Four Island

Once upon a time, there was a website. It was called Four Island. And now that I've finished plugging a website that you are already on, let me explain that there was a user on it named Drifty. She had an idea one day that went like this:

I wasn't sure whether to put this in Deck of Cards, Spam or here, but this is a collaborative effort and it's cool. I just thought this up.

So, want to write a story, but haven't got the time or drive? Why don't you work on a story with a small group? It can be insane, random, funny, sad or... anything!

My idea is that we form a small group, and we each contribute a character of our own making, using a bio sheet. Then, one person types up a chapter and posts it, another person makes another chapter after the first chapter and posts it and we keep on going until... THE END. The only rule is that you can't type two chapters in a row unless you has permission. Oh, and the story must make some sort of sense

Drifty

Yes, I am so insane that I archived the original post (if you notice, it doesn't exist on The Fourm anymore). Anyway, Drifty called it The Greatest Story and plopped it down in Storybook Time. And so, people found it, liked it and signed up. And soon enough, there was a full plot line in development. We called it Starfall. It is, as of yet, incomplete.

Then, I decided to enhance the actual process with some methods to make everything more organized. I pretty much went offically psycho over the entire project and proposed that we make a series of TGS projects, one after another, that had nothing to do with eachother.

The Greatest Story really became a part of Four Island, and although only one such project has ever been started (and is still, unbelievably, in production about nearly two years due to the massive procrastination of a user who I am proud to say was NOT me this time :P), the process itself has undergone a multitude of changes. TGS is no longer just a collaborative project, it's a process under which multiple authors can collaboratively write a book.

Now, TGS was created in April 2008. What am I doing talking about it now? The first TGS project is nowhere near completion. Another TGS project isn't going to start yet (though they are free to do so at any time). Besides, most of you know all this. Most of you know what I'm going to say next too. Who cares, I needed a post for this week. :P

No, the exciting thing is that I'm writing a website for TGS! It's referenced to as "The TGS Website" all over Four Island so now you can understand what I'm talking about all the time. :P Anyway, The TGS Website is planned to be a website where authors can sign up and join new TGS projects. Then, under the guidance of the TGS process, the authors can band together and write a book! Doesn't that sound like fun?

I'm writing The TGS Site in Ruby, oh glorious Ruby on Rails, so you know it has to be good! :P It probably will not be completed soon due to the fact that I'm a l*y porsiaor (TimTam doesn't want me aooiig during this post), but it will not become vaporware! Disregard the fact that this is the third effort so far at creating a TGS Website! I will discuss TGS and its website with you more and more.... and more.... and more later. Stay tuned for more excruciatingly painful details! Starla out!

Lol, nobody liked my suggestions. I want to know what "other" is! COMMENT!!!!!!!!

"Things To Do In A Time Of Great Boredom" - 2 vote(s)! "The Analytical Machine" or "Engima@home" - 1 vote(s)! "TCMP Lifeline" or "Appreciate Me!" - 1 vote(s)! Other - 5 vote(s)!

Anyway, yes, Feburary was a bit shy on posts. Sorry about that. I'm still good with my goal, however, as I posted once a week every week. I'll keep it going! But in March, I want to be more like Janurary, posting more than once a week. Be excited! :P

The other day, I was looking at some delicious Rails plugins when I scrolled to the bottom of the page and noticed a header containing the words "No Signup Forms". What? How is that possible? Well, for those who don't know, gradual engagement is a form of user registration that doesn't require registration forms. What? Insanity!

Actually, it makes a lot of sense. See, what you can do is let the user wander around and do their thing. When they want to do something that requires an account, you automatically generate an account for them and set a "remember_me" cookie to something like 5 years so that they are automatically logged on to their new, autogenerated account when they visit the site. Then they can modify their account settings to fit them and it's allllll goood! :P

Well, I instantly caught on to this idea because, like most Internetters, I dislike having to fill out forms. Wouldn't it be much better if we could just visit a site and do what we want without having to fill out long forms, confirm stuff and then check our email to activate the new account just so we can tell someone that $_SEVER is actually spelled $_SERVER? Yes, it would be much easier and much less annoying.

I see one problem with it, though. The whole system with the remember me cookie is very fragile. If a user clears their browsing data, switches to a new computer or is actually still frequenting that website after 5 years, their account will be lost to them as they were provided with no credentials with which they could use to log in again. I think a good thing to do would be to ask the user for their email address upon auto-generating their account. It's not like filling out a huge form and we could reassure the user that it's simply so we can remember them. Then, we can email them a welcome letter along with a random password that the user can use in case their cookies get mangled. That seems fair, right?

So, what do you, the user, think? Is entering your email address too much like having to fill out a registration form or do you think you would be okay with that? Imagine accessing a site, seeing that someone is wrong about something and clicking "Comment". A little popup appears asking for your email address, which you dutifully fill in. Your comment is then added to the post and next time you want to correct someone, you don't have to even enter your email address. Sound good? :P

Lol, a lot of variety with this poll! I guess Valentine's Day (for all its Conversation Heart goodness) is not looked upon happily by everyone.

YES I AM IN LOVE WITH MATS - 3 vote(s)! No. There is no love. Go buy a cat. - 3 vote(s)! Yo/Nes - I maybe would have - 6 vote(s)! Indifferent - 2 vote(s)!

Whether you like Valentine's Day or not, however, something special happened on Four Island that day! At 3:36 in the morning on February 14th, Four Island received its 50,000th hit! It is just amazing that we've gone so far. I remember when I went crazy because of my 100th hit. 50,000 is more than 100. :P

Anyway, as I mentioned previously, the 2008 Christmas post has been missing for a quite a while. I don't even know how the row got mutilated like that. Anyway, I finally got over my laziness and looked through where I thought I had a backup. It turned out that I actually had three backups (two from January and one from April) and one of them contained Frasty tha Snaman! Yay! :P

Do you ever get that feeling that it's 11 o'clock and you haven't written much all day and you're feeling kind of tired? And then do you realize that it's a Friday, you haven't written much all week and you're 39 minutes away from destroying a month's worth of posting effort? Yes, this has happened to me quite often, most notably during last year's Kirby Week (I invite you to look at the time that post was posted :P).

Anyway, it's happening right now and the little Spongebobs in my head are running around and screaming "WE THREW OUT HER NAME!!!!!" Lol, no, but I'm sitting in bed, overheating slightly (the computer is on my lap) and trying to write something, anything (well, not anything, because my blog has standards (lol, sentences like that make me think of My Weird Social Commentary and the aforementioned Kirby Week post and I shudder)), to prevent myself from failing my annual goal. Yes, I am taking my annual goals very seriously this year. I have only failed one so far and that was the "post 2 True Falsity stories a month" goal, and that's even possibly excusable because I'm thinking of possibly discontinuing and archiving True Falsities. If, by the end of the year, True Falsities is not longer active, I can't really say I failed the goal, so I'll just say NEUTRAL.

Wow, is it getting hot in here? No, that's just the laptop. One of the great features of my new laptop is that it doesn't overheat. Well, obviously, it's new. But my old laptop overheated on a regular basis. In fact, now that I am using a different computer for general use, I decided to use my spare (and slightly broken) computer for other purposes, and chose to use it as a development computer. And then I discovered that running WEBrick caused the computer to overheat. So, I do my Ruby on Rails programming on my general use computer now.

Speaking of Ruby on Rails, I have some news! A few weeks ago, when I announced that my top-priority project was Xidet, a lot of people were annoyed. Okay, one person was annoyed. Lol, maybe a few people, if you count the voices in my head. Anyway, the consensus was that The TGS Website was more important and has been promised for longer. While it is true that the idea to restart Xidet just suddenly popped into my head one lazy Thursday, the original Xidet announcement was posted in March of '08 while TGS was not started until April of '08 (not to mention the The TGS Website, which was not conceived until MUCH later).

However, while Xidet quickly died out (it wasn't official until January of '09, though), The TGS Website had much more promise and my first attempt at it in '08 seemed like it might be going somewhere. Plus, TGS is (surprisingly, considering the slow reaction time of some of our members....) an active project which should have a website to support it. So, I've rearranged my project queue. The TGS Website is Number #1, while Xidet has falled to Number #2. And yes, I have been doing some workingness on it. Check out my awesome codingz at the TGS Website project site! Lol, that wasn't vain at all.

Ah! That reminds me! I would like to inform everyone of a momentous occasion that most people forgot about! Yesterday, February 18th 2010, was the first anniversary of Pillowcase! One year ago yesterday, I sat down on my bed and wrote Bluemonkey's Saga, went insane and later made it into a real comic! Obviously, I am insane, but Pillowcase is yay! I am excited about how well it was received last year and am pleased to leak the rumor that it may possibly be starting up again very soon! Stay tuned for more information!

Wow, would you look at that! My lonely ramblement/massive digression has landed me a post! A weirdly random one, but an actual post! You know, I do think I'll post this. Especially as I now only have 16 minutes. And rest assured, I will, from now on, make every attempt to release my weekly post early in the week so as to prevent this procrastination problem from happening again. Thank you all, and good night!

Lol, everyone seems to love FourChat! Then again, so do I. It will be awesome when it finally comes out.

A suggestions app - 0 vote(s)! FourChat - 6 vote(s)! Complete user integration - 4 vote(s)! Other (please comment!) - 1 vote(s)!

Hi! Sorry, I would talk about more now, but I'm rather in a hurry. I am going away for the next two days and will probably not have Internet. But Four Island will stay up! Don't worry! :P

I'm a bit insane. Yes, I know you all knew that. Anyway, as I make my rounds across the Internet, I find random stuff that I just have to rant about for no reason to people that wouldn't count as extant in a court of law. So, I thought I'd post a big batch of short rants here. It's my weird social commentary!

When I get bored, I occasionally go to some random old date and read all the Daily WTF post preceding it. :P Some five years ago, The Daily WTF posted the following in one of their "fail collection posts":

Are ya WTF-ed out yet? Let's hope not, otherwise you'd miss out on Duane Homick's discovery of the strftime documentation ...

%S is replaced by the second as a decimal number [00,61].

The Daily WTF

I could scream quite a few things right here, but I think the best way to describe what's wrong with this is a sentence found later in the referenced document:

The range of values for %S is [00,61] rather than [00,59] to allow for the occasional leap second and even more infrequent double leap second.

strftime documentation

Yeah, right back at'cha.

Another time I was rather bored, I randomly went to http://bored.com. It was a real site. :P I actually found a really fun game called Red Remover, but that's off the point. I found something that made me laugh and I had to post it here:

Okay, I know what you're thinking: "Starla, don't make fun of advertisements. It's just not worth it." I know, I know, it fails in many ways. But what really got me is how this advertisement, which stages an IM conversation from some person offering me a gift if I click a big button entitled GIFT (which I would've noticed on an IM program :P), is totally platform-specific. See how different the calculator I opened up looks from the Windows XP-style advert?

And don't even go there with the calculator. I'm running Ubuntu Linux.

Anyway, so, um, perhaps I am a bit obsessed with Lady GaGa. Lol, anyway, I had heard a rumor claiming that the video for her song Telephone was to be released yesterday. Sadly, it was not, but while I was frantically searching Google, YouTube and Twitter, I found this hilarious typo of the day:

Okay! That was random.... and fun! Perhaps I'll post more of these short posts at other random times. Or perhaps I can stop writing cop-outs and actually do some blogging. :P

Wow, the results of this poll were really very useful to me. At least you all agreed that nobody else would post on True Falsities.

Yes, it's time to archive it - 2 vote(s)! No! Keep posting and others will follow! - 0 vote(s)! Pretty much, but you still have to post - 2 vote(s)! Indifferent - 2 vote(s)!

Incidentally, I recently failed one of my annual goals by posting to True Falsities only once last month rather than twice. I did have a post called "It Is Abstract" planned, but I never finished it. So, basically, I have no idea where to go with True Falsities.

Anyway, Four Island 3.0! If anyone has any splaztastic ideas for it, do tell! :P

Well, technically it was a virus, but you get the point. For those of you that have noticed that Four Island has been down for three days (I'm insulted if you didn't! :P), the reason is that we got a virus. Not me, no! Not any of my WONDERTASTIC LINUX COMPUTERS. NO, HOW DARE YOU SAY SUCH A THING? :P

No, it was a Windows XP computer. And the virus it had made the poor computer impetuously spam people. They complained and Optimum suspended our service until we could fix the problem. That was easy: flash the drive and reinstall Windows. There were a few teething problems with getting the correct drivers, but soon enough, our Internet was restored. After 3 days.

Anyway, FOUR ISLAND IS BACK UP NAO, YAY. :P Just in case anyone was worrying. :P Wow, this was a very short post, but it wasn't really meant to contain much substance anyway. :P

This is mainly just a message for the people whose sites I host, but if you aren't one of those people, you may still read this post. Don't worry, I won't hurt you. Come back! What are you doing? :P

Anyway, for those of you who I'm in contact with, you may know of a dilemma with my server. Specifically, it's running under Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition when Ubunto 9.10 came out months ago. So yes, it's running an old version of Ubuntu SE.

So, in lieu of the fact that, due to complications, my monthly server backup was not run on January 1st, January 31st became The Grand Upgrade day. I backed up the server and then I upgraded every out-of-date piece of software on my server. Then, tomorrow, February 1st, I will backup the server again. Sound fun?

It's just amazing how much old software was sitting on my server. First of all, Ubuntu 9.04. Second, all of the Wordpress blogs (including hosted sites and my website projects) were running 2.8.4 instead of the latest, 2.9.1. And I just discovered the other day that The Projects Site ran Redmine 0.7.3 when the latest version is 0.9.1. Gasp! Possibly the worst is that Wikipinia ran MediaWiki 1.11.0 while the latest version is 1.15.1! Yes, that's right, most of my hosted sites were using web software that was two or three years old.

Upgrade was horrendous, though. It took a total of seven hours (start to finish) which included installing Ubuntu 9.10 TWICE, running back and forth between rooms two floors apart to download RubyGems and a lot of near-panic moments. Possibly the worst was during the first Ubuntu install: because of the disgustingly restrictive environment that my server is in, it couldn't download any of the files that msttcorefonts needed to upgrade and I didn't even need that package! Because of that, the upgrade failed and the server was, for want of a better word, bricked.

Anyway, The Grand Upgrade is now complete and my server is running up-to-date software! Hooray! It was a success! Hopefully, the next time a new version of Wordpress or Ubuntu comes out, I'll upgrade ASAP instead of waiting for January 31st three years later. :P