The Tower

Established January 1, 2001
The tower was last updated on: 20-June-2006
Click here to see what's new in the tower.

The wizard is happy to have visitors in some of the chambers of his tower. Feel free to move about and enjoy the tower.

30 July 2006 I upgraded my movie review site to WordPress. Unfortunately, this meant losing the original date of my reviews and invalidating the existing links. This was unavoidable, so better now than later.

20 June 2006 I released w2otk, a TCL/TK front-end to oggenc. It allows batch-conversion of a bunch of WAV files to ogg format. It allows control of ogg metadata such as album name, artist name, music genre, and encoding quality. It's been released under a BSD license.

1 June 2006 A couple of new movie reviews are available: Syriana and Match Point. Enjoy.

4 May 2006 I added a new section to the library: a programming section. In this section I will (not very often) post articles on interesting solutions to the programming problems I find day to day. Check my first post, on simulating function polymorphism in C. I hope you find it interesting.

11 April 2006 A couple of months ago I tried to change the layout of my photo review pages from tables-based to pure css-based. I believe tables should not be used for layout; tables should be used to write tables. Yeah, I know, an amazing thought.

After some work and reading up about css, divs, and that stuff, all seemed well. I was very happy with the way my pages had turned up and the html+css code was a lot nicer to look at (and maintain) than the ugly tables-based html code.

Until, that is, I got an email from a kind reader who told me my pages weren't rendering correctly in Internet Explorer. I don't use Microsoft products, and verifying that my new css-based pages looked alright in IE never ocurred to me. It's supposed to be a standard, right?

Turns out I was terribly wrong. I quickly rebooted into Windows, fired up IE, and, lo and behold, my pages were unreadable. One of the columns was right in the middle of the page, obscuring another column. Argh!!

I was very frustrated. Since something like 60% of my visitors use IE, I can't really allow those pages to look wrong. For the time being, it was Microsoft 1, The Wizard 0: I quickly rewrote my pages to use tables again, and at least they were readable in all browsers.

I wasn't going to let the issue rest, though. I finally found a way to use css- and div-based page layout that works in IE and the rest of the world. The answer came via this great resource: the layout gala website. They have 40 different layouts that work across browsers, and they're very easy to use and understand. For my actual pages, I took layout number 14 and adapted it to my needs.

I'm very happy with the results. I took the time to add a navigation column to the right-hand side of the pages, and to do some general clean-up. Please let me know if you have any comments on the new page layout.

28 February 2006 My Succinct Movie Reviews page has accumulated 10 reviews so far!

4 December 2005 Added a sidebar to all my photo reviews.

1 December 2005 Added a review of the Nikon F80 camera to the Photo section of the library.

11 November 2005 Today I inaugurate a new section in this website: Succinct Movie Reviews. In this new section I present very short, to-the-point opinions on movies I've seen.

2 November 2005 The Tamron 200-400 f5.6 just suffered a similar reformatting.

31 October 2005 The Tamron 28-200 f3.8-5.6 just suffered a similar reformatting.

27 October 2005 I did a heavy reformatting of the Nikon FM2 review. Now it is a lot more readable. I will eventually migrate all reviews to this format. I will also add some pictures to the reviews, and a navigation bar.

26 October 2005 I added a linkroll of my latest del.icio.us links. You can see them at the left.

See older Tower News.