The Lonely Astronaut

August 23rd, 2008

A short web series of comedic sketches about an extremely angry astronaut stranded on the Moon. The good aspects include ebjoyably predictable plot twists and cliches set in an unusual environment. The bad aspects… well, pretty much the same. The whole thing (all 6 episodes together) is less than 20 minutes, so you probably wouldn’t [...]

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Cap’n, We Just Got Hacked!

August 15th, 2008

I checked my blog this evening and discovered that every page redirected to some stupid malware site (the link is nofollowed). It was immediately obvious that I had been hacked. Fuck, that’s a first.
Emergency Measures
It took me about 30 minutes to get the site back to normal and start investigating. WP 2.6.1 has just come [...]

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Random Linkage Day

August 8th, 2008

I’m busy with an AJAX+PHP+Google Trends experiment this week and I can’t bring myself to write a complete post, so here’s a random assortment of interesting links instead
High-Traffic Colluding Tor Routers in Washington, D.C., and the Ugly Truth About Online Anonymity
Lucid thouhts on online anonymity and why TOR is not a panacea.
PingCrawl [...]

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On Intellectual Property And The Human Soul

August 2nd, 2008

I don’t have a consistent stance on copyright and intellectual property - I suspect most people don’t. We just make do with shaky beliefs and half-assed ideals. So I decided to finally think it through and come up with some sort of philosophical basis on this issue. Below is the the resulting epic rant. If [...]

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Programmer Rap

July 21st, 2008

Here’s something funny I found today :
pic div fade in slow
shadow current menu show
find content replace all span
div append to table row
Shamelessly stolen from this Russian site.
Okay, so it’s not syntactically correct I’m sure you can still reconstruct the original JavaScript if need be.

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Yay, WordPress 2.6 Is Out

July 15th, 2008

I’m sure you know why I write this. A new version of WordPress is out, and I’ve upgraded this blog immediately. So here are the mandatory first impressions (nope, I don’t use SVN betas). Just conforming with the unquestionable avalanche of review-style posts that have appeared, with more no doubt being written right now.
Right after [...]

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Mars Phoenix In Spore

June 26th, 2008

Behold, my lame attempt to recreate the robotic spacecraft in Spore Creature Editor!

You can’t really make asymmetric creatures in the Creature Creator, so I couldn’t add all the equipment to the top surface. Also, no parts match the solar panel coloring well enough, hence no panels. Eh, it was fun anyway.

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Server Move Complete

June 14th, 2008

If you can read this and see this post on the site (not just in the RSS feed), then the site has been moved okay and DNS propagation has finished. It seems nothing important was lost in the process, aside from a days worth of network stats and possibly an email or two.
Some random [...]

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Moving To A New Server

June 11th, 2008

I’m working on moving this site to a new, better server. A VPS, to be exact. Transferring the data was relatively easy, but domain transfer is taking a while - I probably should have done that first. Ah well, live and learn.
There may be some spurious downtime while all the DNS stuff is sorted out. [...]

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It lives! One Click Plugin Updater 2.2

June 7th, 2008

A new version of the WordPress plugin, now with an improved FireFox extension, ability to delete themes and some bugfixes. Still updates and installs plugins, too.

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I’m on Twitter

June 6th, 2008

I figured I’ll give Twitter a shot. Again. My Twitter account = white_shadow
I signed up about a year ago because it was mentioned in the ThirtyDayChallenge. But I never really did anything with it - I didn’t “get” the social marketing aspect promoted in the TDC, and had no actual purpose. So I let [...]

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Google More Popular Than Sex

May 20th, 2008

According to Google Trends, people search for “google” more often than they search for “sex”. As you can see from the graph, Google beats the primal instinct by a pretty small margin. Still, damn.

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Meddling Googlers

May 20th, 2008

Google has done it again. Just today, I discovered they have banned a specific keyword Google Trends because it was being used to estimate search volume of other keywords. This makes me, as the Cheshire cat would say, vaguely discombobulated, and willing to consider some far-fetched conspiracy theories.

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Digg : Some Useless Comment Stats

May 12th, 2008

As part of a little side project, I’ve written a script that determines the most “dugg” and most “buried” Digg.com comments for the day. It can also find the discussion thread that contains the most diggs. Only popular submissions are checked for comments.
I’ve put it up at TheBestOfDigg.com. The idea is to post the best/worst [...]

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1539 Things To Do When Bored

May 1st, 2008

Things to do when your bored. Have no idea about what to do when you are bored? This extra-large list of stuff might help.

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Still Bored - Shade 2

April 23rd, 2008

My latest programming project (which I’ll discuss in a later post; it’s about DeviantArt) is still in the research phase, so today it is again time for another post of diversion and miscellany. And random music stuff.
What Was
A few years ago I temporarily bought into the common illusion that “it can’t be that hard” to [...]

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Random Photos of Shadowy Reverie

April 17th, 2008

And now, for something completely different! All of my programming projects are currently in various stages of R&D, and I’ve got no scripts or algorithms to show you today. Fortunately I have other interests, too, like visual art and magic ;) So here are some amateurish photos I’ve taken.

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Succumbing To The Trend - WordPress 2.5 Thoughts

March 30th, 2008

Everybody and their animal companion have been writing WP 2.5 reviews ever since RC1 came out. Now that the new version has finally been released “proper”, the temptation to commit the slightly dishonorable act of following the trend and writing my own “first impressions” (or is it “second thoughts”?) post is too strong to overcome. [...]

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Touchscreens : NOT the Future of Desktop PCs

March 23rd, 2008

Touchscreens definitely have their place in the so-called modern consumer electronics market, but some people just take it too far. A recent article predicted that soon the now-ubiquitous keyboard & mouse combination would be totally extinct. All computers would come equipped with huge (50 inches!) touchscreens that would double as virtual keyboards, and you’d do all the point-and-click stuff with your fingers. Now I’m annoyed by these ridiculous predictions, so I’m going to devote a blog post (this one) to why I think they are wrong.

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WordPress Version Survey

March 10th, 2008

A while ago I saw the blog version survey at BlogSecurity.net and got an idea to do my own. The previous survey is more than 8 months old and several new WordPress version have been released since then, so I think a new study is in order
I collected a large list of WordPress [...]

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Be Unique. Or Else.

January 14th, 2008

Randall Munroe, of XKCD fame, just posted a very interesting blag entry (sic) about an interesting way to ensure that IRC discussion remain unique and thoughtful. The idea itself is very simple, and I sure did get the slightly annoying feeling of “damn-this-is-obvious” when reading the post. The trick is that, as far as I [...]

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Google.com Is About “Grave Images”

December 29th, 2007

Google has a free keyword suggestion tool that is supposed find keywords related to a phrase or a website’s URL that you enter. I tried Google.com and got some weird suggestions, like “grave images”. I’m aware of the fact that Google’s bots see websites differently than humans do, but this was unexpected. So I went and tried entering some other popular websites - just for fun. Here are the results.

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Unconventional Ways to Lose Weight

December 25th, 2007

A short and whimsical list of weird ways to lose some weight (mostly aimed at guys). It’s a semi-serious parody of the ubiquitous Top X lists.

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Got Subscribers? - A RSS Rant

December 19th, 2007

Lately I’ve become a bit tired of all the plugin-making, new-feature-adding and programming in general, probably because I’m currently out of exciting and easy to implement ideas. This leads me to finding alternate modes of time-wasting, like obsessing over stats - the RSS subscriber count in particular. And somehow that activity gave me a new idea and made me enthusiastic enough to start work on yet another plugin.

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How To Get Publicity From the Wikipedia Scandal

December 9th, 2007

I just found out about the Wikipedia “scandal” recently (by reading a webcomic), and somehow my thoughts turned immediately to how this could be exploited. Monetary rewards are unlikely, but one could get a good bit of publicity/backlinks… if they found a way to attract the attention of the same people who voted the aforementioned “scandal” to the frontpage of Digg. Here are some ideas on how to do just that.

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Global Warming on Digg - A Comic

November 23rd, 2007

This is something I made just for fun - a comic parodying the typical global warming, green technology and hybrid cars stories and discussions on Digg. It turned out a bit more violent than I anticipated, well, so be it. This is my first try at making a comic, so don’t judge harshly.

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Filter Stupid Comments Automatically - Coming Soon

November 14th, 2007

We have spam filters, okay, but what about stupidity filters? Surely there is a way to automatically distinguish between the “LOOOL u SUcK” junk and intelligent discourse? - that’s what the authors of StupidFilter must have thought when starting up the project. A new program for catching - not spam, but obtuse - comments is being developed. Might have other uses, too.

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This Is Not bash.org

October 22nd, 2007

…And I’m still going to post a bunch funny quotes anyway. I’m currently busy trying to improve the site structure, so instead of long-winded tech-speak you’ll have to endure my sense of humor ;)

The names have been changed for no particular reason. Here goes!

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Discarded Idea Bin

October 20th, 2007

Here are some things I probably won’t do/implement -
Web20Rank
Alexa is inaccurate, Technorati is inaccurate, PR is worthless, inbound links can be bought. Idea - create a new ranking system based on an aggregate of things like Digg votes, del.icio.us bookmarks, stumbles and a whole lot of other social bookmarking services. Throw in the aforementioned inaccurate [...]

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The Amazing Googlecat

October 9th, 2007

The picture was taken by my sister a few months ago and I just recently realized that it can be used to represent the eternal conflict between search engines and blackhat webmasters, in a comical way. Or some such. Anyway, enjoy!

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