Four Island

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

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.