W-Shadow.com

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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. [...]

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.

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 [...]

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.

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.

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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.

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. [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

…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!

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 [...]

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!