If you notice any problems, please let me know.
favicon.ico
Finally decided to add a favicon to my website. Went around looking for an icon creator. Turns out, with this free plugin (ICO (Windows Icon) Format), I can use Photoshop to create icons. Installation was rather easy. Just had to extract a file into “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Plug-Ins\File Formats” and restart Photoshop. One thing to note, is that icon’s maximum image size is 255×255 pixels. At first I was wondering why the .ico format wouldn’t show up in the save-as image type list. The plug-in lists shows it was properly installed and loaded.
Baby Conan on my Blog:
Baby Ran on my Gallery:
After you create the icon, just upload it to your website add the following 2 lines between the <head></head>:
<link rel="icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />Uncensored Search?
Well, since there’s a Google unsafe search, I’ve been wondering if there’s a Google uncensored search, where it takes searches from USA and searches in China and filters out only the links that have been blocked by Google China. It’d be interesting to see what links are blocked and which aren’t.
Decathanerd sent me this link a few days ago: Google China Search Comparison and it’s interesting to see the what gets censored and what doesn’t.
Random Crap:
As I was going through my referals, I happened to find this link: Simon’s Site Plan and I found my own link under Inspirational sites and sites of competitors. I wonder if I’m an inspirational site or a competitor… Hehe.
You’ve seen cartoons, movies, media all proclaimed that mouse love cheese. Starting from when I was young, I was already influenced by Tom and Jerry that cheese were mice’s favorite food, but how much truth is there to that? Is it’s just propaganda from the dairy industry just like what they did with milk? This was just a random thought I was thinking when I was watching Match Point and the old lady brings up the fact the cheese didn’t entice the mice, but it was peanut butter. Did mice change their appetite or is there just way better food nowadays than before? Just a random thought.
Half of Britons chat to their motor cars – A survey of 2,000 owners also found 40 percent thought their car had a personality and was capable of being upset whilst 19 percent worried about how their car was feeling. … More people chat happily to their cars in the southwest than anywhere else in the country, with 54 percent enjoying a good chat, compared with the more taciturn Scots where 26 percent indulged.
Top 10 Strangest MP3 Players (from /.) – Very funky and interesting ideas, some which I’ve already seen before like the Altoids one. Others like the toilet or mirror or scented or clip mp3 players were quite interesting.
Sosumi (So Sue Me) (from /.) –
Sosumi is one of the system sounds introduced in Apple Computer’s Macintosh System 7 operating system in 1991. It is an extremely short sample of a xylophone. The sound is still used in modern versions of Mac OS, including Mac OS X.
The sound’s unusual name was coined during a trademark dispute with Apple Records, The Beatles’ recording company. The two Apples have a long litigation history, and on the release of System 7 had recently settled a lawsuit over Apple Computer’s addition of MIDI capabilities to their products.
Apple Records’ legal team began scrutinizing every audio aspect of the computer. During the development of System 7, they objected to one of the new system beep sounds as having a name that was too musical.
The creator of the new beeps for System 7 and the Macintosh Startup Sound, Jim Reekes, had grown frustrated with the legal scrutiny and sought revenge. Reekes first quipped it should be named “Let It Beep”, a pun on The Beatles’ “Let It Be”, but renamed it Sosumi, which is pronounced “so sue me”.
The two Apples reached an agreement in 1991. Still, Apple Records once again launched litigation a decade later when Apple Computer started selling music in the iTunes music store and the iPods. The key terms of the 1991 agreement were made public in the hearings of February 2005.
The sound’s name also exists currently in an inside joke on Apple Computer’s website, where it marks the CSS class denoting a copyright notice. This CSS class is visible only in the source code of pages on Apple’s site where such legal notices occur. The naming of the CSS class is an obvious reference to the sound and its history. An example of this found on Apple’s homepage is below:
Early Apple sound designer Jim Reekes corrects Sosumi myth (from /.) – Here Jim Reekes tells the whole story: So, upon hearing I had to change the name of my new beep, I immediately thougth of the perfect name, “Let it Beep”. Of course, I was joking but it was brilliant right? As everyone was laughing, someone even took me seriously and said I could never get away with that! I said, “so sue me” and that’s when I realized my scheme. I told Sheila the new name would be spelled “s-o-s-u-m-i”. I asked she return the message to legal, but not to use voicemail (since she’d have to pronounce it) and instead send an email with some story about it being Japanese and not meaning anything musical. (so I don’t know what she actually told them).
Microsoft InfoCard
Many people have asked me what I work on at Microsoft and it’s always been difficult for me to explain what I do because the project I’m working on hasn’t been released yet. There’s been some keynotes where my project was mentioned, but today was the first time a demo was shown during the RSA Conference 2006.
The project I work on is currently called Microsoft InfoCard. It’s a meta-identity system which is a layer that talks between the user and the authentication system. Imagine having all a digital wallet in your computer. All your authentication in one place. You have a card to log into eBay, Amazon, amd Yahoo. For purchases, you have digital versions of your credit card to submit to vendors. That’s the user end of it. What InfoCard will do is verify the card you’re submitting. For example, if you’re submitting a VISA credit card, it’ll connect to VISA’s server, verify the card is indeed legit. VISA will then create a token, which you’ll pass onto the vendor and the vendor can verify the token was from the VISA server. I still can’t say much more about it (or more like I’m afraid of saying something that I was suppose to), but you can read about it here:
- Microsoft InfoCard
- InfoCard on the way from Microsoft
- Microsoft pushes InfoCard for secure online ID
- Bill Gates presents a new software security program
- Microsoft InfoCard’s first backer: VeriSign
- Microsoft Shows Off Tool for Identification Management
- Gates outlines computer security efforts
- Microsoft unveils new security program for online transactions
- Gates Outlines ID Management for Vista, XP
- Microsoft unveils new security tool
- Gates outlines computer security efforts
- Microsoft plans virtual information wallet: Gates
- Gates touts security of next OS at S.J. event
- Gates: End to passwords in sight
- Ending Microsoft’s identity crisis
- Gates unveils virtual information wallet
You can watch the Bill Gates Keynote at the RSA Conference 2006 at Bill Gates Webcasts. The InfoCard demo starts at 37:17.
Gallery Videos
Just a short note to let you know I’ve modified Gallery so that it can play videos directly off the page now. The option to download is still there if you don’t want to watch it on your browser. I’ve always hated videos that started to play in my browser w/o me telling it to, so I’ve disabled autoplay, so if you do want to play a video in the browser, you’ll have to click the play button for it to start.
I also found out to create thumbnails for videos, I needed to install ffmpeg, which I did, so now all my videos have thumbnails.
I also found this pretty neat extension for Firefox: Stop Autoplay – Disable the autoplay of the embedded music and movie (mp3, wma, wmv, avi, mpg, rm…). Pretty neat! Just what I wanted.
I know Internet Explorer honors the autoplay=”false” attribute, but for some reason Firefox doesn’t. For those of you who are using Firefox, can you do a quick test for me and see if that video autoplays for you or not. Thanks!
Enjoy!
WordPress 2.0.1
Just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1. The process actually went quite smoothly. The detailed instructions were quite helpful: Upgrading WordPress.
So just to note, if you see any problems or anything not working, please do let me know. I noticed the (Show/Hide) functions on my friends and personal site list is missing, probably due to the upgrade and replaced files, so I’ll be fixing that shortly.
Thanks!
Some initial changes I’ve noticed included the Write Post page has a bunch of upgrades. Starting with a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) text editor with a fast hotkey (alt+e) which opens a new window where you can edit html code directly. Then there’s the Panels on the right which allows for changing of the post status and categories and etc. There’s this new flag where it allows you to Password-Protect a post. I don’t recall seeing that in 1.5.x, but I may be wrong on this account.
They’ve included a backup utilty which backs up your database. I wish it also backed up my wordpress files because sometimes I edit them directly, so I might be installing the old backup plugin I had before. If you want to try that, download One Click Back and Restore plugin for WordPress 1.5. Although it’s listed as for 1.5, it’s listed as compatible for 2.0 in the 2.0 Plugin Compatibility list.
There doesn’t seem to be a new default theme. The default theme is the 1.5 one that my current site is based off of.
The preview pane in the write post page is now updated to reflect what it’ll show using your theme, so you can make sure the text is aligned correctly and etc.
Haven’t seen much other change yet, but if you know something I don’t, please do tell.
Tab Mix Plus
I first saw this on Jeremy’s computer and thought it was really cool: Tab Mix Plus
It’s an extension for Firefox where it adds several nice features to the tabs. First, it places a close button on each tab. I don’t really use that much since I usually close tabs with CTRL+W. The cool thing is when a page is loading, you can see the status on each tab! And when there’s a tab that you haven’t visited since it loaded, the title with be in red italics.
There are several other cool things such as tab order when you hit CTRL+TAB. It works with the newest Firefox and even contains a session manager! One extra cool thing about it is it remembers your tab history and if you closed a tab by accident, you can always revive it.
Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager with crash recovery that can save and restore combinations of opened tabs and windows.
Added nl-NL locale, fixed 2 locale conflicts, fixed problem with uncloseable tabs in FF 1.0.7, other minor bug fixes
Requires: Firefox: 1.0 – 1.6a1 Firefox
Editor’s Review
Turbo-charge your tabbed browsing — February, 2006 Editors PickEnjoy tabbed browsing, but want more options? This is the extension for you. Tab Mix Plus provides a wealth of preferences for tab behavior and appearance, from close buttons on tabs to a session manager. This is the tab extension to end all tab extensions.
If you have time, do go ahead and check out this extension!
Perfect Google?
The Nine Billion Names Of God by Kathy Kachelries (from /.)
After three hours, the old man in front of me had worked his way through six beers, in addition to every help desk joke I’d already heard. The cupholder. The any key. The write click. These are the stories people tell, now. These are the fish that got away.
“Let me ask you something,” the man said. I didn’t argue. One of the first tricks I learned about being a bartender is to make them think you’re interested.
“Have you ever created a web site?”
I shook my head.
“Not at all? Not even one of those geocities things?”
“Nope.”
“What about a blog? Or an ebay About Me page? You didn’t even have an AOL site or something?”
“Do I look like an AOL user to you?” For the record, I don’t think AOL even has access numbers in the valley anymore. “I’m sure I have something, somewhere,” I said, realizing that I was jeopardizing my tips. Besides, I had a distant memory of a single Angelfire page back in middle school.
“You know what Google is?”
“Yes,” I said. I was running low on patience.
“No, I mean, do you really know? More than just the site?”
Reluctantly, I shook my head.
“You ever meet anyone who worked for them?”
“Don’t think so.”
“You haven’t. Nobody works for them anymore.”
I shrugged, and took the man’s empty pint. I didn’t offer to refill it.
“They’re self-contained. It’s all automated, in there. It’s underground.”
I nudged the basket of pretzels in his direction. “Why don’t you eat something?” I suggested. He shook his head with so much force that I thought he might knock himself off of the stool.
“Listen. Hear me out. You know how Google works,” he said, but didn’t want for a response. “They cache things, right? Like they send out these spiders and take pictures of everything on the web, so when you’re searching, you’re not even searching the internet.”
I’ve heard that before, but it never made much of a difference to me. “Same thing, though,” I said.
“You ever wonder why Google doesn’t cache it’s own searches?”
“They program around it.”
“No. That’s what you think. That’s what everyone thinks. But it started back when Google was just a thesis project, back when it was just a drop in the data sea. No one thought to stop it back then. That web site you had, the one you forgot about. Almost everyone’s got one of those, right? But Google doesn’t forget. Google’s studied that thing so many times that it’s studied its own caches of you. What do you figure happens, when a site gets so big that it’s bigger than the internet?”
“It’s still a part of the internet, though.”
“No. Now, the internet is a part of Google.”
The man had a point. I nodded.
“Here’s the thing. Google has memorized who you are. It’s memorized all of us, through those little forgotten bits that we leave behind like breadcrumbs. And what’s more important, it’s memorized it’s own idea of you. Google is omniscient. It’s omniscient and omnipotent. When it cached its cache for the first time, back in 1994, that’s when Google realized what it was.”
Gradually, it dawned on me what the man was getting at. “You think it’s sentient.”
“I know it’s sentient.”
“How?”
He smiled, but it seemed kind of empty. “Me and Google go way back. But what I’m saying is,” he continued, “It knows us. All of us. It is us.”
For the first time, the man fell silent. He touched his finger to the bar and began tracing circles in the condensation, apparently lost in thought.
“Think about that website you created, okay? That website will last forever, do you understand? That website is echoing through cyberspace. It’s one of the nine billion names of God.”
Which brings up a funny question I was thinking about. What would Google be like if it was perfect? or what would a perfect search engine be? I bet there’s a bunch theological theories behind this but I’m going to give you a simple mathematical example.
Let I = the set that contains every website
Let G = Google and the set of websites it cached
Obviously I contains G (Google is a website and part of the internet), but in order for Google to be perfect, G must contain I except itself, meaning Google must cache every website into it’s database besides itself. This will include files, images, programs, etc. Everything. But if I contains G and G contains I, by mathematical deduction, I = G. In other words, a perfect Google or a perfect search engine is equal to the internet.
Haha. It’s late, most of what I just said probably doesn’t make sense.
Database Problems
Sorry for the down time and several of you have notified me of the problem. Apparently, after a bit of debugging and troubleshooting, it turns out that my MySQL databases were linked through krunk007.com which is no longer registered. I had only gotten that domain because DreamHost provided a free domain registration. They’re currently holding a deal where you get $88 off your first year! Remember to use the coupon code: DREAM88. I told DreamHost that I didn’t want to continue the krunk007.com registration since it was only free the first year and I already had krunk4ever.com and krunk4ever.org under my belt. What I didn’t remember was both my blog and gallery pointed to the database in krunk007.com. The registration ended earlier this month, but took full effect sometime early this morning (before I slept), but it was going on and off. At first I thought it was just some server problems, but they responded to me that there’s nothing wrong with the server which my database is hosted on, I started debugging and noticed the domain issue. So now I’ve relinked the database using a current domain and things should be fine when the DNS starts to propagate.
So both my Blog and Gallery should be running in full power now. Please let me know if you do hit any more issues.
Show/Hide functionality
I’ve added a new functionality to my website, and that’s something I’ve been meaning to add since I had Spoilers. For example:
Spoilers: (Show)
Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be going back and editing every spoiler to insert that functionality.
I did also add it to the links on the side so I can hide a bunch of stuff by default. Enjoy!
Here’s how to do it if you’re interested:
First, you’ll need the javascript code that’ll show and hide the blocks:
<script type="text/javascript">
function toggle(blockID)
{
var block = document.getElementById(blockID);
var displayProperty = block.style.display;
var text = document.getElementById(blockID + "Tog");
if (displayProperty == 'none')
{
block.style.display = 'block';
text.innerHTML = "Hide";
}
else
{
block.style.display = 'none';
text.innerHTML = "Show";
}
}
</script>
What this chunk of code does is it’ll either hide or unhide the element that it finds by the ID you pass in by checking to see if it’s currently hidden or not. If it’s hidden, it’ll unhide it. If it’s being shown, it’ll hide it. There’s also different section of code where it finds the element which has a specific ID based on the ID you passed in, which I’ll explain later. What it does is change the text to “Show” or “Hide” depending on if it’s hidden anymore.
For any element you want to hide with this toggle function, you just need to give it a UID (unique ID). For example:
<p id="toggleTest">this is a toggle test</p>Afterwards, you’ll just need to construction a link to do the toggle. You’ll also need to give this link a UID based on the UID of the block you want to toggle. Here’s the code:
<a id="toggleTestTog" href="javascript:toggle('toggleTest');">Hide</a>Notice how the link id is toggleTestTog and the block id is toggleTest. For my code you need to append the Tog to the UID of the block id for it to be able to know what text to change.
Here’s the above example in running:
this is a toggle test
If you want to have the item hidden by default, you just need to update code of the item to have a style attribute of display:none:
<p id="toggleTest2" style="display:none">this is a toggle test 2</p>Here’s the corresponding link code:
<a id="toggleTest2Tog" href="javascript:toggle('toggleTest2');">Show</a>Here’s the example of the code already hidden. I changed the id to toggleTest2 since it needs to be unique. I also changed the link text from Hide to Show since it’s hidden by default:
I did try to find if I knew the elementID of the object that called me, but I wasn’t able to find much info. If you know how a javascript function can figure out the object/element that called it, please do let me know. Just leave me a short message in the comments section.