Four Island

Lol, it's nice how much faith everyone has in me :P

Yes. You fail at life. - 8 vote(s)! No! PRODUCTIVITY IS EVERYTHING, HATKIRBY, DON'T GIVE UP!!!!!!!!!! - 0 vote(s)! I don't even know who you are. - 1 vote(s)! I am ignorant/apathetic/indifferent - 0 vote(s)!

Now, this week's poll is one of those ones that I actually care about the results for. True Falsities has been dying ever since guest posts started declining in May. My posting twice a month will not save True Falsities, in my opinion. So now I ask you, the readers of Four Island, to please vote on whether you want to keep True Falsities, or retire it to The Four Island Archive (currently unreleased). Please vote!

Anyway, remember some two years ago when I announced that my server couldn't email Hotmail accounts? Well, I do believe I've finally fixed that. By relaying my email through my ISP's email server. Incidentally, that's the solution I suggested two years ago that I was too lazy to implement until Tuesday.... :P

Lastly, I would like to announce a fix. For the longest time, Four Island has been having Unicode troubles that I've attributed to other sources and I've had to removed Unicode from quotes and comments before and it's been very annoying. On Wednesday, I finally discovered that the source of the Unicode mangling was my homegrown BBCode parser that we've been using since December 10th 2008. The bug has been fixed and Unicode should now look normal. You know what that means!!!! I can finally use the interrobang everywhere!!!! :D

However, I would like to ask a question to those interested in the development of Four Island 3.0. Do you think I should drop my homegrown BBCode system and switch to something else such as Markdown, or whitelisted HTML with a shortcode system? There would have to be a way to either maintain backwards compatibility or to convert all of the old system to the new system, though.

Yesterday, I was looking through the Wordpress plugin archive and I found one that was actually released that day. It was called Houdini. It seemed interesting (I always judge books by their covers :P) so I took a look. What I saw.... shocked me. To quote the description:

The fact is the internet is open can lead to theft especially to content stealing and plagarism.

Until now, there was very little to discourage and deter this serious crime. Yes content theft and plagarism is a crime in some jurisdictions.

You cannot rely on others or the authorities to continue to police the internet as they do not have enough resources. You need to protect your content and deter this theft.

The basic form of content theft is to copy and paste your content to another medium.

Well Houdini, prevents this using a little known special algorithm that prevents copying by making the selected text that is targeted by the perps to be copied, to disappear! Yes disappear!!! The only way to recover is to reload the page in the web browser. If they try again, the content disappears again. As long as they keep trying to select and copy your content, the content will disappear before they can get a chance to execute the copy command!

After a few unsuccessful attempts, the theives will move on to a easier target.

Your safe!

PHK Corporation

....WHAT?!?!?!? Nevermind the author's poor English skills, what are they talking about? It's not technically possible to prevent content theft and this odd little method will annoy normal blog visitors (who are probably less technical than the evil plagiarists) who just want to copy a sentence. Honestly, saying this is like claiming that you wrote a virus that prevents people from turning off their computers. I've already thought of 5 ways to circumvent this kind of "protection":

1. Go old fashioned and turn off JavaScript. Yep, the script is rendered useless.
2. More advanced content thieves likely don't just go around to random blogs and copy/paste off of them. They write screen scrapers, small programs that visit sites and download specific parts of the site. As these do not render pages and simply download from them, the script isn't even seen by the scraper.
3. Due to the nature of the Internet, anyone, and I mean anyone, can see the source code of a website. It's done differently in different web browsers, but it's always pathetically easy and, as it simply shows HTML code instead of parsing anything, no scripts are run.
4. RSS. Syndication feeds are normally viewed in feed readers with little to no JavaScript interpreter. Script bypassed.
5. There's this cool little button on most keyboards that says "Print Screen". Even on the keyboards that don't have it, there's usually a key combination that achieves the same effect. It takes a picture of whatever's on the screen. No selection occurs and yet the thief has a copy of your article. They do, however, have to retype it, so this keeps the lazy thieves out.

This is fun. Does anyone else see any other ways that this plugin fails? Feel free to share!

Anyway, if there's something that's so important that you have to go to extreme measures to prevent people from plagiarizing it, you probably shouldn't be putting it on the internet. It's annoying, but the sad fact is that the nature of the Internet prevents copy protection from being possible. The only way to prevent copy theft is to prevent people from accessing the files in the first place, which would only be possible by not putting the files on the Internet in the first place. There are ways of circumventing certain methods of content thievery (like using a CAPTCHA would block out screen scrapers.... and severely annoy your readers) but they aren't worth it. Just stick with the old fashioned method of dealing with plagiarists: tattle to Google so their PageRank drops into the negative values. :P

EDIT: I was going to email the author of the plugin a link to this post, but by the time this post came out (my pending queue is annoying sometimes), someone had already told the author about the plugin's problem. We're currently having some fun arguments :P:

• [Plugin: Houdini] View source?
• [Plugin: Houdini] Plugin is useless

Recently, I was toying around in CompizConfig Settings Manager because I wanted to see what effects were available. I did find something interesting: I could make anything full-screen by pressing -F10, but that's not what this post is about. One of the other effects I saw was entitled "Zoom Desktop" and I tried it out just to see what it did (which should have been evident from the title).

So, I initiated the effect by right-clicking while holding down super. Nothing appeared to happen, so I decided to disable the effect. Nothing happened. I frantically clicked on the disable button and nothing at all happened. "Oh god, I've ruined my computer," and "Haha! Cats meow," were some of my prevalent thoughts at that point.

Some of you may be screaming at me at this point, but I was seriously stumped. I spent a half an hour trying to disable the effect because, while a key binding for initiating the effect was present in the configuration manager, no key binding for disabling the effect was. Eventually, in sheer desperation, I hit the Escape key. As if by magic, the screen popped back to normal and I was left feeling like an idiot.

There are two problems that I see in this (other than the fact that I have no common sense). First, from a Xidet point of view, what if the user wants to bind "disable zoom" to another key? Oh my god, what if someone wants to use a keyboard combination instead of a mouse combination?! :P No, that's not my main argument, I just wanted an excuse to say "Xidet." :P

The real problem is with idiots like me. What if some user goes into CCSM like I did and enabled an interesting looking effect to see what it did and didn't think of pressing Escape to disable the effect? It says nowhere on the form that Escape will stop the effects of the effect (lol). I was ready to shut my computer down to get out of the effect. Think of how much data could've been lost! :P

Anyway, the point of this odd rant (and I do seem to be making a lot of those recently :P) is that the lack of documentation had a possibly destructive effect on my data. Instructions have to be easily visible for idiots like me.

For a very long time, I've disliked Apple and most of its products, especially the Macintosh Computer. I've received a lot of unnecessary flack because of this as it is, of course, my opinion. It's not like I'm bombing Apple HQ, I'm just (perhaps too vehemently) stating that I don't like them.

Because of this, from now on, I will not be taking part in discussions about Apple Incorporated unless they are to do with their one product that I like: the iPod. I will not be bringing up Macs in conversation and I will make every attempt to not partake in conversations involving Apple because nothing good ever comes of it.

The truth is, Macs and I will never be friends. Maybe TimTam's right, maybe I do have a slew of mental disorders that physically prevent me from using a Mac without throwing things at it, but in my experience, the Mac has not been a particularly intuitive computer. That is an opinion and I don't want to see any flame comments.

I am only deciding this now because of the recent bout of Hatkirby-bashing in the Mac thread on The Fourm. I stated my opinion and used a few jokes and I got 3 people yelling at me. Let me look up the word "opinion" in the dictionary.

Hmm.

**o-pin-ion** (ə pin´yən) *n*.
1. a belief not based on absolute certainty or positive knowledge but on what seems true, valid, or probable to one's own mind; judgement
2. an evaluation, impression, or estimation of the quality or worth of a person or thing
3. the formal judgement of an expert on a matter in which his advice is sought

My opinions are mine because that is what opinions are. That was from the real, physical book dictionary. Perhaps the online dictionaries that most people are used to these days have a different definition, one that defines an opinion as some sort of rough draft that others have to fix because the bumbling original author made some mistakes in writing it. This is the last I have to say about the subject.

For once, I do not expect any comments.

There are two things that I find very stupid about Facebook: its apps and the people that frequent it. Not all of them, obviously as I use Facebook and I'm not calling myself stupid, but Facebook and its users have been annoying me so much that I just have to rant about it.

First of all, whenever I reload the page, I have upwards of 5 notifications. That's good, right? Wrong. Not a single one of them is from my friends (or if one is, it's too high up on the list to be visible as the notification list does not have a scrollbar), they're all from Facebook apps.

No. No I freaking don't care what people think of me at first sight because there's no way a stupid Facebook quiz that I have never used and never asked for notifications from would know. And no, I only know 2 people from my family that are on Facebook and I've already added them to my Family Circle whatever and it's been that way since I joined Facebook in April! And I don't care what my horoscope is and I really have to wonder what on earth the numbers and the request for me to "start [my] zoo" mean. And I have never, ever played Scarab Solitare and I don't know why you would think I would want to. And I already took all of my friends' quizzes when they made them.... six months ago! If you notice, there's only 1 real notification in there that I would actually care about and the rest of them are pure garbage. Why?!?!?!

My other peeve is that a whole ton of people on Facebook are so gullible! There are so many Facebook Groups that advertise things like "Get Notifications When People View Your Profile!" and "The New Facebook Chat: With Video!" that are so obviously fake that it's actually incredibly stupid that so many people fall for them. Doesn't anyone realize that something is off if, to enable this "Facebook feature", they have to join a group, invite all of their friends and go to a remote website that isn't part of Facebook? The one I just looked at also had you give them your email address and complete one of those idiotic IQ tests which are full of spam and advertisements "to prove that your a human" [sic].

People need to realize that if there's a new Facebook feature, it will either be automatically enabled or it will be available as an app that is officially endorsed by Facebook. It disgusts me how many people fall for the ones that were put up as applications and state in the corner "This application was not developed by Facebook" or those that can't even spell "Facebook" correctly. I'm pretty sure that the people behind Facebook can spell and capitalize correctly.

So there's my rant about Facebook. I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way and it's time something happened to fix this. People should be able to filter their notifications (I know that there's a way to do this but it doesn't do it correctly) and some action has to be taken against the league of false "Facebook features". Feel free to comment, vote and deblatog. :P

Lol, the classic Hatkirby shift-of-interest never ceases to irritate me. Let's see what project THE PEOPLE want me to do next!

The TGS Website - 3 vote(s)! Four Island 3.0 - 3 vote(s)! Frigid Earth - 2 vote(s)! Other/Indifferent - 1 vote(s)!

People actually voted for Frigid Earth without knowing what it was? Interesting. Anyway, if you've seen Thursday's post, you'll know that I've already done a 180 and have another project in my lineup. A two year old project. Lol. Here's my current project queue in the order of when they'll be done:

1. Xidet
2. The TGS Website
3. Four Island 3.0
4. Frigid Earth
5. FourPuzzle

Yes, I'm clinically insane. Anyway, I'm really excited about Xidet and I can't wait to work on it because it will make working on those other projects easier and more productive.

No, I'm not parodying a song that I don't like, I'm actually asking if anyone remembers Xidet. If not, let me remind you. Xidet is a text editor. A text editor that is so freaking customizable that it isn't really a text editor anymore. Xidet is basically just a window with a textbox in it but it revolves around the concept of plug-ins so much that you can do pretty much anything with it by writing a plugin. To quote the odd little conversation that the voices in my head just had:

Voice 1: Hey, what's Xidet? Voice 2: What do you want it to be?

Voices in Starla's Head

Yes, I'm that zen. Anyway, Xidet was originally conceived due to my extreme frustration at NetBeans, the IDE I was using at the time to develop Tetrgi. While NetBeans and I have since made up, recently, I've just been very annoyed with the existing text editors. Especially now that I'm starting some Ruby on Rails projects, I really just want a text editor that is simple yet extremely productive. As in, I've already got all of the keyboard shortcuts memorized and it knows exactly how I like to format my code (so many text editors disregard my strange formatting style! :P) and I can deploy projects from within the editor and such. How is this possible? Well, my revised idea for Xidet is:

1. We start with a window with an empty text area in it. Yep. That's Xidet.
2. Then we bring some plugins in. Xidet will come with a default set of plugins that add things like File and Edit menus and the ability to save your document. These plugins will be installed and enabled first-run, but they can be removed if you want as they are plugins (though why on earth you would want to do that is beyond me).
3. Bring in the big stuff. More plugins can be written like a syntax highlighting framework, followed by plugins depending on that plugin that contain the rules for highlighting certain languages. And the thing will be that not only can you choose which of the huge matrix of plugins you wish to install, but they will all be totally customizable from Xidet. You can choose which colors the syntax highlighters use or select from a series of pre-defined sets. You can choose which keyboard shortcuts do what and how to auto-format your code. Anything's possible if you only beliiiiiieve! :P

Yes, 'tis awesome. I know what you're thinking, though. "It's the classic Hatkirby shift of interest! She always comes up with some project that's better or more important than the one she's currently doing!" Well.... yes. :P But this time I'm serious. The productivity that Xidet will provide will make it much easier to work on The TGS Website (which is my "current" project :P). I promise! I'm just very excited about this new idea because it would help enormously.

I would also like to know if there's anyone out there that knows Java or Ruby that would like to work on this project with me. It would be insanely cool to be able to collaborate with someone using version control and Redmine. It'd be like:

Voice 1: Okay, there's a bug in the plugin dispatch method. I'm going to write a ticket about it and assign it to you. Voice 2: Great. I'll work on that tonight. * later * Voice 2: I've completed the change and marked it complete! Voice 1: That's awesome, but your recent commit conflicted with mine! Voice 2: Oh well, I guess it's time to merge our changes!

Voices In Starla's Head

Yeah, maybe I should stop sharing what goes on in my head. :P

Sometimes, I think that I'm the only one who knows what I'm talking about. Come on, nobody else liked InstaDisc? It was awesome! Anyway, here are the results:

InstaDisc - 2 vote(s)! Xidet - 0 vote(s)! Project Soshibi - 1 vote(s)! Other/Indifferent - 7 vote(s)!

Anyway, this week's poll is about what project I should work on now. I'm currently undecided between Four Island 3.0, Frigid Earth and The TGS Website, though I do think I should do The TGS Website before Four Island 3.0 to increase my Ruby skills :P

Does anyone remember a post on this blog a few years ago about a program called "Nonsense"? A few blog posts have gone mysteriously missing for no reason (like 2008's Christmas Day post) and that bothers me. You see, I have an obsession with archiving. I MUST KNOW EVERYTHING THAT EVER HAPPENED AAAARGGHHH!!!! :P (That, btw, is the reason I hate Skype, because its chat logs are stored in a proprietary binary format. You'll see, I'll all convert you when Four Island 3.0 comes out. Just wait and see.... :P)

Anyway, I bring this up because TimTam recently asked me about it. I have mentioned Nonsense before in random posts such as Four Island is destroyed by Color Pencils and A Short Tribute To Doctor Who but, other than in 2008's mysterious vanishing post, I've never really explained what it was.

Remember Humorix? Well, on their website, they have a Downloads page with a few random oddities. One of these oddities is an interpreter called "Nonsense". To quote Humorix,

Nonsense generates random (and sometimes humorous) text from datafiles and templates using a very simple, recursive grammar. It's like having a million monkeys sitting in front of a million typewriters, without having to feed or clean up after them. From the Slashdot homepage to absurd college courses to buzzword bingo cards, Nonsense is a good way to waste time.

Humorix

During Four Island's extended downtime (omg, that was such a long time ago! :P), I wrote a script for Nonsense that generates humorous Four Island quotes (and American Pie parodies :P). Originally, some of the diction that I used has some innuendos and the quotes came out sounding quite wrong. :P Recently, however, I've revamped the script so as to make it sound more appropriate (but just as funny!) and grammatically correct. You can find the script here. Download the Nonsense program from its website and run the script like this:

./nonsense -f hatkkirby.data Quote

You can replace "Quote" with "AmericanPie" for a parody of American Pie :P

However, I know most of you scalawags don't use Linux and probably don't have a Perl interpreter installed. So, I've included a few examples to make you loffle!

#536 + (190) - [X]

JAL: I'm going to a toilet while listening to Happy Ending, listening to My Interpretation and asking Hatkirby "What are you doing?" with my sexist Madonna.
Hatkirby: Hihat!
JAL: HIHAT BLUEMONKEY I'M WHAT THE FSCK SMELLY DRAWING A PICTURE WITH SAMMI9494 HAHAHAHA!
Hatkirby: Are you stupid?
JAL: I'm asking Bluemonkey "Are you smelly?"
Hatkirby: ****! That's so alive that I think I'll start being hyperactive!
Hatkirby: Byee!
JAL: ....cyas
Ozzyfrog: SMILEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OH MY T_CASE!!!!!!!! YOU SLOWLY OWE ME 141 MOVIE THEATERS!
Sammi9494: I am drawing a picture with Timbo94 with Pyro's cinder block in North Dakota.
* Hatkirby is eating Douglas
* Bluemonkey thinks Hatkirby is stupid
* Pyro is going to wow-pie.de

#534 + (143) - [X]

Sammi9494: I hate Sammi9494 because she's so gross!

#474 + (959) - [X]

Tamasys: I desire JAL because he's so noobish!
* JAL is making a Star Rod
Tamasys: I collect Hatkirby's phones.
Hatkirby: I annoyingly collect dead Adenosine Triphosphates.
* JAL is listening to music
Tamasys: 23
Bluemonkey: I am radioactive when I am asking "How are you doing?".
Sammi9494: My pasta is listening to Headlock by Imogen Heap, as well as being hyperactive, as well as falling 1993 floors off a high building at Four Island, as well as asking Pyro "Do you want a jawdroppingly thin cinder block??" with my lollipops and eating Mary Poppins with my Douglas with my oneric computer.

Lofflecopter. Also, an online version of my script has existed for a while but in a very bad shape. I've fixed it up so that it's usable so now, you don't even have to download Nonsense! Just go to the online version and loffle. :P

Hmm, it's pretty equal. Some people actually think I can do it? Okay! I can safely say that I've passed the first full week of 2010 without failing yet. Let's see how it goes from there.

YES YOU ARE THE BEST - 5 vote(s)! No. Yuo fail - 5 vote(s)! Wh.... who are you? - 0 vote(s)! Indifferent - 1 vote(s)!