Andrew Huey | pointlessly blogging since 2001
We’re still on IE 8 at work. (Yes, I know.) Just for fun, I checked to see what this blog would look like in IE 8. Holy cow. Not even close, huh? I use Firefox for all of my web browsing at work, except for when I need to do stuff on our intranet, so I didn’t realize how far gone modern web pages look in IE 8.
Things you notice, while spelunking through ten-year-old blog posts:
I’ve had my Gmail account for almost exactly ten years. I’m mostly OK with Gmail, but I’ve been thinking about moving off it recently, due mostly to the standard privacy concerns that everyone seems to have now, plus maybe just because I like changing things around every ten years.
I set up an account on Proton Mail a couple of weeks ago, but haven’t done much with it. I like the general idea, but I don’t think I could use their web interface for all of my day-to-day email. I’ve also considered FastMail, and I think that’s the most likely candidate if I do decide to switch. They have a good reputation, from what I’ve been able to tell, and they’ve got a really nice interface, and reasonable pricing. I’ve also considered getting a hosted Exchange account with these guys, or maybe trying out MyKolab. Probably the next time we get a rainy weekend, and I have nothing else to do, I’ll get serious about this.
I recently started reading WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials. While I haven’t gotten far enough into it to post a review, there is one great quote in the first chapter I wanted to share:
Opening up an existing WordPress plugin is a bit like going into a public restroom: it may be perfectly clean and hygienic, or it may be a rank and apoplectic mess of functions, logic, and HTML. Just be prepared.
I think I’m going to like this book. 🙂
I was surprised and disappointed to see that Project Euler was offline, as of yesterday. The message they’ve posted on the home page makes it sound fairly serious, and it doesn’t sound like they’re 100% sure they’re going to be able to bring it back up any time soon.
I can’t understand why anyone would hack into something like Project Euler. It’s free, so there’s no money involved, and no credit card numbers to steal. It’s not political, so there’s absolutely no ideological reason to want to bring them down. And it’s not popular enough to the point where a hacker would do it just for the media attention.
I guess there might be some value in their password database, but I think most of their users would be internet-savvy enough that they wouldn’t likely be using the same password across multiple accounts. And if that’s what they were after, there must be better targets for that than Euler.
Their forum site is still up, and there’s some discussion about the problem here, but no information from the admins as of yet. And there’s a thread on reddit talking about it, which includes links to some other interesting programming puzzle sites.
In moving my blog to WordPress, I’ve accidentally created a little side-job (or mild obsession?) for myself: cleaning up old blog entries. I have over 1500 entries in this blog, so I can keep myself (pointlessly) busy for quite some time, just combing through old entries and cleaning them up a bit.
First, I have a lot of old entries that don’t have any categories assigned. This bothers me for some reason. So I’m going through those, a few at a time, and categorizing them. And the really old entries don’t have titles, because Blogger didn’t initially support post titles. So I’m adding titles to some of those. And I’m cleaning up random embeds, YouTube links, and the like.
Once thing I’m noticing is how many of the links on older posts are dead now. In particular, music-related links seem to be the most ephemeral. Links to old band websites are often dead, the bands in question apparently disbanded, the members having moved on to other bands, or living quiet lives with nine-to-five jobs, or whatever people do when their bands dissolve.
Many old domains are now in the hands of some fairly iffy companies that hoard domain names, and just put up ads on them, and/or offer to sell them for exorbitant prices. My brother Patrick’s old domain, for instance, can be bought for just $1995. Geez.
There are some really odd changes too. An old domain that used to be associated with The Pixies is now being used for a blog related to DIY home repair. I’m not sure if it’s a real blog, or a test site, or part of a scam, or what. Weird though.
I’ve found myself using the Wayback Machine site to look up some older stuff. Not everything can be found with that, but a lot of stuff can.
I’m also finding myself a little dismayed about how my brother Pat’s footprint is disappearing from the internet. I just went ahead and saved to PDF a couple of pages honoring him, just in case they disappear. I’ll probably upload them here, at some point. No point in getting too deeply into this right now, but it’s something that’s been on my mind lately. I know that dwelling too much on the past isn’t healthy, and I’m trying not to do that, but I can’t stop myself from engaging in a certain amount of nostalgia.
In honor of Father’s Day, here’s a re-post of a quote from How Green Was My Valley, that I originally posted a few years back:
There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember. So I can close my eyes on my valley as it is today, and it is gone, and I see it as it was when I was a boy. Green it was, and possessed of the plenty of the Earth. In all Wales, there was none so beautiful. Everything I ever learned as a small boy came from my father and I never found anything he ever told me to be wrong or worthless. The simple lessons he taught me are as sharp and clear in my mind as if I had heard them only yesterday.
I’ve been using LaunchBar on my Mac for quite some time. It hasn’t changed much over the last several years, and, for a while, I don’t think it was very popular, as Mac apps go. But LaunchBar 6 was just released, with a bit of an interface refresh, and it’s getting some attention, including a good review on Cult of Mac, and a lengthy and useful writeup by Shawn Blanc. I just installed it, and paid the $19 upgrade fee for it. That seems pretty reasonable, given that they haven’t done a paid upgrade since 2010. I’d recommend it to any Mac user who likes the idea of being able to quickly launch programs without having to use their mouse or trackpad.
From a good article about the impending end of The Colbert Report:
…the real heart of The Colbert Report had little to do with actual politics — it was far more a critique of modern discourse, where people refuse to agree on the facts. And, more importantly, it shed light on the complete absurdity of the world with enough levity to keep us from going insane.
via In memoriam: Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA | Stanford Daily.
I don’t watch NYC-ARTS on channel 13 regularly, but I catch a bit of it here and there. There was a short segment on tonight’s episode about the Monet Water Lilies triptych that is on display at MoMA. I’ve been to MoMA a few times this year, but I don’t remember seeing this, and I really love Monet. (I’ve mostly been heading straight for whatever special exhibits pique my interest, and maybe stopping to look at Starry Night or some Jackson Pollock.)
I have actually been seeking out the Monet stuff at the Met, the last couple of times I’ve been there, so I don’t know why it hasn’t occured to me to seek him out at MoMA. I need to make a point of looking for Monet the next time I go! (Which might be this weekend or next.)
It appears that 1&1 is back to normal. Everything seems reasonably responsive, both on the front-end and in the admin. There’s been no explanation posted to the Twitter feed or on their status page, so I don’t really know what went wrong, or if it’s really fixed. That’s a little frustrating.
I started looking into the possibility of switching hosts today. Depending on how well 1&1 holds up, I may consider that. I’m paid up through November, so maybe I’ll revisit things in the fall.