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…

  • Good vs evil

    Hee hee! Max was right. I was amused by this article about the Hollywood phenomenon of good guys using Mac and bad guys using PCs. Actually, the Snook and I find it more amusing when a program shows a “PC” running Windows that is clearly a Mac running a Flash movie in reality. Even Office Space – which is otherwise so true to the IT industry – falls prey to a similar mistake. Remember when Peter is frantically trying to close down his machine and leave the office before Lumbergh stops him? Check out the widgets and progress bars on his screen. It’s clearly a Mac. But for some reason when he finally manages to shut down, he gets a C: prompt. I giggle every time I see it.

  • Hotlinking

    Grrrr. I was just checking my bandwidth statistics at Portland and I was shocked to discover that during February my site has exceeded the montly allowance by more than 500%. And you know why? Because of the Valentine. I’m really glad that so many people posted it on their site, but for future reference, it’s always best to copy an image to your own server and link to it there. Otherwise my host has to bear the brunt of serving images to lots of un-related sites, and then the patient yet frustrated web-goddess has to pay an extra $20 for her bandwidth that month. And that pisses her off.

  • “Roll Your Own” Comments System

    Based on the e-mails I’ve been getting, it seems other people have run into problems modifying Steve’s PHP comments system for use with their own weblogs. Since I’m in a magnanimous mood, I decided to write up a step-by-step description of everything it took to get mine working. It’s in layman’s terms, and as long as you’ve got PHP support at your host you shouldn’t have any trouble implementing it. It also lists all the problems and workarounds I found, so hopefully you’ll have it easier than I did. Let me know how it goes!

  • Amazon

    Remember that guy, the one who broke into Amazon‘s headquarters? He’s got his own website where you can apparently watch a webcast of his entire sold-out play, “21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com.” I might try to watch it tonight after work…

  • Go figure

    Hahaha… Notre Dame got hit pretty hard by the Anna Kournikova Virus, but our sister school St. Mary’s (which is all-female) didn’t. Go figure.

  • Y2K

    Salon’s running an interesting story on those Y2K “wack-jobs.” (Seriously, the author actually calls them that. Ha!) I hate those people. They remind me of when I used to work in a grocery store in my small town, and every time the weatherman predicted a storm we’d get a rush of old people buying jugs of water and flashlights. I’d stand there at the cash register, all of sixteen-years-old, thinking, “Wolcottville, Indiana is the last place anything remotely interesting would happen, let alone something environmentally catastrophic.” I really think there’s a deep human desire to hole up in a bunker for some reason. Either that or my natural optimism is once again setting me apart from the hordes of paranoid wack-jobs around me.