OMG just logged in today and CSS /. totally rules. Nice job guys!!!!

Bout frigging time. ;-)

Do you like to play board games like Puerto Rico, Settlers, Tigris+Euphrates, etc.? Are you located anywhere in the vicinity of Dutchess County, NY USA? If so, me and my roommate are looking for you!

We don't care about your skill level or anything else as long as you don't have bad body odor and your social skills are decent. Comic book guy from the Simpsons need not apply. Also, if you have an existing gaming group in the area we would love to join, if you'll have us. Just reply to this and we'll work something out.

American Refugees Exist! Fact.

Let's not corrupt our language just to save face, or to disseminate PR(opaganda). The word means what it means.

You have them in your country now. Deal with that reality and vote with your hearts -- give with your hearts (but stay off Paypal for Katrina donations).

Mwhahahaha!

There are two plugin updates/releases at phk.ca:

PHk Wordpress Traffic Tracker

and...

PHk Wordpress Plugin: Vars 1.1 Patch

All ye wp bloggers... suggest new plugins!

Some of you will know that I was working on a CMS for a long time. I just don't have the time anymore to keep up with the huge commitment this kind of project requires, so I've shelfed the PHk system for the time being. I'm going to start working on Wordpress plugins now, because I can quickly whip one off and release it into the wild.

Plus they already have their system in order to the point that it won't require that much debugging from me at least.

My first Wordpress plugin is called PHk Big Var Dump v1.0 and what it does is it outputs all the set variable keys and their values in the admin area. If you Wordpress, try it out if you want to start doing plugins.

Other things I'm planning with WP are:

- RSS feed reader to Post Queue (quoted)
- Job finder to crawl employment sites like Craigslist, Monster and HRDC -- and then give you the chance to select the jobs you want to automatically apply to. Quotes Job REF# so that it's SOLICITED email. :-) Just a huge time saver. On a test run last year I was applying to over 300 jobs a day all over Ontario. But a lot of work is needed before this could be released.

I wrote something in my blog that I think is really great, so I put a linky here in the journal.

http://www.apreche.net/blog/2005/08/02#zealot-multimedia/

I think the title of this says it all. I'm having trouble finding a USB switch that satisfies my needs. I basically need to switch two USB2.0 devices (keyboard and mouse) between 3 or more computers. The solution has to be os independent, none of that windows software for the switching. Normally I would need a KVM, but my monitors handle the V quite nicely on their own. However, I wouldn't be opposed to a reasonably priced KVM solution if it did the USB switching properly and the price was right.

The trick here is that the switch must work with my Logitech MX1000 mouse. Keep in mind when I tried to plug this mouse into the USB hub that is built into my keyboard it did not work.

I've searched everywhere on the net that I know, and I can't find a reasonable solution. Please help.

See blog post here for redundant details.

I wanted to share a method I use for keeping all my passwords forgotten without wasting too much time.

I am very picky about what I register to:

1. I will register to a blog I visit frequently.
2. I will never register to sites that have IN YOUR FACE advertising.
3. I never register for sites that break their site if you don't register, because that's evil.
4. I don't register to sites that don't let you post anonymously because I like to get to know people before I register.
5. I rarely register to forums of any kind because they are usually pretty terse.

There are things to remember when you are registering to a site: Most sites will have a forgot password link that you can use to retrieve your password. This is a good thing. Most people are using a browser that can remember your password. Most people use one or two machines or they would not use a public computer for anything important because of a fear of keyloggers. There are many free keylogger blockers, but do they work? Who knows.

What I do when I register to a new site:

1. Open a text document.
2. Type in something really random and take the middle 8 or 10 characters and hit copy.
3. The characters copied will become my new random password.
4. Then I simply paste it in and fill in the registration form and paste in my password.
5. When I get the validation email, I simply copy/paste the link and paste it into a new tab in firefox.
6. If I am logging in on another system or my system is purged/formatted (which I do from time to time), I click the remember password button in Firefox and just copy/paste the pass again.
7. I always use the same username or a variation of it.
8. If I don't remember my own password in my head, I keep all my passwords different.
9. Easy enough.

Looks like the arbitrary date set when I was comment-blocked has been reached. I can't post anon (but I rarely do anyway).

So friends with mod points... this is not really me whining for karma. :-)

Update: 6:19pm : So I post two comments. The one above and this gem that was TOTALLY taken the WRONG way by moderators. The thrust of my argument was that Apple should be embracing Linux on their systems, including iPod, but moderators modded it down to -1 Troll? What gives? Do the animals run the zoo here or what? I guess so. And lessons like these help you learn better system design, so I welcome it to an extent. I will also add that moderators first thing in the morning will mod my posts higher than moderators after 5pm EST. WHY????

June 15 2005: Still bloody well postblocked at Slashdot -- holy crap this is annoying. No sense of humour. Damn funny mod.

From now on, if I have something funny to say, I will put it in my journal, and link the story with a "I was just talking about this today." link in order to get lots of INFORMATIVE karma! :-)

Like I care...

To respond to Chacham's reply to my previous Journal Entry:

        Thanks Chacham! I will write a journal entry when the system is online. I just started rewriting the templating system from scratch today so that I can get some speed improvements and save time for making custom templates.

        Although CSSZengarden has demonstrated that we have the ability to use CSS in order to beautify a site, I would still like to offer the ability for custom web-blocks to be used on articles, comments...etc.

do that beast exist? or is it a evolutionary dead end?

sure you can use the same basic distro for a workstation install or a server install. but thats for office use where you have a dedicated admin that you can turn to. a user in a office enviroment have to reason install stuff on their own.

but on the home desktop box this is a diffrent story. 99% of the time the admin is the user and will therefor spend a lot of time trying to set the box up and installing software.

and the last point is where i worry. the thing is that 99% of the problems i see come from people that want to install stuff after they have gotten the box properly set up.

sure they can use the distros install system and wait for the vendors package server or some contrib server to get hold of it. but often this can take time, at times very much time. so what then? install from source? maybe, but its not as easy as it sounds (go away you longbearded assembly reading code-wizards, i know your rant) for someone that may find a electronic version of solitaire a challange.

so maybe they should not install, but thats the office admin speaking. and from my experience they look down on anyone that dont have root (some even look down on anyone they have to share root with).

but remeber that at home the user most often is the admin.

so is there a distro out there that is desktop simple but allso server safe? im starting to think its a engineers dream.

so to all you that look down on the gobolinux distro, have you stopped and taken a look at what its attempting? its not trying to make the next workstation or server distro. they are working on a distro that they themselfs want to use on their desktops, one that give them minimal amounts of trouble when wanting to install something.

one thing that they could maybe do better tho would be to combo in the rootless system that was the basis for the distro. this so that a user can install a app into their home folder for personal use and maybe into a shared folder that dont need root access. oh, wait. just pop the user into the right group and get sudo going, my bad ;)

and why im not doing the easy thing and telling them to go mac os x (even more so after apple have gone intel)?

1) its not a linux distro, its at best a *nix distro :P

2) even with a intel cpu you will still need a specialy chiped motherboard to get the os going on your hardware. and the only company thats going to sell machines with that motherboard is apple.

I am posting this to my Slashdot journal so you can read what my thoughts are about moderation on Slashdot and how it's influenced my design decisions on PHk, my new blogging suite that is soon to be released under the GPL, through Sourceforge. Still working on getting some of the major issues out of this closed alpha I'm using at my blog.

This will not come as a surprise to many of you, but I have been working on PHk for the past five years, under another name.

PHk will have lots of features, but perhaps the best feature is the ability to drag and drop PHP code into a folder and have it aliased to a URL right away.

ie:
http://yourdomain.com/sideproject/
http://yourdomain.com/news/stuff/
http://yourdomain.com/abc/

This works because PHk uses .htaccess or optionally can use ?z=/news/stuff/

For everyone reading this who is NOT a developer, and who would just use PHk as a blogging suite... read on to learn about how moderation works in PHk as it's different than any other system I've seen.

Moderation only really works on major technical websites like Slashdot BEACAUSE the level of the playing field is generally much higher than the average blog, complete with PHD folks posting what they think about topic X and trolls posting stuff about Y. Slashdot is huge and caters to a wide audience. For the most part, blogs are more narrow and have a more focussed audience.

On your own blog, you will find people saying mostly either insightful or dull things. You will also have a lot of spambots coming in trying to promote their product or service or scam.

On systems like Wordpress, managing spam has always been a problem. Spam runs up the numbers and keeps Wordpress blogs clogged. Playing whack-a-mole doesn't help either.

PHk handles this spam crap a lot differently. You can ban words from appearing in any type of submission. Careful now -- it's powerful. Someone might want to talk about viagara...

So it's a touchy subject and there is a fine line between censorship and ease-of-use.

PHk has a URL banning capability that will block/prevent certain strings from appearing in URLs. So no more 123330-viagara.com sites if you ban viagara, v1agara... etc. Spammers keep changing how they attack sites, so spam still gets through... but it goes to a queue.

The queue contains comments that are not yet posted but could be if the editor wants them to be. Totally separate table than the user-posted comments.

We're not adding capacha yet. But it might come in if it's needed. Basically I would rather try less obtrusive methods of guiding spam to the trash and guiding users to posting good comments.

The blog owner will want to sort the comments in their own way.

But how? Tags, of course.

Each comment is tagged by ONE EDITOR/MODERATOR ONLY: this saves time and there is a general sense of injustice with multiple moderating systems like in Slash and Scoop. The editors also will have the power to choose to display comments in THREAD or BLOCK mode.

Thread: A title line with a link to the comment.
Block: The whole comment shows up.

By default all comments will be threaded.

Admins will also give each comment a rating from 0.1 to 1.0 and that's it.

Each comment will have a button for editors where they can moderate the comment. Press the button and you are taken to a form to quickly fill out with the full comment and your special powers can take over from there. :-)

I would like to also add a user NUDGE feature. It'll be a button where users can click it to suggest that a comment be modded up, or down. This will help the editors use their time more wisely.

Because each comment can be moderated ONCE, then meta-moderation will take place on all comments rated by someone who is NOT an editor.

I will allow admins to add people to their moderator pool. Every user can meta-moderate posts that are not their own.

The effect of metamoderation will be as follows:

Each moderation will have a simple: FAIR checkbox that will default as checked. Each comment that is unchecked will be considered as an unfair moderation.

Most bloggers won't even use this part of the system, so it will be simple and effective, but not too detailed. If you are a moderator, and your metascore dips down past ZERO, you are taken out of the moderation pool until you're put back in.

The system could optionally pick people at random for a day of metamoderation or something like that.

More to come...

I realize I haven't put anything here in a long time. I've pretty much completed my transition from /journal to real blog long ago. However, since I've been keeping track of referrers I've realized that a lot of hits to my site come from people clicking on my /. signature and such. So I figured that since I just made a large blog update, 3 posts!, that I'd make a few pointers over there.

I wrote a story about using a VPN to make private PC gaming communities.

I wrote another thing about how the working hours of most establishments suck ass.

And lastly I wrote about my ideas for creating games using AJAX and other new web technologies.

The front page of my blog is at http://www.apreche.net/blog/ and I'm sure you can figure out the URL of the front page of my site.

Yeah, 3 blog posts is what happens when I'm bored on the train to work but don't get around to uploading anything until the weekend comes.