Four Island

Mm. Feels pretty stupid once you think about it. I mean, really. My whole thing on "pick something when you're not as informed and stick with it forever, constantly ignoring the fact that there are better solutions" is annoying.

The thing I'm going to rant about is <!DOCTYPE>. I learned HTML at a young age, young enough to think that whatever I read must be right and nothing would sway me from that, even if the author did change her mind in the next book. I thought that not using <!DOCTYPE> was a good thing, a declaration of independence, the right thing to do. Not using it also makes writing webpages 10 seconds easier.

And don't even go there with that last comment. I'm hardly a perfectionist, maybe I'm passionate in some fields such as computing and mumble, but I don't have to be perfect all the time.

Anyway, back to <!DOCTYPE>. To this day, I still do not see any merits in using the loggy tag other than to ease W3C's validator. My theory is that the tag explicitly tells the client browser what DTD to use so it can render the document exactly as I wanted it to be rendered. BEEP. Slow down there, we've got CSS resets for that. So, why use <!DOCTYPE>? I'd be much obliged if someone told me.

See? I'm ready to get off of my high pedestal. I started by admitting IE wasn't the best and now I'm trying to set this whole <!DOCTYPE> thing right.

However, you must admit that I am right about Wordpress. I know I made the correct decision not to go with Wordpress for my blog. I can use it for other websites, just not for Four Island. I am also right about Apple. They're still evil and they always will be. So there.

Well! It turns out people actually care about Tetrgi! WHO KNEW? :) And for those who haven't a clue, try reading it's project page in the projects section. :)

Yes - 3 vote(s)! Ewwww! - 1 vote(s)! What IS it? - 3 vote(s)! Indifferent - 0 vote(s)!

At least I updated the poll on the right time this week!

Anyway, I have to say something about Yaplet. We on Four Island have been using Yaplet a long time for our synchronous communication, ever since Drifty found it, but lately it's been rather unreliable. It goes down alot, freezes so we talk to ourselves for hours and slows down. I may just end up writing my own replacement because Yaplet can be rather annoying.

Yes, that's right. I've rewritten Tetrgi in another language. :)

First it was Visual Basic .NET. Riiiight.... it was implemented in a bad way in a language that would only run on Windows with a lot of libraries installed on the side.

Then it was C++. That was pretty much a literal translation of the VB.NET version, it was still implemented in a bad way. It also only worked on the platforms I could compile it for.

Now, I've rewritten Tetrgi in Java, which is pretty much guaranteed to work on any platform. Plus, it's implemented as XML, instead of the "search and replace the string" thing I had going on before. Right. I really don't know. However, now the language is much more stable and it even has a couple of new tags. It's also much easier, now, to create new tags.

One small problem, however, is that the language specification changed slightly when I changed the implementation to XML. Now, all tags must be closed (they can be closed in the starting tag, though). There are a few more slight changes such as the fact that you now cannot put <COND> tags in a room's <TEXT> tag. There is a workaround for this, however, with the introduction of the <INIT> tag. I am going to try to write the documentation so the language is usable.

Anyway, Tetrgi 3.0 is now available from its downloads page. The file is called Tetrgi-3.0.jar. Have fun. :)

You may have noticed that I haven't been working on any Four Island projects recently. Perhaps it's recoil from the InstaDisc Incident, but I think it's because I'm plain lazy. Because of this, I'm sorry to say that I will be discontinuing a few Four Island projects. Here we go.

InstaDisc In light of the InstaDisc Incident, there is no sane reason for InstaDisc is be continued. RSS is a perfectly fine alternative with an advantage: It's much simpler. Plus, InstaDisc's main advantage, the ability for Push notification, only worked for a small percentage of users.

Xidet Xidet was a mistake. There are other IDEs and text editors available that are better. For instance, I use nano on a daily basis to write PHP web applications. I also use it to write C++ and Ruby. For Java (and Ruby), I use NetBeans.

SimpleBlog Unless anyone really wants me to continue this, I will confine it to The S Site because it's more of a tweak-yourself kind of blogging engine.

Single Four As Single Four was never anything other than an extremely esoteric interpreted language, there isn't really a reason to continue developing it. However, I would still like to see some Single Four programs (so far no one's turned anything in).

FoureverNET I discontinued this a LONG time ago, but I never actually announced it. In fact, I never announced its creation either.

Trac Tickets This never really had any point other than a small convince script that didn't deserve to be classified as a "project". Plus, we don't even use Trac anymore, so there's no point in it.

Soshibi I have a strange habit of naming projects after characters in The Hat. Anyway, this was supposed to be an LFS OS, but I got bored of it, and I want to free the name for another project, because, as I said before, I like naming projects after characters in The Hat.

So, there we are. Unless someone really wants me to continue developing these projects, I'm going to close development on them. I do still plan to continue developing Tetrgi and to start developing iNetSneak and Rubiwin sometime.

I like programming. I especially like C++, Java and PHP. However, I decided that I want to learn another language.

Perhaps inspired by the PMS I use, Redmine, I have decided to learn Ruby. It's actually not that bad. It's pretty interesting, simple and easy to use. For instance, unlike many languages, Ruby doesn't require classes or main functions to display its "Hello World" program. This is it in its entirety:

puts "Hello World!"

A great way to learn is the "Try Ruby!" interactive prompt available from tryruby.hobix.com that teaches you Ruby from your browser. It's a lot of fun, it's fun and I'm repeating myself.

Another fun aspect of Ruby is the Ruby on Rails framework, which was the base of the popular PHP framework CakePHP. Rails makes it much more easy and fun to write Ruby web applications. I plan to write a certain upcoming website in Rails, too.

One thing that does annoy me about Ruby, though, is that its command-separation character is, like BASIC and all derivatives, the newline. I fine semicolon separated languages so much better. I just do. :)

puts "So, do you like Ruby?"
likeRuby = true
puts "YAY!" if likeRuby

In response to yesterday's post, I think I've already found a solution. You don't want to anonymously comment? You don't have to. Now, if you have a Fourm account, it serves as a Four Island account too.

The Login link in the NavBar goes to the login module in the Fourm. It wasn't too hard integrating except for all of this cookie strangeness. It was pretty difficult with the cookies as phpBB3 seems to store a lot of session data in the database rather than the session files.

Note: Because I had to change the cookie path to get cookies working with the root of the website, you may have to clear your cache and/or delete all of your cookies to be able to log in. It did that to me and it was annoying. Just letting you know.

For those not in the know, in Firefox, to delete your cookies, you open the Tools menu, click "Clear Private Data", check off "Cookies" and click "Clear Private Data Now". Thank you. :)

EDIT: For those other browsers, here's how to delete your cookies:

Internet Explorer

1. Open Internet Explorer and click on the "Tools" menu.
2. In the "Tools" menu, click on "Internet Options".
3. Under the General Tab select the "Delete Cookies" button.
4. Delete cookies by clicking "OK".

Safari

1. Choose Safari > Preferences.
2. Click Security.
3. Click Show Cookies.
4. Click Remove All.

Opera

1. Select Menu > Tools
2. Click Private data
3. Click Delete cookies

Ok. As I mentioned in my yearly goals, few people comment on my site. I've asked around and a big reason is that they don't like commenting anonymously (Timbo94). That is why blogs such as Color Pencils and Dream Weaver get comments and I don't (along with the fact that their content is good), because they use IntenseDebate so their accounts are centralized.

Hoping to please my readers, I decided to try to implement IntenseDebate on my development computer. At first, it went pretty well. I replaced the comments on all commentable pages with the IntenseDebate JavaScript. It looked great and seemed to work.

However, it all went downhill from there. First of all, the main index page shows the number of comments next to each post. I was able to emulate that nicely by hacking some of the special JavaScript included in the Wordpress IntenseDebate plugin. However, while the post at the top of the page said "No Comment" happily, the rest all said "undefined" and the link didn't even point to the right place. Strange.

More importantly, there's the topic of my sidebar widgets. Since I would no longer be in control of the data, I couldn't access it freely. IntenseDebate does provide "Top Commentors" and "Recent Comments" widgets, but there's a catch. First of all, it's more JavaScript. You have to use the HTML it provides, no changey. There is limited CSS customization support, but it didn't help. The widgets looked terrible in my sidebar. Second, Recent Comments showed an excerpt from each comment. That's way too long. Mine only shows the post title, the author and a link. Third, the "Popular Posts" widget would still have to die because part of the fourmula for popularity is the number of comments on the post, which is unaccessible to me due to IntenseDebate.

Lastly, switching to IntenseDebate would involve me losing all comments already posted on Four Island as there is no easy way to import the comments. And we can't have that, right? :)

Because of all of this, I've decided not to go with IntenseDebate. It'd be too much trouble and it'd probably hurt Four Island rather than help it. So, I think I'll try to spruce up my own commenting system. So, I have some questions I'd like to ask you people (please comment, a few anonymous comments won't hurt and you're contributions will help remove the anonymous problem):

1. For the anonymous problem: I can't use the IntenseDebate accounts, but how about OpenID? Is that a plausible direction to go in?
2. Or would it be better for me to simply make it a lot easier to register? No, that probably wouldn't help. Sorry, disregard that suggestion.
3. Ok, perhaps I'm completely lost on the whole "anonymous" problem. Please leave suggestions, thankses!
4. Should I add comment threading like IntenseDebate does? I'm leaning towards the "no" end of the spectrum, but it's up to my readers. Sortof.
5. Any other IntenseDebate features you'd like to see in Four Island?

Anyway, thanks in advance for helping. I'm just trying to make Four Island a better, more social place. :)

Just like that, another year passes. Well, most of you seem happy for 2009, and while I'm sure we'll all miss 2008, I'm sure the future'll be bright.

YES! Time goes by so slowly! - 4 vote(s)! Not a chance, I looove 2008! - 1 vote(s)! What year is it? - 1 vote(s)! I'm, like, indifferent - 2 vote(s)!

And yes, I'm very sorry for doing the poll late again. I've already failed one of my yearly goals. Oh well. If I hadn't posted late, the True Falsities craze wouldn't have started yet. That might be good. :)

I wanted to start this post off by saying that I had come down with a case of writer's block, a severe condition in which authors and bloggers simply stare at their text editors, unable to write or think and that I'd saved this post in my reserves just in case I came down with this terrible condition, but then I realized that I was copying too much from Humorix. So, instead, I'll start like this:

Recently, I've been reading Humorix again. It's so good! I love it! I so badly want them to continue doing to because it's so funny and good, but sadly, it is not to be.

It is becoming clear that I am obsessed with Humorix. During Four Island's extended downtime, I started a Wordpress blog called "False", which was pretty much a parody of Humorix. However, instead of containing Linux humor, it contained Four Island humor, including all of Four Island's regulars.

For instance, the first story run was about Four Island switching to Wordpress. There was mass hysteria, cats and dogs living together and I had recieved the title of "clinically insane". :)

The next thing was an article on Smiley actually updating his website. Then, akin to Humorix's ''Crashback'' feature, the next post was about the fact that he actually did update his website. However, I then pointed out that Atmos hasn't updated for years.

There was a big series going on in it about Gryphic and the Color Pencils War. It started with Gryphic posting American English on her blog, which people found suspicious. Next post, she posted on her blog an admittance that she was not actually Gryphic, a robot dispatched from the "American English Agency" had locked her in her closet after she posted "Colour 4eva" [sic] and had been writing posts for her ever since. I do not remember why the robot finally cracked, but I do remember paramedics carrying a half-dead Gryphic out of her closet on a stretcher. She was fine by the next post, though, thankfully. :) I think she then sued American English Agency over her blog, a.k.a., she wrote the lawsuit as a blog post. There was a further conspiracy about Gryphic and Color Pencils that I cannot quite remember. It was good, though, and I miss it a lot.

There was this thing about TimTam going insane after being interviewed for something and running out into the desert, but I was probably on cupcakes by then. :) I think it had something to do with this Humorix story, like TimTam was accused of doing that to Apple and then he went insane. I don't know, it was funny.

Sadly, I cannot post the actual posts or the hilarity I miss. There was a problem with the posts, I do not remember what it was. Something, perhaps, with the emoticons, or perhaps the declarations. However, I wrote a PHP script to automatically change all of the posts so the problem was fixed.

Oops. I made a mistake in my script, I forgot the "WHERE" clause in the "UPDATE" command. Stupid me. Every single post was replaced with the contents of the last post written, which had something to do with JAL making a website about saving the children.

That annoys me greatly because I remember LOLing at some of those stories, and I enjoyed the entire Color Pencils fiasco. I liked writing deliberately false news stories, but I wouldn't have the drive to support an entirely separate blog full of it. It would be fun, though.

Perhaps it could be a collaborative project, everyone writes a false news stories, series can build upon others and more fun. That would be fun. And then, there'd be a false news site other than dead ol' Humorix for me to read. And that'd be yay. :)

#5 + (8) - [X] #86 + (8) - [X]

Ok, I'm quite aware that today is not the first of the month. But, because yesterday was New Years, I had to do something special. However, we haven't done QOTM for a while and I decided that I might as well do it (hello from parentheses land!).

Strangely, this month, there are two quotes of the month! #5 (Envy) and #86 (Voices from Nowhere) tied exactly at 8 points each!

I'd also just like to announce the new minor layout, 6.1! If it conflicts or uglifies anyone's face, just tell me!