Seeking validation

I have a web site. (No, wait, I know that's really obvious. There's more.) I also run several other web sites as a job. At work, I spend a lot of time making sure that the sites adhere to web standards by using HTML tags properly and the like. On my personal site, not so much. I don't check it quite as compulsively, and for a long time I was content for this site to be invalid XHTML due to the Creative Commons licensing bit at the bottom.

Well, no more. I actually changed each page's doctype from XHTML 1.0 Strict to XHTML + RDFa 1.0 so that each page would validate. But there was more to it than that. By historical accident, the doctype and head tag for each page was on the page itself rather than in the header file common to all pages, so I had to create a new header file and update almost every page on the site to use it. At the same time, I decided to switch each page's character encoding to UTF-8 wherever feasible (most were ISO-8859-1). The blog posts in WordPress (all posts since 2005) remain ISO-8859-1; that's a task for another day.

Among the dozens of pages I had to update were the blog archives for 2003 and 2004. Digging back through my old (X)HTML, I found some interesting things. For example, a November 2004 post titled "Is Blogging Old Hat?" had a paragraph tag that wasn't closed. The interesting part is that the sentence contained in the paragraph wasn't even finished:

TWoS can be found on the first page of the search results, which just goes to show you

Show you what? Such a cliffhanger! I thought that this error might have been introduced by a later edit to the page, but the Wayback Machine's archived version from a week after the post was written also contains the error. (If for nothing else, check it out to see what the site looked like back then.) Anyway, I just closed the tag. I wasn't making editorial changes, after all. As much as I would like not to have bandied about phrases like "old hat," it just wouldn't be right.

An infographic about the Internet: The State of the Internet. (Via J-Walk Blog)

30 Bizarre Examples of Defacing Money. There are a lot of nerdy references there; cool points for not understanding them. Also, I have to point out that it must be more fun to deface British money because the Queen is, like, alive and stuff. (Via The Presurfer)

And finally, find out what it was like to be Helen Keller with the online Helen Keller Simulator.

The great debate

My university brings a lot of notable speakers to campus every year, although lately it seems that they've been lacking in the star-power department. I don't usually bother to see speakers I've never heard of, so I haven't been to many speaking engagements in a while.

But on Monday, I found out from an Alligator opinion column that Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza would be participating in a debate called "The Great Religion Debate" on Tuesday night. As soon as I read about it, I knew I had to go.

Okay, I hadn't heard of Dinesh D'Souza, but I had heard of Christopher Hitchens. Maybe you've heard of his book, God Is Not Great. Just by the title, you can tell which side he was on. And maybe by the fact that I had heard of him.

On Tuesday evening, my friend Mark and I went to the debate. We were a little late because we had come from Free Culture's last meeting of the semester, but fortunately, some of Mark's friends were saving seats for us. Needless to say, we were able to get tickets just fine, even though the place was pretty packed.

The moderator was a UF professor who asked extremely long questions and then gave each speaker a little bit of time to answer. I was familiar with some of the arguments they made for and against religion and gods' existence. D'Souza was a relatively engaging speaker, which made him sound fairly convincing in spite of all the untruths and logical fallacies he trotted out.

Hitchens offered plenty of witty remarks, though, and some of his comments inspired applause from the audience. In one such remark, he characterized Vatican City as a fiefdom, carved out by an agreement with a fascist dictator, that was being used to shelter child-rapists from justice. Incidentally, my mental applause-o-meter indicated that more people agreed with him than with D'Souza.

The most interesting part was the Q-and-A session at the end. Most of the audience's questions were pretty simple, and the debaters provided short answers. One guy, however, literally referred to Hitchens as Satan, provoking shouting and jeers from the rest of the audience. Bad memories suddenly came back to me, but things calmed down after a minute.

Blake, the president of Gator Freethought, asked each debater what it would take for him to switch to the other side. I believe Hitchens' answer was "Rabbit bones in the Precambrian layer," and D'Souza seemed to dodge the question.

During the debate, Hitchens mentioned that he and D'Souza had been discussing a certain topic over dinner beforehand, and they also mentioned how they would be debating at Notre Dame (where, I assume, D'Souza would be the audience's favorite) the next day. I thought it was pretty interesting that two people who disagree on so many things could be touring together and debating night after night while still being able have dinner together. That's professionalism.

For more quotes and a pretty picture, see the Alligator's article about the debate.

In San Francisco: humorous signs from a counter-protest of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church.

News from Canada: Students Failing Because of Twitter, Texting. Speaking of which, you can now follow The World of Stuff on Twitter!!

Tired of your big, evil bank doing evil things with your hard-earned money? Then stop doing business with them. Duh! Move Your Money is a campaign urging people to switch to local banks and credit unions. (Via The Consumerist)

Installapalooza

I talked about my Thursday, but I didn't get a chance to mention my weekend yet. It was... interesting.

For many college students, the weekend begins on Thursday, and the people living in the apartment below me are no exception. They had a party on Thursday night. I don't mind if people have parties, but I do mind if said parties are extremely loud and preventing me from going to sleep. Usually I go downstairs with my roommate Andy and we ask them to turn the music down, but this time, Andy volunteered to go by himself. He didn't come back; he had joined the party.

On Friday night, there was another loud party downstairs. A normal person probably would have been able to sleep through it, but I have a hard time getting to sleep unless it's quiet. Still, I thought I should try. I did sleep for a little while, but the noise woke me up at 4:30 in the morning. That's when I called the police.

Over the next hour or so, the noise still didn't go away. At 6:00, I went downstairs and told one of the guys that if they didn't turn the music down, I would call the police. He asked if I already had, so presumably some officers had paid them a visit. I said I hadn't called, and he said that that the party was ending anyway. A half an hour later, the music stopped, and I instantly went to sleep.

I probably won't call the police again. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now they probably know that I did it, and I don't want them to be mad at me. There are more of them than me, after all, and they know where I live.

I always wake up early, even if I go to bed very late, so I wasn't worried about oversleeping. Imagine my surprise when I woke up well-rested at 11:15 in the morning. I was supposed to be on campus at 11:30 for a Linux installfest!

Technically, I didn't quite oversleep, but I came very close to it. The only time I actually did oversleep was about a year and a half ago when I was supposed to be giving a presentation for a class. Why do I only oversleep (or almost oversleep) when I have to do something important? Well, I guess if it's not important, then you're not really oversleeping.

My friend Mark, who was going to give me a ride to campus, had been waiting outside for a few minutes. I got ready as fast as I could, and we weren't too late. The installfest actually went pretty well, and we had a pretty good turnout. I helped a guy dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows, and Mark got a guy's graphics driver working. There was also a lot of food, and we got to take home what was left over.

Know Your Meme is indispensable. If you've seen the one with the old-fashioned painting of a guy striking a non-old-fashioned pose and saying things like "It feels most outstandingly pleasant to be involved in gang-related activities," the site explains what that's all about. (Via waxy.org)

British humor: How to Report the News, presented in the style of a news report. (Via waxy.org)

Do you use Last.fm? HacKey will show you the musical keys of your favorite songs. Apparently a whole 18% of my favorite songs are in B major, which I thought wasn't a common key in popular music (well, it's hard to play on the guitar). (Via waxy.org)

Happy birthday, The World of Stuff

I've become one of them.

How many people do you think would be less likely to read a particular blog if they couldn't get e-mail notifications of new posts? Probably not that many, right? Well, since I introduced e-mail notifications at the beginning of last year, I've accumulated 20 e-mail subscribers.

Now, how many people would be less likely to read that blog if they couldn't be notified of new posts on Twitter? Probably more than the e-mail people, I would say. Or at least as many, anyway. Twitter is, like, the biggest thing in the world right now.

I've resisted it for so long, but in the end, the desire for not-so-shameless self-promotion won out. TWoS is now on Twitter. Well, more properly, I'm on Twitter (words I thought I'd never say), and I'll be tweeting (more words I thought I'd never say) whenever there's a new post. Twitter etiquette dictates that I do more than just that, so I'll probably join in on the collective conversation as well. My hope is that this will introduce new readers to the blog.

I predict that there will be three main reactions to this announcement. Some of you will be disgusted. Some of you (mostly people I don't know in real life) will be overjoyed. And the rest of you won't care one way or the other. That's okay. It's just another way for you to creep on me, and I promise I won't mention Twitter too much here.

Consider the whole thing experimental for now, but I think it's a good way to celebrate TWoS's seventh birthday, which is today. Here's the link: @theworldofstuff.

In this interview, an anonymous Facebook employee gives insight on the inner workings of Facebook.

The BBC talks to people who never forget a face.

Yet another list: 16 Things You Never Knew About the Automobile. (Via The Presurfer)

Behind the screens

Well, April is upon us, and you know what that means: Lifeapalooza!

Get Carded's annual organ donation awareness concert was on Thursday night, and unlike in previous years, I had an exam at the same time and couldn't help out for most of it. All I had time to do was set up and clean up. Go figure. But I was around to witness us reaching our goal of signing up 50 organ donors. At least, I think we made it. If not, we were very close.

My exam was the crucial second exam in my accounting class. (I'm taking it for my business minor.) To give you an idea of what my accounting class is like: during the first week of class, the TA asked us, "How many of you have heard this class is hard?" Most people raised their hand; I didn't.

Back to Thursday. I was setting up for Lifeapalooza around dusk, when the insects come out to play. Some of them decided to bite my face, and then they decided to bite my face some more. So I took a two-hour exam with an itchy face. After the exam, I needed to show my student ID to one of the proctors, so I shoved my hand into my pocket, opening a cut on my finger and causing it to bleed profusely. Despite those bad omens, I did better than I thought I would on the exam, and a B remains within sight. My weekend has also been pretty mixed, but I'll get to that in a future post.

Right now, I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that I just upgraded WordPress, including my database and several of my plugins. If you notice that any aspect of the blog is broken, please contact me right away.

I've been using WordPress for over five years now, but I've always hated upgrading, so I rarely do it. The official instructions tell you which files to delete and which ones not to delete, but I always feel like I'm going to accidentally delete something important. It wouldn't be a big deal because I always back my stuff up before upgrading, but still, I just don't like it. It's awkward and painful. I liken it to pulling out your own teeth. Not that I've done that, of course.

But if upgrading WordPress the regular way is like pulling out your teeth, then upgrading with Subversion is like having a sexy dentist cart out the laughing gas and take care of everything for you. Essentially, Subversion allows you to download all the updated files with a single command. Pretty sweet. Hopefully now I won't be as lazy about upgrading.

For a long time, I had some measures in place that eliminated automated comment spam but let manually posted spam right through. The manual spam was never a very big problem until recently, so I have some new anti-spam measures that you should also be aware of. For years, I've been too lazy or paranoid to install Akismet, the premier anti-spam plugin for WordPress. Well, I've finally installed it, but I'm not using it the way it's normally used.

Normally, Akismet checks an incoming comment against its database and puts it in the blog's spam queue if it thinks the comment is spam. That's all fine and good, but I get dozens if not hundreds of spam comments every day, and I'm not going to sift through them to find false positives. Fortunately, I've discovered a helper plugin called Conditional CAPTCHA. Now, if Akismet thinks a comment is spam, the submitter will be asked to fill in a simple CAPTCHA. If it's filled in correctly, the comment proceeds to the spam queue, where I can approve or reject it. If not, it is summarily deleted.

With these two plugins working together, automated comment spam is still zapped instantly because Akismet generally recognizes it as such and because robots can't (or don't) solve the CAPTCHA. The spam queue will hold what we might call false negatives (comment spam posted by beings intelligent enough to solve a CAPTCHA) and false positives (the hopefully very few legitimate comments that Akismet thinks is spam). Of course, true negatives (i.e., normal comments) will be merrily allowed through as always. Nothing is different about that.

What's the advantage of all this, you ask? Now, the blog has a defense against both automated and manual comment spam (as long as Akismet can recognize it, which it almost always does). Also, when I mark comments as spam or not spam, the Akismet system learns from its mistakes. Pretty cool. I can teach it that anyone who violates my plainly stated no-advertising policy is a spammer, so don't even think about linking to your irrelevant web site where you sell stuff, or you could be blackballed from other blogs too.

By the way, my roommate Andy suggested the title of this post. Thanks, And-Man.

Just one link, since this is getting pretty long. I don't normally like so-called 8-bit music, but MOON8 is pretty cool. It's what Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon would sound like on an original Nintendo. (Via waxy.org)

April is the cruelest month

I should be studying now. I have an exam tomorrow. I also have homework due tomorrow, Get Carded's Lifeapalaooza tomorrow, homework due Friday, a Linux installfest on Saturday, a project somewhere else out on the horizon, and who knows what else I'm forgetting. It's been a busy week, and April is going to be a busy month as the spring semester comes to an end.

Oh yeah, and I get to pick my classes on Monday. Apparently my peers all get to pick their classes today or thereabouts, but since I don't have as many credit hours as most of them, I can't register for classes as early. It's not fair, I know... or is it? It probably is. I can't wait to catch up on my credits over the summer so I can register for next spring's classes relatively early. Well, we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Some of the blogs I read have open threads periodically (or all the damn time). I find them kind of annoying, probably because I don't feel like I'd fit in in a discussion with the rest of the commenters. The World of Stuff, I think, is different. I think you'd all get along with each other, and I don't often abdicate my responsibilities as a blogger by declaring open threads. The circumstances are extenuating this time. That accounting exam won't take itself.

Oh, and The World of Stuff's birthday is on April 6. Happy almost birthday, The World of Stuff!

Crystal blue persuasion

I've been an avowed Firefox user since 2004, and I intend to stay that way. But I feel constant pressure from all sides to adopt or at least try out Google Chrome as my browser. Reasons for trying it include that it's fast and that it's by Google. That's about it.

First of all, I don't get all the Google idolatry. It's just as bad as the hype surrounding Apple's products. (These two companies could make the bubonic plague trendy and popular.) Within days of Chrome's release, it had accumulated more users than Opera had managed to scrounge up in 12 years. No, I don't have a citation for that, but I remember reading it somewhere. In any case, Chrome is now the third-most popular browser out there.

I also don't like the user interface. It probably does make sense to have the tabs above the address bar, but they shouldn't be where the title of the window is supposed to be. An application's look and feel should be consistent with that of the operating system on which it runs; anything else is the result of either ignorance or sheer arrogance. Firefox can fit right in with GNOME and other Linux environments.

Google Chrome now supports extensions, a feature that Firefox users had been asking for. I depend on a lot of extensions (currently about 30) to make my browsing more convenient, and I doubt that most of them have been implemented for Chrome. In particular, NoScript, which no web surfer (has anyone said that in the past ten years?) should be without, cannot currently be made to work on Chrome.

Finally, there are privacy issues. I use Google for searching the web, but I don't want to trust one company with that and my browser, e-mail, news, RSS feeds, documents, photos, videos, DNS service, operating system, cell phone, voicemail, web hosting, instant messaging, social networking, electricity, advertising, stats tracking, and Internet connection. And that's just what I could think of off the top of my head. It's just too much for one business to potentially know about me.

Advantages of Chrome over Firefox include faster JavaScript performance and keeping separate processes for separate tabs, but Firefox developers are working on those features.

TinyOgg converts Flash-based videos to the patent-free Ogg format.

For my fellow Beatles fanatics: Charting the Beatles, a series of infographics relating to the Beatles' music and career. (Via J-Walk Blog)

More fun uses of Google's search suggestions: What boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google. (waxy.org)

What to say, what not to say

Yeah, so I've been pretty busy. I know, I tend to start a lot of posts with that, but it is true. Sometimes I actually have (gasp) homework.

But in between homework sessions, there's this little thing called life, and things do happen to me. Some of them are interesting or even blogworthy. Those things often end up here in the blog. Often, but not always.

As I get older and more people I know are aware of my blog, I feel that there are more things I can't say.

"What?!" you ask. "You just wrote a five-part series detailing every waking hour you spent with your special friend Kate. You kissed and told. You even mentioned that you cried."

Okay, first of all, crying is okay sometimes, especially if it's one's party and one wants to. Second of all, more things happened than I mentioned in my blog posts, either because I momentarily forgot about them (for example, Kate and I played some eight-ball at the student union one day—I forget which day it was, but I remember the TVs were all tuned to sports channels, which were announcing the news of Lane Kiffin's move to USC) or because they just aren't things I want to share with the world. You know?

You've probably heard about bloggers who got fired from their jobs because of something they said on their blog. It's kind of like that as well. I don't want to say anything that will make me look bad to potential employers (although I think I kind of have already, though I won't link to any examples for obvious reasons), and once I get a full-time job, I probably won't mention it very much as a precaution. It might also be very boring as well.

Also, have a look at the archives for September 2003, won't you? There are a lot of minutiae in there. I don't bother too much with the little things about my day anymore. Maybe they no longer interest me, but I think it's mainly because I just tend toward longer, less frequent blog posts. I guess I prefer them that way because I want each of them to have a lot of substance. I want them to really be good reading.

What brought this about? My friend Andy recently mentioned in his new blog that he admired my "ability to censor [my]self enough so that [my] blog is not just random thoughts" but also "to be open enough so that [my] blog is interesting." My initial reaction was: He doesn't know the half of it! Boy, do I ever censor myself. I probably censor myself more than not... whatever that means. Or something like that.

What really brought this about was that last night I had a dream that one of my female friends was smooching me. I wanted to talk about it with someone to try to see what it meant, but how best to go about that? I certainly wouldn't mention it to the girl herself. (Creep-a-leepy.) And, of course, I ruled out the blog as well. (Sort of.) I ended up talking about it with Andy.

There are many reasons for me not to mention certain things here, but if they're really interesting, I try to remove any sensitive details (see the previous paragraph for an example). A pretty good story is better than none at all, and you deserve a good story.

Here's a handy chart showing How the Health Care Overhaul Could Affect You. (Via Lifehacker)

The Bouba/Kiki effect suggests that people might not attach sounds to shapes arbitrarily. Interesting stuff.

Failure Magazine (yes, really) presents a three-part series: Quirkiest Basketball Failures, Parts One, Two, and Three. Related: quirky football injuries.

The server post

Well, spring break is history, and now it's back to the grind. I've been meaning to mention this for a while, so here goes.

The weekend after Kate left, I experienced a strange emotion called "boredom." I was thinking about how I was starting to rely increasingly on my external hard drive, and I was also thinking about how my sister and I both use said hard drive for backups. I was the keeper of the drive, so I could make a backup whenever I wanted, but my sister could only make a backup when I brought the hard drive to her. She had made her last backup in August.

On a whim, I decided to see if I could set up an SSH server on my computer so my sister could access the hard drive from her apartment. I figured it would be pretty simple because we both use Unix-like operating systems (yes, Mac OS X and Ubuntu are cousins). I installed the openssh-server package, and that was that. (Ubuntu's wiki page was a good introduction.)

I made some tweaks to improve security, such as using a non-standard port (I know, security through obscurity is bad, but not if you also have better security) and disabling password-based authentication in favor of key files. SSH uses public and private keys, similar to PGP in the scheme I've described previously. Essentially, in order to log in, you have to have a copy of a key file that has been approved by the owner of the server. Your key itself can be encrypted, with a password used to decrypt it. This is useful because my sister doesn't have to know my password to log in; she just has to know the password for her key.

Since my IP address changes from time to time, I decided to give my server a name that would be consistent and easier to remember. I signed up for a free account at DynDNS.com and got a subdomain of the form example.dyndns.org. (I won't say what it actually is. Security through obscurity...) Then I installed and configured the ddclient package, which contacts DynDNS periodically to say, "Hey, I'm at IP address such-and-such. Point example.dyndns.org to it." So, essentially, the subdomain becomes a synonym for my computer.

I didn't realize how arcane all this stuff was until I was on the phone with my sister trying to get her to log in. She's not dumb; I just had a hard time explaining how Unix command-line applications work in one marathon session. (Try doing it over the phone as well.) After about an hour, she had a key and was backing up her stuff on the external hard drive on my desk. Since then, we've performed another backup successfully. I'll describe the backup scheme in a future post.

But that's not all an SSH server is good for. Port forwarding makes a lot of fun things possible! Since setting up the server, I've used my computer as a web proxy, which might come in handy sometime. I've also installed a VNC server so I can view and control my desktop from other computers. Ubuntu's wiki has some handy information on how to set up things like that. I could also cover them in a future post if you're really interested (I can tell you are!).

It's worth noting that if you're using key-based authentication on your server and you want to use PuTTY to connect to it, you'll have to convert your private key to PuTTY's format.

For today's first link, I'd like to showcase my friend and roommate Andy's new blog, Seek the Sooth. For you polyglots, Andy is also blogging in Esperanto and Spanish! I'm looking forward to reading your posts, Andy, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

I should start using this video to help explain why I'm afraid of Google. (Via The Presurfer)

I'm too young to remember some of these, but you might find the article interesting: The Twelve Most Tarnished Brands in Tech.

I don't get e-mail

After spending the weekend at my grandparents' house to celebrate my mom's birthday, I am home. Waiting for me here was a package my friend Natasha sent me for Christmas. It came back to her when she sent it the first time, so she sent it again, and it arrived a couple of weeks ago. She got me some cool Vancouver 2010 swag (a sweater and a planner), some of her favorite pens, and some notebooks reppin' her college. It's too bad that they came so late, but I'm glad they didn't get lost in the mail.

Speaking of things getting lost in the mail, my current e-mail setup is not working, and I'm tired of it.

My personal e-mail account is one that I've been using for about 10 years now. Last year (actually, two years ago... jeez, it seems like last year), I had e-mail forwarding set up at my web host so that I could have a permanent and easy-to-remember address at my own domain name. That's all fine and good, but my e-mail provider's spam filters often bounce messages back to my web host, where they're kept in a "spam quarantine" for me to view and delete.

By not checking my spam quarantine religiously, I've missed out on correspondence from long-lost relatives, notifications from web sites, e-mail newsletters, plane ticket receipts that I needed to print out, and more. My e-mail provider thinks all of this is spam (probably in part because it's been forwarded through another server), and I don't have control over their spam filters... even though I'm paying $20 a year for their service. It's time for change.

I'd like to switch to an e-mail provider that meets the following requirements:

• I must be able to use my domain name with their service.
• Spam filtering must be very accurate, or I must be able to fine-tune it (or turn it off altogether).
• Must be cheaper than my current e-mail and forwarding costs of about $27 per year.
• Must have a POP server. (I prefer it to IMAP. I know, I'm a weirdo.)
• Not Google. (They already know what I search for; that's enough for them.)
• Not Microsoft. (I'm basically against everything they stand for.)
• Not my ISP. (I travel back and forth between home and school, ISPs get swallowed up by bigger ISPs, etc.)

I've come across a service that fits all of these requirements: it's Lavabit, which I think I had previously heard of (it used to be called Nerdshack). It was founded as a reaction to Google including targeted advertisements in Gmail. Or, as they put it on their history page, they "felt it was possible to create an e-mail service that was fast, reliable, feature rich and didn't achieve profitability by prostituting its user base to marketers." Their freedom-loving, no-nonsense philosophy is similar to my web host's. I like it.

Other perks are that they have an SMTP server; allow SSL connections to their POP, IMAP, and SMTP servers, as well as their webmail interface; and encrypt your e-mail on their servers if you have a paid account. I would have to have a paid account; they said I would have to have a $16/year personal account or a business account if I wanted to use my own domain name with their service. It's more than I'd like to pay, but it's less than I'm paying now.

I've been researching them online, and there are some criticisms of their service. Some people claimed that their support was limited. I can live with that, I guess. I think the benefits outweigh the costs. Has anyone else used their service? I'd be interested in hearing what people think. Unless somebody has a better suggestion, I'll probably sign up with Lavabit in a few days.

What do blind people see? The answer is more complicated than you might think, and there's hope for people with certain types of blindness. (Via The Presurfer)

In the past, I've considered using Amazon's online music store, but their downloader (which is required to get discounts on buying whole albums) is not free software. Now there's pymazon, a free replacement, so I might reconsider.

Back in the day, Soviet scientists tried to domesticate foxes. After 10 generations, the foxes were not only completely docile but also had colorings not seen in the wild. Humans may have domesticated dogs just as quickly.