This will, in all honesty, be the last post of this year (Like I had to tell you that.) Few things. I got a Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited. It has 4 wheel drive (all time) and a V8, also just about any other thing a person could dream of in a 4x4/Luxury vehicle. Bender is doing good. Took him to the vet. The doc there gave us an A+++ with gold stars for the amount of care we are giving to him. so thats all nice.
Ramen Noodles with Cajun flavor are awesome when eaten as a snack (prepared without water or heat).
On to site news! I have been learning how to use some XML parsing modules for perl and am getting pretty good at it; about 3 lines to extract a desired value from a given file. Soon I will implement it on the site here. I'll use it for simple things at first and get more complex as I get better. First will be stuff like Theme storage and maybe WebCam information, since those are both hard coded into CGIs right now. The news will never be stored as XML because its already stored in a superior way with SQL; same with U.D. and S.S. I may convert the menu to XML vs its current HTML with an include statement, but that would add milliseconds to the load time. Theoretically, my overall idea for the site is to have everything working in the most efficient fastest loading/processing time possible while still maintaining complete and extreme dynamics. Sort of a balance between speed and usability.
About the webcams being black sometimes. This is not for privacy, believe it or not. The software I'm using (which is sort of the only choice if you have 2 or more cameras) doesn't properly initialize the video digitizer for each of the cameras when it is launched. After launch, if you modify something, all comes to life as normal. The application is NOT scriptable, so I cannot automate this task. So, if its black, just drop me a note so I know to fix it.
Thats all for now. More cool stuff to come.