nfreader

FYI: all requests to be excited about something must be run...

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:46:55 -0400

FYI: all requests to be excited about something must be run through Miah.

Well that's just fraking great

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:22:00 -0400

So after a few months of forgetfulness, I finally decided to get the Battlestar Galactica Season 4 soundtrack off of Amazon. The only reason I hadn’t done so sooner was because the soundtrack isn’t available to legally download anywhere. I mean, what geek wants to download a soundtrack?

I give up and place my order with Amazon. The CD ships, and after an excessively long wait, finally arrives today, all shoved in my mailbox, care of a very bent-up UPS envelope.

Gleefully, I run upstairs to import the CD into my iTunes (who still uses a CD player?).

Disk one goes in and the import commences. Hooray! Import completes and it’s off to disk two!

I shove it in the CD slot, noting, as always, the horrible sound the MacBook Pro’s DVD drive makes when you feed it a disc.

And nothing. It just churns and churns and churns before it spits it out.

By this point, I’m raging. Up until now, every piece of music I’ve ever wanted has been only a few clicks away on iTunes or Amazon. For the first time in several years, I had to order a CD.

Discouraged, I looked to see who the publisher was. “La La Land Records”. A little googling led me to their website.

“Hey look, I found the 90’s!”

The entire site reeks of a mom and pop operation, just like the local sci fi bookstore of yesteryear. A disclaimer in the footer states: “WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE.” There is an order form for paying by check or money order. This is the same company that published the soundtracks for every season of Battlestar Galactica, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Eureka and Farscape. Their support options consist of their street address and a generic info@ email address.

I could call them up and complain that the disc doesn’t work and wait while they send me a new one, or I could download it illegally. Which I just did while I was writing this article*. La La Land Records needs to get with the times and release their catalog on iTunes, if not Amazon’s MP3 store. The music of Battlestar Galactica is a work of art that many people only hear once or twice because the music itself is such a pain in the ass to get ahold of.

*And it’s totally justified since I already gave them my money.

"No one should be frozen in carbonite, or be slowly digested for a thousand years in the bowels of..."

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:38:34 -0400

“No one should be frozen in carbonite, or be slowly digested for a thousand years in the bowels of the great, terrible Sarlaac, just because they couldn’t pay Jabba the Hutt what they owe him. If you agree, post this as your status for the rest of the day.”

- Viral status on Facebook

It IS your fault, you mouth-breathing idiot.

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:20:00 -0400

In response to: http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2009/09/its_not_your_fault.html

Security is the single most important thing to think about when running a website or blog.

The only, only blame here belongs, 100%, period, end of statement, to the dickwhip that attacked your site.

So, so very wrong. The blame falls on YOU, the end user who decided that Wordpress’ auto-generated password for the admin account was too difficult to remember. It’s YOUR fault for not clicking that one-click auto-update button*.

Y’all are the victims of this, and rather than blaming yourselves, you should be angry. You should be white-hot balls of fucking angry fire, and you should be on the fucking phone to the fucking FBI and letting them do some forensic analysis so the shitheads who did this might one day be locked in a soundproof, windowless room with a 6’8” serial killer with a huge cock and a skull-fucking fetish.

1. Victims, yes. Innocent? No. Absolutely not.

2. Because the FBI tooooootally gives a flying crap about your kitten blog getting hacked. Was money stolen? Massive fraud perpetrated? Did someone die because Aunt Margo’s blog about candle making got defaced?
I didn’t think so.

This idea [is] that if you aren’t locking your site down tighter than Fort-fucking-Knox, you deserve to be attacked.

Most people don’t want “Fort-fucking-Knox” security, most people want “Armored-frickin’-Truck” security. In most cases, “Bike-freaking-Lock” security is more than enough for a website. But if you’re too lazy/stupid to even think about adding “Jewelry-farking-Box” security to your blog, then you DO deserved to get hacked, because maybe you’ll learn some common sense and realize that the internet is a dangerous place.

It’s exactly the same as blaming a woman for getting raped because she wasn’t dressed like a nun and living with her parents,

Wow, seriously?

It is their fault if you have no security, it is their fault if you have fucking stellar security, it is always, always, always their fault.

Wow, I’ll just tell that to my bank the next time some douchebag empties my account. “Well it’s their fault for hacking me even though I was on an open wifi network in the middle of the city, logging in with my password consisting of ‘123456789’”.

Sure, they could stop themselves, but you know as well as I do that the internet is full of psychotic assholes who want nothing more than to ruin your day.

If someone breaks into your site, it is not your fault. There is no room for argument on this, don’t even attempt to justify this to me.

I would really not expect someone in your field to have this mentality.

*and if you weren’t because that would break any customizations you have, you can UPDATE MANUALLY or switch to a platform with fewer vulnerabilities, like say… Tumblr.

A stupid wp-caption width issue

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:52:00 -0400

Or: “How I learned to stop CSSing and get my hands dirty with some PHP”

From Wordpress, wp-includes/media.php, line 596:

return ''

A deceptively simple line of code. This constructs the basic caption box around an image in a Wordpress post/page.

This line also wasted a good hour or two of my time today. Why? The last half is to blame.

 (10 + (int) $width) . 'px">'

That simple bit of PHP adds 10 pixels to the width of the caption div. Spoiler alert: This drove me batshit insane. No matter what I told the CSS to do, no matter how much negative margin I put on the div, it was always 10 pixels wider than it should have been. After a quick jaunt through the source code (And Coda’s awesome Search in Open Files feature, I located this line and set that 10 to a zero. Problem solved.

What annoys me is that it was there in the first place. What possible use could that extra 10 pixels serve? Is it an IE fix? (God I hope not). Is it a mistake? Or could it even be part of a massive conspiracy to annoy me?

I would also like to point out that this line is in Wordpress’ core, where no theme or plugin can go*. Absolutely disgusting.

We may never know, but this only serves to reinforce my point that WORDPRESS SUCKS. Had I been thinking at the time, I would have told my client to go with Tumblr instead.

The most disappointing thing here is that Wordpress has a huge community that has produced a staggering number of themes and plugins that do everything you want and more, but the post editor and source code are so sub-par. Ah well.

*As far as I know.

Quadcamera is back on the AppStore.

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:26:54 -0400

Quadcamera is back on the AppStore.

Like CandyBar, But For My House

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:53:00 -0400

superimposition:

Yeah, but Season 6 blows/blew.

I’ve got a disc from season 6 of 24 sitting on my desk, ready to watch. Problem is, I can’t move down to the next entry to watch it.

Season 5 is where it’s at.

Spooge in my camera body. Makes me not want to take pictures...

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:40:59 -0400

Spooge in my camera body. Makes me not want to take pictures anymore.

iSight Motion Detection and Growl: The Why

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:36:00 -0400

So, as you may have heard from Twitter, I’m looking for an app that will send a Growl notification when the camera detects movement.

Why Growl?
Well, maybe you’ve heard of Prowl, for iPhone, which lets you receive Growl notifications from your computer as push notifications on your phone.

It should be easy to see where I’m going with this. The end result is that I’ll get a notification every time my cat jumps onto my desk, or whenever my brother snoops for god knows what in my room.

That’s the why, stay tuned for The How whenever I come up with a solution.

Arbitrary blackout? Yes please!

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:17:21 -0400

Arbitrary blackout? Yes please!

Trying out Tumblr. Can it replace the bad taste left by Wordpress’ crappy markup?

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:48:44 -0400

Trying out Tumblr. Can it replace the bad taste left by Wordpress’ crappy markup?

Why I'm here

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:19:00 -0400

Because Wordpress sucks.

More specifically, the way Wordpress handles markup sucks.

“But nfreader!” you’ll say, “Wordpress is great! It’s open source! There’s thousands of plugins! I love Wordpress and it loves you!”

To which I’ll say, “Yeah, but what if I just want to write a post without haggling with the editor?”

“You’re just doing it wrong, silly!”

Yeah, I’ve had enough. Hello Tumblr, will you be me friend?