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Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category
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While not all of us can find a farmer’s field in Italy that bears our name, we can stumble upon what the Internet considers to be the best (three) idea(s) ever:
I cannot argue. Except the spork only gets half an awesome, because generally plastic sporks are great spoons but piddly forks. Metal sporks are another story entirely.
And, yes, I may have been looking up ‘best idea ever’ on Urban Dictionary. So?! QC is slow to update today, I needed something to do.
Lazyweb: looking for icons
Alright, internets: find something for me.
This page on cocoadev.com links to a zipfile of royalty-free (and, apparently, free-as-in-beer) icons by Matt Ball. The problem is that this zipfile has disappeared completely from the Internets, and the site that was hosting them is French, and the user’s site is gone altogether. (Yes, two of those links are 404s.)
So after a little searching, I managed to find where a different blogger was hosting them on his site, except… you guessed it, 404. They’re gone altogether. They are, in fact, the only thing missing out of his wp-content/uploads folder for the month of March. How odd, and what a frustrating coincidence.
Anyway - does anyone out there happen to have a copy of these icons? I need them for an app I’m prototyping. Thanks!
Why is it…
… that TV news people are always so hilariously uninformed about technology, gadgetry, the Internet, or reality in general?
Also, is everything a tool for pedophiles? Frigging everything?
13375p34k means you like sexin’ kids!
Weird Rails crap: help me, lazyweb
Ugh, I’m about to give up on using Rails other than at work. As much as I like Ruby on Rails, it seems impossible to do what I want to do with it on my hosting provider. And no, I’m not switching hosts. I like it here. I’ll just go back to doing something instead of Rails.
Here’s the problem: does anyone know how the hell to tell Rails to run as a FastCGI daemon? If I were still using Django, all I’d have to do is:
./manage.py runfcgi method=threaded host=127.0.0.1 port=3120
However, I can find no similar capability in Rails whatsoever, and running Mongrel or WEBrick on that port obviously does no good because they’re not FCGI daemons, they’re webservers.
Details on the setup: Basically, in the public HTML directory of the site I want to be FCGI’d, I have an htaccess file that contains:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://localhost:8080/ulrichp/$1 [P]
Near as I can tell, FastCGI is running as a daemon on port 8080, and is looking for my FastCGI process to be running on port 3120. Which is why my above code for Django works just fine: it starts serving my app itself on port 3120, and responds directly to requests passed to it via FCGI. However, I can’t find any way to do the same thing using Rails.
How utterly random
This picture showed up at the top of my last.fm profile. I have no idea what it is, or what it’s for. It’s a Flash animation, but it doesn’t actually do anything, and no part of it is a link of any kind. However, I liked it, so I felt compelled to steal it. Anyone got any ideas what it is?
An open letter to the Internet in general.
Dear Internet,
I’ve been on a number of different websites today, and I’ve noticed that the Internet, in general, cannot properly spell, capitalize, or recognize a brand name. Here’s just a few of the things that have jumped out at me repeatedly today:
- Lo and behold, not low and behold.
- iPod, not I-Pod, i-pod, or IPOD. Similarly, iTunes - not I-Tunes, i-tunes, or ITUNES.
- While we’re on it: it’s a brand name. Your SanDisk Sansa is not an iPod. It is an MP3 player (or, since most of them support more than one format, an audio player). So is your iPod. An iPod is a type of audio player; it is not something in a separate category all its own (i.e., ‘audio players’ and ‘iPods’).
- Mac, not MAC, unless you are referring to a MAC address, which has nothing to do with being a Mac, but which a Mac does have.
- Voilà, not walah or viola.
- Java, not JAVA. It is not an acronym.
- Websites or sites, not websights or sights.
- Brakes = car. Breaks = bones. Breaking your brakes = get new brakes. Slamming on the brakes = stopping the car. Slamming on the breaks = painful.
- Harmless cartoons, not terrorism (are you paying attention, Boston?).
- Don’t get me started on apostrophes. The entire Internet has forgotten how to use apostrophes. Fuck you, Internet.
Sometimes I really wish I had never been taught how to properly spell, punctuate, or capitalize. Maybe I could live in blissful ignorance like most of the rest of my country, being led by a man who can’t fucking pronounce ‘nuclear.’ NU. KLEE. UR. IT IS NOT THAT HARD.
Sincerely,
Phil
P.S. Don’t be this guy.
Links galore
- Mr. Gosling, why did you make URL equals suck?! A useful warning to Java developers - using URL.equals may be considered harmful, because apparently it does a blocking lookup to the IP address of the machine.
- No Shredder in TMNT? Peter Laird, series creator of our favorite heroes on a halfshell, suggested the change. The villain is now a more generic ‘monsters and space aliens.’ Maybe it’s this guy, even though he didn’t really come from outer space, per se?
- The world’s most indispensable Firefox tab: Ctrl-Shift-T (or Cmd-Shift-T on the Mac) will re-open the most recently closed tab. Hallelujah!
- Slain trees haunt loggers. My coworker’s response: “heh, ent ghosts.”
- Find out your Windows Vista Experience number. Sort of like a compatibility rating between your computer and Vista - is it love at first byte, or is Vista simply too high-maintenance for a down-to-earth machine like yours? (Pardon the pun - I had to.)
- O’Reilly Media launched Hackszine.com, an online companion to the Hacks series of books gracing bookshelves for quite a while now. This is already in my RSS reader.
- MAKE Blog: Do it yourself grassroots media sites using NewsCloud. Twenty bucks a month gets you a Debian install and NewsCloud; I think they handle hosting. Or you can just do it yourself, it’s open-source.
- Dear God, it’s the Woot-Off that won’t die. The offer as I type this: a 37″ Sova widescreen HD-ready LCD monitor for $649.99 plus $5 shipping. I wish I could afford this monster.
That about covers it. I’m sort of like a bargain basement Weekend Update. (Obvious pop-culture references linked for my friend Sandra’s sake, who recently revealed she has no idea what movie features the songs “Danger Zone,” “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling,” and more. Or, for that matter, has never seen SNL.)
Mega Man vs. Pedobear in an ASCII duel to the death
From Joystiq: 2ch meets flash gaming, and the world may never quite be the same. Check out this video from Jinsei Owatta No Daibouken, aka “My Life Is Over’s” Big Adventure:
Now with extra Stalker Juice™
Now you’ll all know what I’m doing at all times. (I remain annoyed I can’t send a text to it from my phone. I think CBW hates short texts.)
Leafletter: what the heck is this?
What exactly (or perhaps better, who exactly) is Leafletter for?
I watched the demo and other than a silly Flash-enabled artist’s portfolio, I can’t figure out who would use this, or for what. Other than maybe MySpace kids, who absolutely love slapping Flash everywhere (consequently, my own MySpace profile is one of the dullest on the web, but also the most readable and possibly the quickest to load… and no, it doesn’t play that damn Nickelback song).
(Snazzy Flickr integration, but everything integrates with Flickr these days. I think a new corollary needs to be added to Zawinski’s Law, something along the lines of, “every web app attempts to expand until it can integrate with Flickr and/or del.icio.us.”)
Annoyance of the day
Why, in this day and age, can Barnes & Noble still only take one gift card per order on an online order? I don’t particularly want to traipse down to a store, have them order a book for me, wait for it to come in (because you know that this book isn’t available around here [and yes, I do know; I looked at the B&N in Florence for it, and Newport's B&N recently suffered a technology book spasm and lost about 3/4 of their section]), then come back down to get it… or pay the extra to get it sent to me. Nein, I say, nein! Why can I not just spend these two (TWO!) gift cards on the Internets?
Isn’t that what the future’s about?
Fuck flying cars, where’s my ability to spend two gift cards at once on the Internet?
Dear Internet:
Addicting is a verb, the present tense of the verb addict. As in, this game is addicting me.
Addictive is an adjective. As in, this game is addictive.
Figure it out.
Thank you.
–Phil
Pet peeve of the day
Okay, so I have an account on Facebook and MySpace. Both have nice little message systems (well, if anything about MySpace can be said to be nice, anyway…). MySpace’s is given over mostly to webcam porn pam, while Facebook tends to be spam from groups I’ve joined (such as Apple Students and Mad Hatter Productions… though Mad Hatter’s been fairly light of late). Thus, most of the time, I know right away if I want to save a message or delete it without bothering to read it.
Attention MySpace and Facebook: please, please, please give me a fricking option I can turn on that will stop asking me if I’m sure I want to delete a message. Yes, goddamnit, I’m sure! I clicked Delete, didn’t I?!
And, because I know people are going to say ‘how unreasonable, that doesn’t protect people whose lack of motor skills make them hit delete’: I said make it an option. Give me a little checkbox somewhere that I can turn on or off that makes them not request confirmation for deletion of a message.
I don’t ask for much, do I?
And lastly, several stories in one go
Put YOUR slogan on someone’s lower back with ImageChef (via Lifehacker).
Spell your name in alphabet soup. Turn your slogan into a neon sign. Give your loved one a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. These are just a few of the cool images you can cook up with ImageChef.
Then, if you think YOU’RE a Mac fanboy or fangirl, check out this guy’s OS X Dock pillows (via MAKE’s blog).
I particularly like the Finder one, myself. Next up, China manages to kill off the white dolphin after twenty million years (via CNN):
An expedition searching for a rare Yangtze River dolphin ended Wednesday without a single sighting and with the team’s leader saying one of the world’s oldest species was effectively extinct.
The white dolphin known as baiji, shy and nearly blind, dates back some 20 million years. Its disappearance is believed to be the first time in a half-century, since hunting killed off the Caribbean monk seal, that a large aquatic mammal has been driven to extinction.
And last but not least, someone’s killing English hookers (also via CNN):
Police in eastern England are combing through rural areas hoping to find out who is behind the suspected killings of five women — all believed to be prostitutes — that may be the work of a lone serial killer.
Prostitutes were on Wednesday warned to stay off the streets of the Suffolk city of Ipswich, fearing the killer or killers could strike again.
“I’m not sure what starker message there can be at the moment: Certainly three of their peer group have been murdered, now potentially another two,” Chief Supt. Stewart Gull of Suffolk police said.
“Clearly it’s not safe, they need to stay off the streets.”
A Jack the Ripper wannabe? Maybe!
Who opened the floodgates?
I opened my Gmail inbox tonight and I noticed a peculiar number by my spam folder:
Why is this important?
Because it was closer to 7000 on Friday at this time.
This means, even with Google deleting any spam older than 30 days, I got approximately 3000 spam messages in two days.
Sheesh!
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