web-goddess

Category: Computers

  • Start preparing your acceptance speech, Ms. Kidman!

    She’s a shoo-in to win, according to the entries I’ve received for the Oscar Contest. Check out those nifty pie graphs! Those images are all generated on the fly by PHP from the database tallies. There are some surprises in there. Like, I can’t believe how many of y’all expect that Big Fat Greek Wedding woman to win. Yeah, I know it was a big cultural thing in the U.S., and it did okay business over here, but I never thought of it as Oscar-worthy. Maybe it’s because most Australians actually know real Greek people… 🙂

    (Also, some people might want to re-think their tiebreaker guess. You’re supposed to predict how many extra minutes the show will run beyond the allotted time, not how long it will be overall. A couple people had guesses up around the 3-hour mark. Just e-mail me if you wanna change yours…)

  • Simpsons Valentine

    You know, all the thank you’s I’ve been getting have been great, but I’m thisclose to taking the damn Valentine down. There are still jerks sucking up my bandwidth despite me asking three times now for them to stop. I’m sorry to punish everybody for the actions of a few, but I’m now looking into barring all external image serving permanently. For now I’ve just renamed the image… for the third time. Do I sound frustrated and bitter?

    Update: I’ve used .htaccess to block all external image serving. If I was hosting an image for you and it’s now appearing broken, let me know and I’ll add it to the exception list.

  • OmniWeb

    You Mac OSX users should go download the 4.2 beta version of OmniWeb. Still no tabbed browsing, but it’s got a new feature that I’m loving: a “zoomed” form editor. Basically, wherever you have a text box on a web page (like where you enter comments on this site), there’s a little button near the scroll bar. Click it and up pops an editing window for you to enter your text in. (It dynamically updates on the page itself.) So when you’re entering large amounts of text, you can have a full-size window and don’t have to keep scrolling. I’m really amazed nobody’s thought of this before. I was heeding the siren call of Safari, but OmniWeb has once again reeled me back in…

  • ARRRRGGGGHHHHHHH!

    I just lost the last two weeks of database work I did on the project I’m contracting. “Upset” doesn’t begin to describe my state at the moment. “Frantic and wailing” is more like it. If anybody needs me, I’ll be drinking my face off for the rest of the night before trying to pick up the pieces tomorrow.

  • Bookworm

    Bookworm is my new obsession. My highest score so far is just over 150,000. It’s also sucked two hours of my life away. Be warned – this game is extremely addictive!

  • Ugh, spammers.

    I hate spammers. I especially hate the ones that send you messages that say, “Hey, I visited your site and noticed you’re not listed on some search engines…” They piss me off.

    • Okay, first off, the spammer is assuming that I want my site listed on 50,000 random crappy search engines. Which I don’t. Based on my server logs, 90% of people come though via Google or Yahoo anyway, and I’m already listed there.
    • Why add the bit about visiting my site? In the case of Purple Weasels.org, I think it’s pretty clear that the site is not for the general public. It’s an online community for a very specific group of people. It’s obvious that it shouldn’t be submitted to lots of search engines. Therefore, the spammer is either stupid or dishonest.
    • Why must they send huge bloated HTML-formatted e-mails? Am I the only one that uses PINE to read my mail these days?

    I’m just annoyed because this particular spammer has hit all three of my personal sites and has repeatedly ignored my requests to be removed from their mailing list. Anybody feel like engaging in a little Google bombing with me? Just throw up a link like this – “evil spamming assholes” – on your site. I thank you.

  • April 1

    Hee! Best April Fools Day fake news story: “You’ve got Blogs! AOL buys into homegrown media”. It’s about AOL-Time Warner supposedly buying the rights to two hundred of the most popular blogs. My favorite part is where the AOL executive says, “No cat will ever go ill in America again in obscurity.” Ha!

  • And the evilness of today continues…

    Here’s a tip for you web developer kids out there: Don’t write code when you’re angry. You’re likely to mess up some SQL statement that, when run, completely buggers your database, and of course you don’t have a backup. And that sucks.

  • Has the Web gotten boring?

    Has the Web gotten boring? In some ways I think it has, and I do think that the “profit” argument has a lot to do with it. Back in 1994, people were building crazy sites and offering them up to the world just for the fun of it. Nowadays no one wants to lift a finger unless they can make some quick cash. Maybe we webloggers are the last hope of fun on the Net. We create things and offer them up just in the hope that other people find them amusing. (And yeah, the ego boost is nice.) We’re it, kids.

    Edited 29/03/2025: Link is dead and not archived.

  • CIPA

    I was reading an article about the congressional trial challenging the Children’s Internet Protection Act when I came across the following statement:

    CIPA, signed into law in 2000 by President Bill Clinton, was the third attempt by Congress to restrict access to the Internet and its estimated 11 million World Wide Web sites, about 1 percent of which experts say contain some sort of sexually explicit material.

    One percent??? Does that sound low to anyone else? I mean, sure, if you’re talking hard-core porn images, but what about erotic fanfiction, smutty personal journals, and chatrooms? Don’t get me wrong; I’m not arguing in support of the CIPA. I think it’s idiotic. I’m just pointing out that whoever wrote this article hasn’t done any research since 1997. Google‘s indexed over two billion pages already! Very sloppy reporting…

    Edited 27/03/2025: Original news story link is dead and not archived.