From the “Not What Not To Do” Folder

Click the below image to follow along with this exercise in comedy (Lightbox 2 is hotness, yeah?)

• Showcase your customized graphics by performing copyright infringement of a well-known character.
• Representing said character in a degrading light.
• Wordperfect Art header text, 1993-style.
• The print quality of the flyer looked to be sourced from a dot-matrix printer, 1993-style.
• That bubble typeface… is that… Comic Sans?
• Completely random selection of other fonts.
• At least he knew to put the Spiderman bubble above the character. Why is the rest of the text positioned where it is?
• You should learn about communication before advertising as a business specializing in communications.
• LOL

By the way, this guy is competition to my employer. Well, according to geography, anyway.

Internet Explorer 6, JavaScript, and YOU

Lately, I ran into two mentally challenged issues when it came using JavaScript in IE6.

1. My first mistake was writing the line:
   
<script type="text/javascript" src="editEvent.js"/>

   The browser’s inability to properly parse XHTML leads it to ignore all tags beneath this line as it believes it to be part of the <script> definition, but just throws it all away as tag soup. Correct usage in XHTML:
   
<script type="text/javascript" src="editEvent.js"></script>

2. The second issue made me want to pound my head against a wall. Keeping in mind my script was working fine in Firefox, the error I received in IE6 on my work PC was, “Object Expected at line 1, character 1″. Since it was the first time I had written code to dynamically build a table using DOM, I figured it was just an issue with IE6 not supporting some of the methods I used. However, when I tried the same page on my home PC with the same version of IE, it now said, “Object Expected at line 51, character 1″, which was the point where I made my first call to a JavaScript function that didn’t involve DOM code. I used the Firebug extension for Firefox to ensure my JavaScript code was sound. Thanks to the Dow Jones and Rimwad, it was discovered that Apache Web server was sending my separate .js file as document type “application/x-javascript” rather than “text/javascript”. IE6′s parser didn’t know what the fuck. A simple fix of MIME types in Apache’s httpd.conf and it worked. And the disciples said, “what a big fucking lizard, Lord”.

Let Me See You Stripped

Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger has become a necessary evil for online communication over the past few years, although Europe and the US seem to be holding on to AIM/ICQ as long as they can. The problem in MSN (Live is a stupid branding scheme; your Xbox gaming is no way related to my PC IM or web searching) is that it pushes advertisements on all users. The app also manages to bypass the Windows HOSTS file (c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) so you can’t redirect requests to their ad server to localhost in order to disable the ads. On the screen it also throws many buttons and options that power users will never touch.

Now as an alternative, these powers users tend to pursue third party applications compatible with the protocol, such as Trillian, Pidgin (formerly Gaim), and Miranda IM, which allow more customization. But let’s face it, they’re all ugly and bloated to some extent. Luckily, there’s A-Patch, which modifies Microsoft’s executable to scrap away the excess user interface fat. Pretty much anything shown on the screen can be hidden. I now have my contact list and messaging window stripped down to only 4 or 5 widgets; basically the bare essentials. No web cam, voice chat, advertisements, Windows Live search, Microsoft My Spaces (a little late in the social networking game, huh?), or any of the fluff that makes computing any more cumbersome than it already is. You can also install a Winamp plug-in for updating the song currently playing to your MSN personal message, similar to Windows Media Player’s functionality. Personally, I don’t use that feature because I think Last.FM is bad enough for advertising the shite music I consume.

Migrating the Inane

I have moved servers so maybe my blog’s uptime will at least reach 50%. Yesterday, when confronted with the task of migrating from Despayre, I thought the steps would be simple enough. I installed WordPress 2.1.2 on Alcopop and also upgraded Despayre to the same version. A new feature of the blogging software is an import/export feature, using XML as the intermediate format. This would be a useful feature, if it actually worked. Exporting was fine, a 1.8 megabyte file was downloaded. When I attempted to import to Alcopop, I received a memory allocation error message. After a few Google searches, the solution I tried was to add “php_value memory_limit 20M” to ~/public_html/.htaccess. The next upload attempt went further, to a point where I instead got a blank page! Folder ~/public_html/wp-content/uploads shows my uploaded XML file with the proper file size, however the WordPress import module refused to parse it. So I said fuck that noise, let’s try a direct SQL migration. I created a ~/mysql/ directory and tried:

mysqldump –user=afterglow -password=etc –tab=~/mysql/ –opt afterglow

This resulted in an error about locked tables. I messaged arioch to either reboot Apache or ensure I had full permissions to unlock tables. Today, I tried again, with error message: “mysqldump: Got error: 1045: Access denied for user ‘afterglow’@'localhost’ (using password: YES) when executing ‘SELECT INTO OUTFILE’”. I tried different directories. Same error. I tried another backup method outlined in the MySQL 5.0 docs:

mysqlhotcopy afterglow ~/mysql/

Error message: “Cannot open dir ‘/var/lib/mysql/afterglow’: Permission denied at /usr/bin/mysqlhotcopy line 295″. Ok. So maybe a direct copying of the database files was necessary. On both Despayre and Alcopop, I tried:

find / -name “*.myd” 2>dev/null

Also searching for *.myd and *.frm only resulted in showing the base permission and configuration tables used by MySQL. Finally I found a solution:

mysqldump –user=afterglow –password=etc –opt afterglow > wp.sql

So I transferred that file to Alcopop, ran:

mysql –user=afterglow –password=etc –database=afterglow < wp.sql

That successfully went through… or didn’t. http://afterglow.alcopop.org was now blank, and visiting http://afterglow.alcopop.org/wp-admin instead redirected to http://afterglow.despayre.org/wp-admin. WP-Admin->Options->WordPress address (URL) and Blog address (URL) must be set to the domain, so in MySQL I edited the wp_options table where option_value = ‘http://afterglow.despayre.org’, setting it to this domain.

With the front page blank, I went into WP-Admin->Presentation but it didn’t show any themes, even though ~/public_html/wp-content/themes/ had a directory containing a theme. I uploaded the Almost Spring theme, then both themes finally displayed in the admin screen. Now everything was fully migrated.

I decided to just go with one admin login rather than the additional user I used to post on Despayre, so I attempted to delete the extra user and assign all the posts and comments to the admin. Error time! “You have specified these users for deletion: ID #2: Afterglow The current user will not be deleted. There are no valid users selected for deletion”. So the hundreds of posts made by that user must also not be valid. I’ve just said fuck it and I’m going with the two logins.

All that work for a bunch of banal posts, including this one. Rock on. I will be posting my top albums of 2006 list sometime within the next month. So that’s something to look forward to, I guess?

Java 1.5 Hilarity/Stupidity

GlitchInTheMatrix.java

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

import java.util.GregorianCalendar;
 
public class GlitchInTheMatrix
{
	public static void main(String[] args)
	{
		GregorianCalendar date = new GregorianCalendar(2007, GregorianCalendar.DECEMBER, 31);
		System.out.println("" + date.get(GregorianCalendar.WEEK_OF_YEAR));
	}
}

The output? 1. Yes, it’s the first week of the year in December. Can I call the bug, “Titorus Pullo”?

So I wrote a wrapper class on top.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16

import java.util.GregorianCalendar;
 
public class NonRetardedJavaCalendar extends GregorianCalendar
{
	public NonRetardedJavaCalendar(int year, int month, int day)
	{
		super(year, month, day);
	}
	public int getWeek()
	{
		int week = get(Calendar.WEEK_OF_YEAR);
		if(getMonth() == DECEMBER && week == 1)
			week = 53;
		return week;
	}
}

Hrm, Upgrades

Well I’m settled in Ontario, somewhat, kinda. At the very least, I have some JSP programming that will keep me busy for the next couple weeks. Then I have a PHP project to finish. Oh, and look for a permanent job.

So I flew 2,000km westward and now have to get a new PC. Keeping in mind since February 2002 I’ve been running the same Duron 1ghz with nary an upgrade, sans for a DVD-ROM bought in 2003 and a Seagate 80gb hard drive last year. I was convinced I needed a laptop since I will soon again me moving and I found it attractive, the idea of using a PC in any room of a house for programming, gaming, and web surfing over wireless. The post I am writing now is on a Compaq Presario 2100 I borrowed from a friend to tide me over and it’s great, except for the fact it only has 192mb RAM. Unfortunately my original budget for a new PC was $1,200 but getting a notebook for that price would be in Celeron-rubbish territory. I also don’t want to have to deal with warranties if anything breaks and the fact that you can’t really upgrade a laptop except for something superficial like RAM or hard drive size. So I decided on a desktop. I also went over-budget by $300, but I think I’ll be happy once it arrives.

• Asus P5B Socket 775 Intel 965 Express + ICH8 Chipset Dual-Channel DDR2 533/667/800 Gigabit Lan Intel High Definition Audio PCI-Express x16 Graphics 4xSATAII Support Core 2 Duo Processor
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86 GHz (1066MHz) 2MB L2 Cache Socket 775 Processor
• Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro LGA775 2500RPM 45CFM
• OCZ (OCZ26672048ELGEGXT-K) DDR2 PC2-5400 667MHz EL Gold Edition 2GB (2X1024MB) Dual Channel Kit
• BFG GeForce 7900 GS OC PCI-E 256MB GDDR3 Dual DVI-I HDTV Out Video Card
• Acer AL1916W Asd 19IN Widescreen LCD Monitor 1440X900 700:1 5MS VGA DVI-D
• LG GSA-H22N 18X DVD-Writer, Black, W/ Software, OEM
• Amazing P4 ATX Middle Tower Case with 500watt Power Supply (Black-Black) FC-AM11A BK/BK
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB SATA2 3GB/S 7200RPM 16MB Cache Ncq Hard Drive
• Logitech (967461) Internet Pro Cordless Desktop – Wireless Keyboard w/ Mouse – USB – Black – (OEM)

I just want a PC for software development and gaming, specifically for Half Life: Episode 2, if it comes out this year. If need be, I can easily upgrade the processor or video card at a later date once I get a real job (ha). Until then, I wait in agony for all my parts to arrive from Waterloo, ON and Vancouver, BC.

The Plea-For-Sanity Dollar

Huge market. I skipped October, so maybe a November rant can bring some business to order.

If you are a rock band writing song titles or lyrics Latin, please stop. It does not make your art progressive, hyper-intelligent, or have more depth. It makes you look like pretentious twats.

Can we ban the words “stuff”, “compelling”, and “whatnot”? This includes the phrase “good stuff”, especially when it’s an Internet forum post in response to some subject you approve of. It adds nothing. The only time “good stuff” is permitted is Family Guy’s Stewie referencing Brian reading Dostoyevsky (Russian Madman, etc). This does not mean you can parody or lampoon this scene, especially at your workplace. Thank you for adhering to these guidelines. I’ll await your token joke replies using these words as a point where you believe I am agitated by their use, when in fact, I don’t give a hoot! Tahell with y’all!

We all know MySpace is late 90s Geocities reborn, except now jailbait posts their scantily clad images. During my quest to update the visual style of my profile, I discovered the site is really just an ad-hoc clusterfuck of design. The elements in each profile (e.g., profile picture, about me section, favourites list, add/msg/etc actions) don’t have assigned CSS classes, so you must use CSS hacks of generic tag children (e.g., table tr td table { … }) to enforce your custom stylesheet on multiple tables rather than handling each table individually. A few of the tables have id= set, however the genius parsers prevent identifier code from being used in your stylesheet, so that’s useless. Like this paragraph. Let’s just tear the motherfucker down (and go to Facebook which has already started its decline by introducing embedded media).

Web 2.0, the term that people really don’t know what the fuck. Due to Gmail’s popularity, Microsoft has initiated the usual Steal Ideas From Competitors Action Plan by introducing their Windows Live Mail Beta as a substitute for Hotmail. Its interface is a Cronenburgian mutant of Gmail and Outlook, temporarily freezing Mozilla Firefox for a brief second on each load for it’s oh-so-wonderful dynamic features which really just reduce visual feedback on the web. It forces me to type my password approximately every five visits, even though I set the Live cookie to save my password always. The font spacing for composing and reading emails are just a mess. I would switch over to Gmail’s service, if only their contact management wasn’t so shite and if my Hotmail address hadn’t been around since 1997.

Winamp 5, using 50mb simply for the skin. Restoring from the system tray takes at least a second to load, which is not satisfactory when I wish to change the song playing. Most of the Winamp 3 skins don’t replace the AlbumList plugin’s window colours, so I’m “stuck” using the v5 skins. Insert Foobar comment.

I took this week off work as vacation, although in truth I will likely just generate a load of rubbish on the Internet and return to work bitter, as per usual. A haircut must be put in the works.

The Browser and the Damage Done

Happy New Year’s. It’s a celebration, bitches.

One of the great things about consistently keeping personal document backups is finding web design projects of yesteryear. Even now my illustration skills are absolutely brutal so I rely on other’s peoples hard work instead (see: this site’s layout). However, imagine me with a few less years experience. Now that we have that in mind, let’s continue with examples.

• SacrificeDM circa 1999 [846 KB]
  Go green. The logo represented my then fascination with the text rendering app Xara3D. Note my mad pixel-art skills for the grey borders without any anti-aliasing whatsoever. When keeping it real goes wrong, no? Instead of <hr> I use a dotted line again made with Xara3D along with a sidebar of lame facts and standard “fuck you for not having the proper browser” message. I like how the bottom right of the page is completely empty leaving the last few map boxes misaligned with the screen. The colour scheme makes me dry heave.
• SacrificeDM circa 2000 [421 KB]
  This is where I enter an Ola Björling phase by going back to the bare basics of a black background with plaintext and an image. The big text at the top of the page also known as a “logo” is somewhat bearable in this redesign. Bonus marks for the pixelated, pseudo-beveled screenshots. Hey, at least you don’t have to press ctrl+a to read the content.
• Doomworld circa 2000 [526 KB]
  Ah, the famous display of unreadable text and a visibly jarring juxtaposing of objects. What the fuck is with that top menu? Srsly. I’m quite sure that I did all the shadowing pixel by pixel in Paint Shop Pro and I’m glad to see my work bring on the comedy. Note the pushed in “News” button that seems to be pushed into an aqua surface, yet the background is gray. The geometrically fucked curves and discovery of PSP’s noise filter completes the disgusting visage. The only good thing I can pull out of this is the logo’s font which I will now have to look up.
• SlaughterDM circa 1999 [239 KB]
  Here’s more use of the noise filter for every graphic and now the content boxes are misaligned in modern browsers because my code was a hack (“text-align: center” is not supposed to align <div> or <table>!). Why is there a download page when it’s only one link? Why not have that link on the front page? Also, what is SlaughterPM? Pre-menstrual? The logo could work if the typography wasn’t so borked. This is pretty much a demonstration that I found out how to change an images’ src attribute using JavaScript. I believe I actually changed the web site’s code after 2000 to use CSS. Hurrah!
• Alkali circa 2003 [744 KB]
  I think this one is repsectable simply because the content is so simple that you can’t really fail. Yet I somehow did since the page covers 100% of the width so in 1280×1024 mode, the lines in the news updates would be so wide that people would fall asleep trying to read a post (note: again, work on your metaphors). This design along with the others also seem to indicate that I don’t think about using pastel colours (wouldn’t they look fabulous!?). This was made during my tables hack-styled with CSS phase. I think those two updates are also mis-dated as Canada’s junior team won World’s in January of 2005. The green is still fugly.

I can now pray to albino, black baby Jesus that The Wayback Machine didn’t archive the full design for my old Doomnation web site that was _all_ brown or my ml.org site (pre-frad.org, bitches) that had blue (0, 0, 255) and red (255, 0, 0) pixel-by-pixel created logos and layout markers. It was a site to behold. Cornholed.

This fascination with my own personal destructions and design come full circle in my present activities redoing the AG @ Doomworld and Crucified Dreams web sites using pure XHTML/CSS. Once I got over the hump of not thinking in the mindset of every bit of content of tables, I started getting use to the fact that I fucking hate CSS and the inconsistencies with web browsers. I have received much help from verbatim from The Shack and Manc when it comes to getting the layouts I want, but most of my own experiments have been complete failures due to misunderstandings of [inline|block] for elements. I have had The Zen of CSS Design eBook downloaded for months but have been too lazy to get around to reading it. I also have about 100 URLs bookmarked on web design, standards, and layout how-tos.

Think I should spend time more wisely by looking for a job? Forgetaboutit.

• Dangerous Questions
• Layout Reservoir
• Content With Style
• Top 20 Web Design Tips of 2005
• Poor baby seals.

Not all Rio funk tracks are about violence; many are about sex. Out in Acari, on the outskirts of Rio, Valeska, the bleached-blonde lead singer of Gaiola das Popozudas—The Birdcage of Big-butted Babes—is teasing the crowd with their hit “Se Marcar”: “If you check me out, I’ll make out with you,” she sings. Behind her, three girls in skintight outfits grind out a dance routine. Halfway through their 20-minute set, Valeska invites a member of the audience onstage. She and each of the dancers take turns rubbing their bodies against him. “Show us your butt,” she shouts, and he bends over. Suddenly, a dwarf dressed as Trinity from The Matrix and holding a giant inflatable penis jumps out of the crowd onto the stage.

WordPress Theme: Almost Spring

I upgraded my WP theme “Almost Spring” from version 1.0 to 1.2 thinking it would fix a problem I was having when attempting to filter the site through the category links in the right menu. It did not and the problem doesn’t reoccur with the default Kubrick so I thought something was up with the theme itself. I found another site using the Almost Spring theme but the category links work fine there. So I had to go digging through code.

The problem is the menu doesn’t display since a PHP server-side error occurs. The culprit code is in wp-includes/classes.php in the WP_Query class method get_queried_object(). It is attempting to pass an integer to a get_category() function located in wp-includes/functions.php, however that parameter is pass-by-reference, not value. So I made the following change to classes.php at line 629.

629
630
631
632
633
634
635
636

/* [DMD]
 * changed previous code:
 * $category = &get_category($this->get('cat'));
 * Method is pass by reference, requires a variable
 * so I added $category_num
 */
$category_num = $this->get('cat');
$category = &get_category($category_num);

I’m not quite sure why passing the the class’ member didn’t work for pass by reference, but it works now. The lioness has been reunited with her cub, and all is right in the jungle.

p.s., I would appreciate if WordPress didn’t enter automatic <p> and </p> to substitute line breaks, thereby ruining my W3C compliance due to such code as <p><center></p> appearing instead of <center>.

You Can’t Control My Dasein!

Format was a success as there hasn’t been any pulling until it goes click (eight year olds, dude). However, after the format I realized a couple obvious facts. Firstly, I’m on 28.8 dial-up and now have to download all the applications required such as the Windows XP system updates (SP2 is 75mb, estimated download time is almost 8 hours). Secondly, I don’t have the install CDs for MS Office, Adobe Photoshop, and other suites I use regularly. Thirdly, Windows Media Player has a terrible fucking interface. Jesus. * Goes to get Winamp *

We Have Assumed Control

Since June my computer’s main hard drive has been failing. It has two partitions, the 10gb Windows XP install and a 30gb partition for music. Months ago it started clicking, with the computer hard-locking if I attempted to access certain files. Running chkdsk /f would fix the problem most of the time. Just to be sure, I moved all my music over to another physical hard drive and backed up anything important.

Two months ago I had to do a repair install of XP which caused a handful of problems afterward since I was repairing a service pack 1 install using an old XP cd. There was even a point where the installer had a show-stopper error that I had to Google for finding a fix. Since then, I’ve just been running chkdsk every couple weeks to delay the inevitable. I’m so poor that buying a new hard drive isn’t really an option.

This morning when I turned my PC on, I got a bluescreen for a physical memory dump because the registry file was corrupted and there wasn’t a backup. I started the XP install and tried to the repair console to get into C:\Documents and Settings\ and C:\Program Files\ to backup anything important, but it says “Access Denied”. Thanks for that feature! So right now I’m trying to format the hard drive and reinstalling Windows XP. If it doesn’t work then I’ll have to try to remove as much media as possible on my alternate 40gb hard drive and install XP on there. But I really hate having a PC with only one hard drive since I’ll have to run backups every couple days (for Doom files, My Documents, Outlook email, etc.).

Anyone want to Paypal me some money? I’ll grab the digicamera and take some risqué pix+divx for you! Oh wait, maybe I should take responsibility for gathering my own resources… nah.

Witch’s Titties

It looks like the hard drive containing the XP partition on this computer is about to die due to a wonky IDE controller on the mobo, so I’m going to list the applications I have installed for future reinstallation reference and a sanity check.

7-Zip, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Photoshop, Apache HTTP Server, CDisplay, Citrus Alarm Clock, DivX, Doom Builder, DU Meter, eMule, Exact Audio Copy, FileZilla, FireBurner, InterVideo WinDVD, IrfanView, IsoBuster, Java 2 SDK 1.4.2_04, Jaws PDF Creator, Lame 3.93.1, Media Player Classic, Microsoft Office, Mozilla Firefox, MP3-Tag Studio 3.05, NetLimiter, NTI CD-Maker 2000 Plus, O&O Defrag, MySQL, Peer Guardian 2, PHP 4.3.4, Quicktime, Real Alternative, RegClean, Soulseek, Spybot, TGTSoft StyleXP, TorrenTopia, Trillian, UltraEdit, Unlocker, USUSoft Subtitle Workshop, VirtualDub 1.6.4, VobSub, WhoLockMe, Winamp 5.08d, SSHeed

Winamp Plugins: Album List, Enhancer, CD Reader

Python Presenter App

Here’s a new screen capture of my little presentation thingamajigger. Yes, I realize the “word” presention is in there. Right now I’m redesigning the settings GUI so it’s all in one tabbed dialog rather than in a bunch of separate dialogs. I hope to get that all completed by tomorrow and then I’ll move on to figuring out a couple silly bugs that are only happening in Linux. They’re caused by bugs in the version of Qt included with Redhat 7.0 (I think 3.0.4?) so I’ll have to find some work around.

This evening, I also watched David Lynch’s Eraserhead for the first time. Like most people’s reaction to the film… what the fuck? I saw Mulholland Dr. and Lost Highway, so I expected something non-linear and generally odd. What I saw was beyond my expectations. I’ll have to watch it a couple more times to even attempt to gather an understanding. Not like Lynch’s films are understandable. The soundtrack was also terrific. It made me feel so content.