Category: Internet


  • Attempted to watch the Transformer’s 3 trailer, but apparently Chrome on Linux was a no-go for the JavaScript which hides the web site and displays the trailer. Fancy but broken. So I thought I would look at the HTML and get the .mov file. I found this snippet of code in the HTML quite interesting.…

  • WordPress has neat new functionality to notify about and easily update templates. Apparently some of mine are so old they can no longer be updated? The result of trying was not removing the “.maintenance” file resulting an inaccessible blog. Easy enough to remove it once I looked up the problem. However, annoying that I was…

  • The answer to the differences between the wiki and browserchecker.xml according to Blackboard? It is very much intentional to leave unsupported browsers in the browserchecker.xml just in case those unsupported browsers do still work. Also in the answer was that in general only the two most recent stable browsers will be kept as supported. Since…

  • The below text is from a ticket I opened with Blackboard this morning. I used this unix command to dump a list of all supported browsers from the browserchecker.xml. grep -A 1 ‘supported=”true”‘ serverconfs/browserchecker.xml | grep descript | awk -F\> ‘{print $2}’ | awk -F\< ‘{print $1}’ The list of supported browsers does not match…

  • When To Upgrade

    After Firefox just upgraded, I noticed it did a check to on the compatibility of the Add-Ons I have. Should any be incompatible, then the add-on gets disabled. The rationale being, “Add-Ons which do not work under the current version should not be enabled.” Seems like I as the user of the software really ought…

  • How Google Works

    A few basics of Search Engine Optimization came up at brunch a couple weekends ago. A few of the key points were that its not just important to have good information, but one has to have good metadata, good incoming links to raise authority, and no nefarious techniques. When I saw this, I immediate thought…

  • The upgrade to WordPress 3.0 doesn’t appear to have broken anything? Good. It pointed out my Tarski theme was a point revision behind. That has also been upgraded. No apparent problems. No need to go mess with code. That makes me verrrry happy.

  • It’s like the Electronic Frontier Foundation is Captain Obvious? It says web-sites fingerprint browsers to identify the users. The website anonymously logged the configuration and version information from each participant’s operating system, browser, and browser plug-ins — information that websites routinely access each time you visit — and compared that information to a database of…

  • One of the out of session discussions at the Georgia Baha’i School yesterday morning was on how bad online media are for us. (I’ve boiled down what was described to neurotransmitters.) Dopamine: Anticipation with each click will lead to a reward leads to addiction-like behaviors. Oxytocin: Lack of touch leads to feeling lonely. For those…