1. 2008
    Dec
    12

    New look :-)

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    Regular visitors (yeah right, as if I have any) may have noticed that I've updated the site with a new, or at least pseudo-new theme. This grew out of an effort to procrastinate doing real work: I was bored with both the physics problems I was supposed to be working on and the endless Python coding and sysadmin-type-stuff that this web server is needing to become truly production-ready, whatever that means. (Warning: the rest of this is quite possibly boring, I'm mostly writing to test out the new features and so that I can remember what I did)

    So I pulled up Inkscape and the GIMP and went to work creating new images. Most notably, I've gotten rid of that ugly blue/green aura that used to surround the blog posts and replaced it with a clean blue and gold border with pure white on the inside. And in order to make that contrast with the page background, I've got a papery texture created with the GIMP's airbrush tool (that, by the way, was all too easy).

    Also, in the way of changes to the CSS, some of the blog post details have been reduced to a smaller font size …

  2. 2008
    Dec
    10

    Testing the time

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    I'm not sure what time zone the database is in right now so here's a test... posted at 2:18 AM EST/7:18 AM UTC

    EDIT: 'sall good ;-)

  3. 2008
    Dec
    04

    yay it worked! Part 2

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    After long sleepless nights of work (really), I finally have the email server up and running on the new host. All emails sent to contact@ellipsix.net and other defined @ellipsix.net addresses should be getting through. Please email me, all I get is spam and that gets boring quickly ;-)

  4. 2008
    Dec
    02

    yay it worked!

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    The new site is finally up and running — mostly... email seems to be a little problematic to set up. If you notice any problems with the site, email contact@ellipsix.net and hopefully it'll get through.

  5. 2008
    Nov
    24

    Rebooting Ellipsix

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on
    The Ellipsix website is getting its own home! I'm moving the site to a new server and rewriting all the site's backing code from scratch, among other changes hopefully to come.
  6. 2008
    Nov
    10

    Armageddon

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    Armageddon, the movie. This is exactly Independence Day, except instead of aliens in giant spaceships there are rocks, in... bigger rocks. Also, cross-bred with Lord of the Rings, because Arwen is in it. Not Liv Tyler — Arwen, because I can only hope Liv Tyler is capable of something more than standing stoically while everybody else panics about impending doom. I have never seen a more useless character.

    ROFL

  7. 2008
    Oct
    31

    Subliminal messaging

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    Seen the latest McCain commercial? The one that goes "Barack Obama is for higher taxes. John McCain is for workin' Joes." and so on, with monotonous (monorhythmic actually, it's just a beat) string music playing in the background. Take a closer listen to that music. Notice how all of the "McCain is for..." soundbites are set to lovely major chords whereas the "Obama is for..." bits have ugly dissonances in the background.

    Could that be turned into an ad for Obama just by switching the consonant and dissonant chords? If I get my hands on that video I have to try it.

  8. 2008
    Oct
    28

    Worst phishing ever

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    Okay, not the worst — there's plenty of room on the internet for any amount of incompetence you care to look for — but anyway: I just got this link in what looked like a rare well-crafted piece of spam. Now, for a while I've wanted to actually follow some of these spam links, see what the latest phishing tech looks like, and maybe if I'm feeling nice feed them some fake login information (like empty calories for websites, I suppose).

    Turns out, when these particular spammers created their mockup of the Enom web page, they completely neglected to change the links! So anyone who clicks anything on the page — even the "forgot password" link — gets redirected to the legitimate site. Way to completely defeat the point...

    Not to mention, the email they're sending talks about domain information in the WHOIS database, which is something that only a very small percentage of internet users would know/care about. Probably the same small percentage who know how to identify spam. And who know to actually look at the addresses of the websites they go to. All in all, I have to wonder whether this particular scheme is actually going to work on anyone …

  9. 2008
    Oct
    16

    the news is stupid

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    So apparently all the news/fake news/crap on TV now is about this random plumber dude who said some random stuff to some random presidential candidate. Who I'm not going to give the distinction of naming.

    AAAAAHHHH who cares?! About all I can get out of this is the fact that the people reporting on world events are the kind of morons who will wake up one day and say "hey, let's sensationalize something totally useless today"

    grrrr

  11. 2008
    Oct
    08

    Let's call it the "Reacto-meter"

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    You know that little audience reaction graphic that CNN puts on the bottom of the screen during debates? I want one.

    OK, backing up: as I understand it, CNN puts about 80 people in a room in Ohio to watch the debate and equips them with little dials which they can turn left and right to indicate, on a scale of 0 to 100 . . . something. I'm guessing the dial setting is supposed to correspond to how much people agree with or identify with what's currently being said, but it really didn't say; unfortunately CNN didn't give any vertical scale other than "+.....-" (Note to anyone who wants to do better-than-useless data analysis: this is a Very Bad Idea. Always label your axes.) Anyway, the graph at the bottom of the TV screen shows some sort of average opinion over the focus group, split up by party affiliation or gender or whatever.

    During the second presidential debate last night, I started thinking, why couldn't we the people pull this nifty trick for ourselves? It should be pretty easy to emulate CNN's dial gadget with a small Java applet to allow people to contribute their opinions over the internet. Of course, the UI …

  12. 2008
    Oct
    02

    not another blog...

    Posted by David Zaslavsky on

    Blogs are everywhere these days. It seems like they're slowly - and by slowly I mean quickly - infesting every last corner of the internet. So why are blogs so popular? (And how many corners does the internet have, anyway? What would you call that shape?) I'm sure there are about a zillion answers out there if you cared to look, speculated into existence by people who make it their business to come up with random speculation and get you to believe it. Mostly bloggers (look, now I'm blogging about blogs about blogs! It's (meta)2!)

    I'm now going to inform you why blogs are so popular by ignoring all that random speculation and coming up with my own random speculation. This is precisely what happens with blogging: everybody writes, nobody reads. Blogging allows a person with nothing more than a computer and an opinion (sometimes optional) to spout rhetoric for the world to hear, while remaining completely insulated from the fact that in all probability, nobody cares. It's like the law of supply and demand: with such a glut of communication, the vast majority of blogs become pretty much valueless to all except the people writing them. So actually, most blogs …