described by Khoi Vinh in Grids are Good.⁷

Information about me, the person, can be found on the about page.

Why didn't you use XHTML?

Draco was an Athenian politician who codified the first laws of Athens. His laws were wildly unpopular and lauded for their impartiality and severity. The laws were later completely rewritten.

Where did the old Alpha-Geek.com weblog go?

It's been moved to http://oubliette.alpha-geek.com.

I have more questions?

That wasn't a question. Why did you end that in a question mark? See if the about or copyright or attribution pages answer your question. If they don't, email.

Site To-Do List

• Rewrite the Movable Type "Remember Me" Javascript because it pooped in my markup.
• Redo the intra-archive navigation (the "see the next/previous entry/month" links that appear in the side bar on the individual entries and monthly archive pages).
• Split up the stylesheets media appropriately and come up with a print stylesheet.
• Fix IE6 rendering "correctly."

• ¹ I'm still getting used to the concept of having to spend money on software when you move to a Mac, which is why this site wasn't done in Textmate. Plus, I like using the adjective "venerable" with software tools like text editors.
• ² If only in spirit because the server actually appears to be in San Diego, CA.
• ³ "Customized" in this sense means that, yes, I carelessly went in and doinked around with the Perl code numerous times to get things just the way I like them and none of it is probably reproducible.^†
• ⁴ I live in a warped world^‡ where dropping $70-100 would be normal-ish.
• ⁵ Black… White… Gray… … Oh!, and two colors — the blue is rgb(0, 51, 102) / #003366 and the tan is rgb(178, 160, 140) / #B2A08C.
• ⁶ "Picking" == asking my girlfriend if they were pretty… But "pretty" in a manly computer geek way.
• ⁷ Grids are, indeed, good.

• ^† Much like Perl.
• ^‡ Cleveland.