I end up having to tweak this every time I update the site, and compounding this is the fact that between updates, I consistently forget exactly how to do it. Anyways, here’s how:

1. Open up wp-includes/classes.php.
2. Find the Walker_Page class.
3. Find the end_el function of the Walker_Page class.
4. Change remove the \n from $output .= “</li>\n”;.
5. Save and upload the file.

Yes, I’m aware that this should probably be remedied by creating a custom function in my template that formats the output correctly, but that would require a delving into Wordpress’s class structure that I find much more daunting than just deleting two characters from a file after each update. This fix works on both Wordpress MU, and regular Wordpress.

The Windows mercs have implemented a method of reloading the machines that I think is pretty awesome. Using Windows Deployment Services (WDS), we can hit F12 as the machine boots, select the image corresponding to the machine’s specific build (there are several species being used throughout the building) and Windows is (re)installed fresh on the computer in about half an hour over the network. All we have to do is name the machine once it boots for the first time on the network.

Now, we have brand-spankin’ new HP Elitebook 2730p laptops that are going out to the teachers this week. The teachers already have laptops (Toshiba something-or-others, we’ve got like three similar models of them floating around) and we have to move their data so that it appears on the network and is synchronized to their new laptop when they log on. The Windows mercs have devised a Group Policy that redirects their “My Documents”, “Desktop”, and “AppData” folders to the network and uses Sync Center to make them available offline (ie: at home).  The problem is that the Documents redirection very rarely ever works properly (automagically). So I have to move the teacher’s data from their local machine (usually in “My Documents”, or on the extra partition on the machine) up to the network and then get them on the laptop. Once they log in, I have to manually relocate their Documents folder to the network, and then make it available offline. Me and the other two guys working on this have made sure to get out of the habit of saying “It shouldn’t be too long,” and have instead picked up saying “This will never work!” when we sat down at their machine.

I’m also getting a crash course in Symantec Ghost and Sysprep (got any tips?), as there are several machines that don’t take kindly to WDS, we need a way to update them, and for the price of the Windows mercs getting it done we could buy all-new machines to replace them. I’m enjoying this part, I’m basically getting a chance to custom-roll an install for the school. While I’ve already convinced them to load up Firefox (something they were quite opposed to), Notepad++, 7-zip, MediaCoder, and VLC Media Player on the computers, this is different because I’ll get to handle it. Even though the machines I’ll be imaging are far from the best in the building, I know I can make them run well enough to be confused with the best . When these other guys roll up packages, they leave all the junk around. Adobe Reader quickloader, Flash/shockwave updaters, driver tray programs, and all kinds of other unnecessary junk–not a big issue on the beefier machines, but on the boxes I’m working with (512MB of RAM or less) it really eats up resources. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, on the old Toshiba machines, about half of the taskbar would be eaten up by this crap. They’d take about three minutes to be usable after login while it all loaded!

I love this shit.

In any case, I think I’ve got the basic look of the template down and now I need to just work on cross-browser compatibility and then on refactoring it to play nicely with Wordpress. I can’t wait until I can get my main computer going again, I need to get some VirtualBox instances running so I can make this thing work in other browsers/operating systems.

As for the site’s look, I wanted something simple and clean. I don’t think our site is going to be very content-heavy, so I went with a fixed-width layout. The main goal was to somehow get The gold/black colors of NKU to jive with the light blues of the ACM. I think where it is at (with the gold header and important content being blue) is about as close as I’ll get. I tried making the stripey background have a dark blue as a secondary color, but it seemed a tad bit distracting. I think I’ll experiment a little more with colors.

I’d appreciate any input you guys have to offer! Just hit me up on the forums or on Xfire/Steam.

It is really wierd working five days a week full-time. Sure, I’m around for the same times that I used to be there for school, but this is totally different. In class, if you aren’t having it at the moment you can just kind of zone out and get away with it without issue (unless you’ve got one of those evil teachers that like to call on the people zoning out–I’m looking at you, math teachers!). But when you’re there for work, zoning out just isn’t an option. Don’t get me wrong, I love doing this stuff. I’m not used to being required to focus on (often) small, specific tasks for 40hrs a week.

I think I’ll set a long-term career goal to work no more than four days a week. Yeah, that sounds good.

After I got home from work Friday, there was still no power. So I listened to the radio for a while (I couldn’t believe a station in Cincinnati was playing some decent black metal!). My brother and I both agreed that the situation sucked, so we went outside, hooked the iPod into the radio for some metal goodness, and started a fire in the grill. All of our non-frozen foods were spoiled and/or funky smelling, so we grabbed some ham and burgers from the freezer and cooked (read: burned) them on the grill. I couldn’t eat one of the burgers, it was so bad.

I think I am going to charge up an older uninterruptible power supply I have, so that it may be used to power my laptop and the DSL modem during lengthy periods of power failure.

As I was porting our old content from Joomla, I couldn’t help but notice that many of the posts had code like that seen in the image. Why in the world would the software allow that to happen in the first place?

I’m glad we’re finally on Wordpress, where the code editor works well by default, and the administration panel is pretty, and at least somewhat coherent.

I’ve been having off and on video problems for a while now. Sometimes during a game (though it seems to be rarely as of late) my screen will go blank (the monitor reports no signal), the last bit of sound will loop (sometimes), and the machine stops responding. I’ve been in contact with XFX support for a while and we’re not sure what the problem is. They’ve hinted that this might be a software problem, but I suspect it might be the card itself.  The issue only appears during games, and happens randomly.

I have tried driver reinstalls, reseating the card, checking the temperatures, and downgrading to Windows Vista SP1. I’ll think that I am fine for a while, and then out of nowhere the machine will crash again. I can’t come up with any sort of pattern in all this either. XFX has offered to RMA the card so they can test it, but I don’t want to send it to them and be without a beefy computer for a week and then have them send it back to me like “Yeah, should be fine!”. However, I guess that would make things certain that it is indeed a software problem (that I would probably have to remedy by reloading Windows) instead of a hardware problem that I can’t do much about.