Continually Different

I stand here, watching the man
He cannot see me,
But this is the only place we exist together
He is telling of his past, of the place he works
His desk was a store,
That room was a restaurant
In the past, this place was different
Now it was decrepit, barely alive,
As he tells of a time long past,
Surprise and bewilderment in his eyes,
I wonder what I also had forgotten.
Stories I've lost,
Songs I can no longer sing.
Granted, I'm on my own now,
Reduced from my troupe of three,
But I wonder,
As I learn new tales,
As I sing the new songs,
Am I, too, losing the past?

Crash Review

I started going through the Pimsleur course today for Japanese. Since I didn't know what they would cover in the course I decided to just start from the beginning, making most of it a review early on. The first lesson just went over general inquiry about spoken languages. The second one went into greetings and small talk, and, oddly enough, that's where I first hit new vocabulary. 

Somehow, I had missed the term 'weather' in my 3 years of taking it in high school and the other random stuff I've picked up since. Of all the things a simple world like that I had never learned. Also on the second one they tried going into the explanation of the sentence particle 'ne', which as I've mentioned before doesn't have a good general equlivalent in American English, which left the narrator the task - much to my amusement - of trying to explain how to use it during the lesson.

Cloaked

As of right now most of AnacondaSoftware is now closed, leaving just the forum. I had a security issue come up with my hosting account, and so in the process of doing security audits decided to shut off access to the DevBlog until I finish working on the new style, which I should be able to launch next week.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about particularly. What I am wanting to talk about is a new term I found today, idiolect. It's not a term I'd ever heard of before, but oddly enough, its something I'm currently studying.

I'm reading Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October currently. I've had different comments about my particular writing style, both favorable and not-so-favorable, and I've mentioned in the past some disapproval at it myself at times. I hadn't known that he had written Red October until reading up some on him while playing Ghost Recon, nor that he was particularly a novel author in general (nor did I know that he had actually started the video game company that had made a lot of the work tied to his name). However it was interesting to find out that he actually didn't write any novels for the Splinter Cell series (one title using his name), which are instead written by several ghostwriters using a different pseudonym.

The primary job of a ghostwriter, of course, is to pass the writing off as someone else. That means mimicing their style of writing, sentence composition, and storytelling methods. In essence, the whole point is to write with someone else's idiolect. I've particularly found a few things so far about Tom Clancy's idiolect (at least as far as Red October is concerned), paying special attention to that while looking for some alterations to make to my own style. Each section is particularly focused on the point of view of one character, a particular trait that in some novels I've read in the past I haven't seen stuck to very well, although he does tend to throw in a random paragraph every so often from someone else's perspective around him. I'm also not particularly very far into the book but there's a lot of personal narrative in what I've seen so far, but that's likely just the side effect of it being early in the book and needing to explain the characters, and I expect it to taper off later.

I'll probably do another summary into the idiolect of this novel when I finish it, and other things into the topic in the future.

Clean Code

While I wait for this function I just added to my map editor to finish I'll drop in here. Over the weekend I cleaned up all the code so this site is valid XHTML, and got mostly finished with the templates for the new AnacondaSoftware site. Just need to do some images for that design, and decide what content I want to use, and I can launch that. Might do that this weekend, might not until next week.

It really is very liberating to do website design these days, as opposed to back when I last did it regularly. Now that I can safely simply ignore IE6, my CSS doesn't have to be filled with hacks, my pictures can be nice PNGs instead of severely limited GIFs, and things will look the way I want them to. It was such a pain in the past, and I don't miss those days at all. Hooray for the rise of Firefox, and the internet moving forward into the age we have now.

It was the very beginning of 2006 when I last did major website developent work, employed for a short time for a small company here. At the time (rather, going off of 2005's year numbers since it was literally the beginning of 2006), which was before IE7 was released and just barely after the release of Firefox 1.5, Internet Explorer browser market share was 87%. Now, year to date put it at 67%, with Firefox a solid 22%, and Safari sitting at 8%. IE's still the dominant force, of course, because it comes installed with Windows, but the actual amount of that number that is IE6 is now only 18%.

As XP machines get rotated out with Vista (which includes IE7) and 7 (which includes IE8), and as education about alternative browsers grows, that will soon further vanish. The biggest hurdle still is corporate use, which has been slow to switch to Vista, but with upgrade cycles coming up and 7 looking a lot more favorable than Vista (because of Vista's bad press), and Mozilla's just announced upcoming project to allow corporations to deploy custom Firefox builds, that last hurdle should soon be passed.

Cloudy

I've spent most of today working on cleaning up the site. I went through all the entries and fixed the bad characters from the Unicode conversion, and the dead links caused by turning on mod_rewrite and it not properly handling the old links.

But the bulk of the word was turning on tags for the blog. I had to edit the templates to add in the code for it, and then go through every single entry and add appropriate tags. I have altogether 43 tags currently. All the entries are tagged, although a few entries don't have all the tags they should, looking back through the tag list and forgetting about a few of them. I'll make another pass through it later, but for now it's good enough.

My next task will be cleaning up the templates so that the site can validate as XHTML 1.0 correctly again, as the little button on the left put there by the template designer indicates.