Alex's Journal

I’ve been hard at work working on a design for wideopenart.com. I think I’m going to turn it into a personal portfolio displaying my photography, stories, digital artwork, web designs, etc. For the past several days I have been trying to come up with a design for the site and after many different trials, I think I’ve finally come up with something that I like.

Wide Open Art should be opening soon. I’ll make a post here of course when it’s finally up and running in full.

I am the proud owner of 4 domain names: www.alexseifert.com, www.wideopenart.com, www.eswirdkalt.com and www.undesregnet.com. As such, I have been trying to figure out what to do with the latter 3. I use alexseifert.com as my general internet-base for things such as this blog and my other blogs as well as for my music. Wideopenart.com used to be a website that I kept that displayed online galleries of art done by myself and several other friends. Eswirdkalt.com used to be a fansite for the German band, Eisbrecher and undesregnet.com used to be a fansite for another German band, Der Bote. The sites went down quite some time ago when the Windows 2000-based server I owned and co-hosted at my ISP became too infected with viruses and other malware to work properly.

Since then I have decided I have no interest in having and maintaining my own server and therefore have signed up for a hosting service. While I have gotten alexseifert.com back up and running, the other domains I am no longer sure what to do with. I am thinking I am going to use wideopenart.com as kind of an online portfolio for my photography, webdesigns, digital artwork, stories, etc, but as far as the other 2 domains go, I am not sure what to do with them. I no longer have the time (or desire) to keep fansites.

I am considering maybe using one of them (possibly eswirdkalt.com) as a blog that I will keep in German, however I am not sure what I would blog about nor am I sure if I would have the time. I barely have enough time to blog here and at History Rhymes (in fact, I’m really far behind at History Rhymes).

Does anyone have any suggestions?

I decided to update the header image. The last one was a picture of the top of 金閣寺, or the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, Japan. It was a photo I took while I was there.

The new image is another photo I took, except it is a photo of the top of the entrance to the Tower of London in London, England.

I’ve been living in Germany for almost a year now and with the exception of the internet at the university library, not once have I encountered fast internet here. The speed of the internet in the place where I live is dreadfully slow. It is supposed to be broadband, but behaves as though it was trying to be dial-up. And that’s when it works!

The way they’ve got their system setup is such that everyone is routed through a proxy server. While this may be common and isn’t that big of a deal, the fact that the proxy server is constantly refusing connections is a big deal. During this time I can access secure sites that bypass the proxy server, but the rest of the internet is unaccessible. That means that not only is the internet slow, but half the time browsing the internet is impossible which is extremely annoying.

I suppose it’s not really fair to say that every connection in Germany is this horrible, but as of yet I have to see a connection that isn’t horrible — broadband or otherwise.

ScratchPad 1.2.3 has been released! Included in the new version:

• [Changed] Moved ‘Delete Page’ menu item to the File menu.
• [International] Dutch localization added.

You can download either by selecting “Check for Updates” in the application menu or by downloading it here.

Today I downloaded Firefox 3 for the first time since the first beta. So far I am extremely impressed at its speed. It’s unimaginably faster at rendering images and pages and also at running JavaScript than its predecessor, Firefox 2; especially on my slow old PowerBook G4.

I had a brief stint where I used Safari again for a while because it was so much faster than Firefox 2, but that came to a quick end as Safari just doesn’t offer the features of Firefox. I would have to say that Firefox 3 is even faster than Safari which is quite impressive.

The new version also looks a lot better than the previous version, especially for Mac OS X. The new theme blends in more than the old one.

I recommend downloading it. You can find it for free for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X here:

ScratchPad 1.2.2 has been released! Included in the new version:

• [Feature] Users can now delete pages via a new menu item or a new toolbar button.
• [Fixed] Empty pages are no longer saved and also automatically removed from the harddrive.
• [Fixed] Fixed a problem with the German localization and umlauts.

You can download either by selecting “Check for Updates” in the application menu or by downloading it here.

PCWorld Australia has pitted Fedora 9 against Ubuntu 8.04 in an interesting article showing each one’s strengths and weaknesses. PCWorld’s article concludes:

For users who are already familiar with Linux, Fedora 9 is an excellent choice. Robust security features and installation options make it somewhat more versatile than Ubuntu, which offers a more streamlined (and therefore more restricted) installation. For most users, though, including millions interested in trying Linux for the first time, Fedora lacks the polish and ready-to-run simplicity of its more popular rival.

Ubuntu 8.0.4 offers a level of functionality comparable to that of Mac OS and Windows, from delivery to installation to daily use. Unfortunately, the ties that bind all Linux distributions – primarily a lack of support for major Windows- and Mac-based business, design, and gaming applications – still hold Ubuntu back from mass popularity. For users with such moderate computing needs as Web browsing, e-mail, and basic document creation, however, Hardy is a compelling option.

You can read the full article here.

ScratchPad finally has a proper website!

Instead of a mixture of free services (Google Pages and Blogger), I have now merged everything into one site hosted with the same host as all of my other web endeavors (including this one) and using my domain name. I hope you enjoy the new site! You can find it here: http://scratchpad.alexseifert.com.

Please let me know what you think!

ScratchPad 1.2.1 had been released! This is what is new in the new version:

• French localization has been added.
• Added a ‘Show Ruler’ toolbar icon.
• Current page number is now shown in title bar.
• Auto-save now works when navigating to a specific page number.
• ScratchPad no longer responds to letters typed in the Go To Page Number box.

You can download either by selecting “Check for Updates” in the application menu or by downloading it here.

Thanks to Jean-Louis for pointing out some of the bugs now fixed in this version!