April 24, 2004

Mac users are going to hell.

This is probably the funniest thing I’ve read in ages… Evolutionism Propaganda (Scroll down to the Apple Macintosh sub-heading)

This company is well known for its cult-like following. It isn’t much of a stretch to say that it is a cult. Consider co-founder and leader Steve Jobs’ constant exhortation through advertising (i.e. mind control) that its followers should “think different”. We have to ask ourselves: “think different than whom or what?” The disturbing answer is that they want us to think different than our Christian upbringing, to reject all the values that we have been taught and to heed not the message of the Lord Jesus Christ!

AAAAAhahahahaha… Seriously that is just too funny. The article says that Apple computer is promoting darwinism and satanism because OSX is based on Darwin, the old Unix OS. It also runs “daemons”, and has a “secret code” to set permissions called chmod 666! Holy crap. Seriously that is just the funniest thing I’ve ever read. Read the article. Seriously. It’s absolutely hysterical.

Thanks a lot to SkinnyJ for the link! You made my day!

April 15, 2004

Page 23

I don’t wanna be left out, so, I first saw this on Keith’s site.

1. Grab the nearest book.


2. Open the book to page 23.


3. Find the fifth sentence.


4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

“The answer is threefold.”

A bit anti-climactic, eh? The quote is from Flatland a book written in the late 1800’s by a guy named Edwin A. Abbott. I’m almost done with it, and it’s definitely been the most interesting book from the 1800’s that I’ve ever read (probably the only book form the 1800’s I’ve ever read, actually). It’s a man that lives in a two-dimensional world who is shown the third dimension by someone from “Spaceland”. The citizens of “Flatland” (the two dimensional world) have a strict caste system, and some interesting views on women. Namely that they function purely on emotions and are incapable of any logical reasoning, which renders them mostly useless. Hahahah, hey, it was written in the 1800’s, plus it’s fiction. :)

Anyway, the caste system works like this: The people with the most sides are part of high-society. Since it’s a two-dimensional world, people are made up of shapes (squares, triangles, polygons, hexagons, etc). The isosceles triangles are the lowest form of society and are made up of criminals, bums, and soldiers. Equilateral triangles (all three sides the same length) are slightly above them and are considered workman if I remember correctly. Squares are tradesman, etc. All the way up to “The Circles” which are actually polygons with a very high number of sides, who are considered the Priests of the society. The women are straight lines, no matter their class. The citizens of Flatland equate intelligence with the regularity of angles that make up one’s body, as well as the amount of angles and sides that you have. This shows why the women are considered mostly useless, considering they have no real sides or angles at all, being only a straight line.

The book is actually extremely interesting, imaginative, and quite funny. The writing style reminds me vaguely of Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). If you are interested but don’t want to buy the book, you can read it online thanks to the Gutenburg Project, since the book’s copyright has expired.

April 12, 2004

QotD: Launcher

Question: LaunchBar or QuickSilver?

My Answer: I had been using Launchbar and was very pleased, but then I read several glowing reviews of QuickSilver and made the switch. Mainly because QuickSilver is free, looks cooler, and has more features. I love the Email to… and IM To… features. Overall it’s just a lot more powerful than Launchbar. Of course I haven’t tried the new version 4 beta of Launchbar, and from reading the feature list it looks like they caught up to QuickSilver as far as features go. But it’s still not free.

Virtual PC

I’ve been using ieCapture lately to test my web sites on Windows browsers, and it’s been working great. There are a few faults though, mainly that you can’t scroll the page or interact with any mouseovers, and the service can be a little slow if a lot of people are using it at once. I’m certainly not complaining though, it’s a fantastic service and I thank Dan Vine every time I go there by clicking on as many ads as I can, but I needed something a little more flexible and speedy, so I got Virtual PC setup on my 12” Powerbook with an installation of Windows 2000.

If you haven’t heard of Virtual PC before, it’s a software application that emulates a Windows PC. The Virtual PC software actually only emulates a PC processor, and has nothing to do directly with Windows. You have to buy Windows separate, and can install any flavor of it that you like into your little “Virtual PC”. You can also install other PC operating systems like the PC version of Linux. (And by PC I mean an Intel/AMD computer).

I installed Windows 2000 because XP is bloated and slow, and because of the speed decrease when emulating a completely different computer platform, I wanted to have all the speed I could get.

I had heard that Virtual PC was pretty slow, but I am actually pretty impressed with its speed on my Mac. You definitely couldn’t run any 3d games on it with any playable frame rates, but for productivity apps like the MS Office suite and other general business applications, it would work just fine. It’s also great for testing web sites, because all of the browsers run very well on it.

As you can see in the screenshot, I have Safari running on the Mac, with a Virtual PC window open running Firefox, Opera, and IE 5. With a bit of hacking, I can setup IE 5.5 and IE 6.0 to run on the Windows system as well. This means I can test my sites on basically every popular browser with full interactivity, scrolling, javascript interaction, etc. all from a single Mac laptop! I could also easily install a Linux partition into Virtual PC and test sites on Mozilla and Konqueror for that OS as well. I’m still pretty amazed that this is possible.

I’m sure there are a lot of features and possibilities of this that I haven’t fully grasped yet since I just installed this last night, but even for the sole purpose of testing sites, this is a really great thing to have! And that’s probably what I’ll be using it for 99% of the time anyway, as I’ve never really come across a Windows application that I just have to have that isn’t available on the Mac.

The screenshot I showed is of Windows running in a window, but you can also run it full screen, so it would be like working on a regular PC laptop, even though it’s actually a Mac. You can easily share files between the Mac and the Virtual PC OSs, and Windows easily accesses the network connections as well. I haven’t tried printing or anything like that yet, but I would imagine it is possible and easy to setup.

So if you are a web designer looking for a way to test your site cross-platform, look no further than a Mac running Virtual PC. And if you have thought about buying a Mac in the past but were afraid you’d lose your favorite program, or have a Windows-only program that you have to use at work, now you have no excuses!

April 10, 2004

Protecting pictures and other files with .htaccess

Recently people have been stealing my bandwidth by “hotlinking” ass of the week images from my site. Hotlinking means they include the pictures in their own web site, but they are actually being downloaded from my servers. So they get the pictures on their site, but are using my bandwidth.

I don’t appreciate this very much.

So, I have used .htaccess to prevent that from happening. Now if you link to my images from another web site, you are given a “broken image” instead of the picture actually showing up.

Here is the code to do it in case you have a similar problem:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yoursite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yoursite.com/.*$ [NC]
ReWriteRule .*.(gif|jpg)$ - [N,F,L]

IndexIgnore *

Just replace “yoursite.com” with your domain name and any other site you want to be able to display your images.

Copy/paste this info into a file in the directory you want to protect, and call it .htaccess (note the period before the name). You maybe have to turn on “View all hidden files” in your FTP client in order to see the file, because it is normally hidden.

The last line, “IndexIgnore *” will keep people from being able to display a directory listing, and seeing all of the images in a directory. Instead of seeing all of the AotW pictures in the whole directory, you’ll just see this.

Thanks to ScriptyGoddess for the info!

April 08, 2004

Ass of the Week #38

AotW #38

Note because of a lot of sites linking directly to the images on my site and stealing my bandwidth, I’ve set it up so that you can no longer do that. So to all you people hotlinking my stuff, download the pictures and host them on your own server if you want ‘em.

Another Note:
Sorry everybody, but I had to remove the archive of Ass of the Week pictures. For the past couple of days I’ve been being linked by porn indexing sites, and as soon as one links me, another finds it and links me as well. I’m now getting well over 100 visits a minute and my bandwidth usage is skyrocketing. I’ve used 5gigs of bandwidth in less than 24 hours, and my account isn’t going to last long with that kind of traffic.

So from now on, I will still post the ass of the week, but I will just update it from week to week, and will not keep an archive of the images. Check back every Thursday for a new picture, but if you miss one, it’s gone.

Sorry I can’t keep them all up for everyone to enjoy, but I’m just not willing to upgrade my hosting account in order to keep up with the demand.

April 06, 2004

Worst DVD Cover Art Ever

Seriously now. What is up with this cover art? It looks like it was made by a 13 year old as their first project in Photoshop. Did the designers just get tired of making Matrix DVD covers after the second one, so they decided to throw a couple of frames from the movie on there with the logo? At least the first two used some real custom posed shots to make it somewhat interesting… This is just a few screen captures assembled in a square with a logo. They didn’t even feather the edges of the boxes.

I dare say, even I could have done better. They could have at least made it look like one of the movie posters. Oh well, I’ll end up buying it anyway just so I can own all three DVDs. :)

What do you think is the worst DVD cover art ever?