Upgrade

If portions of this site were unaccessible with strange error messages for about 45 minutes yesterday, it’s because I was upgrading WordPress, the blogging platform that this blog runs on. It’s something I don’t do very often due to the sheer complexity and (for some of you who tried to read the blog yesterday) inconvenience of the upgrade process. (I liken it to pulling out some of your own teeth and putting in new ones according to a manual. It is actually deleting some of your own files and putting in new ones according to a manual.) The process of being told to delete lots of important files but not others gives me such a sinking feeling that I only upgrade every six months or so even though running an old version of WordPress puts me at risk of known security exploits.

So I jumped up from WordPress 2.3.2 to 2.6, skipping the entire version 2.5 in the process (there was no version 2.4). With each upgrade, it’s pleasant to see the dashboard — what I see when I’m writing posts — subtly or not-so-subtly redesigned, even though it takes me a little while to get used to it. There are some new features back here that I like too. I like that WordPress shows me my word count as I’m typing this post, and how it seems to automatically save the post more often. And it gives me more fun facts at a glance, such as the following:

(The number of posts is not quite accurate; for reasons that are outside the scope of this entry, my posts from 2003 and 2004 have never been loaded into WordPress. The actual count of posts can be found on the archives page.)

I had been vaguely aware that when you mark a comment as spam in WordPress, it disappears from your blog but isn’t deleted. Thanks to my ingenuity, I never get comment spam anymore, but WordPress 2.6 alerted me to the fun fact that thousands of old, nonsensical offers for home loans, online casinos, and V1a-gr–@ were taking up room in my database. There were also a few legitimate comments that were automatically marked as spam even though I had no anti-spam plugins running at the time. Sorry, Evan and Kirsten. Your comments are posted now, six months to a year late. There may have been others I didn’t catch, so if you’ve been waiting for two years to see your comment posted, you’d better stop now.

Evan’s comment mentioned the word “porn” (a running joke from bash.org). I wonder if certain keywords or patterns trigger(ed) the automatic spam-marking of comments. Folks, why don’t you talk about porn and we can see if your comments show up?

A final note: each version of WordPress seems to be getting more and more bloated. Please, stop the bloat. I don’t want static pages, post revisions, widgets, link categories, or a media library. I don’t even use tags. I probably should, but I don’t want to tag all my old posts, and I don’t want to convert my old categories to tags because there are undoubtedly some extra tags I could assign to each of them. I could spend a week doing that. Why does anyone need categories and tags, anyway? I mean, I think I understand the subtle differences between them, but they’re pretty similar.

Another Lego-related link: Classic photographs restaged in Lego.

Something else about porn: Why ISPs’ “Stand” Against Child Porn Is Actually Not a Stand Against Child Porn.

I’ve long been wondering what web browser Richard Stallman, the iconic head of the Free Software Foundation, uses. He’s a principled man who would never use a browser that didn’t meet his definition of free software. Even Firefox isn’t free enough for him. But I was surprised to learn that Stallman does not use a web browser at all:

That’s hardcore. Now I just wonder what e-mail program he uses.

The SVG problem

I’ve been going out with my friends so much lately that any interesting things I might have had to say are now so commonplace that I can express them in pithy statements: Played baseball. Went to Outback Steakhouse. Went bowling. That was yesterday. Tonight, though, we hope to go to Miami for wild times. It’ll be a night to remember… or to forget. I wonder which one!

The other day, I woke up with a song in my head. It was very clear, as if I’d just heard it, but I couldn’t remember where I had or who it was by. I tried Googling the lyrics, but I got very few results. Then I remembered that it was a song I had recently downloaded on Jamendo. Lately, I’ve been browsing Jamendo, a community where musicians provide their Creative Commons licensed music for free download, and I’ve found some cool stuff. Here are some of my latest Jamendo picks:

• The Wavers EP by The Wavers. Four surf rock tracks that are clean, snappy, and well produced. I don’t know how you couldn’t like this stuff.
• The Great Pharaos by The Pharaos. Some more surf rock. This one’s in mono, so it’s more authentic? Worth it just for “Hava Nagilah.” Insert surfing reference and Yiddish word here!
• Here Comes Plasma Raygun! by Plasma Raygun. They’re a bunch of kids making loud sounds in a garage. Punk rock in its purest form. “I Love Her So” is my favorite track.
• Your Reality by STEEP. Is it pop? Rock? Probably both. It’s indie, but not obnoxiously so. I thought I’ve heard some punk or metal leanings in there too. “Fly with Me” is the song I had in my head when I woke up. “Like This” is also really catchy.

Here are all of my favorite albums on Jamendo.

Here’s a musing and observation for you: there are a lot of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) images on Wikipedia. Unlike traditional images, which are defined pixel by pixel, vector images are defined in terms of the lines and shapes that make them up. As such, you can scale them to enormous sizes without a loss of quality; no matter how big, a line still points in this direction and continues for that percentage of the image’s length. This is great for images of flags, little graphics of checks and X’s, and other things.

But it’s slightly worrying that people are vectorizing company logos that are supposed to be displayed only at low resolution for copyright and trademark reasons. Here’s just one example. How can an SVG be a low resolution image when you can make it infinitely high resolution? Picking a random company, I see that Exxon’s logo is an SVG that is nominally 200 x 120 pixels, yet in the article, the logo is crystal clear at 250 x 150 pixels. If these logos are only supposed to be rendered at low resolution, why don’t we just make them regular images again?

Yet another reason to use free software: Apple’s iPhone apparently has a “kill switch” that might disable the use of applications that Apple has not authorized. Nobody really knows except Apple, but the company does tell you what software you can and can’t run on your iPhone. Free software, on the other hand, is about being in full control of your computer.

Oops. The US Postal Service has issued a stamp showing the American flag with too many stripes.

This is actually a featured article on Wikipedia: “The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.”

The archives

I’m pleased to announce that the Great E-mail Scare of ’08 has been resolved. My e-mail client is again able to download e-mail from the server. It must have been a server issue in the first place.

While the scare was ongoing, I had to check my mail on the web, which is something I rarely do unless I’m traveling without my computer. Before I switched to Thunderbird in 2004, I used webmail exclusively. After I switched, the old e-mails I had saved on the webmail interface had to be left behind. There was no option for me to move them to the inbox, where Thunderbird would be able to access them. And so, they stayed. But recently, all this webmailing got me wondering whether they had added that really obvious option — and alas, they have.

So, I sifted through a few hundred e-mails from 2000 to 2004 and decided which ones I would want to move to the inbox, and thus to Thunderbird. Actually, it was pretty amazing to look back and see reflections of myself as I was between the ages of 10 and 15. I had written e-mails to people I’d forgotten about things I’ve forgotten. And I’m usually someone who remembers a lot of things.

I decided to save a lot of e-mails not for their content (some of them are extremely short) but by the very fact that they exist. For example, if someone sent me a link, it doesn’t matter if it’s dead now; it’s just interesting to look back and see that they thought I would find it interesting in the first place. But a lot of the e-mails are really interesting to read. I found e-mails my friend Kevin sent me when he spent the 2001-2002 school year in Honduras. I found the first e-mail that Daniel, The World of Stuff’s #1 fan, ever sent me. I came across lots of discussions from my friends about our band, including what to name it.

I also came across this:

(I didn’t discover the words that spell other words in rot13; I just put the sentence together.)

What’s more, I found a lot of e-mails I had saved from my time at Where’s George?. I was a big part of that community even though I was pretty young. I mean, I had a lot of enthusiasm for it, and I made a lot of friends. I no longer talk to most of them, and now I’m wondering how they’re doing. Some of them helped me out a lot. One time, I wanted to create my own web site, and this one guy recommended a free host. It actually cost a dollar, and the only interface was a Unix shell. So here he was, describing Unix commands for me years before I would ever need them again. He also taught me how to use pico. In some later e-mails, I was talking to a “Georger” about her web host, which I soon signed up with myself and still use today.

It’s pretty interesting to see how those events have shaped the way things are for me today. Now if only I had access to my first e-mail account, which I got in ’98 or ’99. But alas, it’s long gone. And yeah, I just said “alas” twice in this post. And now it’s three times.

Mailbox Map is a cool Google Maps mashup that shows you the locations (US only) of post offices, mailboxes, and UPS Stores.

The movie industry is adopting Blu-Ray as its next-generation high-definition home video format. And if the movie industry does something, it probably sucks. Find out why Blu-Ray Sucks.

Here’s an article about people who attempt to master the art and science of picking locks.

E-mail frustration

This is a tale of two e-mail accounts. I have one for personal use and one (from my university) for academic use. I use their corresponding POP accounts with Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 on Ubuntu. The server settings are identical. Thunderbird is set to download new messages whenever there are any new ones. But starting a few days ago, Thunderbird started telling me I had no new messages in my personal account even though I could log in to the web interface and see that I did. Thunderbird still connects to the server quickly and successfully, but it has been saying “There are no new messages on the server” when there are.

Since Thunderbird is getting mail from my school account just fine, I have to assume that it’s a server problem. But I’ve exhausted just about every option that I can think of. Well, I’ve run Thunderbird in safe mode, compacted my folders (hey, you never know), and deleted all the mail from the server, but Thunderbird still doesn’t acknowledge any new mail. The only thing I can really think of, except for some esoteric e-mail server bug that I’d never understand, is that the port might have changed. But port 110 (the default for POP) has worked fine for me for years, and I don’t feel like making thousands of guesses in the unlikely event that they suddenly switched ports.

Possibly useful note: I have Thunderbird set to leave old messages on the server for 90 days. The ones it has downloaded are marked as read on the web interface, while the ones it hasn’t are marked as unread (unless I read them online, in which case Thunderbird will still download them at the next opportunity). When I checked my inbox on the web yesterday, the first three or so e-mails that Thunderbird hadn’t downloaded were marked as read. The subsequent messages were all marked as unread, as they should have been. I think Thunderbird might have choked on them, but shouldn’t it be unchoked now? Is there some file in the profile that I could delete that would regenerate itself and fix everything?

I sent a support request to my e-mail provider last night, but they haven’t replied yet. They’d better soon, since I pay for their service. Maybe I should point out how much money I’ve given them for their quality service over the years.

And yes, I still put the hyphen in “e-mail.” Always.

[Edit Tue Aug 5, 2008 7:52 UTC -5: This problem has fixed itself, lending further evidence that it was an issue with the server. I haven't received a reply from my mail provider.]

Speaking of problems, I tried the pidgin-facebookchat plugin for the Pidgin IM client. It allows you to use the Facebook chat feature from within Pidgin. It was pretty cool except that you couldn’t get your whole buddy list (friends list) at once; they would simply appear as they signed on. And if you deleted someone from your buddy list, it would defriend that person on Facebook. I found that one out the hard way. Imagine my surprise when I eventually discovered that I had 90 friends missing. Luckily, I was able to add them back quickly, and I think some of them didn’t even know what happened.

The price of first-class postage in the US is going up more and more often these days, and the USPS claims that they’re just following inflation. It turns out that they’re right. Here’s a chart of the US first-class postage rate from 1885 to 2008, adjusted for inflation. Although the nominal cost of a stamp has more than doubled since 1981, the actual cost in 2008 dollars has remained between $0.40 and $0.45. By comparison, it has varied between $0.20 and over $0.50 in the past.

Typographers are responsible for making the fonts that we see all around us in our daily lives. Some guy wondered: what does a typographers’ handwriting look like? Of the typographers he asked, all have pretty cool handwriting. One guy’s handwriting looks like a familiar font because he made a font out of his handwriting.

We’re number one!

May, June, and July have come and gone. Now it’s August. But I’d never know it if I hadn’t been looking at calendars and things. My friends and I have been carrying on as usual. Yesterday, we played some baseball until rain forced us off the field. We went to Nick’s house and watched Starship Troopers, had dinner at Friday’s, and hung out at Pompano Beach for a while. As it got dark, we were on the pier, which, unlike Deerfield Beach’s, is free to get on. Later we went to one of the lifeguard stations and shot the breeze for a while. Fun stuff.

I dressed for baseball yesterday, so I needed a light shirt that would be comfortable to wear for a few hours in the sun. But I was too ashamed to wear my ash gray University of Florida t-shirt in light of the announcement that UF is the #1 party school in the nation. That’s according to a recent survey of 120,000 American college students conducted by the Princeton Review. UF was also ranked (from least to most embarrassing): #13 Best Career/Job Placement Services, #7 Best College Newspaper, #6 Everyone Plays Intramural Sports, #4 Best Athletic Facilities, #1 Students Pack the Stadiums, #10 Dorms Like Dungeons, #2 Jock Schools, #10 Major Frat and Sorority Scene, #7 Lots of Beer, #17 Lots of Hard Liquor, and finally, #1 Students Study the Least.

From my limited experience, UF students do party a lot, so the #1 ranking is probably deserved. This past year, I knew some people who could talk about nothing but the last party they went to (which was usually the night before), the people who hosted it, who was there, exactly how drunk they got at it, the misery of having to be the designated driver, and how they almost threw up or blacked out and woke up in someone’s dorm room. This was usually followed by a discussion about how early they had to get up the next morning for class or how late they slept in while skipping class. And these people lived in the honors dorm.

If anything surprises me, though, it’s that UF has the 7th favorite college newspaper (presumably the formerly official Alligator). I thought I was the only person who liked the Alligator. Everyone I know hates it and doesn’t read it. The rest don’t really come as a shock… except maybe the Lots of Beer one. I thought my cohorts tended to prefer the classier stuff. Oh well. I bet the university will try to avoid a repeat of the more dubious rankings by cracking down even further on underage drinking and other such activities. They’ll have nothing to worry about from me, but I would do well to study more next year.

Here are 30 Most Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth. They look nice.

Wired reports that Volkswagen is going to be making a 235-MPG car. But I bet it’ll only get 200 MPG in real life. You know how cars are.

If you use BitTorrent, you might find this interesting. Glasnost is a test to see if your ISP is manipulating BitTorrent traffic. The test isn’t perfect, but it seems that AT&T isn’t messing around too much with me.