Minimalist wall paper made from a photo of my keys on the dinning room table. Why? Cause I was board one night. There’s a lot of white in this pic which kinda annoys me after a while as a background.
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Categories
buttons, buttons, buttons!
2011.03.09 & Buttons gone… why? Well, XHTML is dead, The CSS is not valid as per the validator, it’s out-of-date and jQuery does crazy things, blah blah blah. I updated the footers ‘disclaimer’ to link to the Creative Commons as all my words is still free…
2008.12.24 & I have updated to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported [creativecommons.org] license. The link(s) below are to the older 2.0 version.
You may have noticed there are a bunch of buttons at the bottom of the pages here at confusion.cc. What does it all mean? Let me tell you…
This button links to WordPress [wordpress.org] because I use their software to run the blog [wikipedia.org] on confusion. And basically all the content on the sight is uploaded as an entry in the blog (which I call my ‘journal’ a holdover from when I was doing this manually before the glory days of blogging!)
Next is the Creative Commons [creativecommons.org] license button. This button is intended to show that you can copy anything you want from this website and use it (with a small number of restrictions) how you want. Read this post [confusion.cc] for more info.
Ah the power of standards! This button means that the pages on this site are designed using valid CSS [wikipedia.org]—which stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is a way to separate the layout and visual style of a webpage from the HTML code and content. We love standards! And we’d love them even more if they worked in IE! Damn Micro$oft and their non-conformist ways!
This one says that confusion is coded in valid XHTML [wikipedia.org]. What does that mean? It’s another standard that along with CSS is designed to make coding and maintaining web pages easier. All of the basic pages here at confusion should validate but some of the older journal entries may not. Click the button to see if this page validates!
Want too keep up with my latest dribble? Feeds are just the thing! Using a feed aggregator like those you can find here [blogspace.com] and here [wikipedia.org] you can add the links these buttons and you will be able to keep up-to-date with all my pointless ranting. The ‘entries’ link will will give you all the new entries I post and the ‘comments’ link will provide a feed of all the comments other leave.
WTF? This one takes you to this post, because an odd number of buttons was not cool. I made this button to match the other second row buttons using this handy utility [kalsey.com] created to support the “steal these buttons” craze which you can read about here [antipixel.com] and if you need a bazillion buttons go here [gtmckignt.com].
I first read Dune one summer sitting in an old arm chair in the basement of my grandparents house in rural Minnesota. I found a copy of Dune on the book shelf next to Louis Lamour western and Readers Digest Condensed Books when I was 14 or so. A battered musty original print run version that had belonged to my uncle. I read it in 3 days sitting in the basement in a chair that is probably older than me.
I still have that copy of Dune — it’s held together by a strip of Duck Tape along the spine. Has that lovely quality of curling into the palm of your hand naturally when you read it but still manages to close flat. The well used nature was hard won by repeated readings over the years.
I think I have read Dune 10 times, give or take. I read it in high school on the bus. I read it in college late at night and in the student union. I read it on planes on my way to business meetings. I keep reading it because it blew my mind the first time.
There are so many interweaving topics in Dune: It deals in ecology, psychology, philosophy, politics, physics, and a myriad of other subjects. Most good Sci-Fi and Fantasy books have politics and religion but only at a very shallow level. A ‘look, back-story! Now over here…’ level. Frank Herbert weaves them into the core of the story in a mostly coherent way that is missing from most Sci-Fi and Fantasy, J. R. R. Tolkien excepted..
Maybe it appeals to me because I like complected, epic stories. I know that each time I re-read Dune it looses a bit of it’s magic. The story is not high fiction and it doesn’t grow up like I do. But it’s still a good story, and one of my favorite. Dune is one of the books I would want with me if I was lost on an island or, lost in space.
Categories
interesting read…
…even if you don’t ‘do the Apple thing,’ you should go read I, Cringely‘s [PBS.org] column on the future of Apple: Dethroning King Gillette: Is iPod the Razor or the Blade? [PBS.org]. The concept of Steve Jobs [wikipedia.org] standing up in a few years and saying ‘All your content are belong to Apple’ is quit amusing, even if the idea of Steve being the consumer media version of Bill [wikipedia.org] and Larry [wikipedia.org] is not so amusing… Watch out MPAA/RIAA or is that watch out consumer?
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This discussion is over
For a long time my little corner of cyberspace was quite, the neighbors didn’t make much noise and there were not a lot of strangers around.
Life was good…
Then reality came crashing in. For sometime now I have been getting comment spam. It has been confined to a single post [confusion.cc] from a single spam bot for the past few months. To manage this I added Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist [jayallen.org] plugin to my Movable Type installation. This allowed me to remove the offending post easily and for the most part automatically.
And life was good… for a time…
Today I had 136 comments posted to my journal. Comments posted by people with names like; cmxmqr, yreaiile, kaiewh, turjey, hkqoaq, etc. They have been coming in fairly regularly all day, about every 15 minutes. MT-Blacklist is still working, blocking a number of these posts, but spammers are persistent and my in box is getting full.
By lunchtime I was a bit annoyed about this and was trying to figure out what could be done. I went through a lot of heart ache when my email address first made the rounds with the spammers. I was a long hard struggle, but I am fairly spam free now thanks to spamassasin [apache.org]. I didn’t want to go through that painfully long process again to make my journal spam free. Then I remembered that over at Jonathan delacour’s [delacour.net] weblog there is a little tag line at the bottom of the comments on old posts. It reads This discussion is now closed. My thanks to everyone who contributed. This is a good idea, especially since most comments come within the first week or so that the entry is posted and most of these spam comments are being posted to achieved entries.
Now Jonathan doesn’t say how he does this, but a quick search of mt-plugins [mt-plugins.org] turned up this nice little plugin called CloseComments [mt-plugins.org] which does exactly what I want. It took only a few minutes of fiddling around with the plugin to get what I wanted.
And life is good… for now
I have set the CloseComments plugin to remove the ‘post a comment’ form from any journal entry over 14 days old which has not had a comment posted to it in 7 days. Now you will see in place of the ‘post a comment’ form a short note saying that comments are not allowed and pointing any lost soul, who may happen to wonder in from the cold and decide to participate in old discussions, to this post. So now, this discussion is over. Have a nice day.