Colophon
This site began as an experiment in Perl and a way to force myself to write more often. A major like Computer Engineering doesn’t call for a lot of term papers or essay exams, and I felt like my grammer skills were slipping. Since then it has filled many different roles: photo album, open source program, music trivia contest, and most importantly to me, a place to tell my family & friends what is currently happening in my life, and to hear what they have to say about it.
Who
CMS programmed and posts written by Ross Terence Harmes, currently of Sunnyvale, California. I have a degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Florida, and am currently making a living as a frontend engineer for Yahoo! and a part-time author (see my latest book). My programming/technical web presence is elsewhere, mostly to insulate it from this half of my life, and so that I can feel free to say whatever the hell I want without a potential client/user seeing it. I enjoy reading books of all kinds (and by that I mean all kinds of scifi), biking, both on the road and off, and drinking beers that are so dark that they have more carbs than a big mac value meal.
How
The site is run by a series of PHP scripts that I wrote in Fall 2004, and by Perl scripts before that. I am in the process of updating them a bit, but not much will change from the point of view of a visitor. All of the pages are 100% valid XHTML and CSS (most of the time), and are accessible to those with poor vision, no vision or a red-green color deficiency. An RSS 2.0 feed is automatically generated with the first part of each new post.
As for hardware, I only use the best. The best from the mid-90’s, that is. This site (and another like it) used to be served from my 233 Mhz G3 tower, using the version of Apache installed by default on OS X 10.3. It wasn’t the fastest machine I’ve ever had the pleasure of using, but it served my needs at the time, and still takes honors for the most stable machine I’ve ever used (I’ve only had to reboot it for software updates, and even then only six or seven times ever). In March of 2006 I finally moved the whole site over to Dreamhost, which is without a doubt the best web host in business today. People are shocked when I tell them the bandwidth and disk space I get for nine bucks a month.
Little Known Facts
- To see a random post, go to http://rossharmes.net/random/.
- To see a random photo, go to http://rossharmes.net/photos/random/.
- All major sections can be navigated by using accesskeys. See the accessibilty statement for more details.
- I try to make these pages look the same no matter what browser you are using, but to be safe you should still be using a modern, standards complient browser like Safari or Firefox.
- Se habla Espanol. I don’t remember much of the language personally, but thanks to Google Language Tools, I don’t have to. Just click on the link on the bottom of the main page sidebar, and the main page will be translated.
- I keep ridiculously detailed statistics about the visitors to this site. The statistics page will show you the number of visitors per day, where they went, where they came from, and what browser they used. Maybe not much use to you, but I find it enthralling.
Legal Nonsense
All ideas, paragraphs, words, sentences & photos on this site are mine, and do not necessary express the views of my employer, Yahoo! Inc. They have no responsibilty here, nor do they tell me what to write. Any praise I give Yahoo! products or sites comes solely from me.