Four Island

Yikes, this poll was scary. The lack of three of the options resulted from a typo on my side, I accidentally pressed ENTER instead of TAB after typing the first option and at that point, my admin panel didn't let me edit polls, I actually would've had to go into my server and modify the database. Now, my new admin panel does let me edit polls, so this weird poll shouldn't happen again. What, what? I like weird polls! Anyways, here are the results!

Go eat a flying glass of water - 3 vote(s)! - 1 vote(s)! - 1 vote(s)! - 0 vote(s)!

Yeah, kind of weird. Anyway, YAY! I am still enjoying the new Layout, and I lovvveeee the new admin panel! :D

Layout Judgement Week is over, welcome new layout! Layout 7 is here to stay.... for a while.... until I get bored again.... :)

Though nobody made a single comment on my post (IM SO HURT!!!!!!!!!) I gathered from that that you liked it. Plus, I found a few bugs that had made their way into production and squashed them! :)

You may have noticed the short downtime that just occured: that was me, I had rewitten my ubiquitous admin panel and needed to make a few database changes. But now it's up again!

Like oh em gee! Time for the mandatory layout nostalgia that always comes with a new layout! This time, it's about length of existence! I was talking to Drifty the other day and was randomly measuring the lengths of the layouts. And I'm astonished to find out that Layout 3, unlike I had led everyone to believe, is not the longest lasting layout.

Let's measure them in two categories: major layouts and minor layouts. Major layouts being 1, 3, 4, 6 and the rest, minor being those plus their derivatives like 6.1. For this experiment, I will be considering Layout 2 a minor layout of Layout 1 as there really was no major change there. Layout 4 in The New Four Island is considered 4.5. Layout 2 doesn't have any definitive date as there was no blog post about it so it is measured with Layout 1.

Let's start with minor layouts. Layouts 1 & 2 together lasted 72 days. Seems long, but wait. My long worshipped Layout 3 lasted for 150 days! Very long. Layout 4 (my favorite layout) first existed for 13 days before being rudely interrupted by the disgraceful Layout 5, which lasted only 8 days. Layout 4 then picked up again with another 20 days, bringing Layout 4's total existence to 33 days.

Then the New Four Island arrived, and so did Layout 4.5, which lasted four an astounding 165 days. So far, 4.5 is the winner. But wait! Next came Layout 6, which lasted a measly 39 days, soon followed by Layout 6.1, which only lasted 34. But then, the sun was blocked out by the massive layout to follow. Layout 6.2, our most recent layout, lasted for a huge 184 days. Layout 6.2 is the winner for minor layouts!

Here we go with major layouts! Layout 1, as stated previously, lasted 72 days. Nothing much to boast about. Layout 3 then lasted 150 days, bringing it to the lead. Wait, what's that? It's Layout 4! Layout 4 lasted an amazing 198 days before leaving. However, the undoubtedly longest living major layout ever on Four Island (so far) was Layout 6, with a massive 257 days of life.

YAY that was fun. Isn't Four Island history fun? Well, nostalgic me thinks so. :) Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new layout of Four Island!

Hiya all! I'm sure you've noticed something rather different about Four Island, I made a new layout! No, it's not the long awaited three-column layout that Bluemonkey prophesied while standing in the Sahara Desert, surrounded by raging sand-winds, one day. No, it's simply Layout 7, a pretty unique Four Island look as it has several things different between it and the previous 4 major layouts. (I don't generally count Hatkirby CDI, Layout 2 or Layout 5 as major layouts, really.)

The biggest difference is probably that it just looks so different from the other layouts. The other layouts had a banner, a navbar, and content down the middle. This one is more, full screen. The banner is at the very top, the sidebar-ish thing is at the very left, and the content is floating in the middle of the remaining space with the navbar sitting contentfully above it. It's not another centered layout, ladies and gentlemen. :) Plus, the glaglaglada of "Recent Comments", "Recent Fourm Posts", "Recent Whatevers" that have annoyed people in the sidebar have also moved, they now reside in the footer, looking pretty nice, I think. :)

Also, because I'm now using more space for the site, The Fourm doesn't replace the sidebar. It's still right there, looking happeh in it's surroundings, eating a lot of cheese. And Fouripedia is like, totally gone. For now. Maybe.

For some reason, whenever I write a new layout, I always end up doing a TON of work around Four Island. Here's something I'm very happy about: I rewrote a lot of the Quotes module, so now it looks a TON prettier and it works a lot better now. Plus, I've added AJAX so you can vote on quotes and flag quotes without leaving the page! Speaking of AJAX, yes, I took it too far! Now you can do a ton of stuff without leaving the page such as voting on the Poll Of The Week, commenting on anything and voting on blog posts! YAY AJAX! You can see the rest of the changes I made at source control.

And as I bet some people (whisper) will notice, Four Island no longer uses HTML. It now uses XHTML! It was gasps very annoying gasps going through my templates gasps and lowercasing all of the gasps tags. Lol :)

I hope you people like Layout 7, and that's what Layout Judgement Week is. I sort of did Layout Judgement Week for Layout 6 too, but I didn't tell anyone about it which is why it sort of omg failed.

Layout Judgement Week is the first week following the release of a new layout. During this time, I'd love it if you could traverse my site and see if you like the new layout. If you do, please comment on this post and tell me so! If there are any changes you would like me to make, just tell me! If you don't like it, after the week has completed, I'll revert to Layout 6, but I like this layout, so I hope you do too. :)

Um, omigod. We've had this same poll for like four weeks or something. Shame on me. NO! OUCH, THAT HURTS! STOPP!! stops going crazy Anyway, YAY C++! I <3 C++! It is a good langu-Segmentation fault.

YES - 5 vote(s)! Ugh! I mean, like, ick! - 0 vote(s)! Number Nine - 2 vote(s)! Indifferent - 4 vote(s)!

And about today's poll, the lack of the lower three options was the result of pressing enter at the wrong time. And as my hosts file currently points my PhpMyAdmin domain to the dev database (as I'm working on the super secret Layout 7), I sooooo can't be bothered fixing it. So, have fun voting on invisible options! :)

So, as I've said a ton, I'm totally at camp. Yes. But like, I have like totally a lot of free time! And, well, while looking around for something to do, I noticed that this computer has Adobe Flash installed, and more importantly, activated. I have a copy of Flash on my computer but I sadly lost the activation key (WHYYYYYY!?!?!?!??!?!), so I took this as a happy opportunity. :)

So, I gathered my parodying skills and wrote a script of a short video that would be a parody of Kirby, I Wanna Be The Guy, the song Umbrella by Rihanna and Saturday Night Live's "Dear Sister" sketch (I'm OBSESSED with the song in it). So like totally, using my trusty friends Visual Boy Advance, CamStudio, Audacity and Flash, I made a video!

I totally uploaded it onto YouTube. WATCH IT NOW OR DIIEEEE. jk :) But, watch it! Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVWRGPUSPUI Fav it, rate it, comment it, hug me, whatever, but watch it! It was fun to make and I think it's pretty funny, so watch.

Sorry about the bad quality, by the way. The original SWF looks better, but Flash wasn't going to let me convert it to a YouTube supported format without a fight. The QuickTime one went all red halfway through so I ended up exporting to a multi-gigabyte AVI file which was then converted to a 10 megabyte WMV file. Odd. I probably will upload the original SWF to Four Island Other when I get back from camp so you can watch the video in all it's glory.

I totally hope to make more videos because this one was fun to make, and I REALLY hope that Adobe has some sort of "I lost my activation key" service because I need that program. :)

NO NO NO. If you are making a funtastic level game like Karoshi, even though it may seem like a good idea, Level 49 of Karoshi 2.0 was a mistake. In case you are clueless, it involved you putting an Audio CD in your disk drive and stepping on a blue button in the level, which plays the first track on the disk and then advances you to the next level.

Ummmmmm no. Not everybody has an Audio CD. Not everybody has a CD drive. Not everybody cares enough to go out to the store, buy a blank CD-R, search their hard drive for a random song, download a program that burns CD Audio (Red Book is surprisingly nothing like any other CD format) and then burn the song.

However, I am insane. Lol. I reeeaallly wanted to beat that level so I thought "Hey, why don't I create an ISO file and mount it as a second CD drive?"

Ummmm no. First, WINDOWS IS EVIL. I'm stuck with Windows this week and Windows didn't want to help. I eventually found a program that mounted ISO files on Windows, but it was terrible and ended up being worthless. Apparently Red Book CDs cannot come in ISO files. Gah.

So, after a whole ton of false turns and ffsdfsdfdsfs, I discovered the solution. I downloaded Virtual CD (sadly, it's a trial) and CDRWIN (also a trial, gahness, but I really only needed to do this once :) ). CDRWIN is a simple program that lets you burn various types of CDs, including the elusive Red Book format. Virtual CD is a fake drive management program. Very useful.

First, I opened Virtual CD and created a fake burner, a fake CD drive with write capability. Then I clicked "Create a blank virtual medium" in the "Burn" menu and filled out the form so as to create a blank writable virtual CD in the virtual CD burner. Next, I opened CDRWIN and burned a simple Audio CD with one song I found on my memory stick (Christmas Canon by The Trans Siberian Orchestra) and burned it to the virtual CD burner.

Finally, in Virtual CD, I mounted the CD image created by the virtual CD burner onto the REAL CD drive. When I opened Karoshi, the stereo triumphantly did not state "NO CD" and I watched in happiness as the sound waves from the stereo pushed a safe onto my character.

Yes, I feel like omg cool yo. O_O That was weird, but YAY I DID IT. Lol, this post is going insane. Anyway, yes, I mounted a virtual Audio CD on a real CD drive. Funness. :)

Ummmm I forgot to update the poll again! Don't hurt me! Anyway, last week's poll wasn't as randomly insane as it looked. It was a reference to KSA. :)

Yes - 4 vote(s)! No - 1 vote(s)! Ummm..... head asplodes - 4 vote(s)! Go away - 1 vote(s)!

Okay. I have big news. INSTADISC IS BACK. Well, it's coming back. After a half year hiatus while I felt sorry for myself (and worked on FourPuzzle which I never posted about), I finally thought of something. A way for InstaDisc to work.

I seem to recall InstaDisc dying because it's Push notification only worked for a VERY small number of people (a.k.a. just me) and without Push, InstaDisc was pretty much a highly convoluted RSS replacement. However, my work on FourChat, the Yaplet replacement that never really surfaced, led me to realize an alternative to server push.

REVERSE AJAX.

Okay, it's not actually Reverse AJAX as I'm not using JavaScript, it's Comet. But I like calling it Reverse AJAX. Anyway, Comet is the way! I have been rewriting the InstaDisc Central Server in C++ and Comet seems to work perfectly. Yayfulness.

So, you may be wondering, when will InstaDisc be completed? Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I am actually already nearly done with Central. There are only 3 API functions that I haven't yet implemented and after that, there's just the testing period.

The bad news is, along with Comet, the InstaDisc specification has changed. A lot. Because of this, the Client will have to be majorly rewritten. I'm thinking of scraping the original code and staring over in C++. So that will probably take a while. Plus, the Update Servers will also have to be rewritten, but that's not much of a problem as they're small.

So, InstaDisc is back. YAY.

Oh, and by the way, Ohats Is So Dead.

Woohoo for FourFiction fanatics! FOURFICTION IS TEH LIKE OMG SADLLFH!!!!!!!! ....okay, just breathe Starla, it'll be okay.... Lol :)

YES LIKE OMG I LOVE YOU ARE YOU MADD?!?! - 3 vote(s)! no - 1 vote(s)! Jordin Sparks! - 2 vote(s)! Indifferent - 2 vote(s)!

Anyway, YAY! And like, totally a note: This week's poll isn't as random as it appears. :)

Lol, time for another short randomness. Today, I was thinking about how Makefiles didn't have to be used for compiling programs, that they could be used as a recipe for anything. Then I thought, "I know! Let's make a cake using a Makefile!" :)

all: cake topping
![Image](http://other.fourisland.com/spacer.png) $(COMBINE) cake topping

topping: butter milk brown_sugar salt
![Image](http://other.fourisland.com/spacer.png) $(ADD) butter 115g
![Image](http://other.fourisland.com/spacer.png) $(ADD) milk 60ml
![Image](http://other.fourisland.com/spacer.png) $(ADD) brown_sugar 220g
![Image](http://other.fourisland.com/spacer.png) $(ADD) salt pinch
![Image](http://other.fourisland.com/spacer.png) $(BOIL) 3m

cake: wet_mix dry_mix
![Image](http://other.fourisland.com/spacer.png) $(COMBINE) wet_mix dry_mix
![Image](http://other.fourisland.com/spacer.png) $(BAKE) 350F 75m
![Image](http://other.fourisland.com/spacer.png) $(COOL) 10m

wet_mix: eggs sugar vegetable_oil vanilla
![Image](http://other.fourisland.com/spacer.png) $(BEAT) eggs eggs eggs
![Image](http://other.fourisland.com/spacer.png) $(ADD) sugar 400g
![Image](http://other.fourisland.com/spacer.png) $(ADD) vegetable_oil 355ml
![Image](http://other.fourisland.com/spacer.png) $(ADD) vanilla 10ml

dry_mix: flour salt baking_soda
![Image](http://other.fourisland.com/spacer.png) $(ADD) flour 375g
![Image](http://other.fourisland.com/spacer.png) $(ADD) salt 6g
![Image](http://other.fourisland.com/spacer.png) $(ADD) baking_soda 5g

The recipe described is the Caramel Coffee Cake from Wikibooks. Let it assemble before using the linker. Enjoy. Lol :)

A SIDENOTE: When writing this post, I was trying to indent the command lines in the Makefile so that it looked right, but I was tricked by my own code: My pre BBCode no longer preformatted the text, &nsbp; was converted into text, and the

indent trick messed up the formatting. I tried adding a BBCode that preformatted the text, but I was unable to commit as, on my development computer, I'm currently working on the new layout for Four Island. Finally, I thought of making a transparent image and putting it on Four Island Other. It workded. :)