So what’s new in this theme?

• A LOT of new optimizations in the CSS code and image files, making the site load faster.
• XHTML 1.0 Strict compliance for all pages, along with validated CSS
• A more professional template with a more simplistic view. Easy to read and standardized.
• Wider layout – optimizing screen real-estate for those bigger monitors.
• No more wide column layout. All pages have a sidebar which simplifies navigation.
• Various bug fixes with coding and images.
• A new logo. That’s actually readable. YAY.
• And some other things I can’t think of at the moment.

All in all the site turned out to be somewhat decent and the web designing part of my head has been fed. The design is not done yet, as I have a few more things in terms of bordering and coloring to add. Gray is good, but it’d be nice to add some vector art here and there and get away from everything rectangular. Or not; it all depends, but I put up a beta version of this template anyways.

So if you’d like to, tell me what you think of the new layout and any improvements you might suggest.

On another note, the gallery template has not been changed, so it’s still using the same old layout. This will be my next item to fix up.

And for further news, I am planning on destroying the Windows Vista OS I am currently running this server on (yeah, you’re probably looking at your monitor in complete shock, but it works great with Apache…) and switching over to some version of Ubuntu (there, happy now? No, I won’t switch over to server software because I need a desktop platform to actually do work at work ). This will happen as soon as I obtain an external hard drive to back up data and such on this computer. There will probably be a day or so of “downtime” (I will move the contents over to another computer and it’ll be hosted there for a while), but I am unsure of the exact date.

My new computer shall be arriving soon – in pieces; that I will have to build together into one intricate, yet delightfully powerful gaming powerhouse. And this is the whole package deal, with the monitor and everything, since my last computer (and the one I’m currently using) is a laptop. Not many laptop parts fit with regular PC parts, unfortunately. Luckily, I’ll still have a backup/portable computer if something does go awry.

The price was steep, but not as steep as it would’ve been if I purchased everything in a bundled package. Partially, this was because I overestimated the price on some things and decided to go for more quality and faster items/chips. It’ll work out great for me in the long run, with some overclocking here and there. Speaking of overclocking, I can safely do that and have a nice and cool environment, apparently. With 4 fans in the case, plus another few here and there, I’m not sure how loud it’ll be, but the cooling is a definite plus.

I’ll bring more in depth reviews of the products and their price once I get the computer and assemble it. Perhaps I shall write a post on that computer, perhaps not. We shall see.

Camera Blues

In other news, my FujiFilm S700 Digital Camera broke down on me and gave me an infamous “Zoom Error”. I tried all the suggestions, replacing batteries, shaking it up a bit, hitting it against an object (said to work, but it didn’t). The problem was probably due to the two tiny gears inside the camera that controlled the powerful 10x optical zoom that somehow got misaligned. Either way, it was too much of a hassle for me to try anything else, so I returned the camera back to Wal-Mar and it was easily taken back since it was under the 30-day warranty (yeah, it broke down that soon). I took quite a few good pictures with it, though, and you can view the results on my gallery. The other problems I noticed with it were that it blew out highlights like none other and had a few problems with purple fringing (things that you can find out on any camera review site, really). And when taking scenic pictures (of buildings, especially), the picture would get distorted in a bubble fashion, making the object look bloated or curved depending on the picture.

The good part of the camera? The price, being only ~$200, the quality with 10x optical zoom and 7MP pictures, and of course the size was quite manageable. Other things included the camera taking 4 AA’s, an SD or xD card, and having a nice viewing LCD screen.

My next camera will probably be a Canon Powershot or a Canon Digital Rebel; still weighing the options of both.

So, new things, well, firstly, a newly acquired host. Somewhat paid host. It’s free, advanced, and more details can be found on the first news item of austrian.uni.cc. A lot more details there and such. And links to the gallery that I set up can also be found near there.

What else? Well, the new job, of course. I’m actually employed in two places, it’s just one of them never called me in for work quite yet. I’m a web developer at Eastern Washington University, and also a tech-support kinda guy. The second job I have is kind of a sub-job of my primary web-developing job – to be the University Honors Webmaster. It’s a little less glamorous than the title actually sounds. At least it still pays well enough.

Finally finished my freshman year of college – pretty much went through the whole year and got Dean’s List awards from my department (Computer Science). I just find programming to be simple, challenging, and fun. And I just love to see people squint in confusion when I start talking about Euclid’s recursive algorithm.

So, now, for the purpose of this blog, I’ll have it maintain its blog status but I’ll integrate more technical stuff, possibly something like programming tips, or pretty much the stuff I’ve already been putting on here, except not as lame or outdated.

So yeah, there ya go, more to come soon.
-Alex

The hosting service starts out good
It’s just too good to be true, and they’re still on the internet! First things first – check how long the host has been operating and see how their uptime has been (just because the host says their uptime has been 99.5% or higher doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way). Get to know your host, see how many servers they have running and in which part of the country (stay the heck away from Florida and places that have hurricanes – water + electronics = BAD JUJU!). I don’t know how many times I’ve signed up for a host only to find a week later that there are SQL connection errors, slow load times, or even extreme downtime that goes on for days. And then the host just shuts down and takes all of your files with them (luckily if you know the concept of free hosting, you also tend to know the concept of backing things up).

Ads are evil, even with Firefox and AdBlock
Well, that is, unless you don’t mind them. Problem is, I do! And so do many other people. If your website isn’t selling products with the advertisements that are put up, it’s usually a bad thing. And when your host forces those ads on you, that’s just pure agony (and some ads make it worse with flashing colors and annoying roll down menus). There are only a few ads out there even worth looking at from a designers perspective, the rest suck. Which brings me to my point – if your host makes you put up ads, or even worse, forces them on each page, move to another host. Ads will mess up layouts, destroy any chances of returning visitors, and will make your site look less than professional.

Bandwidth and Space limitations
The more the better (in terms of actual space and bandwidth)…but do you really need that much anyways? My blog actually consists of less than 10megs worth of files. But I always look to the future, and since I’m going to start hosting files and such, I expect my host to be able to hold that up. And even if you only have one 5 mb file being hosted, and that file just got “dugg”, its pretty much DoS for the host in general, paid or free (in most general cases). And if the host doesn’t go down, your bandwidth will go up and strike you upside the head. The worst website is the one that you can’t even see (arguably the one that doesn’t exist). Free hosting may be good for now, but not for later.

Free hosting and free support just doesn’t come hand in hand
There are exceptions, but generally, if you have a free host, you’re not going to get any kind of support. Sure, some people don’t even need support, but if something on your site goes haywire with something that you can’t fix (say something with an SQL connection or FTP going down), you absolutely need to communicate to the support/webmaster to get it fixed. Even for paid hosts, make sure you’re getting proper support, check it before even signing any sort of deals. Ask them for a trial hosting service for a couple of days to check out support response times.

So basically, the main thing I’m trying to get at here is don’t rely on free web hosting because it will actually cost you something in the long run.
Want a free web hosting service? Get any kind of computer, install Ubuntu LAMP on it, hook it up to a 256kb+ line, and there’s a free reliable start for you. Ok sure, it costs you a computer and your internet connection, but isn’t that what you use anyways to read this blog? Maybe then, you can start up your very own free hosting service for others as well and see exactly how all those other free hosts are doing it!

Well, just so happens that Starbucks decided to release a “coupon” to a limited number of Starbucks employees by email with the following text:

Example Email
Hi Everyone,
Starting today until September 30th, please join us in “surprising and delighting” our family and friends, while introducing you to our iced beverages. Attached is an invitation for a complimentary iced Grande beverage. Please forward this invitation to everyone in your email address book.Thanks so much!Kimberly Beasley
*Starbucks Coffee Company*
*Southeast Regional Coordinator*
*(404) 636-5200 ext 2200*Attached Image

“Hey, we can provide coupons to people who never or rarely visit our store to get their hands on addicting stuff that they won’t be able to drop later on – means more $$$ later on in the long run! Let’s do it!”

Well, a few things went wrong with this little “coupon”.
» First of all, the coupon itself – it asks to be printed out on a regular piece of paper. Most coupons are printed on a special…well, coupon paper, making it a coupon.
» The other thing about this coupon design was that it could be used, reused, and reused again – as much as you wanted to use it. One drink per customer per visit – and one visit counts as walking out of the store and walking back in. Print them out for all your friends and come in three times a day if you’d like.
» In addition to that, the Corporate Starbucks office didn’t tell all of the Starbucks locations about this offer. In fact, they thought it wouldn’t spread at all. So there were plenty of people who went to a Starbucks store and were told the coupon wasn’t legit (even though it was).
» Once people figured out that it was legit – well, the stores were packed, especially in areas like New York where people waited in huge lines just to get a $2-3 drink.
» And by people, I mean lots of people. Why? Starbucks initially thought that there would only be a limited number of people using this coupon but…oh wait, look at the email again:

“Please forward this invitation to everyone in your email address book.”

Myspace analogy: the real Tom posts a bulletin telling everyone that you can get a free CD if you message him. The bulletin will be reposted…people will email other people etc. Then it gets posted on a website where 500k people a day visit and…well…chaos ensues.

So what does Starbucks do, since they are losing so much money off of this little money maker? They cancel it and say it’s no longer valid.

Well, there were still people who decided to wait in long lines only to find that the coupon was cancelled on them. What do they do? They sue Starbucks for $114 million dollars.

Quote From BusinessWeek.com
The $114 million the lawsuit asks for approximates the average cost of one cup of Starbucks coffee a day for all of the people turned away* for the 38 days the offer was valid, Sullivan explained. “That’s a very conservative figure,” he said.*note: this lawsuit was filed in the state of New York and only for the residents of New York

Final Statement: Someone at Starbucks is going to get / already got their butt soooo fired.

The simple answer is no – there is no accurate way of knowing who visited your page using a MySpace tracker, unless you employ some very tricky tactics (which I shall cover in the technical part of this post).

So what about all the claims of MySpace trackers and how they really work and so on? Most of the sites are made purely to obtain sensitive information, such as your MySpace username and password, and store it into a database. Some are made just for the purpose of spam (repost bulletins). Some can actually have some “tracking” ability, but nothing too complex, as I shall get to in the technical section. Some do all three.

How can you tell if a MySpace tracker is legitimate, at least with the minor tracking that it does? There are a couple of guidelines you may want to follow:
1. There is no innate ability with MySpace to track who has visited your profile – any site that says it can “activate” that feature is a fraud. These sites usually ask for your username and password to your MySpace account.
2. With other sites, never register with the same email and/or(preferably and) password that you have for your MySpace account. Or if asked for your email/profile ID, just don’t give the same password.

So, the Technical Part:
Here are the things you can track with a legit MySpace Tracker (or any kind of SiteCounter/Meter service) –
1. IP Address – the unique Internet Address that your ISP assigns to every computer (or if you have DSL/Cable, it assigns it to your router/modem). An example would be something like the one I have now: 65.103.130.10 (You can check yours here). IP addresses will change constantly unless you have a static IP address (which most people don’t), especially if you have dialup internet like AOL. This makes it somewhat harder to determine who is who when you’re trying to track them. This is probably the most useful piece of info but only if you know what to do with it. You can whois the IP address to see the ISP using DNSStuff which will give you the name of their ISP. Problem is that usually there’s only two good ISP’s in a certain city and everyone is using them. But it can be like 20 questions, it’ll narrow the list down a tiny bit (you have to know who is using what ISP as well). Then, there is a second tactic that’ll give you more precise info but will require more effort on your part. What you do is get a certain person to visit a certain page that only they can access. This includes messages, emails, and comments if the user requires comments to be previewed before they are posted. What you do is insert a different tracking code into a message or comment (I use different “invisible” images that are hosted on my server), check the IP address of the user once they load the image, and then compare that IP to the other IP’s of people who have visited your page. This is the best way to track someone, but it may be somewhat inaccurate just because:
   a. IP addresses change constantly
   b. 65.103.130.10 can be used by me for one day, and then given to someone else (reusable in a way, so a person can think that it’s me who’s accessing their site, but it isn’t)
   c. If the user is using a public terminal or Wi-Fi connection, their IP address will not be the same (unless they use it constantly, and still, it’ll be used by other people)
2. Browser Headers (Referrers) – Basically which page the user is coming from. Unfortunately, with most trackers, you’ll notice that most referrers come from your profile page because usually a tracker has you insert a code with an image or flash content. Each time the image or flash is loaded into a web browser, the server that is called to get the image records your IP address and your referrer (along with the time you accessed it and other info, depending on how good the tracker is). Since the image is on your page, when the browser asks for the image from the server, it sends the referrer information from the current URL it just came from – which technically is the page that you put the image on. With JavaScript counters, you can actually see what page they came from before that (if their browser is set to send referrer headers – most are), but MySpace does not allow JavaScript for good reason. The only thing you can get from the referrer then is just the user’s MySpace “MyToken” value – which serves absolutely no point in regards to tracking a person (it may be useful for something else besides a way for MySpace to store info in cookies, but no one has found it yet or never will). So the referrer is pretty useless.
3. The time the page was accessed/how many times it was accessed – It’ll give you info on how many times your page was loaded and when. You might be able to use this if you constantly look on your logs and compare the times your page was loaded to who was online on MySpace at the time it was loaded. Frankly, people can choose to turn off their “online” status in their profile, so you’d never know. And if two or more people are online at the same time, good luck trying to find out who it was.
4. Browser Type / OS – Are they using Firefox or Intercrap Explorer? Using Windows as an OS? How about Mac or Linux (on a sidenote, I recommend Ubuntu)? Again, you have to know who likes to use what.

SiteMeter/Counter/Tracker Services
» Site Meter – Great service, MySpace compatible, displays a button on your page.
» Stat Counter – Again, great service, needs to be tweaked a bit for MySpace, generally invisible tracker.
» Use your own server that will generate logs – IIS is included into most Windows XP Pro computers. Then there’s Apache that can be used for Linux as well as Windows.

Other MySpace tips
1. If I didn’t mention this a hundred times already – never give out your MySpace password! Or I guess you can if you want to, it’s your account, not mine.
2. You never have to repost bulletins to “activate” features. There is no way that “Tom” or whoever will track your bulletins.
3. Use common sense. If it’s too good to be true, then it probably is.

EDIT: Update
After further research, there are some sites that can track who visited your profile IF and only if both the person who is tracking you and the person being tracked are signed up for the same service that provides “specialized” myspace tracking. If you’re not part of the tracking site, you will just simply be labeled as “anonymous” to the person who is tracking you and you’re basically back to square one.

ONCE-MIGHTY DELL ended up in court in May charged with ripping off its customers in Washington State, USofA, to the tune of $24 million in sales tax. The court ordered that every penny should be repaid.

The case slipped under the INQ’s radar, so we’re grateful to Bob Sullivan over at MSNBC for sniffing out the facts.

As Bob says, in the connected world the consumer relies on the operators of a web site to apply the correct taxes on purchases, especially if you’re dealing with a big, um, reputable outfit like Dell.

The overcharging occurred from 1999 to 2005, during which period some 470,000 customers in Washington State were affected.

And one lawyer in the affair reckons that when cases in other states are looked into Dell could be looking at a final bill in the order of $100 million.

But, since Dell claims to have made an honest mistake in Washington, it says it will have already handed the cash over to the Washington taxmen.

Lawyer Rick Ellis, however, doubted Dell’s word and, in Massachusetts, filed suit under the state’s deceptive trade practices law.

The taxes relate to maintenance contracts, warranties and the like and the different taxation levels applied to different sorts of contract.

Maintenance contracts attract sales tax because the maintainer actually has to do some work to honour them. Extended warranties are treated like insurance policies because like most insurance policies the insurer usually has to do nothing except take the money and run.

Dell, it seems, charged sales tax on warranties and like and so ended up in the current pickle.

The Washington State class action is the only one yet settled. Further class actions could follow in a number of other states, although one suit in Maine has already been dismissed.

Here’s a tip that I give to anyone and everyone regarding purchasing computers: ALWAYS BUY IT ON EBAY! Yes, there are risks with buying computers from online sources, but its almost always worth it. I bought my Inspiron 9300 more than half a year ago for about $1600 on eBay; looking at the current catalog that Dell just sent to our house, my computer (if it was still new) would still be worth $1700 at the Dell store. On eBay, my laptop is now worth about $1300. Get the picture?

And if hosting on the site changes, I will be able to automatically redirect the blog to a backup server. That is all.

-Reality Corp.

Robert:
“I was recently looking through my music library and I realized that at least half of them were guys singing to girls. Sure, they came in different styles: Rock, R&B, soul, etc, but the majority of the songs were sung by heterosexual men and directed at girls. So it made me think: Why do I like these songs? I can’t identify with the audience, because I’m a straight guy. I can’t identify with the singer, because I have no love life. Do I just like those songs because of the music and don’t care about the lyrics? Even some of the less romantic songs, like “Over Thinking” by Relient K or “Old Brown Shoe” by The Beatles, throw in some lines that make it clear that this is a song about relationships I’m listening to.

So do I just like these songs because of the pretty sounds and nothing of the deeper meaning it has? That’s kind of depressing.”

My response:
“I think you have a bit upside down. The deaper “meaning” of music IS actually in the melody rather than the lyrics. Think about it, what is music without melody? It is poetry if not anything at all (think Bach or Beethoven – no lyrics there). The true essence of music is the sound waves playing through the mind of a person, those waves affect who you are, your inner being. Sad music makes you depressed, happy upbeat music cheers you up, no lyrics required. Techno music makes you do the robot. Well, for me at least. And rap is argued not to be music because it doesn’t do much.

The lyrics of the music are just additions to the music – a singer’s voice adds a flare to the music, and the words add their own flavor of art and direct the music towards a certain passion. If you can kind of get what I’m saying here – you like music because it SOUNDS good, it pleases one of your senses.

As for the singing of girls – that’s just your library. People will sing about anything that excites them, anything they have a passion for. Yes, girls are one of those things, but so are topics such as God, President Bush, Drugs, Alcohol, Sex, Trucker Hats, Telephone Calls, Yellow Submarines, etc.”

Part 1 | Part 2