Holy crap I need to learn not to be so clumsy with database operations. Meh, this post was lost and I don’t want to type all of it out again. So, this latest RogerHub redesign took around an hour because I’ve switched to WordPress which is incomparably easier to manage than Boggert. I’m dead serious, handling a custom blogging program is a nightmare, don’t ever try it. But still, Boggert was good fun and good learning and fun while it lasted.. for that one year, and now I’ve got a firmer grasp on web programming and stuff, skills that will be useful later on sometime, which is what I’m hoping for anyways. Okay, back to History IA. Bye!

EDIT: Whew, backups are ~1MB now. Crazy (they’re plain-text)

Boggert’s a year old. More than that really, like 1.4 or something. Kenny, last year I was really biased about how great having a custom-made blogging system was. It was mostly because those two weeks of programming gave me something to show for my effort and I just couldn’t let go of that. Honestly, the bragging period is over, especially now that I’ve got the much-more-well-structured NHS Website there for show. But last night, I was looking at WordPress and man, I just can’t believe it. Post-output processing and cache regeneration: I thought of it but it was too tough for me to implement. Regex URL rewriting: I couldn’t do it last year, but I eventually did. And not even that. Just the amount of effort that was put into WP gives it that connected feel. Not that disgusting, horrific Facebook connected feel, but the transparent, open, publicly connected feel that is just pure awesome and full of rms-spirit, something that I really really really want as Facebook’s replacement. Really, this opinion might change in a month. Or if it doesn’t, I might even port RogerHub to WordPress, rather unlikely. Moreover, WP programming structure and design makes my stuff look like, oh I don’t even want to think about it. Maybe I just need to learn to stop working alone.

I just thought of another brilliant idea, but no time to do it: A aggregator that brings together updates from your friends blogs, news feeds, tumblr; essentially a RSS reader but with a learning curve that normal people can handle. But then there’s stupid Facebook which has all sorts of whatever going on that I don’t know about and Vincent, those email notifications about a IB Group damn.. How did this happen? How could this have happened? Where one day, Facebook will have some sort of exclusive hold on information, almost as if some idiot will start using Facebook as a sole outlet of communication. Zuckerberg must be sitting somewhere, laughing and speculating about how far his little project can screw up the world before someone notices. If we’re lucky, some big disaster will occur and it’ll stop this crisis before it occurs. I didn’t know why I hated Facebook before, but now I’ve got it: It’s ridiculously closed. It’s more secret and private than N. Korea. From what I’ve picked up, users aren’t even identified by anything other than their email. Their API is evil: Information goes in, but it’ll never come out. For communication, it’s better than average. But don’t expect Facebook to stick around forever. It’s got as much tenacity as a cellphone-accessory kiosk.

I haven’t really posted anything in a while, and it’s pretty obvious as to why. Now that I’ve taken SAT, I still have a BIO reading to catch up on, another hundred pages to read for English, my IOP, but damn, you didn’t come here so I could complain to you. And frankly, there is nothing to complain about. Even though I don’t like losing sleep as much as the next guy, I appreciate how I’m like busy all the time. No time to idly thing of million-dollar projects and try (and fail) them. No time to make a better bow. I want to learn skateboarding, but really that’s just because I can’t drive, I gotta walk home, and I’m even considering cutting down on walking-home time now. So either, I learn to drive (troublesome and heh), or I can go find a faster way to get home while doing some CAS while I’m at it. So I’m feeling guilty sitting here spending time writing this, but honestly, if I weren’t doing this, I’d probably outside running in circles or something. Definitely not homework. Not till the time starts choking.

I was planning to write some huge article on MS Outlook and how ridiculously useful it is, but then time constraints (and temptations to drop homework and go outside) got in the way. Then, I consider: The whole point of trying to get people to use Outlook is so they’ll start checking email and get off of... the site that must not be named. There’s people who leave GMail’s web mail app open 24/7 and that.. well it’s not the same because GMail doesn’t give you cool desktop notifications and doesn’t make cool sounds when emails come and doesn’t quietly close when you accidentally hit close on Google Chrome. It’s not as beautiful as Outlook. Say what you will, but Outlook makes GMail look like, well I can’t think of a clever metaphor, but just pretend like I said something really witty, something to that effect. This may completely absurd, but it’s paradoxically true: GMail is not decentralized. Woah, no way. Of course, there exists no mail service provider better than GMail in terms of openness, freeness, unevilness, and here-to-stay-for-longer-than-you’ll-live-ness but GMail doesn’t give you that same feeling that Outlook does. That feeling you get when you know you are in total control of everything related to your email and theres nothing anyone can do with anything to prevent that. Then Outlook lets you send/receive multiple emails and stuff, something that’s super-important if you’ve got to manage multiple emails like me. Then anyone who’s anyone uses a non-web Email Client through SMTP/IMAP, only stupid teenagers (heh) don’t use desktop email clients. Ironic right? Yes and Yahoo sucks. I’m not even gonna add their stupid exclamation mark. From past experience, my ranting about how much Yahoo sucks won’t do anything, no matter how caustically true it is. But I will warn you now: If you do not want to be screwed over in the future when everyone realizes how much Yahoo sucks and when it’s super-heavy unsustainable business plan collapses under its own weight and forms a black hole or something (heh funny right?) leave Yahoo now. It is stupidly pointless and pointlessly stupid. Having Yahoo as your homepage is a sure sign of computer-illiteracy. Yahoo emails? Pshh, those are for elementary schoolers. Dead seriously. Give those little punks a computer and they’ll type meaningless emails and forward crap to each other with psychedelic backgrounds and rainbow color words and stuff. And guess what? Yahoo makes it even easier for them to make these head-ache emails. Yes it does. The stupid “Email Theme” and background, which idiot thought of bringing HTML support to email? We follow the SPIRIT of the RFC’s not the literal meaning. See? It’s like an illusion to interpreting the constitution and stuff? Yep?

It bugs me when people say email is outdated. If email was ever going to be phased out of our lives, it would have happened a hell of a long time ago. RFC 733, RFC 822. RFC 2822. A decade goes by, then another, and still the email standards specification is revised and revised. But no! We have instant messaging protocols and social networking and IRC and crud. So why would anybody want to use stupid old email anymore? Hmm, maybe its decentralized and foolproof (not really) and so horrendously integrated into society, I mean you imagine a big corporate office and the next thing that comes to mind is a big MS Exchange server and little cubicle-dwellers with their MS Outlook all there. Teachers at school use it, big businesses use it, maybe 40 years isn’t enough evidence to see how timeproof the email specification is. It’ll keep being revised and get renamed and stricter formatting but the IMAP/SMTP model made in the 70s is here for another 50 years at the very least. But think, far in the future, a epoch bigger than 64-bit timestamps, when some revolutionary comes to light and rids the world of email once and for all. Or maybe there’ll be a nuclear winter and everything digital we know today will be erased and destroyed. We’ll have to hand make our integrated circuits and work on more precise machinery and rebuild, from the knowledge of professors and enthusiasts, the entire digital, but fragile, infrastructure that we’re so stupidly reliant on. Then, there’ll be a ingenious new digital-network text/multimedia messaging protocol made by some geniuses that survive in the future. Ironic that the historic Email Revolution will be the second greatest event in human history of its time.

The anti-aliasing and subpixel gussing needs work and heh some DOM methods still suck. But damn, this is beautiful.

So roger, tell us about your greatest weakness.(Crud. Oh crud. Alright, well I’m supposed to say something like I work too hard or I get too caught up in my work. It didn’t sound so demeaning last week. Gotta make something up quick. Weakness. Like getting distracted? Man it’s gotta be positive. Damn, I’m sweating bullets.)

My greatest weakness.. Probably working with other people.

(Yeah, that’s partially true. I’d really prefer to work alone. Actually, that’s not true. I’d like a bajillion clones of myself with unquestioning obedience and access to whatever I’m thinking of at the moment.)

Usually I work alone on my projects. Partly because there wasn’t anyone in my life who I could really discuss programming about, with. (ROGER! stop stuttering damit.) Then, I’ve got this theory about programming in teams. (Okay, familiar territory. I got this planned.) See, if one person works alone, they get a certain amount of work done. But if it’s two people, they get less than twice the amount of work done. (Wow that came out confusing.) I mean, say one person gets x amount of work done. Two would be like 1.5x. Sorta. They’ll screw around and stuff. And even if they don’t they’ve got to discuss the work they’re doing. There’s no instantaneous telepathic communication unlike if you’re working with yourself. I’d always wonder about how quickly I could finish big projects if I had a twin or two. Like, they’d know what I’m thinking and I’d know what they’re thinking and we’d be side-by-side programming on rainy afternoons. (Holy crap, this makes me sound like a work-a-holic.)

(Seriously, the programming enthusiasts I know are.. well. So I’m at the club meeting and theres these two white guys standing up in front of the classroom figeting around. Yup, something about a something else in March, or was it April? Then there’s these other short white guys and indian guys sitting around with their big backpacks and all slouched over and such. Damn, and these are the guys that I’m supposed to be like. Oh I hope not. This is exactly why I don’t work well with other people. Though, I can’t just blurt out all this in public. That’d be horrible. Okay well..)

I’d like this position because it gives me an opportunity (heh, typical BS. this is really humbling..) to learn to work with other people and not just myself. I believe that when people come together and pool their effort together, (Man note to self: get a bigger vocabulary.) they can achieve more than if they were working alone. (Heh, yup. Yeah right.)

If I’m given this position, I would turn this weakness into a strength and form better bonds with my peers and (peers, wtf? wrong word. damn.) help them communicate better. Because I will be specifically focusing on this aspect of team cooperation (gotta stop repeating myself now..), I’ll make a great project manager and I will help push products from start to finish quickly, and with skill.

Ahh, crud crud crud crud. Please get this over with.. Elapsed time: 16 minutes.

Heh. I really don’t have time to blog on RogerHub because of IB. Though, I like the workload since now, I never feel like I’m wasting time. (Just finished ~60 pages of BMU) Heh. So I’ll just go train-of-thought and type down whatever I can think of in 5 minutes. So I’m tutoring this Mexican guy in geometry and sometimes, I just don’t see how people don’t understand something. I thought it’d be interesting and all to tutor, but it’s really idle and pointless. You know, I saw this guy doing a news summary thing on CNet on the 16th. (I remember this because Diaspora opened up their repository and IE9 went beta.) I’ve no idea how to pronounce most of the words related to internet/web events. So, when I see these live broadcasts of people talking about github and social networking, it’s just odd. Maybe it’s because I’m not used to hearing those words, or maybe it’s because they’re not used to saying them. Which makes me notice that most news anchors and such people aren’t chosen because they have expert political knowledge or are some specialist in science. They’re professionals in talking and looking pretty. Talking from a script and not knowing what you’re saying really sounds awkward. The words don’t come out right, especially the accents and topic points that really matter. Of course, they can’t have this genius engineer come up and talk about new company innovations and crap. They have a special guy for that and he gets a ton more fame and recognition than the guy who’s actually doing the work. Though, sometimes, that’s a good thing. People who discuss things on the news should be some kind of expert or at least an enthusiast in their field. Maybe this is true for every piece of dog crap that the media secretes, or maybe they’re just unlucky, but I’ve noticed that the media takes old news (like really old news) and gives it to writing-experts (rather than subject-experts) who make it sound alarming! Then the public gets all scared shit and they talk about how scared shit they are to their friends and they sound like idiots to the people who aren’t idiots. Oh no! We’re running out of IP addresses. Oh man, this problem was realized over a decade ago and a solution was made in 1998. Then people are suddently scared shitless that their pictures have RFID data that records the GPS location of every picture their fancy thousand-dollar camera takes. Holy crap man! They need to do something about this huge privacy issue! They, being the magical lords of the technology world. Then even more ridiculous, people are surprised that auto-complete Google searches involve.. well, telling Google what you’re typing before you type it. Well what the hell man. Obviously, those auto-completes need to come from somewhere. Is all news really this full of dogshit? Oh man. Alright well see you some other time.

Elapsed time: 11 minutes.

This is a bit late, but the ACSI published their annual report on customer satisfaction in the US and this time, its about E-Business. So like, holy crap right? And this year, they added social networking companies to the list. Since I’m a total prick when it comes to social networking, I thought I’d talk about that.

Whoops, I forgot the link. Here it is. Okay I’m just joking, here it is for realz. Go check it out—I’ll wait.

Cutting the crap, Facebook gets 2nd to last in the long list of competitors. Though with social networking, there’s not a lot of precedence to compare to. But if Facebook is so horribly “unsatisfying” why do 400 million people continue to use it? [source]

I don’t see why Wikipedia is bunched in with social media. Youtube should be out too. So with only Facebook and MySpace left, the bar isn’t set real high.

Facebook claims 400 million active users, but they don’t specify much in terms of what counts as active. (500M registered [>source]) But accounts galore: There are millions of duds in Facebooks database (0MG MYSQL L0l0l0l). I mean, there’s just so much to do with a Facebook account: You can intimidate people to pay you or even get a free mousepad (expired, x-ref or x-ref). Who knows?

Another thing: Companies that listen to users don’t do as well. Examples just keep showing that the path to success involves completely ignoring what your customers think. While Zuckerberg just ignoring all the heat he gets from users, Facebook is booming. On the other hand, Digg loses traffic because they cave in to their users like lurkers cave in to youlaughyoulose. All the crap you learn in preschool about respecting others’ opinions and always showing your pleasant side apparently does not apply to products.

Logic: What’s wrong with listening to your users? Here’s what: They don’t know what they want. Some people say things out of whim. Some say things to sate their OCD. If you have to ask someone for their opinion, they’ll put little thought into responding because they simply do not care what you do. It’s selfish, but it’s only expected. “Product should be a dictatorship. Not consensus driven.” (source) So things are better when one guy’s making calling all the shots.

So I’m claiming that all humans are idiots who should be righteously ignored. So why do people listen to critics? Movie critics, art, design! Logically, anyone should have the ability to distinguish innovation from idiocy. But since people don’t know what they want, critics must save them from ignorance! Then what makes a good critic? Is there, perhaps, a scale? Or even a critic to judge critics? Before I start on this infinite loop crap, I’m not.

Yes, that’s right. As these random chains of logic form in my head, I remember them so I can pass them to you. Magic happens on the pooper.

(that’s my free mousepad pic up top if you’re wondering)

Bleghh.. Physics is such a drag, along with websites to do, SAT crap. Then I’ve got to write crap to keep this lame website alive. Inuyasha!.. but then I’ve got to write a report on the biggest Transformers-geek in history. News to keep up with, free mousepads and trolling 11-year-old’s.

From Goossens’ collection of ancient sci-fi films (ffs they’re on VHS), we saw iRobot, again. I just noticed something at the part when James Cromwell is spewing crap about how extremely complex programs have the capability to transform and evolve themselves. Here’s the exact quote:

First off, the notion that you can give a program three laws (moreover, in English) and expect it to follow them is ridiculous, especially when they’re so retardedly vague. Making a bipedal robot is tough enough. But it’s completely possible, through a complex physics-based simulation of the environment. How do you even begin to write a program that can distinguish danger? Here, I’ll feed this computer the entire selection of the world’s violence and action films to teach it what’s dangerous and what’s not. That’s not gonna fly real well.


Inb4 DOOOD ITZ JUST MOVIE STOOPID


If you look past the “random segments of code” (lol), this movie claiming that program logic will question creation given an amount of time. Computers aren’t aware of what they’re doing. They follow instructions given to them by programmers and it won’t do anything that you don’t explicitly tell it to. Moreover, computers have been around for half a century, but you don’t see self-aware robots anywhere (except, well, other movies). This idea is just impossible: From the electric charges in the semi-conductors of your computer to programs tackling the challenges of artificial intelligence, there’s really no room for computer logic to somehow develop consciousness unintentionally.


Now, consider this: A hundred years from now, on a quantum computer the size of a football field (since Americans seem to like this measurement), programmers have started running a new program that will simulate the biological processes that occur in living creatures. With a carefully crafted robotic body, the program will simulate environments, human interaction, and even emotions by adjusting variables in a massive simulation. Like a baby, neurons will adjust to things that the simulation experiences, and slowly, based on trial and error, the simulation will learn to talk, move and interact like a human.


But is this simulation really self-aware? Or are you just speaking to a very well-made program? Theoretically, it all looks possible–in the future, of course. iRobot is set in 2035, a stupidly soon date for such an achievement to occur. Ignoring that, a simulation of processes we’ve only begun to understand will be more difficult and complex than any idea ever conceived or attempted by anyone. In the end, the purpose of this simulation is to simulate self-awareness. If it works, then the program did what it was intended to do. Nothing special there.


Faulty code can lead to intent errors: If you screw up, the program might not do what you want it to. Screwups made potato chips, post-it notes and fireworks. But I’ve yet to see screwups (or alchemists) create intelligence accidentally.


So Edward Elric, good luck. You’ve got quite a challenge ahead.

This is genius. Editing flames into a clip of me snapping my fingers. Anyone else think FMA’s ending was a bit underwhelming? They could have all died or something. But meh, it never happens.

Link

NHS’s website is nearing completion. Well.. not really. It’s come a long way, but there’s still a lot I haven’t done yet. While making the event creation form, I found this service called JSLint. Now, HTML and CSS have the W3 (World Wide Web Consortium) validators to make sure everything’s neat and tidy. But JavaScript isn’t so lucky. So JSLint takes your JavaScript and tells you everything that’s wrong with it. And damn, it is relentless. I thought I had good coding habits.. But in return, you get reliable, quality code.

This made me laugh. Firefox had a rush release the other day. Just 3 days after Firefox 3.6.4 came out, they pushed out 3.6.6. (What happened to 3.6.5...) Damn, what could be so important that Firefox would rush a patch like this?


Are you kidding me.. First of all, wtf? Farmville? Second: What kind of Flash app lags for 10 seconds before letting up? Old computers, yes. But 10 seconds? That’s hair-ripping territory. So, they’ve decided on 45 seconds—which is ridiculous. Unless the app is unattended (in which case this feature would be useless), nobody’s going to wait 45 seconds for their app to respond. (On the other hand, Firefox has approximately as many active users as Facebook does.)

I know you don’t care, but studies show that Chrome gets more active users from Firefox than any other browser. And I’ve switched to Chrome completely too. It’s not because of speed or standards compliance. I really could care less (unless it’s IE-level). Chrome simply has better Dev tools. Firefox’s developer console is about as useful as 5YNT4X 3RR0R 0N L1N3 235!!1!!1!, which is not very useful at all.

And what’s with all the stats that say IE still has 50% market share? RogerHub’s IE users has always lingered around 10-15%. Likewise, analytics from Digg show that they get very few IE users too. Maybe everyone that uses IE (farmers and grandparents 80+) is limited to MSN, AOL, and other websites that nobody ever goes to. And here’s Robert Pattinson demonstrating the proper way to bone a horse:



Remember Me was my movie-of-the-year. (and it wasn’t gay at all)



“The fish is moving but it’s dead!” Go zombie fish.. and Happy Independence Day. I’ll be blowing stuff up with my fire alchemy. (: