Four Island

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.

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

It's New Years Eve! OMG! This is so exciting, soon it'll be 2010 and Four Island will be different yet again! Does anyone remember last year when all of the blog posts had red calendars next to them? Lol, we've been looking at blue calendars for so long.... And tomorrow it will change again.... to purple! :)

So, last year on New Years Eve, I posted a list of random/cynical predictions of what was to occur in 2009. Did any of them come true? Well, I did make a seventh layout, but not until September. :P And I did reinstall my operating system once, but on my personal computer (because I had somehow deleted the contents of /sbin.... :P) not my server.

This year, because I like the whole annual tradition thing, I will also be writing a list of predictions. But not in list form. I wrote an extremely strange song! :P

In the year oh-ten No-thing would hap-pen Because everyone will be busy typing "Greetings :)" into Yaplet!

Starla will change her site Into an Imogen Heap fan...site And then she'll realize she's pronouncing "Imogen" wrong and change it back like that!

TimTam'll make a wiki About a witch in Helsinki Then we'll all mob him from stealing a joke from Sabrina!

And Drifty, she will write A hundred stories in one night Then she'll post them all to FourFiction and my server will explode!

And Smiley, he will post Exactly one post, about toast And he will receive a medal for not posting about com-pu-ters!

And Sammi, she will draw All over her grand-maw Then she'll get grounded for so long that she'll actually write on her blog!

Then Bluemonkey and I Will collab on Layout 9 Until I realize he's trying to write it in ASP and I m-fire him and he m-quits and I realize that I skipped Layout 8! phew

And Pyro will perform A hostile-takeover of the town Jorm Then every day and every night will be a national holiday!

And Ozzyfrog, he will fly Right up in to the Sky And then receive a ticket for flying into a cable company!

And maybe J-A-L Will invent some sort of smell That makes iguanas want to eat toast and he becomes very rich!

And Timbo.... (oh, right, he discontinued his blog) will breathe air!

And True Falsities Will run another story About New Years being redirected to /dev/null and nobody knows what that means!

My router will explode (again) My website will be hacked (again) And Google will be acquired by Soy Products Ltd!

"2010 In Song"

Ummm.... that was weird. :P It.... sort of follows the melody of the first verse of Different Town. :P Anyway, have a very Happy New Year and I will see you tomorrow for my annual goals post!

On the fourth day of Kirby Week, Four Island gave to me: A deeper insight on the true meaningful nudules of randomness.

Randomness is a trait. It's also a blog, but we're talking about the characteristic here. So, what is randomness. WLEll of carser oiyoar know RANODMES S I shyperactivity!!!!!!! pbuttu!!!! Well.... no, not necessarily. You don't have to be a radioactively hyper sheep to be random. Randomness comes from within. Yeah right. :P

Randomness isn't really anything. You want to be random, go run outside and pull a tube-sock over your head. Write a story about someone's brain falling out. Oh dear, I do believe I feel a list coming out!

• Write a poem on a banana peel and then place it in front of your bedroom door.
• Exclaim your love for Russian mashed potatoes.
• Learn how to do the Macarana.... backwards.... twice as fast.
• Eat a computer.
• Radioactively reproduce Shakespeare's complete body of work. (This one requires fourteen lifetimes of practicing, so we don't expect you to complete it)
• Write a post about random stuff as a cop-out because you have a deadline in 12 minutes.
• Throw one of your favorite belongings into an empty trash bag, dance with it and make sure it knows how to spell "marfsky".
• Try new things. I've heard catfood is tasty.
• WRITE WRITE WRITE. Writing a random story is seriously fun and easy. Just think about the stupidest possible thing that could happen AND MAKE IT HAPPEN TO GEORGE WASHINGTON!!!! It never fails.
• Moderate comments.
• Listen to the collected works of Ludwig von Beethoven. Backwards. With each song logarithmically faster than the previous one.
• Download 200 pictures of lolcats, print them out and decorate your favorite mausoleum with them.
• Sing. Lady GaGa songs. Of course, it has to be backwards.
• Read a book on advanced physics and apply it to garbage collection in modern programming languages.
• Write a book outlining THE INTERNAL REOCCUPATIONS AND FLAGRATOINS OF USING ELLIPSES TOO FREQUENTLY.
• Make a website about something you enjoy. Such as dust-mite finding. You like finding dust-mites, amrite?
• EAT A MOOSE. Fine, it can be dead.
• Using red litmus paper, test various household objects for acidity and alkalinity and then throw them out the window and watch Spongebob Squarepants.

As you can see, there are many ways to be random. INVENT YOUR OWN, DUDE. See? That was random. Be random, spread happiness and try to ignore the fact that this post is so obviously a cop-out. Comment! :P

On the second day of Kirby Week, Four Island gave to me: A short story about nothing in particular.

It was the first day of Christmas.

"Wait," a voice yelled, "Christmas only lasts one day! By saying the 'first' day of Christmas, you're implying that there is more than one day!"

For the sake of continuity, can we simply assume that there are more than one days of Christmas?

"That sounded really grammatically incorrect, you know."

Shut up. Just.... shut up. Anyway, it was the first day of Christmas. The snow had blanketed the beach house and everything around it so everything looked peaceful and-

"....snow? At a beach house? As in, on the beach? Not likely. And when you say that it blanketed everything around it, you're implying that it also blanketed the ocean. You know, the one adjacent to the beach the beach house is doubtlessly on?"

You don't have to take everything so seriously, you know. It's just a simple story. And a beach house doesn't necessarily have to be next to a beach.

"Yeah, well, stereotypically, you will find beach houses on the beach."

My beach house is in Iceland, okay? Moving on....

"You do know that Iceland is the one with the green, right?"

Don't make me come out of here.

"You're just a narrative device used to tell the reader of the story what is going on without using dialogue. You can't hurt me!"

I'm best friends with the writer of this story. She'll erase you if you don't qwazam.

"Seriously? You're making up words now?"

That's it! I QUIT. STARLA, YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO FIND A NEW NARRATOR NOW BECAUSE THIS CHARACTER IS REALLY UNCOOPERATIVE.

"Hi there! Guess who I am."

O_O

"Yes, I like to write confusing stories. Good luck with that whole multiple personality disorder thing."

She walked away laughing, leaving the narrator very confused. Soon, however, the story was over and everything vanished.

Yes, okay, that story was very odd. But, well, that's what you get when you promise PROMISE to write a blog post and then fall asleep and laze about until you are only three hours away from your deadline. Tomorrow's post should.... make more sense. :P

On the first day of Kirby Week, Four Island gave to me: An extremely weird rant on what Starla did last weekend.

Hi peoples, and welcome to the first day of Kirby Week. I'm sure you're all super-spectacularly excited for the upcoming holiday, yes? Well, today, I'm rewinding a bit to the weekend when Advent 2 ended and Kirby Week started. Some weirdly cool things happened that I fell like talking about.

First, on Saturday, I was bored. I didn't know why I was bored because I had plenty of things to do: work on Pillowcase, work on FourSearch, implement many of the pending renovations currently required around Four Island, work on the HKRPG site, work on one of my games, or anything else listed in The Bet. But, instead, I continued to be the queen of procrastination, and did nothing.

So, it was with boredom that I opened Google Reader. Oh yes, that's right, it's Saturday, none of my usual humor blogs had updated. I did notice, however, that TimTam's feed had over a hundred unread items in it. I decided to work that number down to a reasonable (0) amount.

That totally didn't work. The first post I read was a list of Lifehacker's best posts during 2009. Among that list was an article on how to install the Homebrew Channel on the Wii without needing the Twilight Princess hack. I had previously found out about the Homebrew Channel (it was The Daily WTF, actually) but was always annoyed because I didn't have, nor had any intention of getting, Twilight Prinecss.

Excitedly, I fetched my SD card from my broken camera and followed the instructions. Amazingly (because cool things that I want to do never work), it worked perfectly. The Homebrew Channel sat peacefully in the Wii system menu and I was ecstatically excited.

If you know me, you may not know that, among my normal programming, I also like to indulge in some homebrew programming. I've written for the GBA and the DS (both required special cartridges to put the homebrew games on and both have been lost by my evil siblings) but now I could possibly write something for the Wii! And as I was pondering this, the perfect training exercise that would get me into programming for the Wii popped into my head: I would port Maze Of Life to the Wii!

For now, however, I just wanted to play something fun. I ran back to my computer and looked through the list of homebrew applications to find something cool to play. As I was scrolling through the list of games, one caught my eye. POWDER. I sort of freaked out at that. POWDER is an extremely fun roguelike that I (during my DS homebrew days) had previously playing on my DS. I remember it to be an extremely fun game. I don't, however, remember being any good at it. :P

So I downloaded it (and a few other games including a super-cool looking port of SuperTux) and loaded it onto the Wii. I immediately became hooked. Yes, obsessively so. I played that game for two hours straight today, and many more not in succession. I even found the Linux version of POWDER and started compulsively playing it on my computer. I was even.... doing well, occasionally! :P If you've never played POWDER, you must do so. Seriously.

One other cool thing I did on the Wii was downloading the port of Visual Boy Advance (a GBA emulator). I had this emulator on my computer and (during my GBA homebrew days) used it to test my GBA games. However, it was difficult to play actual games on it because the keyboard isn't the intended controller for these games. So, I couldn't enjoy my Kirby Amazing Mirror ROM (I had lost the physical copy of this game years ago and really wanted to enjoy its amazing funness again). So, my grand idea was to use the Wii, VBA and the Classic Controller to play the game in its full greatness. And what do you know, it totally worked. Yippie for me. :)

So, I hope you've enjoyed this randomly long post. I'm off to play POWDER now.

Okay, so last night, Drifty and I were talking about how I give myself a whole ton of work (Four Island, The Sabrina FanWiki, True Falsities, Pillowcase, Endlenge, whatever story I am currently writing for Four Fiction, KFM, FourPuzzle, my annual RPG and more....) and she dared me to do the following things in one day:

• Make 3 Pillowcase comics
• Write a Four Island post
• Write up an episode of Sabrina
• Write a True Falsity
• Finish chapter 1 of my novelette
• Work on my current programming project

Now, it's 3:56pm and I'm just completing the final item on the list. However, I didn't exactly follow the bet. Instead of making 3 comics, I made 6. Instead of writing one post for Four Island, I wrote 3! (The other two will come out daily, as per usual)

I didn't, though, write up an episode of Sabrina. I had decided that I was going to do that task first, and I went to the FanWiki to see which episode I needed to do next, and it was very evident to me that I hadn't visited it in a while. Every single page had been replaced with spam. And I mean replaced. The original pages weren't in the history so I couldn't revert the spam. So, basically, the Sabrina FanWiki has died. That's why it's been removed off of the Website Projects list. It amuses me, though, that I procrastinated from that project for so long that I didn't even notice it being covered in spam.

I still think I won the bet, though, Drifty, because I doubled my Pillowcase output and tripled my Four Island output. So you have to follow up with your side of the bargain. :) Oh, and my awesome True Falsity? The Gates Of Subliminal Messaging. :)

Wow, I had no clue what drugs I was on two weeks ago. And sorry I didn't update AGAIN. I'm a weirdo.

iTunes - 3 vote(s)! Banshee - 0 vote(s)! Windows Media Player throws up - 0 vote(s)! Other - 1 vote(s)!

I think I'm officially going insane, what with updating the poll 8 days late. Yesterday I had an excuse, I was sick (and still am) but last week I wasn't so I should've posted.

And Now I Rant! FOUR FICTION THE FOURM OMG PILLOWCASE LETS POST ON STUFF LIKE TRUE FALSITIES AND THIS OR THAT WHAT HAPPENED TO ENDLENGE OR THE PROJECTS LETS JUST DO STUFF.... okay, I'm done. Sorry, my brain isn't really functioning properly. Anyway, post on Four Fiction or The Fourm! The Fourm seems to have been semi-revived in the last day or so because there has been a lot of posting! :)

Also, I'm working on a new story based on a dream I had a few days ago, so, if you don't want to ruin the surprise, DON'T READ MY DREAM DIARY!

Lol, it seems I accidentally thought Friday was Saturday and update the POTW a day early. Weird. Oops, Ima Silly. :) Anyway.... what was I going to say in this post? Yes, I just wanted to mention that I had added FourFiction to the sidebar so random people can find it. I've also written Chapter 9 of my story, Dreams Are Magic, in case anyone's interested in reading it. FourFiction pretty much died when I went away and I hope to revive it because it's a pretty cool place, if I do say so myself. :)