The great eight

The World of Stuff is 8 years old today! Holy crap. I know some people who aren’t even 8 years old. Actually, I think I don’t.

At this juncture, I’d like to give you a quick update on yours truly. As I alluded to earlier, I’m bogged down with schoolwork, but it’ll all be over soon. The last day of classes is two weeks from today, and I actually don’t have any exams during exam week! Finally!

Mostly I’ve been working on my senior project. The phrase “senior project” has been on my mind so much, in fact, that it’s starting to become hilarious. It’s something about the letter “R,” I think. I had the same problem once when I was working with MATLAB. varargin. Say it a hundred times, and you’ll get what I mean.

When I’m done with my education and they’ve found someone to replace me at work, I’ll have some more time to write about what’s been going on (and what went on during winter break—I know I’m really far behind on that!). And as I move to Seattle and start my career, I’m sure I’ll have a whole lot to say.

One more thing: I haven’t done away with my trademark “Links at the End of the Post.” It just so happens that 7 out of my last 8 posts have been what I call “11:59 posts.” I like to shove my posts out the door by midnight. I know you’ve been missing the links, so here are a few to keep you busy:

Young People on Car Ownership: Meh. That describes me pretty well.

If the most populous countries had the greatest area, China would be the size of Russia, India would be the size of Canada, the US would be the size of itself, and so on down the list. Here’s a map that illustrates that idea. It really gives you a sense of the relative populations of different countries. (Via The Presurfer)

New layout preview

A few months ago, as my boss was talking to me about the importance of having a good resume, he made an offhand remark that resonated with me: If I’m to get a career in web development (or anything computer-related, I guess), then my web site should be my portfolio.

I took a look at my layout, with its wannabe-Web-2.0 stripes and “beta?” badge thing that already looked outmoded when it got off the drawing board, and decided that the whole thing wasn’t really professional enough to be taken seriously. I decided it was time for a redesign.

I’ve been working on a new layout on and off since then, and in my eyes, it’s pretty much done. It just has some rough edges that need be smoothed out. And, rather than springing it on you as a surprise, I’m going to let you have a sneak peek. See that link on the top of the page that says “Switch”? Click that. (You’ll have to enable cookies in your browser. If you don’t know what that means, you needn’t worry.)

So, here’s a brief tour of the new layout:

The first thing you’ll probably notice is the collection of colored squares in the upper-right hand corner. Hate the colors? Reload the page! You’ll almost certainly never get that combination again because the colors are picked at random on each page load. I think you’ll find that randomness usually produces beautiful results.

The new layout will stretch to fit your browser window. There’s a maximum width, though, so if your screen resolution is really high, the page won’t get ridiculously wide. There’s also a minimum width for obvious reasons, but most people shouldn’t encounter that.

On the right, in addition to the usual old stuff, you’ll see my latest tweet (excluding blog post announcements). Basically, this is to get you to follow me on Twitter—not gonna lie. It is also useful if you’re Twitter-averse but still want to keep track of my (formerly figurative, now literal) blog marginalia.

If you’re using the latest version of your browser, you should see everything in the wonderful typeface Linux Libertine. The previous layout uses three different fonts, so I thought I’d consolidate them down to a single one this time, and an elegant one at that.

Speaking of browsers: In the course of designing this iteration of The World of Stuff, I’ve come to a new philosophy. I’m no longer trying to make each page look the same in all commonly-used browsers. Internet Explorer 7 (released in 2006) and 6 (2001!), which are still widely used by certain swaths of the web population, have been holding back the web for far too long as web designers have had to deal with their bugs and their lack of support for useful new features. From here on out, if I want to include an embellishment that superseded browsers don’t support, then I’ll include it as a reward for people who upgrade their stuff.

For the new layout, this means including a row of asterisks after each post even though IE7 won’t display it. In fact, IE8 doesn’t either, but with IE9 just around the corner, I expect everyone to upgrade soon. I know it’s an unrealistic assumption since IE is widely used by businesses, but I don’t care. It may seem unfair to single out IE users in this discussion, but they’re far and away the least diligent when it comes to upgrading. I just want to keep people who fail to update their software from spoiling everyone else’s fun.

As I said, there are still some things I would like to work on. Many of them are formatting cock-ups that have come from years of assuming that paragraphs aren’t indented and have spaces between them. I’m still not sure what I want to do about those, but I’d appreciate your comments and suggestions about anything and everything.

Aaaand here’s a montage of security camera footage showing trucks crashing into an underpass. For the metric people, 11 feet, 8 inches is about 3.5 meters. (Via The Presurfer)

Seven links

I don’t usually participate in these memes, but I thought I’d take the 7 Link Challenge (thanks, Kirsten). These answers aren’t necessarily authoritative since I’ve written over a thousand posts and can’t be bothered to go back and look at all of them except in special circumstances.

1. Your first post: The World of Stuff Opens, April 6, 2003.
2. A post you enjoyed writing the most: [sic]. You could say I started writing this one in junior high, when I would keep track of my teachers’ many slips of the tongue. In the post, I listed some of my favorites.
3. A post which had a great discussion: Tough one. We usually don’t have those around here. The discussion on Brain Damage went on for a while, though.
4. A post on someone else’s blog that you wish you’d written: That would have to be The Ultimate “0.999… = 1″ Guide over at Greatplay.net.
5. Your most helpful post: My Sony DSC-H55 Digital Camera Review seems to have helped a fair number of people so far.
6. A post with a title that you are proud of: Man, what post title am I not proud of? Half the time they’re clever as hell. Sometimes I think of them ages in advance. I was going through some old titles, and this one made me chuckle: A Turtle (And Also the Meaning of Life).
7. A post you wish more people had read: Any post with no comments. Seriously, I think if my every post generated a huge discussion, it would compel me to write more often. Not that I don’t write a lot, but I used to write more often than I do now. One post I like that seemed to go under everyone’s radar was By the Way… It brings back a lot of memories for me.

I guess this post should be called “Nine Links” because here are TWO MORE LINKS!!

Here are some Useless Fliers. (Via waxy.org)

Here’s a pretty extensive article about the guy Nintendo named Mario after.

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.

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!

What TWoS Means to Me

While I’m busy entertaining a guest, Peter Hurford satiates your hunger for stuff with this site’s first guest post in two and a half years.

Hi! I’m Peter Hurford. I run the amazing website Greatplay.net, which Jordon sometimes links to — for example in this post and then in this post, and in that fancy blogroll in the sidebar.

I actually asked Jordon to let me guest post because I was bored, but apparently he is — quote — “not sure when [he'll] have time to write a post next”. So you ended up with me or nothing. And I’m hoping you prefer me over nothing. Feel free to compare me to the other guest posts if you want to know how I’m doing.

Actually, that was more of a demand. You WILL prefer me over nothing. I’m hoping the lack of any serious competition (from Jordon during this week, not from the other guest posts) will get my demand off the ground.

Anyways, the fact is that I like The World of Stuff a lot, and it really motivated me to bring my own blog off the ground. I vaguely remember stumbling upon it because of The Ultimate Cool Characters back in 2005ish, about 2 or 3 tWoS web redesigns ago. I had my own Greatplay.net back then and it was about 50% more personal and 75% less updated than it is now.

I got involved with The World of Stuff directly when I asked for a link exchange, back when friendly link exchanges were considered “cool”. I ended up in his sidebar (which now contains many blogs), and he ended up in mine (which used to contain two blogs, and now doesn’t exist.) For some reason, Greatplay.net was then doing very well traffic-wise (something that I can’t seem to recapture) while tWoS ended up staying about even. Jordon then asked me for advice! (Of course, today, the tables are turned.)

In 2007, I was behind in technology in keeping up with TWoS. Jordon had this cool thing called PLAPS which, while no longer defined on the site anywhere (as far as I can tell) used to be a script that would allow you to write posts ahead of time and then suspend them, scheduling them to not appear to the public until later. This allowed one to develop content on a regular schedule while secretly writing nearly everything on weekends, or seem to post while secretly on vacation. I wanted to try to use PLAPs. But by then, Jordon had already discovered WordPress, something I had never heard of!

I then sat around for some more years and then relaunched my site with WordPress on March 2009, more or less the way it is now. For those that don’t know, WordPress is a blogging software that lets you run a blog on your site without having to script the entire system by yourself (which would take weeks). I also got the idea for Ask Jordon, pretty much stolen, but with a nice link on my site. I, however, gave Jordon the idea of “Jordon Asks You” (except he gave it the cool Russian Reversal name). So I guess it’s pretty much even, assuming “Jordon Asks You” still ran, which it does not.

But the end of the story is that if it wasn’t for Jordon, I probably would never have WordPress, I would never have Ask Peter, and I would likely never have the blog I have today.

Therefore, I blame Jordon entirely for my lack of success.

And you can blame Jordon for the existence of this post.

Thank you.

The club scene

As I took a seat in one of my classes today, the guy next to me said, “World of Stuff?”

He explained that he’d been to this web site and wanted to freak me out by randomly mentioning it. I asked how he had heard of it, and he said he couldn’t remember, but he remembered my face, presumably from the About Me page.

I wish that happened more often. Thanks, random dude!

As this school year has been getting up to speed, student organizations that have been dormant over the summer are springing back to life. I’m active in several organizations, so this means exciting haps for me.

Yesterday, I handed out flyers for Get Carded on campus. Actually, we weren’t handing them out as much as going into dorms and putting them in residents’ boxes. Not the mailboxes, but they also have these, like… cubbies. Yeah. They have cubbies. It was weird going to campus on a Sunday and seeing people mulling around because for two years, I was mulling around with them. In fact, one of the dorms I went to was Hume Hall, the dorm where I lived for two years. From what I saw, it’s the same as it was a few months ago, when I last lived there.

Florida Free Culture, of which I’m now the secretary, is getting into full swing as well. There’s already been an organizational meeting, during which many events were planned or at least discussed. Coming up soon are the Student Organization Fair, at which FFC will be present, and Free Your PC, our signature event during which we install antivirus software and free software on students’ computers.

And then there’s my own club, the Esperanto Club. Ah, yes. I’m hoping to have an even better year than last year, which should be pretty easy. For our first meeting, Andy and I will be talking not only about Esperanto but also about how we used it throughout our epic trip to Europe this summer. If we can drum up enough publicity to attract people who’ll want to hear about our amazing story and this exciting language, this year will definitely be a success.

Here’s an awesome time-lapse video that tracks the sun around the sky for a week near one of the poles. (Via The Presurfer)

Peter over at Greatplay.net came up with a cool idea that I wish I’d thought of: a random featured article from Wikipedia.

If someone told you they couldn’t send e-mail to people over 500 miles away, would you say they were crazy? That’s probably what this one guy thought when he was confronted with just that problem. Find out how the case of the 500-mile e-mail was solved.

Yawn

Besides being a blog, The World of Stuff is a bunch of stuff. Over the years, I’ve added new pages that defy categorization. Nonetheless, I’ve been trying for a long time to keep each extraneous page one of a few neat, little boxes. It’s not working.

Currently, the navigation links are Blog, Archives, Geek, Writing, Video, Fun, Store, and About. Of these, the Blog, Archives, and Video pages are worth leaving alone. They do their job well. It’s the Geek, Writing, and Fun pages I’m most concerned about. They’re not very intuitive. (Would you expect to find Ultimate Cool Characters in Geek, Writing, or Fun? It’s in Geek.)

I’m thinking of splitting up those three categories into the following four categories. (The current category for each page is in parentheses.)

Articles:

• Free Your Computer with Linux (Geek)
• Finding the Day of the Week (Writing)
• Courtesy Autographs on US Currency (Writing)
• Tredici (Fun)
• Being Left-Handed (Writing)
• The Dvorak Keyboard and You (Geek)

Fiction or Creative:

• PLEASE READ THIS!!!1 (Writing)
• The Prisoners (Writing)
• Romeo and Juliet: A Sock Puppet Adaptation (Writing)

Reference:

• Using IRC on UF DHNet (Geek)
• Kalilić/Kalilich Family Genealogy (Writing)
• Donation Information for Free Content Projects (Geek)
• Fix for Ubuntu Hard Drive Problem (Geek)
• “Click Here” Around the World (Fun)
• Minor Scale Chart Thing (Fun)
• Ultimate Cool Characters (Geek)

Interactive:

• RTS-SMS (Fun)
• From Canada with Love (Fun)
• Fake Cyrillic Generator (Fun)
• Greasemonkey User Scripts (Geek)
• Ask Jordon (Fun)

If I were going to change up all these organizational things, which I probably will, then I’d also change the name of the About page to “Meta” at the risk of alienating the 98% of the population who don’t know what “meta” means. It’s because I have not only About Me, About the Site, and Donations, but also press coverage of the site.

As for the store… the store makes me sigh. No one’s ever bought anything from it. Looks like I’m going to need another way to effortlessly make money while promoting my blog.

By the way, all of the above is up for discussion; that’s why I’m posting it here. Let me know what you think. Ideas for effortlessly making money while promoting the site are particularly welcome.

Awesome video: a complete Goonies reunion. (Via waxy.org)

Roomba + camera + time = Roomba time exposure. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Here are some rare and interesting mental disorders and illnesses you’ve probably never heard of. (Via The Presurfer)