Four Island

Oh yes, I did it again. A new layout. Well, not really. Like 6.1, layout 6.2 is a minor update to the major Layout 6. I've removed the phpBB-style background and made the center semi-transparent instead. This way, all text is still visible, but you can also see the background, something I was going for for ages.

I got this idea from CSS-Tricks' RGBa Browser Support. I saw that and immediately went "YAY THAT'S LIKE TOTALLY PERFECT!" (the previous sentence may have possibly been paraphrased :)) I've been trying to achieve an effect like this since I saw CSS-Tricks' Blurry Background Effect and thought it'd be a great way to overcome the problem.

So, if anyone has any difficulties with the new layout, such as it throws up in IE 7.6546465 or looks so disgusting that you'd like to eat a cheesedoodle, just comment and tell me. :)

At the beginning of the month, I posted about my falsities blog, True Falsities. Back then, the implantation for True Falsities was a subfourm of Storybook Time on The Fourm. However, now I've moved my falsities blog and put it up for the interwebz. It's available at false.fourisland.com.

Not only can I write posties, so can you! You're perfectly allowed to register and submit an article for review. Timbo94 has already done so and his post "Heat Kills, Aircon Saves Life" has made the front page. Of course, any new post makes the front page, but I just like saying "made the front page."

You may be wondering why I'm using Wordpress even though I've sworn Wordpress is evil. Well, I'm still using my own handtyped code for my personal blog, so it's okay. Also, you may have noticed that I totally stole Humorix's theme. I know they won't mindy, right? :)

Oh dear. A few days ago I read on Daily Blog Tips that due to Google acquiring FeedBurner that all feeds should be moved to Google's servers. The problem with that is that Google set a deadline. Feburary 28th. Worst part is, any feeds not transferred before said date will 404.

It's pretty easy to transfer your feeds. There's a link at the top of the FeedBurner member pages entitled "Move my feed now" or something similar, which lets you sign into a Google account to move the feeds to. Then it transfers the feed, which may take a very long time depending on the length of said feed. Then, you're done. You won't be able to sign in to feedburner.com anymore, but feedburner.google.com works. You'll also be advised to change your feeds.feedburner.com links to feeds2.feedburner.com, but if you don't, they'll redirect.

I think Google's mistake, though, is setting unmoved feeds to 404 after the deadline date. For instance, if I didn't read Daily Blog Tips, I would not have known about this. At all. I'm so detached, I didn't even know FeedBurner had been acquired! Imagine the problems. I probably wouldn't know a thing until June when someone complains that the RSS feed has stopped working.

So, you peoples who use FeedBurner, make sure that you transfer your feed to Google's server!

YAY! People actually care about my posts! They've even been commenting! YAY! But for those immune people, HOW COULD YOU? :) JK. And you Edna Modes? :)

OMG YES - 5 vote(s)! No, I'm immune to your website! HAHAHA - 2 vote(s)! What are you talking about? - 1 vote(s)! Indifferent - 0 vote(s)!

So, now that I'm posting again, yay? :) Well, I'd write something else here, but I can't think of anything.

Since the Fourth layout was released, my admin panel has had the sentence "Welcome to the ubiquitous administration panel!" at the top. I haven't a clue what that word means and I don't know why I put it there. So, I finally decided to get a dictionary and find what it means.

**u.biq.ui.tous** (yoo bik`we tes) ***adj.*** present, or seeming to be present, everywhere at the same time; omnipresent

Everybody bow down to the all-seeing admin panel! Lih, that was weird. I have to be more careful when choosing words that I don't know. :)

Remember back when I was being nostalgic about old layouts when the 6th layout was released? Remember I was pining for a supposedly non-existent screenshot of the elusive Layout 1? Well guess what. I have found one.

I found it while traversing Wikipinia one lazy day. I found, in my User hierarchy, an old list of websites I hosted, with other information about them such as launch date. Upon opening Four Island's page, I gasped in amazement as I saw, staring at me, the long-sought after screenshot of Layout 1. :)

I can't believe how much Four Island has changed since that. Does this site even slightly resemble the one in that screenshot? Plus, back then, I knew a lot less about blogs. I even remember thinking that posting once a day is too much. Now I'm concerned about posting too little. :)

You may notice a discrepancy in that screenshot. As you know, The Fourm wasn't released until March 30th 2008. However, the third layout was enacted December 3rd 2007 and there's a link in that screenshot entitled "Fourms". Well, Four Island did have a fourm before Layout 3. It ran miniBB fourm software (which was a mistake because that resulted Four Island being blocked from a certain place for a long time) that wasn't that good. It was removed October 22nd 2007.

I haven't updated my Wikipinia user pages since forever, but there's a lot of interesting information in there. For instance, the original release date of Color Pencils was April 27th 2008, even though everyone thinks it's May 5th 2008. Weird. :)

Ah yes. Due to some sortof reasonable reasons, I recently had to install McAfee Internet Security Suite on my Windows partition. A certain Wi-Fi network I depend on doesn't allow me to connect unless I am running "approved" anti-virus software. So, after the fee, I attempted to install.

Oh, would you look at that? McAfee comes with this new-fangled (you know I'm kidding, right?) download manager thing that downloads the programs for you. I loaded it up, and it just sat there and clicked. You know the sort of click, as if Internet Explorer is refreshing the page over and over again. Yes, I lost sanity. Easy fix though: Mute the speakers. But that didn't help me install McAfee.

I searched teh interwebz and found that the most likely problem was that I already had a virus. So I downloaded McAfee Stinger (which thankfully worked) and scanned my computer. Three hours later, it completed and told me that there was nothing wrong. GAH.

After a while, I found out that another problem may be that I didn't uninstall my trial copy of McAfee properly. So I ran McAfee's MCPR.exe program thingy and forced myself to restart the computer. Nope! Didn't do anything.

Exasperated, I finally tried the "Virtual Technician" thing it provides on the help page. It ran some sanity fixes (such as clearing the DNS cache) and lo and behold, the download manager worked! That was weird!

Wait a minute! After the download manager did a lot of stuff, it just sat there and told me that the installation had failed. .... I then tried the Virtual Technician a few more times and the installation a few more times and it finally worked. But that had taken QUITE a while. And all so I can continue to email people during Lunch. Hm. :)

One last thing I'd like to mention that's annoying me: At the bottom of the support page for McAfee, they have a button labeled "Fee Based Support". Is it just me or is it unfair to change people for support? For instance, a company could build themselves up (so they get good reviews) and then deliberately introduce bugs into their programs so people have to pay to get them fixed. Hopefully that's just me being paranoid, though, right? ....right? :)

Well! It's good to see that people are reading my posts! Even if I don't seem to be posting anymore....

Of course I do! - 5 vote(s)! No, I use Four Island for other things - 2 vote(s)! You have a blog?!?!?!? - 0 vote(s)! Indifferent - 0 vote(s)!

About not posting or even being on for ages.... Yes, I've been sick since Saturday. Sorries! Not my fault. So if anyone's been yelling at me via email, I don't know about it! :) I'm sorry, I'll try to post again ASAP. Yes. I think. As soon as I'm better. I guess. Hi mom. Look, a four! :)

Ooh, here we go with a series of coincidences that happen to make a problem, just like the Rubiwin Glitches. What do you get if you have Ubuntu, BIND and no internet access? A 50MB log file full of entries like below, of course!

too many timeouts resolving 'weather.noaa.gov/A' (in '.'?): disabling EDNS

Nah, I didn't find it that funny either. In fact, along with my Apache error.log of death, mah log files were spiralling out of control because they like to repeat cyclic data out of order so they cannot be shortened into:

last message repeated 303 times

Something had to be done. At first, I hadn't a clue why the negative my computer was attempting to access a .gov domain over three hundred times a second. Was it a conspiracy?

Um, no, probably not. I finally remembered that Ubuntu comes with a handy weather lookup feature in the time panel. It was constantly attempting to access weather.noaa.gov--where it, apparently, got it's weather data--and because I don't have internet access, it was resolving through MY BIND server instead of a root server's. And since I don't have any entries for weather.noaa.gov, it failed. And computers take the mantra "If at first you don't succeed, try and try again" VERY seriously.

I thought, "Oh, okay, I'll just go disable the weather thing." Wasn't that easy. I disabled it, but something was still querying the remote server. I then came up with a cheat: I'd add weather.noaa.gov to my BIND server! Then, it'd resolve, but nothing would come of it so everything could be the same just without the 50MB log file!

YAY! There's that done. Now I just have to figure out what the negative the below message means in Apache's error.log:

[debug] mod_deflate.c(619): [client 127.0.0.1] Zlib: Compressed 16400 to 4363 : URL /index.php

That was.... pretty unanimous. Love to see that people still vote, though, even though they don't post anymore! :) :(

The Hat - 3 vote(s)! iNetSneak - 0 vote(s)! Rubiwin - 0 vote(s)! Other - 0 vote(s)!

Ok, I'll start working on The Hat. I think.... I'll try. :) Sorry, I would love to get working on it, but there are a lot of other things in the way such as LFS, the Sabrina FanWiki, FourChat and more.... But I promise I'll work on The Hat sooner or later. :)

Also, I'm sorry I haven't posted on mah blog recently. I've lost inspiration, I don't know what to write. Does anyone think that maybe I shouldn't try to post every day? Maybe a few times a week, but not on a strict schedule? I don't know, I just want to make you (the viewers) and me happy at the same time.