Digital Alterity

I created a new theme for Digital Alterity today. Those of you who are up on your Bactroid.net history may recognize it as a variation of what the Digital Alterity site on my personal web space used to look like.

I wanted my blog here on Bactroid.net to look a little different than the default Bactroid theme. This is, after all, one of the advantages to the way that Bactroid.net works now. Having a front page built from the aggregate content of the blog authors allows each person’s blog to have an individual look while the front page style remains unified.

Keep in mind that, if those of you who have Bactroid.net blogs find a theme you like, you can just point me to the theme via email and I’ll gladly install it for you to use.

I’ve been getting hit with a flood of comment spam. Now, you, my ever faithful reader, have been blissfully unaware of this prior to this moment because my Wordpress blog has comment moderation turned on. Every comment that comes in must be approved by me before heading out onto the web. This morning, the amount of spam increased several times over, and I frankly reached boiling point. I got tired of getting interrupted all day by emails full of spam for me to harvest. Because of this, I have installed reCAPTCHA, an ingenious hack that uses those little funny pictures with letters and numbers to help digitize old books. Confused about how this works? Here’s a bit more info from reCAPTCHA’s “What is reCAPTCHA” page:

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

So, in addition to foiling spammers, we’re also helping the preservation of human knowledge. This alone should encourage you to leave more comments.

Other Bactroid.net bloggers can turn on reCAPTCHA for their own blog at any time. Just log in and access the “Plugins” tab on your admin page. Activate reCAPTCHA from that screen and then follow the link to input your public and private keys. reCAPTCHA will even provide you with a convenient link to the signup page. Once you’ve entered your keys, give it a test by trying to leave a comment on your own blog. It should just work, but if you have any difficulties (or don’t feel comfortable setting it up on your blog), just send me an email.

Some of you may have noticed that the Bactroid.net Sorting Hat was out of commission since the conversion to WordPress. I have corrected the problem and returned the Sorting Hat to its former glory.

I was interested to find out that the Sorting Hat Quiz has been taken by over 5000 folks. The geek in me is really tempted to start doing some statistical analysis on the data to see how everyone is testing.

Technorati Tags: Harry Potter, Sorting Hat, Quiz

The great WordPress conversion is now done. I should have redirects in place to refer you to all the new places, but I accept that some general weirdness will be occurring in the next few days. If you notice anything amiss, just email me.

If you’re a Bactroid.net author, you should have gotten an automated email with your password information for the new site as well as a more informative email from me later in the day. If didn’t get these emails, just drop me a line, and we’ll get you set up.

Looking for my status? Check out this page. You can find a link to my status at the top of the sidebar on virtually every page of the blog.

Those of you following my ChangeLog via RSS will probably want to update the URL in your feed reader. I have a redirect in place, but I’ve noticed that a fair number of RSS readers really don’t like being referred to a different URL. Just update your feed reader to point to:

http://fuzzcat.bactroid.net/feed/

The RSS feed for the whole site can be found at:

http://bactroid.net/wpmu-feed/

And be sure to check out the new front page. It’s built dynamically from all the individual blogs hosted here at Bactroid.net.

Big changes are possibly on the horizon here at Bactroid.net. About six months ago, I had the idea that the front page should be built from ChangeLog entries since virtually all of the activity on the site is coming from there. Some initial investigation into the scope of such a project revealed to me that I would have to do some real infrastructure overhaul in order to accomplish such a thing. We’re talking about forty man-hours just to get to the point where I could start coding the new front page. After looking at the situation with fresh eyes, I think I’m going to shift us over to using Wordpress MU, the multi-user installation of the open-source Wordpress blogging tool.

I chose to go forward with Wordpress MU for several very important reasons. Primarily, it keeps me moving forward with creating content. As time has gone on and Bactroid.net has started including functionality that I never anticipated back in 2000 when I started coding the content management, changing much of anything has become a time-consuming task. By shifting over to a blogging software package, I’ll have more time to draw comics, write articles, read comic books, and play video games. In addition, after the initial effort to transfer our data over, we’ll all benefit from the efforts of free software coders from around the world. Beyond the cool and convenient plugins, we’ll also have a de facto full-time security team offering us patches when the dudes in black hats break something. Wordpress MU is a project licensed under the GNU General Public License, and I’m grateful to have the source code to it. If anything goes wrong with either the Wordpress or Wordpress MU projects, I can and will continue to use and improve the system. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t trust our important data to anything less than a free software solution.

Each user on Bactroid.net will have their own independent blog, hosted by Bactroid.net. You’ll be able to change the look of your blog and use well-known blogging tools to create posts, manage comments, and generally create your online identity. Then your efforts will help build the collective Bactroid.net front page. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working out the process of transferring all of our existing ChangeLog entries and articles into a dummy WordPress installation. I’ve hacked out a theme that looks almost exactly like the existing Bactroid.net pages, and I’ve wrote a custom plug-in that will allow the front page to be built from all the blogs managed by Wordpress MU in the manner I just described. It’s working well, and I’m happy with the results.

I’m not changing things over immediately, but this might start going forward as early as next week. Allyson will be in Maine, so I’ll be solitary geekin’ up through next Thursday. Unless I get distracted by something shiny on Xbox Live or in the stack of trades I just bought from In Stock Trades, I suspect that I’ll probably have a lot of alone time to move on this. I just wanted to give a quick heads up to everyone. Watch this space for more details.

Technorati Tags: News, Programming, Bactroid.net, Wordpress

You know you’re in for a great day with your database suddenly and inexplicably decides to choke on all the Japanese text stored in it.

Had this happened on the day when I upgraded all the applications on the server, this wouldn’t have been so unexpected. Had this happened immediately after I restarted MySQL, this wouldn’t have been so unexpected. As far as I can tell, no one did much of anything with the system last night.

So anyway, I’ll see if I can figure out what went horribly wrong. Hopefully we can get things back on track with a minimum of fuss.

Random Japanese Text

猫が大好きです。

Update

Reloading tables from the nightly backup seems to be the right answer. Damn computer gremlins.

Technorati Tags: Unix, Why God Why, Databases, 日本語

Most online Sorting Hat quizzes suck. They really do. They almost inevitably have questions like “What’s your favorite color?” or “My favorite subject is…charms!” I decided a while back that I could do better. I wrote up a series of quiz questions that I finally got around to turning into a quiz.

Behold! The Bactroid.net Sorting Hat Quiz is now operational.

I’m currently tracking results as they’re submitted so that I can hopefully do some amateur statistical analysis. Hopefully in the next few days I’ll roll out percentiles. Right now, with so few results in my data set, the percentiles would be pretty worthless. As an example of this, I’m currently in the 100th percentile for Slytherin. My friends and testers are too pure.

For reference, my scores are:

Gryffindor = 17
Slytherin = 12
Ravenclaw = 11
Hufflepuff = 5

My Slytherin score used to equal my Gryffindor score. Apparently a commitment to practicing the Four Noble Truths lowers your shrewdness quotient.

Technorati Tags: Bactroid.net, Harry Potter, Quiz, Sorting Hat

Without any warning and without any direct provocation from me, Bactroid.net’s foreign character display has suddenly stopped working. I’ll be working on fixing it outside of work today, so if you’re desperate need for the Japanese text on this site (which I sincerely doubt), I sincerely apologize.

For my testing purposes, here is some Japanese:
日本語を話しません。

And some French:
Je ne suis pas français.

I’ll post my new quarterly goals this evening.

Technorati Tags: Bactroid.net

I’m pleased to announce that as of yesterday evening. My ever-neglected personal homepage Digital Alterity has been relaunched as Digital Alterity Wiki. I never updated Digital Alterity because, let’s be honest, what more is there to say beyond what I already say in my ChangeLog and in Bactroid.net articles.

I’ve already been using the wiki for my personal benefit for almost six months now. It provides a convenient and fast dumping ground for all the miscellaneous knowledge floating around in my head. Some highlights?

• My active projects list
• Projects I intend to work on someday
• The set list when I went to see The Cure in concert
• My reading queue
• Vegan food options in Gainesville

As of right now, only people with logins can edit things, and only people I manually give logins to will have them. I might open it up a little bit more as time goes on. In the meantime, share and enjoy.

Technorati Tags: Bactroid.net, Digital Alterity, Wiki

ChangeLog titles are now working in production. You can now name your ChangeLog entry rather than just having the PostDate show up as a title. The fields for title creation/editing are enabled on the add and edit pages. Titles are optional, so you only have to use them if you want.

A few notes on the new titles:

• If you have provided a title, it will appear in the HTML page title as well. In the end this will work to make the ChangeLog system more Google-friendly since Google gives a lot of weight to what is in the title for a page. If there is no title, the date of your post will appear in the HTML page title as well.

• Titles show up in the RSS feeds for your ChangeLog if they exist. Otherwise, the entry titles for the RSS feed continues to be the date of your post in ISO standard format.

• If a title is provided, it is specified as an HTML H1 to the PostDate’s HTML H2. If no title is provided PostDate continues to be an H2.

Feel free to go back and add titles to all of your old posts. It might improve the Google page rank of your entries.

Technorati Tags: Bactroid.net