Results tagged “web”

Oh, man. This is sad. I actually secretly liked this guy's videos. He had this great fake Russian accent and fired a lot of guns.

Mr. Ratliff's passion for firearms made him something of a celebrity on the Internet, where he helped make scores of videos about high-powered and exotic guns and explosives. His YouTube channel, called FPSRussia, became the site's ninth largest, with nearly 3.5 million subscribers and more than 500 million views.

But last week, the authorities said, Mr. Ratliff, 32, ended up on the wrong end of a gun. The police in northeast Georgia found him dead at his office on Jan. 3, shot once in the head. He was surrounded by several guns, but not the one that killed him. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is treating it as a homicide.

Keith Ratliff, Gun Enthusiast of FPSRussia, Is Shot to Death - NYTimes.com

This reCAPTCHA code is getting harder and harder to fill in. Found this in my comments section.

So .... does it want me to solve for x?

... apparently. Well, this is good news. I'm a big fan of Cory.

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I Write Like Cory Doctorow

Trying to restore the backup database again. Looks like it might have been a mysql issue.

A little unforseen maintenance and one broken RAID controller later, we're back online. Lost a few days, though, and for some reason, the ZuckerBlog page appeared to be publishing from the MissingLinks page as well. In fact, all the blogs I manage had some kind of content bleed into other published blogs. The origin of this was that I imported the backup .sql file into the wrong version of MySQL, and although everything looked good in the Movable Type web interface, the database was moving everything around. The best way to fix this was to pull everything apart again, and reinstall the older MySQL server.

So far, everything's OK. The only thing I'm still having problems with is email posting, and I should have that fixed up in a little while.

By the way, Movable Type 5.2 looks pretty awesome. And it appears much faster than version 4, though this may actually be because I gutted the old server and replaced it with a newer one.

My keyboard went offline when I plugged in my BB today. I started mashing keys to test it out, and Google made some interesting search suggestions.

I've been using the MT-Twitter plugin for a while now, so that when updating the MissingLinks page, a corresponding twitter posting is made. It used to be using bit.ly to shorten the URLs (prior to the big server crash, I was using icanhaz.com, but lost all my code when the RAID controller on the server failed). Sometime in mid-November, the bit.ly URLs just disappeared, making me thing something went wrong on twitter's API. Either that, or something went wrong on my server, which I hadn't even touched that month.

So, I looked around for some suitable Perl code to re-introduce the bit.ly API calls that mysteriously went missing. The answer was a chunk of code from openclue.org (now apparently defunct). I'm reposting it here, so it might help someone out (myself included -- I'm backing stuff up properly now).

The twitter.pl script just needs a few extra lines. I inserted this code just after the "my $intro" line in the _update_twitter function:

my $bitly = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $url_response =
    $bitly->get("http://bit.ly/api?url=" . $obj->permalink);
my $small_url;
if($url_response->is_success) {
   $small_url = $url_response->content;
} else {
   $small_url = $obj->permalink;
}

Then you have to update the part of the script which creates the twitter message. Replace the original $text string with the $small_url string:

# my $text = $intro . $entry->title . ' ' . $obj->permalink;
my $text = $intro . $entry->title . ' ' . $small_url;

Presumably, you can use any URL shortener API you want -- just insert the proper API call. Or, if you're enterprising, make your own URL shortener. That way, you own all the links.

Someone even came up with an idea to use .htaccess 301 redirects to bounce a link ending with <mt:EntryID> to the proper <$mt:EntryLink$>. Of course, this really only works if your domain name is short to begin with.

... or "What do I want to be when I grow up?"

R sent me to the Kitchener Public Library's career cruiser questionnaire. I don't know, maybe it's a slow day or something. Essentially, you answer a bunch of questions about what you like or dislike in a job, and it throws you a list of things you might be good at. I kind of wish I had one of these things in high school.

After answering 39 questions, they had me pegged as a guy who mainly fixes things. Not too far off from what I do, but I guess they couldn't decide on what I liked fixing:

1. Race Car Mechanic	2. Appliance Repairer
3. Cable Installer and Repairer	4. Farm Equipment Mechanic
5. Aircraft Mechanic	6. Diesel Mechanic
7. Lifeguard	8. Motorcycle Mechanic
9. Small Engine Mechanic	10. Automobile Mechanic
11. Heavy Equipment Mechanic	12. Industrial Machinery Mechanic
13. Elevator Installer and Repairer	14. Taxidermist
15. Recreation Vehicle Service Technician	16. Computer Support Person
17. Veterinarian	18. Millwright
19. Agronomist	20. Food Inspector
21. Veterinary Technician	22. Curator
23. Film Processor	24. Hairstylist
25. Fitness Instructor	26. Home Economist
27. Diving Instructor	28. Boilermaker
29. Automotive Painter	30. Special Effects Technician
31. Technical Writer	32. Tilesetter
33. Website Designer	34. ESL Teacher
35. Welder	36. Foreign Language Instructor
37. Historian	38. Industrial Designer
39. Choreographer / Dance Instructor	40. Director of Photography

Pretty varied list, if you discount all the ones that said "mechanic". At the very least they got Computer Support Person in there somewhere. I decided to fine tune the list a little. It asked me 57 more questions, and I got to fill in my level of education.

The next list was much much closer to what I do now (especially since I do a lot of artistic things in my spare time).

1. Critic	2. Multimedia Developer
3. Writer	4. Director of Photography
5. Special Effects Technician	6. Choreographer / Dance Instructor
7. Director	8. Historian
9. Video Game Developer	10. Desktop Publisher
11. Technical Writer	12. Driving Instructor
13. Camera Operator	14. Business Systems Analyst
15. Database Developer	16. Website Designer
17. Computer Programmer	18. Webmaster
19. Researcher	20. Makeup Artist
21. Web Developer	22. Stuntperson
23. Computer Support Person	24. Curriculum Specialist
25. Association Manager	26. Audio-Visual Technician
27. Artist	28. Communications Specialist
29. Computer Network Specialist	30. Print Journalist
31. Electroneurodiagnostic Tech	32. Cardiovascular Tech
33. Diagnostic Medical Sonographer	34. Photographer
35. Dietitian	36. Cable Installer and Repairer
37. Microbiologist	38. Foreign Language Instructor
39. Film Editor	40. Chef

On the other hand, this doesn't really inspire me to look for my ideal job. I kind of feel like Philip J. Fry being told he'll be a delivery boy.

Why, yes, Vigilant Assassination is my middle name.

Get Your Cyborg Name

From 11points.com. Unfortunately, their permalinks aren't working, so you may never see the article. Fortunately, I put the best ones below:

sydneytherapist.com Officially: SydneyTherapist.com, the website of Tanya Koens, a sex therapist in Sydney, Australia. (No word if she is affiliated with Tobias Funke.) Unintentionally: SydneyTheRapist.com, home page of a guy named Sydney who just can't stop telling his stories about rapin'! (No word if he is affiliated with Tucker Max.)

americanscrapmetal.com
Officially: AmericanScrapMetal.com, "a B2B-based scrap metal recycling expert" in Texas.
Unintentionally: AmericansCrapMetal.com. And we piss awesomeness!

Unintentionally Hilarious Domain Names

Whoa. That's a toughie. What with the High-tech triangle, RIM, those nerds at the University of Waterloo, and the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics (where Stephen Hawking is rumoured to be kept in a sealed jar these days), one would suspect we've got our own little Eureka here, in the heart of Southwestern Ontario. Of course, I'd always seen myself as a bald version of the cunning, but not too bright Sheriff Jack Carter, but that's another story.

So, if I had to guess the highest IQ in Waterloo, I'd conservatively say it was around 175-180, in the highest genius category. Note, we're not talking about average IQ, but highest IQ. I may be wrong, of course; feel free to let me know what your guess would be.

Oh, yeah. The whole reason this came up is because of this stupid "Test Your IQ" ad which foolishly showed up in my browser the other day:

Yup, 115, apparently. It's not that I believed it would actually give me an accurate rating for the highest IQ in Waterloo (but wouldn't that be something you'd like to see?), or that I didn't already know that no matter what city my Internet connection originated, the number would always be 115, in order to entice me into clicking on the link to think that I might (gasp) have a higher IQ than whatever they listed.

No, it's more that they picked 115 to be the highest number for the region.

It was kind of funny when the ads showed off IQs for Paris Hilton or George Bush. At least there was enough reasonable uncertainty that made you confident you could have a higher IQ than George Bush. Or you could be pseudo-outraged that Paris Hilton could possibly have a higher IQ than you. But nothing pulls back the veil of willful disbelief suspension than to say the maximum IQ in Techtown is a modest 115. I mean, really, guys.