“Krenim” commits crimes against sanity with the final episode of his Series ? miniseries, The Undiscovered Continuity, Part V: “Powderkeg”. You thought that last season’s Enterprise finale was as shocking as you could get? Well, you’re in for a surprise!
There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth this afternoon after I discovered that my recent "fix" to start serving this site’s pages as XHTML had the unexpected side effect of making my site partially invisible to Google. I’ve fixed the problem, I think — read about it in my article about XHTML, the Runaway Train, if you care.
New today is the fifth question in the “You’re the Admiral!”: Sector Eta, Part I scenario.
“Krenim” is back with the penultimate chapter of the Series ? miniseries, The Undiscovered Continuity, Part IV: “Unfair Trade”.
After a bit of a delay, the next question for “You’re the Admiral!”: Sector Eta, Part I has been posted. This week’s question is a guest lecture by none other than Mark Nguyen, the original creator of the YtA series!
You may have noticed some intermittent “internal server error” messages getting reported yesterday; this was completely my fault, as I was attempting to upgrade my htaccess script to serve the XHTML pages with the proper MIME type. (It’s a geek thing; you probably wouldn’t understand. But on the off case you’re actually interested, there’s a fuller explanation in The Web Kit.)
Please report any connection problems you encounter to minutiaeman@st-minutiae.com.
As part of my project to improve the appearance and accessibility of my site, I’ve partially re-done the Starfleet Academy article on Basic Warp Theory; all of the mathematical equations in the article are now displayed using MathML. This replaces the previous cumbersome screenshots that were used to render the equations.
Many thanks to TrekPulse for their Award of Excellence!
I’ve made some minor changes to the style sheets for this site; when I added the fancy semi-transparent backgrounds for the side panels a while back, I completely forgot that MSIE can’t handle transparent PNG images. (cursemuttergrumblestupidIE!) I’ve added a small hack that will force IE to substitute a colored background where it refuses to display the transparent background instead. Click shift-reload to force a refresh of the style sheets for this site.
Please let me know if you encounter any other style bugs on this site! When you contact me, please provide information about your platform, browser, and browser version.
I’ve just posted a new article to The Web Kit, this time about my favorite Five CSS Tricks for Beginners. Hopefully someone out there will find this little tutorial useful!
I’ve been doing some fiddling with the style sheets and the structure of the blog-related web pages and the front page; please excuse the slight mess that might be caused as I make the changes and test them on the live site. (I suppose what I should do is set up my computer as a testing server... it can’t be that hard, can it?)
Also, I neglected to mention that I put up a new article in The Web Kit a few days ago, about a cool new method I’ve implemented that makes for a better way to stop bandwidth theft. Check it out!
I’ve fixed some minor problems with the Starfleet Academy Entrance Exam— the results of the quizzes were being displayed, but not recorded.
I’ve also started a new opinion poll, asking about how often you visit “Star Trek Minutiae”.
Welcome to the new home for “Star Trek Minutiae”! Most of you probably won’t be noticing any difference, aside from the absence of occasional timeout errors and other types of downtime. But for me, it’s a big difference, because STM is now hosted on a Macintosh server! (Call me a Mac zealot if you want, but this is something I’d been hoping to be able to do since Day One of planning my website. It just wasn’t in the cards before now.)
I’ll be getting back into the swing of things with a few more updates over the coming days. If you find any parts of the site that are missing or broken, my apologies in advance — I promise they’ll be fixed ASAP!
I’m currently in the process of moving my website to a new hosting service. Hopefully everything should happen transparently (because the old site will remain available while the new one goes up), but it will take a few days for the location change to propagate through the DNS network.
My apologies for the screw-up this morning; our host was upgrading the server software and did something that took down both the PHP processor and the mail server. If anyone sent me any mail between last night and this afternoon, please re-send it, because I didn’t receive it!
Congratulations to Matt D. of Trek5.com, the winner of this month’s Explosive Site Award!
Also new is Question Three of “You’re the Admiral!”: Sector Eta, Part I. There’s still plenty of time to join in the fun!
I’ve also added another article to The Subspace Cafe, this time about That Temporal Cold War Thingie.
In addition to yesterday’s announcement of the Starfleet Academy Entrance Exam, I forgot to also mention that I’ve added a series of articles on the Dominion War to the Starfleet Academy section. These articles come from Memory Alpha, but were written largely by yours truly.
“Star Trek Minutiae” celebrates its fourth anniversary today!
In honor of the occasion, I have unveiled a special feature that I have been planning to add since practically the first day I opened my website: the Starfleet Academy Entrance Exam! The Entrance Exam is a series of three trivia quizzes that test your knowledge of the Star Trek universe.
There’s one small catch: I haven’t had the time yet to think up very many questions, so there are only a few of them for each quiz so far. Therefore, I am accepting submissions for quiz questions from everyone! (The only condition is that you provide the full question, the correct answer, and, if the question is multiple choice, three incorrect answers to accompany the correct one.) E-mail me at minutiaeman@st-minutiae.com!
Continuing my tweaking of the site’s appearance, I’ve come up with a revised footer appearance that uses smaller web badges that aren’t quite so gaudy. In addition, I’ve put up a short explanation about why I validate my pages, just for those who are curious or uninformed.
Well, I may have decided not to redesign the website, but the great thing about the existing setup is that I can tweak the appearance very easily! 😉 I’ve decided to spice things up a little bit by switching to a different font, Trebuchet, which gives the site a slightly more “interesting” feel, IMO.
I’ve posted yet another article at The Subspace Cafe... this time, it’s a random musing on What Makes Trek Great.
I’ve added another entry to The Subspace Cafe (yeah, I’m on a roll!): A Historian’s Rant about the recent rumors concerning Enterprise’s fourth season premiere.
I’ve also started a new opinion poll, asking about what your favorite non-Trek sci-fi series is.
Well, it’s almost to STM’s fourth anniversary, and as usual at this time of year, I start thinking about ways that I can redesign my site (yet again). But after I thought about it for a while, I decided that I didn’t really want to go through the hassle of coming up with an entirely new appearance for the site. Plus, a reasonably large number of people who’ve responded to my site poll have indicated that they’re happy with the current design.
But I couldn’t just leave everything alone, of course! So I went ahead and decided to redesign the front page only. It’s got a couple of new features— the latest update to the site is now listed, plus the current opinion poll. It may not be quite as snazzy as the older version with the fancy rollovers, but it’s functional and (IMO) more informative.
Drop by the announcement thread at the SCN and let me know what you think of the new design!
After a slightly longer than expected delay, I’ve posted the next question for the You’re the Admiral series: Sector Eta, Part One, Question Two. Anyone is still more than welcome to test their starship management knowledge in the "official" “You’re the Admiral!” participation thread at the Subspace Comms Network!
I’ve also added new entries to both The Subspace Cafe and The Web Kit: Stargate SG-1: An Undiscovered Gem, and Compatible Designs Don’t Have to Be Boring.
Please bear with me... I’m in the process of moving the site updates into the new blog format for easier management.
In the mean time, I’ve also started a second blog here at “Star Trek Minutiae”! (I know, I know... I don’t even update the existing stuff often enough, do I?) The Web Kit will be an occasional publication featuring tips, hints, and commentary on various topics of interest to webmasters. I’ve already integrated a couple of previously-published articles into the system, and I plan to add some more discussion there soon.
Well, the process of converting my update archives to the Movable Type blog format turned out to be a lot less painful than I was expecting. Part of it was because of the very simple format that MT uses to import content, but also because of the incredible text-editing tools available in BBEdit, an incredible piece of software for any webmaster. Also, thanks to the flexibility of MT, I’ve customized the number of entries you see on the main updates page, so that the appearance isn’t distorted by the over-long list of archives. Snazzy, no?
After working for several months and gaining some experience working with weblogs, I’ve decided to upgrade The Subspace Cafe to a more advanced blogging application, Movable Type. It’s got some more advanced features, but more importantly, generates static XHTML pages that are able to be indexed by search engines. I’m still in the process of putting the finishing touches on the custom templates, but everything should be up and running properly!
Since I’m not using Simplog anymore, I’ve reverted to using plain XHTML pages for the site update pages. I may or may not migrate the updates to the new Movable Type, because importing 250+ entries will be a real pain in the ass!
Happy Birthday to Me! 😀
I haven’t been posting about new articles in The Subspace Cafe recently, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten about it! Today comes an overview/review of the Xindi Arc that comprised all of Enterprise’s third season. It’s longer than my usual Cafe entries, but I think it’s worth a read, IMNSHO!
The plot thickens as Robo-Nechayev discovers that Braxton has defied her, in the latest chapter of the Series ? miniseries, The Undiscovered Continuity, Part III: “The Wrath of... Nah, Too Easy”.
Next up is “You’re the Admiral!”: Sector Eta, Part I, set in the years before TNG. I was originally planning to write a third part for Sector Zeta set in the pre-TNG period, but I nixed that idea after realizing that there probably wasn’t enough material to keep working through the same sector over and over and over again. So now, instead of Klingons, we’ve got Cardassians! Pop on over to the YtA! thread at the SCN and join in the fun!
I’ve posted the fourth and final question for “You’re the Admiral!”: Sector Zeta, Part II. The first part of Sector Eta will be coming up in a few weeks!
I’ve started a new poll, asking whether you prefer the current look of the site, or if I should design a new appearance instead. I really should go into web design... the urge to continually redesign my site is powerful! 😉
Robo-Nechayev makes a chilling pronouncement in the next chapter of the Star Trek: Series ? miniseries: The Undiscovered Continuity, Part II: “Daniels Ex Machina”! Be prepared for a shocker!
The next two questions of “You’re the Admiral!”: Sector Zeta, Part II have been posted. (Well, Question Two was posted on the SCN a week ago, but I neglected to mention it here.)
After another long slumber, I’ve decided to present another Explosive Site Award. This month’s award goes to FlashTrek, an awesome new web-based game.
Kris has produced a handful of new insignia for his collection of logos.
After a few weeks to take a break, I’ve now opened up “You’re the Admiral!”: Sector Zeta, Part II. Be sure to check out the thread at the Subspace Comms Network as well, where you can join in the fun and post your own replies to the scenario!
Well, it may be several months later than I promised it, but at least it’s here! I’ve finally finished work on my Warp Speed Calculator v1.0, a FileMaker database solution that can calculate almost any distance, travel time, or speed based on the information you put in. Check it out— there are downloads available for both Mac and Windows platforms!
“Krenim” is back to posting his excellent parodies, with a Series ? miniseries: The Undiscovered Continuity, Part I: “Some Assembly Required”!
There have been some big changes at the Subspace Comms Network! We’ve recently added a couple of chat rooms to our community to help encourage participation. Take a few minutes to go check them out!
Memory Alpha has just moved to its own hosting server and domain name! Please update your bookmarks for Memory Alpha to www.memory-alpha.org.
Yesterday, the Subspace Comms Network announced that it would be closing. Yesterday was also April Fools’ Day, of course! Read this thread at the SCN to see the many varied reactions.
The final question of “You’re the Admiral!”: Sector Zeta, Part One has been posted. I’ve also uploaded a preview map for Part Two.
This past week, Memory Alpha suffered a major blow when the database was accidentally erased during an upgrade of the wiki engine. The good news was that a backup was available. The bad news was that the backup was six weeks old. If you’ve got any interest at all, please take some time to pitch in and help clean up, and make Memory Alpha even better than it was before!
It seems I spend more time fiddling with the code and design of the site than with the content, sometimes. I’ve added the site’s opinion poll so that it displays in the sidebar of The Subspace Cafe.
The third and final part of “You’re the Admiral!”: Sector Zeta, Part I, Question Four is now available.
In doing a quick review of my logs, I realized that I’d never actually updated all of my old site updates to the new system— all of my records for 2002 were MIA! That omission has naturally been fixed. Unfortunately, the list of archived months is now so long that you have to browse manually. I’ve restored the calendar to the sidebar so you can do so.
On a related note, try adding the new news feeds of the Subspace Cafe and the site updates to your favorite RSS reader! ...If you’re into that sort of thing and care about my site that much, anyway. 😉
I’ve also done some long-delayed housekeeping and fixed up the forms for my 404 and 500 error pages— if you click the button to report the bad link or the faulty script, the message will now be sent successfully! (I’m particularly proud of the PHP scripts I’ve used for the contact forms— although they’re obscenely simple, they at least work properly! 😀).
The next installment of “You’re the Admiral!”: Sector Zeta, Part I, Question Four has now been posted. We’ve reached the top of the roller coaster, so let the wild ride begin!
The first part of Question Four for “You’re the Admiral!”: Sector Zeta, Part I has been posted. You’d better brush up on your history, because it’s about to land right in your sector!
I’d like to apologize (again) for the repeated major outages that this site has suffered over the past few months. Unfortunately, they’re completely outside of my control, because I’m hosted only on a basic shared hosting plan. For a complete account of my problems with Global Internet Solutions, my current host, please read about the GISOL Hosting Disaster.
In the mean time, “Admiral Ross” has posted his guest lecture for “You’re the Admiral!”: Sector Zeta, Part One question three.
Almost exactly three years after I first started maintaining it, I’ve made the decision to discontinue my Advanced Starship Design Bureau mirror here at STM. All pages have been redirected to the main ASDB site.
An update to my personal Ode to Cats page. Yeah, it’s non-Trek, but cats are such wonderful creatures... Don’t try telling me that Maia and Pandora aren’t cute! 😉
Just to prove that I haven’t forgotten it, I’ve posted some information and a screenshot of my Warp Speed Calculator. Hopefully I’ll be able to post a working version within a week or so!
The second question for “You’re the Admiral!”: Sector Zeta, Part One has been posted. Beware... the entire Federation bureaucracy is about to land on your desk!
I’m also working on a special new surprise to add to the site, but it’s going to take a few more days to get ready. Apologies in advance if there aren’t as many updates— combined with school assignments, work, and general real life stuff, it’s tough to fit in updates sometimes!
Today, I’ve caught up with all of Kris’s latest new logos and symbols that he’s drawn over the last week or two. Check them out!
Minor change to this Site Updates page— seeing as how there was a lot of space being taken up by the calendar, with the “Archives” listing right below it, I decided that the calendar really wasn’t necessary for this page. It’s gone.
Today, at long last, I’ve started the next scenario in the “You’re the Admiral!” series: Sector Zeta, Part One. This scenario puts a new twist on the old idea— it takes place in the TOS era, starting around 2265!
Thanks to “MJ” for pointing out a major flaw in my contact form. The PHP code has been fixed and spruced up a little.
I’m pulling out all the stops with these big updates, aren’t I?
Today I’m starting up a new Trek Links Directory to replace my ancient links list. (It’s actually just brought over from its temporary stay in the Memory Alpha domain— it fits better with STM than with MA.) This directory is interactive, meaning that you can add your site to the list yourself. (Yeah, I’m lazy, aren’t I? 😉)
Today I’ve started a new poll, asking what you think about my decision to transform The Subspace Cafe into a blog. After all, if no one’s going to read it, then what’s the point in me updating it?
Kris Trigwell has also added a few more logos and symbols to his collection. Also, thanks to “Mr. Wilbur” for spotting some major bugs in the link list!
Another big update today, of a somewhat different sort. Today, I’m beginning a massive overhaul of the site’s update pages. After starting to use the blogging software for the Subspace Cafe updates, I decided it was useful enough to handle the regular site update notices, too! And so, here we are— we’ll see how it works out. For the moment, all of the older updates (from 2003 and earlier) are still on their original pages. Assuming I have the time, I’ll transfer them for storage in the new system.
In the mean time, the three old articles from the Subspace Cafe 1.0 have been transferred to the miscellaneous section.
Happy New Year! Yes, I realize that it’s been quite a long time since it was really the New Year (or even the Chinese New Year). All I can say is that I’ve been extremely busy with some real-life stuff, not the least of which was a full class load. (I’m graduating in June, so I’m basically at the point where I can’t slack off anymore. 😉)
Although it’s a couple of weeks in the past, some explanation of the huge server outage is probably necessary. I’m not privy to all the details, but my host’s server suffered a major hard drive failure that took two days to fix and restore all the sites from backup. (Yeah, I’m not sure I like that explanation either, but it’s the only one I’ve got.) My apologies for the silence on this matter!
Long-term visitors to the site may have wondered when— or even if— I would be updating that fabled final section of Star Trek Minutiae. With the even-more-mythical Starfleet Reference Databank finally brought to life (sort of, anyway), I decided it was high time for me to resurrect the final major part of my site that had been long forgotten— The Subspace Cafe. Since the Cafe had always been intended as a sort of a personal soapbox/review page anyway, I’ve decided that I might as well jump on the bandwagon and turn it into a weblog. ...Now, before anyone groans and exclaims, “Not another one!”, I’m not intending for this to be updated on a daily basis. Hopefully it will be semi-regular, but knowing my record, we’ll have to wait and see. But be assured that under no circumstances will I be resorting to the sort of inane and irrelevant gibberish that seems to populate the vast majority of the ’blogs out there.
In the past couple of months, Kris Trigwell has added a whopping 35 new logos to his collection of symbols. Check out his awesome work!