W-Shadow.com

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 [...]

Yes, I’m talking about backlinks, the spawn of evil. Everybody craves them, craves the promise of power, wealth and getting laid that links offer. And this craving is both abhorrent to and blessed by the mischievous higher powers, a dangerous path leading into the darkness. Outrageous!
Here’s further proof that links are the cause of [...]

What will search engine optimization be like 30 years from now? How will the SE algorithms have evolved in this huge - from the technological perspective - time period? Will every SEO have a solar powered flying car, or will they be reduced to working at algae farms?

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.

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.

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.

I read a very interesting post today. It tries to prove that science - as opposed to religion - is not faith-based. The story also got on Digg frontpage and was heavily discussed there. One comment thread in particular caught my attention, and it gave me some ideas that I feel I should write down [...]

It seems logical that mutual friendship could have been produced by evolution - the I help you, you help me, contract-style relationship can be seen as beneficial even from the selfish PoV or evolution. What caught me by surprise was the idea that true friendship - perseverant, everlasting despite circumstances - is also a product of survival of the fittest. This post talks about some interesting ideas in CFAI.

A few days ago I saw an IRC quote that went basically like this :
When voice control interfaces finally go mainstream, the very first thing they need to do is make “Oh fuck!!!” immediately abort and undo the latest command or task.
Sounds fun. Below is my lame attempt to produce some ideas along the [...]

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 [...]

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.

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.

I’ve had some of my posts scraped by spam blogs (splogs) in the past. Since I think “legal action” against these sites is not very effective (and I’m lazy, too ), I began wondering if there was some automated way to stop the content thieves. In this post I’ll talk about my findings, starting with simple feed copyrighting and up to advanced techniques that could be used to fight sploggers.

About two weeks ago I was browsing SEO-related sites and came upon a promising technique for getting one’s pages out of the supplemental index. It’s called “third level push” and looks particularily useful for blogs. This is an advanced technique and you should work on the basic stuff first before trying something like this.

Instead of a detailed tutorial I will offer some thoughts about the “third level push” method and some tips on implementing it (yes, this is going to be a long post).

I spent a while today wondering what to post about.
I have an aptly named file on my desktop - “arggr.txt” (apparently I had misspelled “arrgh”). That’s where I store most of my ideas. Since I’m pretty sure that I don’t have a “feeling” for the audience/people in general, I looked through some of the [...]

Do you…

Don’t “get” Twitter, Facebook and the like?
Consider “normal” an insult?
Typically only lurk in forums and rarely or never post anything?
Are generally out of touch with popular trends?
Feel article writing or this “blogging” thing are unnatural for you?
Have no idea what the mystical “other people” want?
Don’t really care much about what they want?
Have above average [...]

As I was, weary and tired, in the darkness, in the wind as weak as my hope, in the starless night, and cold enough to know the autumn. As I was walking in circles I saw someone looking at me from the eastward, forest.
What do you want?, I asked grimly.
Your soul, said the wolf.
What would [...]

Have you noticed the bit of the subheading up there on this page that says “(and some magic)”? It’s a kind of disclaimer; it gives me the justification to post just about any crazy rant I want. Unfortunately I don’t do that very often, if ever. It’s all programming and tutorials on this blog. Well, [...]

This is not about dolphins, monkeys, cats or dogs. It’s not even about all the infrastructure that makes up the Internet - routers, servers, communication lines. This is just an unusual observation made by checking some publicly available statistics.
Consider this :

The average Internet user sends 4.9 emails every day. This is the global aggregate; the [...]

If you’re familiar with this years Thirty Day Challenge, you’ll have heard about the awesome “GTrends” technique that can help you find promising keyword phrases (& niche markets) to make some money of. Typically it goes something like this :

Get an idea.
Go to Wordtracker’s GTrends tool and type in a phrase that describes the [...]

A suspicious occurence - I got and e-mail today, with a (tracked & cloaked) link to a video tutorial about how to unzip files (note: the author keeps changing his permalink structure, so the link may stop working whenever). The weird thing was not the arrival of the e-mail - it’s was from a newsletter [...]

…but that’s okay - WP-Syntax resurrected it.
After looking at one of my earlier posts I noticed that all the backslashes were gone from my code examples, most notably my regular expressions. I had the code wrapped in <pre></pre> tags. As some searching revealed, this seems to be a recurrent bug in WordPress 2.2.1 (I upgraded [...]

I discovered this interesting PHP class today that can be used to process all kinds of .ico files in PHP.
Features

Read/write icon files.
Extract individual icons from a multi-icon file as GD icon resources.
Add new icons to an .ico file.
Supports all icon image sizes, bit depths and transparency.

You can find the source code on PHPClasses.org (you’ll need [...]

Not “cool” like “the concept of web 2.0 posesses a large amount of coolness” or “web20.cool == true“. For many people Web 2.0 equals “cool”. That’s what I understood after reading this fine blog post.
Programmers and the like might know Web 2.0 is about things like AJAX, social networking, “folksonomies” et cetera. Some might even [...]

I’ve seen people asking on the Internet if there’s a way to get a list of the most bookmarked pages from a specific site. Some other social bookmarking services (like Digg) have this feature but del.icio.us doesn’t. This looked like an interesting problem so I decided to write a script that would crawl a given [...]

If you’ve ever written a server-side script intended for distribution (as opposed to personal use), you’ve probably encountered the problem of needing to write a tutorial detailing the installation and setting up of the script. There are several typical tasks that you might need to describe - setting file permissions, creating a database, etc.
Don’t [...]

Recently I decided to take a look at Squidoo and almost immediately I noticed they offered a Module Development Kit. After checking out the list of “Most Wanted” modules it seems a countdown module is a fairly popular idea and should be easy enough to do. A countdown module would basically “count down” to a [...]

There’s been a lot of talk about Google’s corporate motto - “Don’t be evil” - for years. A fun bit of statistics - searching for “google is evil” yields around 41,700 results while “google is not evil” only produces 5,370 hits.
Here’s my take on it - the motto is sound and being followed to [...]

…because that’s what I tend to do. You know how it is - while browsing the web you come across some component library, API spec. or similar, and it looks so cool you wish you could immediately put it to use. I usually download those, store them somewhere, maybe read the docs/watch the demos… and [...]

Let’s have a change of focus!
I know, this blog has gone quite stale now. No posts for how long? - a couple months I’d say. Why? Let me tell you about that…
Blogging isn’t really my “thing”. Blogging might seem like a form of “self-expression” (which is good) and such, but essentially it’s still about communication [...]