The Sandwich

The sandwich, traditionally referring to an edible bready snack, is taking on a relatively new meaning to represent more than the cold-cut filled meal. My purpose here is to discuss the difference between a traditional sandwich and relatively new sandwich meaning, a person sandwich. It occurred to me that the ingredients to a whatever sandwich does not follow a common naming procedure.

To describe a traditional sandwich you say something like "turkey sandwich," which is describing the inner contents of the sandwich. To describe a person sandwich you say something like "cheerleader sandwich," which is describing the outer contents of the sandwich. While those are both mouthwatering ideas, they are not using a common naming procedure. You do not say a "bread sandwich," or "Joe sandwich."

So, it appears that in common reference, an traditional sandwich is classified by its contents, while the person sandwich is classified by the outside component. The reason for this, I believe, is that a sandwich is classified by its interesting parts. In my examples the traditional sandwich the interesting part is the turkey, not the bread, and in a person sandwich the interesting part is the cheerleader, as opposed to the Joe. So next time you are stuck in a cheerleader sandwich, remember that if you were the traditional edible sandwich it would be a You sandwich.

Shipping Christmas

This year, as I have done in the past, I ordered some items on-line. But this year I may encounter a problem; an item not making it here in time. I thought I gave sufficient time, ordering two weeks before leaving for home, but now it does not look that way. There were two things impeding the delivery; the item wasn't shipped until a week after it was ordered, and the shipping agent (Airborne Express) has the slowest delivery time across country I have seen.

While this was stalled by both contributing factors of total ship time, I feel this could have been avoided. The problem was I had never previously ordered from this retailer and did not know the order-to-ship turnaround time and their shipping agent.

So I offer this advice; do not to trust a retailer who has not built up a reputation in your mind, leaving plenty of time before the order must arrive. This is probably obvious, but it's easy to blindly trust unknown retailers.

More Updates

As you may have noticed, there have been a few more changes to the site. The first and most obvious is the falling snow (if your browser is capable). Its something I made myself, and I'm pretty proud of it :). Also, I added a 'View Source' link at the bottom of all pages. There are a few pages that cant be reached using this link, but most of them are there. Creating that was quite a task because I needed to hide my MySQL password (you'll noticed its replaced by *'s) and I also wanted to make links to any pages that were included by the page being viewed. So with the help of Mr. Regular Expression I was able to accomplish this. You can also view the source of the View Source page if you like. Remember, this site is GPL'd so feel free to use any of the code on this site. Just don't look through my code to find vulnerabilities and break my server ;) Because I will find you.

Site Changes

I made some changes to the site today. To start, I added a page for Webitor a new Open Source project of mine. I also redesigned the backend of this site. Before I was using a hexadecimal word to represent each page, and kept a history of the last 3 visited pages and put a row of links at the bottom similar to a taskbar. The hexadecimal was to shorten the URL with histories attached. I found that this was not well used, and the price of having cryptic URL's was too great. So It's gone. I'll have to entertain you with something else. So keep an eye out for something new.

You want what I got?

On the subject of Open Source, If you want any of the functionality of my site you can email me [ joe AT joemonti . org ] and I will send you the source. It's all done in PHP and MySQL and is protected under the GNU GPL (General Public License). I would have made a page dedicated to this subject, but I'm not anticipating the response would warrant the action.

The only part I could imagine anyone would want is the web log system. I think its actually pretty good. It supports authenticated posting, maximum post length display in the main listing, user comments, multiple pages; everything I could want in a Blog.

There's also the page comments. I can make a page commentable (i've been putting them in my /var/spool pages) just by including a php script in the page.

Also on the front page I export my currently playing mp3 with the help of an XMMS plugin and perl script on my main computer. I didn't do much of the work to make this possible, but I can tell you how it was done.

Webitor to be Open Source

After a long an through investigation into the matter, I found that Webitor should be Open Source. For those who are unfamiliar with Webitor, which many of you may not, Webitor is a web based text editor that I have been writing. It's designed to provide the ability to remotely edit files served on a web server, from a browser window using a Java Applet.
At the time of this post, Webitor has basic opening, editing, and saving capability. I'm hoping I can get the project in a releasable form in the next week, so keep a web browser out for it.

Thanksgiving Turkey

I survived another Thanksgiving, but not without my fair share of discomfort due to an abundance of turkey [stuffing|gravy|soup|sandwiches|pot pie]. Four days of turkey and football. Between games I got to work on a new article called 'A new GUI' which isn't up yet, but should be in a few days. It will be exploring new ideas for the way we use computers, and should be a good read.

On a side note, related to site updates, I changed the way the site is navigated behind the scenes to help me track site usage. I found a new Apache module, mod_rewrite, and I'm impressed. If you run an Apache webserver I'd suggest reading up, here's a link.