So I’ve decided I didn’t like the black background on my square thumbnails for my gallery and changed it all to white. Took awhile to redo all the thumbnails and the longest part was the custom thumbnails since those had to be redone manually. I also updated all the videos with a thumbnail that was just just all white or all black.
Fixed Sidebar
My sidebar was beginning to be a mess and not many open the hidden lists. Therefore I’ve picked a few which I frequent and still gets updated periodically to be shown by default.
Multiple Blogs
I’ve decided to to stop blogging on Sue Happy and Freak Mutations (formerly known as Modern Evolution) as I just didn’t have enough time nor get as much fun out of it as I expected. Interestingly, the week I decide to stop blogging, multiple mutations stories popped up as well as interesting lawsuits. Oh well, that’s life right?
The HD-Trailers.net blog looks like it’s here to stay. Given that it’s mostly automatic and I just comment on some trailers once in awhile is something I can still manage to do.
Server Downtime Earlier
My website was down beginning last evening till this afternoon. Dreamhost apparently had some DNS issues which took forever to resolve. Outlook kept complaining that it couldn’t connect to my email server. When the DNS issues were finally starting to resolve, I started getting my emails in chunks as email servers retried sending them to me. I also got back a bunch of unable to send emails (people spamming using my domain). I’m guessing these emails were also trying to reach other Dreamhost customers.
Everything’s back up now, but I’m starting to get tired for all this Dreamhost nonsense. I’ve decided that after my contract is up, I’m probably going to switch over to 1&1 and purchase a business plan. Space and bandwidth might not be as much, but I’m only using 8GB out of 256GB on Dreamhost. I use about 65GB/month, but my plan comes with over 3,000GB. For the 1&1 Business plan that I plan to upgrade to, for about the same $10/mo plan, I still get 250GB of webspace and 2,500GB of bandwidth.
Plus the fact that I haven’t seen 1&1 down for half a day has really given me confidence during the past 3 years that I’ve used them.
You know something’s gone awry when DreamHost has to offer a new add-on for $15 more per month so that you can get guaranteed CPU and memory. I got an email awhile back introducing DreamHost Private Servers. For $23/month (assuming you’re on the 2 year contract for $7.95/mo), you get a guaranteed 150MHz CPU and 150MB of RAM.
For that amount, I can get a 1&1 Developer Hosting package.
You know, DreamHost is the first webhosting service I’ve hit into CPU/memory issues and it hasn’t always been like this. My gallery and blog used to coexist fine on the same account. Now I have to split them apart because combined, they’re consuming too much resources for 1 account.
Many people have said they oversell their web hosting, but I’ve always thought, who doesn’t? But I’ve never hit a problem until a few months ago, that I was getting 500 Internal Server Errors because they have a CPU/memory monitor program that kills anything that exceeds a certain CPU usage during peak hours. One person even calculated if he was to serve a static page 24/7 at the sustainable speed and below the CPU/memory requirements, he’d never be able to reach the allotment of bandwidth that he has purchased. I can’t find that blog entry anymore, but I did find this: Dreamhost Sucks At Hosting
A Series of Unexpected Events
The past 6 blog entries was originally 1 really long blog entry, initially titled “A Series of Unexpected Events.” However, it even got too long for me to read, so I decided to split it up. I mean, all entries were inputed on Sunday night and basically lasted the entire week be editing the post timestamp.
Anyway, given that these entries were written almost a week ago, I do have some updates.
I finally got all my computer hardware that I need to build a new file server. I ended up picking up a new ATI Radeon X600 for $27 shipped (Ungsunghero found it on AnandTech For Sale/Trade). I’ve also ordered some extra RAM as it turns out they were some high quality RAM and at $20 after rebate, it was a really good deal. Since 2 of my hard drives were OEMs, I needed some SATA cables and SATA power adapters which I picked up from Monoprice.
My final configuration will look like this:
- BIOSTAR TForce TF570SLI motherboard
- AMD Sempron 64 3000+ CPU
- HP 2GB (2x1GB) PC5300 DDR2-667 RAM
- ATI Radeon X600 128MB video card
- 4x Seagate 500GB 7200.10 SATA hard drives
- 1x Western Digital 100GB hard drive
- Sony NEC Optiarc DVD burner
- Ultra Case
- Ultra 500W PSU
It’ll probably share the LCD, keyboard and mouse with my existing file server. I might pick up a USB/DVI KVM, but those guys aren’t cheap.
The motherboard already comes with dual gigabit ethernet adapters, so that’ll work out great as a file server. It also has 5.1 surround sound card, though I highly doubt that’ll be utilized at all by the file server.
Ungsunghero and I spoke about laundry after he saw my post a few days ago. One of the topics we hit was bleach. He was saying how bleach makes all his white clothes nice and white. I’m actually afraid to use bleach now. The last time I did, I ended up with 3 or 4 dark colored t-shirts with a bunch of red dots. It’s not because I used bleach on my dark colored clothing, but it had splattered a bit when I was doing the light colored laundry and somehow got onto my other clothes. Plus the fact I have no idea how much bleach I’m suppose to use, I just keep pouring into that little hole in my washing machine until I think it’s about right.
We also reached the topic of laundry detergent. I’ve been a big fan of liquid Tide before, but decided it didn’t really matter much for me. I’ve been using powder Tide for the past few years, the main reason being it lasts more loads than a big jug of liquid detergent. I still haven’t finished the first box I bought from Costco since I moved up here. With liquid detergent, I use up one of those big Costco jugs in less than a year. However, I noticed that Costco has these new super concentrated Tide detergent that I’ve meaning to try. Unfortunately, I bought a new box of Tide from Costco (when it was on sale with coupon) which will probably last me another 2 years. I’m also pretty sure at least 10-15% of my laundry detergent was used up by my mom when she visited in those few short weeks.
One thing I’m very strict about with all my laundry is fabric softener. I MUST use it on every load, because I really like how soft my clothes come out. I actually prefer Snuggles, but since Costco only carries Downy, I’ve been using Downy for the past few years. I’m not sure if Snuggles actually makes my clothes softer, but the cute little soft bear makes it seem so much softer. I guess if I had a kid and felt how soft he/she was, then I might like Downy more.
Comments
For the longest time, I was thinking… people haven’t been commenting on my blog lately and I was sorta sad. Turns out it was my fault. Whenever WordPress puts a comment into the moderation queue, it sends me an email alerting me that a comment is being held for moderation. However, about 2 months ago, I started getting spam in that email address, so I blocked it in my control panel. Apparently, I forgot to update that WordPress with a new email address to send me the notifications.
So today, when browsing different parts of WordPress, I landed on the comments section and noticed I had 94 comments in my queue (those which passed Akismet). Of course, when rerunning the comments through Akismet again, it drop down to 35. I believe the actual number of comments was around 25 which actually approved.
Therefore, in order to make all comments equal, here are the lists of post which had comments that have been held in comment for way too long (in no particular order):
- Six Flags Discount (~50% Off)
- How to download HD Trailers from Apple.com
- Cascada – Everytime We Touch
- Happy Birthday Liam!
- Ultra-Pasteurized Milk
- HD-Trailers.net
- Missing Codecs in Firefox to Play Video in Gallery2
- LeekSpin
- Poker Riddle
- Sherbert vs Sorbet
- Rebates
- Hecho en México
- Death Note
- Microsoft Health Screening Results
- Convert APE to MP3
I’ve been tempted to just like Akismet be the spam filter and not go through the moderation process. However, seeing how 94 comments drop to 25, it still shows Akismet has some work to do.
Web Ads
Recently, I’ve been playing with different ad sites and applying them to my different websites.
If you haven’t noticed, on my main blog, I’ve decided not to use AdBrite anymore, which for some reason dropped a lot in ad revenue over the past months. I switched to Text Link Ads, which was advertised by dnScoop and so far, I’ve made $19.07 in the past month, which I’m happy about.
They even have their own WordPress plugin. They sell ads for both the overall site and individual blog posts. I currently have 3 blog posts with ads:
At first I had no idea that the plugin actually wrote an extra paragraph on the bottom, followed by Related Link, so I had actually hacked the plugin to add additional entries to the top ad block.
I’ve also been experimenting with different colors and styles to make the ads not look as ugly. I have to say, the default ad block was rather ugly (if you recall seeing it for the past few weeks). I’ve updated it to a new background color and I think the top and bottom borders actually make it look decent.
Of course if you’re registered on this site, you won’t be seeing the ads.
However, Text Link Ads is picky with which sites they use. They only allow ads on certain sites that reach a minimum audience and apparently all my other sites are too new or don’t have enough viewers yet to join the Text Link Ads program. So for those, I’ve stuck with AdBrite for now.
However, I’ve been having a lot of problems with AdBrite recently with it posting semi-adult ads on my sites. For Ad content, the default is “Only clean, family-friendly ads” and I’ve double checked that’s the selection I have for all my ad zones. They have this option “Also include edgier ads (but still no adult ads)”, which I’ve never selected.
I disabled the auto-approval of network ads and these edgier ads stopped appear, since I assume they’re only showing the ads I’ve approved. I contacted AdBrite support and inquire about this and they said this should not have been the case and asked for screenshots so they can investigate the problem. I re-enabled the auto-approval of network ads and 30 minutes, these semi-adult ads started popping up:
I immediately took some screenshots and disabled the auto-approval of network ads again. I’ve sent them the screenshots. We’ll see what their response is.
HD-Trailers.net
Here’s my latest project: HD-Trailers.net
First, I attempted to do this with a blog: HD Trailers, however I thought it would be much cooler if I could represent in a much easier to use interface. So I started playing around ideas. The 1st part was coming out with a data structure that would be easily extensible. I thought about XML at first, but I’m not that familiar with PHP and their XML encoding/decoding. I ended up taking the easy way out and am using the included serializer for PHP, which turned out quite useful.
This started as a pet project because I enjoy checking out movie trailers and I definitely enjoy watching stuff in high definition (especially 1080p). However, neither Apple and Yahoo make it easy to download these trailers and I don’t particularly like being forced to watch it in Quicktime, since the free version Quicktime doesn’t allow full screen and is actually quite a poorly written video player. I’d much prefer to watch it in Media Player Classic or VLC.
I’ve figured the trick to download Apple HD trailers awhile back, and recently started collecting trailers from Yahoo! Movies. I do have to say that trailers at Yahoo! Movies are typically sub par when compared to their Apple counterpart, but they also have some non-overlapping HD trailers (like Transformer and Golden Compass).
The parsing of Yahoo’s HD trailers page was actually a bit more difficult than Apple’s. I actually had to download a qtl which redirects me to makeplaylist.dll and includes the SID to the trailer file. It took me awhile to figure out that in order to download the correct qtl file, the referrer has to be within Yahoo’s domain, which was easy to set up with PHP’s curl.
Halfway through my project, Apple decided to change their trailers page completely and I thought I was screwed. However, Apple switched to JSON (Javascript Object Notation) and in the latest PHP, they support JSON decoding, so that made my life even simpler and also gives me additional data which I wasn’t collecting before.
I just finished the caching system, where instead of parsing in the data table and creating the entire page for every load, it’ll be loading from a static class unless something triggers it to to delete the cache. The data is automatically updated every 24 hours and is smart in the fact that the cache will only be deleted if changes have been made. Individual movie pages also have a similar caching system.
New Projects and Blogs
Wow… It’s been awhile since my last post, but I’ve been working on a new project which isn’t quite ready to be revealed yet. It will be in due time. I’ve also started 3 separate blogs:
- HD Trailers – A blog about HD (High Definition) Trailers and how to download them
- Modern Evolution – Evolution is happening everywhere around us today.
- Sue Happy – Just how “Sue Happy” is America?
The latter 2 are just collections of articles which I find particularly interesting, while also giving my opinion on them. The 1st one (HD Trailers) might be retired once my “project” gets completed.
Random Crap:
Perfect Petzzz (from Cari) – These sleeping puppies and kittens plush / stuffed animals are so cute!!!
Yahoo! Be a Better Planet (from SD) – Yahoo! is on a mission to find and reward America’s most eco-friendly city. Can your hometown claim that title? Join in now to help your city win a fleet of hybrid taxis, and get free compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) for your efforts. I’ve also been a big fan for fluorescent light. Not only because it saves me a bunch on my electricity bill, but also the fact that it’s white light compared to the yellowish light most regular light bulbs emit. Also, you never burn yourself trying to touch one, because it just never gets that hot.
Prosthetics (from Digg) – Robert Barron is a master of disguises. He uses his artistry to create realistic body parts for those who are missing them.
The man who owns the Internet – Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you’ve never heard of, reports Business 2.0 Magazine. Here’s how the master of Web domains built a $300 million empire.
Online Savings from Washington Mutual (from SD) – Wamu apparently has joined the rank of the online high interest savings account game. Although 5% isn’t shocking to many, the good thing about Wamu is the fact they have branches everywhere. You can easily link up your checking account and online savings account. When you use your Wamu ATM card at any ATM, they won’t charge you any fee. I’m not certain if they’ll refund the fees that the ATM itself charges, but Wamu has always been customer friendly in my opinion.
Robot Arm Pours Beer Into Glass (from MS newsgroup) – You’ve probably seen the Kuka Robotic Arm in other videos before (one even had it swinging samurai swords around), but this one is program to perfect beer pouring from a bottle into a glass.
Hjo3 posted this awhile back about how the opening song of BPS (Battle Programmer Shirase) is actually using the melody of Rick Astley – Never Gonna Give You Up. I never knew this, then again I’m not that familiar with songs from the 80’s and 70’s, but this was interesting trivia knowledge. I do have to say, Rick Astley’s voice doesn’t quite match his face.
Ant Buster (from Digg) – Another Tower Defense type of game, where this time, there’s actually more freedom for the attackers, and the attackers (ants) are actually stealing pieces of pizza from you.
Xbox LIVE Brings You Even More Matrix Content (from Ars) – I got my copy a few days ago. Circuit City had it on sale for $20 (price mistake) and they actually decided to ship 1 copy per customer, which was pretty cool. Then again, I don’t have a HD DVD player yet, but Matrix being my favorite movie of all time, I have a hard time deciding if I should sell this or not. Plus the fact, I can download the Animatrix in HD via Xbox Live makes it even tougher. When you purchase The Complete Matrix Trilogy, you will also receive a token in the box to download the entire Animatrix series from Xbox LIVE® Marketplace. Unfortunately, I posted this a bit too late, but you were also able to download HD trailers and clips of the Matrix via Xbox Live: From May 15 through May 25, download free content like HD trailers from all three Matrix movies and some of your favorite scenes in HD like “Bullet Time in the Subway” and “Morpheus fighting Agent Smith.” You can also purchase and download themes for all three films plus Animatrix.
Captive shark had ‘virgin birth’ (from Digg) – Female hammerhead sharks can reproduce without having sex, scientists confirm. Story was somewhat interesting, but the funniest was when commented: Jesus Shark?
Top 4 Ways You’re Wasting Gas When You Think You’re Saving It (from Digg) –
- Driving across town to save a nickel on a gallon of gas.
- Driving on the highway with their windows down to avoid using the air conditioner.
- Driving with their truck’s tailgate down.
- Accelerating extremely slowly.
#1 is a toughie. I agree that it’s rather stupid to drive across tow to save a nickel per gallon, but what about driving 3 blocks or planning a trip across town so you can stop by the cheap gas station? CDMCC and I had an argument about this awhile back. It wasn’t really about saving on gas, but the time you spent driving 3 extra blocks to save a dime per gallon. If you have a 15 gallon tank, that equates to a saving of $1.50. To drive those 3 extra blocks, you’ve wasted more than 5 minutes already. Is 5 minutes of time really worth the $1.50 savings? I dunno, but coming from a family that squeezes the most out of a penny, I’m always willing to drive the 3 extra blocks, and with tools like Seattle Gas Prices (or the corresponding gas price searching tool for your area), it makes it easy to find the gas stations that is cheap and not too far out of your way.
#2 is also something I’ve known for awhile, since Mechy often talked about aerodynamics of car. Opening windows just breaks that efficiency.
15 (Painfully) Unforgettable Cartoon Theme Songs (from Digg) – It’s tragic, really. For every math formula forgotten, every anniversary that passes unremembered, and every pet ferret dead from starvation, there’s a cartoon theme song from our youth, tenaciously hogging our limited mental hard drive space. In what is perhaps some sort of small attempt to exorcise these demonically persistent tunes from the depths of our consciousness, we’ve ranked 15 of them through the highly technical and thoroughly researched process of writing down whichever ones we could remember/find on YouTube first. Enjoy. Haha! Ungsunghero and I enjoyed this post as it sure brought back a bunch of memories. We even pointed out a few that they forgot to include: Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers and Darkwing Duck. What happened to cartoons? They use to be awesome and now, they’re just the same stupid crap over and over again.
Gallery RSS Feeds
I finally got around to figure out how the RSS feeds plug-in for Gallery2 works. I still haven’t figured out how to define rss feeds yet, but I’ve got simple feeds working for every album and item. I doubt RSS feeds for items would be of any use at the moment as it’s an RSS feed of comments, which I haven’t really enabled yet. But it came free when I defined RSS feeds for albums, so why not I thought.
First you’ll need to download the RSS plug-in from Site Admin > Plugins > Get More Plugins.
After you install and activate it, you’ll notice a new category (RSS) in your Admin Options. On the settings page, you can define the max number of items in each feed, how long before rss feed aggregators refetch (aka TTL: time to live), and some other stuff. I left all the settings to be default.
On the next tab (Simple Feed Settings), you’ll find settings for the simple feed generator. Every item and album has its own simple feed which can be reached at:
main.php?g2_view=rss.SimpleRender&g2_itemId=itemId
(replace itemId with the item’s id)
Anyway, it defaults to items in this album only, so it ignores items in sub-albums. I’ve enabled “Items in the album and its subalbums”, which is the slowest of the bunch, but I would like to be able to subscribe to my main gallery RSS feed and be able to get updates for everything.
On the wikipage for the RSS Feed plugin, they mention if you enable the RSS feed block, it’ll enable hidden page headers which will give you the RSS feed icon in most modern browsers. However, I wasn’t able to get that working even when I enabled the RSS feed block. It might be because I’m using a non-standard theme: Ajaxian.
Also, since I don’t have any specially configured RSS feeds, all my RSS feeds block just shows this message: No feeds have yet been defined
Therefore, I decided to remove that block and just manually add it to the theme. If you goto /themes/themeName/templates (replace themeName with the theme you’re using. by default, it’s matrix), you’ll find a file called theme.tpl. Open that up in your favorite text editor and add this line after your stylesheet:
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0″ href=”/main.php?g2_view=rss.SimpleRender&g2_itemId={$theme.item.id}” />
I also noticed that my favicon.ico was no longer available for my Gallery. Must’ve forgotten to move it over when I transferred my gallery to this subdomain. Anyway, that’s fixed now.