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Events around Buffalo? Meetup 2014?
Niagara Celtic festival is this weekend (13-14) in Krull park in Olcott NY. I'll be there with the Sterling Invaders.
Next weekend is Queen City Con Quest - Downtown Buffalo, in the convention center. I should be there one of those days.
Too many links!
Unvetted links, this is just everything I found interesting over the last week or so:
What Alzheimer's and Hearing Loss Have in Common
Adapting gadgets to our needs is the secret pivot on which technology turns
These Are The Oldest Fossilized Muscles, and They Are Rewriting Prehistory
If Geek Girls Acted Like Geek Guys [Video]
XKCD's "What If?": Walking New York
God-Man, in "Enter the Purse Thief"
The Many Ways to Map the Islamic 'State'
This Cryptocurrency Doesn't Want to Beat Bitcoin, It Wants to Beat the Economy
Solved: Mystery of Death Valley's "Sailing Stones"
Inside Google's Secret Drone-Delivery Program
Keurig's K-Cup coffee DRM cracked
Lock In Through the Lens of Disability
Citizen Power - Part II: Those Cop-Cameras...
Real Stuff: "Three in a Bed," part 2 (I apparently missed part 1. Also, NSFW)
CBedroom on Etsy: Awesome space-imagery bedding
Does transit infrastructure cause ridership?
The Most Awesome Prosthetic Leg of All Time [Video]
The Ten Worst-Paying Jobs in America
How The Industrial Revolution Ended Naps
Comprehensively addressing the stupid, intellectually dishonest critique of Anita Sarkeesian
XKCD's "What If?": All the Money
Here’s What Happens When You Drunk Text a Doctor Who Fan [Pic]
The British MP Who Wants Geeks to Hijack the Politics of Surveillance
The wild wacky world of publishing
Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition gets it mostly right
Not Your 'Traditional Hacker Camp': Inside Electromagnetic Field Festival
HOWTO make a steam-powered RC tank
Kevin Kelly: the Internet has just started
Police arrest North Carolina man for distributing voting rights leaflets
A strangely legal act of public indecency
The Immortal Augustus Gladstone - Motion Picture (Long! 95 minutes)
Rolling Stone profile of Randall "XKCD" Munroe
Video: Philip K. Dick on our simulated reality (1977)
Half the remains of slain Vikings in England are female
The Science Of Power Ups: Fire Flower [Video]
I Infiltrated a Mutant Hacker Bike Gang
Snowden, Sousveillance and Social T Cells
Anonymous Really Wants a Cyberwar with the Islamic State
Finally, 3D Printers Are Making Things That Are Actually Useful
Publishing: Not a Zero-Sum Game
Lava Lamp inventor: a World War II veteran turned ardent nudist
The Deeper I Stare Into the Internet, the More My Red Eyes Burn
Pornographic Adventure Time parody
Dog Dressed as a Mutant Giant Spider Scares the Hell Out of People [Video]
Bitcoin Exchange CEO Pleads Guilty to Enabling Silk Road Drug Deals
The Law Needs to Address Cyborgs, Because We've Already Become Them
Here's an Insane Idea: Twitter Should Make 140 Characters the Minimum
The Gadget and the Burn: An excerpt from “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” a novella by Cory Doctorow
The FBI Finally Says How It ‘Legally’ Pinpointed Silk Road’s Server
NYPD arrest human rights lawyer waiting outside restaurant while kids used bathroom
Bitcoin payments
<OfficialDevHat>
So, I'd given an estimate of "by this weekend" for crypto-currency payment processing. I was pretty close for not even having looked at it or picked a payment processor yet. It's looking like I'll finish Monday unless I find another 3-4 hours of coding in my brain today. I can't really speak to when it will deployed to prod afterwards.
The skinny of it is I went through two other payment processors before settling on Bitpay. It would have been nice to accept litecoin and dodgecoin as well as bitcoin but some payment processor who shall remain nameless had a dev environment that did not mirror their prod environment and all the documentation for the API was for their dev environment, so I killed with fire all nine or ten hours of coding I'd done to process payments with them and went back to looking for another processor. Maybe one of these days they'll update and bring some sanity to their system and you lot will be able to use litecoin and dodgecoin here. Until then, bitcoin payments via Bitpay are currently working from my dev environment but in need of some finishing touches and testing before being deployed for you lot to use.
</OfficialDevHat>
<PrivateCitizenHat>
A quick word about Bitpay. If you ever want to receive USD when being sent BTC, I personally highly recommend using them. Aside from test.bitpay.com not being mentioned in the docs at the time, they were bloody brilliant to code against. As a random code monkey on the Internet, they have my resounding personal endorsement.
</PrivateCitizenHat>
To Filter ACs, or Not?
I'm guessing the popularity of SN is increasing, as I now find myself having to filter out lame ACs and 0 rated comments on a regular basis... in a way this is a GOOD thing as it shows that SN is still attracting new members, but it's still annoying all the same.
A message to the newly joined and all those ACs - this is NOT /. so please:
a) start being more polite on your comments - civility costs nothing
b) think before you comment - are you adding to the conversation?
c) refrain from tit-for-tat one line responses (such as '...and so's your mom')
d) swear freely when appropriate, but temper your language when expletives add nothing to your point - no one likes a potty mouth.
Thank you, and good night.
-Jar
aqu4bot, libcurl, and Windows.
For a few months now, aqu4bot's Windows support has been broken. Compilation would fail because nonblocking sockets were not properly doable in Windows the way it was intended. I was using the same network core I use on the IRC protocol to download HTTP.
It worked, except when it hung. This affected mainly the $title command. So I added the nonblocking, which was necessary, but this broke all Windows support. I was reluctant in using libcurl because although I love libcurl, I only had two commands for aqu4 that used HTTP. That was $ddg and $title.
The good news is libcurl is VERY portable and works well under Windows. So needless to say aqu4bot's Net_GetHTTP() function was removed in favor of a new CurlCore_GetHTTP().
There is now a hard dependency on libcurl, but that's fine I suppose, since I now have my precious and arguably useless Windows support once more.
To celebrate, I created a new icon for aqu4bot that is used as the icon for the Windows executable: http://universe2.us/collector/aqu4bot.png
There's still a small issue with $time, as Windows does not have zoneinfo so I can't set the timezone properly, but everything else appears to work!
On Mod-Bombing
So, mod-bombing is becoming a problem. Where mod-bombing is defined as blowing a bunch of moderator points on one person's comments in pursuit of a personal vendetta. I think we're pretty much all in agreement that this type of behavior is NOT what the moderation system was designed to do and can't be allowed to continue.
So, I, personally, not anyone else on staff or the site as a whole, would like some input to use to further refine or outright change my opinion on how to deal with the matter. Bear in mind that I am not the person who gets to decide this, just the guy who would likely be coding it up.
At the moment my favorite idea is that after N downmods from person A to comments made by person B, person A be presented with a page offering them the choice of removing all their moderations from this set of modpoints or to continue on with the knowledge that an admin WILL be checking their moderations for today with the possible consequences of reversal of their moderations and their ineligibility to receive mod points again for a number of days ranging from 1 through infinity.
What say you, SN?
Typing Speed and Accuracy Measurer - typerise.com - v0.9
If you want to practice or test your typing I've been working on a little webpage game for this purpose. No login or plugins required, but of course it needs javascript as it measures keystrokes.
Thanks to Paulej72 for finding a bug in safari, which is now fixed.
It uses excerpts of public domain texts, like sherlock holmes and moby dick, which I pilfered from the very excellent project gutenberg.
Any suggestions or bug reports or whatever comments are most welcome. I intend to improve the game further, such as adding optional logins to remember your score, and also links to the whatever book you're typing from at the time in case you like it and wish to read the whole thing.
rtl test
This text should be RTL if overrides are not stripped out.
utf-8 regression testing
cf: http://dev.soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=1115&cid=27307
See: http://www.w3.org/2004/04/uri-rel-test.html
All of the following were entered using <a href="...">>...</a>
Test 101: http://www.w%33.org/
Should be: http://www.w3.org/
Test 111: http://r%c3%a4ksm%c3%b6rg%c3%a5s.josefsson.org/
Should be: http://räksmörgås.josefsson.org/
Test 112: http://%e7%b4%8d%e8%b1%86.w3.mag.keio.ac.jp/
Should be: http://�豆.w3.mag.keio.ac.jp/
Lameness filter encountered.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Morbi porta tempus nunc, vel gravida eros. Fusce ac sapien sed elit adipiscing pharetra at vel neque. Cras consequat a nisi vitae interdum. Nulla pulvinar, nisi a varius venenatis, lorem mauris posuere nulla, sit amet venenatis enim mauris quis tellus. Fusce nec ullamcorper lorem. Proin vulputate leo sapien, sollicitudin tincidunt urna eleifend vel. Etiam eleifend nulla id leo egestas interdum. Sed dignissim mauris eget tincidunt fermentum. Sed nec felis et nisl ullamcorper gravida varius in augue. Morbi ac erat quis dolor ultricies pulvinar. Vivamus sagittis viverra leo et sollicitudin. Maecenas at vulputate tortor. Donec ipsum erat, bibendum vel viverra eu, ornare vel sem.
August Slashcode updates
Here is look at the upcoming changes in August update for Slashcode. We anticipate that this will be deploy within the next week or so, as we are finalizing updates to the subscripion plugin.
- Complete Unicode support for all but 4 byte Unicode.
- 4 byte Unicode support as html entities
- Upgrade subscripion module.
- New themes, CSS fixes, and styling of blockquotes.
- Removal of Jouranl themes as incompatible with new theme engine.
- New Zoo icons, new topic icons, and updated logos.
- Removal of most of the annoying comment and submission filters (needed to support Unicode).
- Fix broken web messages.
The majority of the work done in the past two months has been on Unicode support. The Mighty Buzzard was the point man on this endeavor, and almost single handedly bent slash to his will. The amount of code changes need to make this work was large. All of the slash Perl modules needed to be touched to add utf8 support. Our memcache processor had to be upgraded so that it would not mangle utf8. Form inputs had to be sanitized as Perl sometimes can't determine that what it reads in is a utf8 string without being told so specifically.
During our testing of utf8 we discovered many processes in slash that were deliberately breaking utf8. These all had to be tracked down and squashed. Our MySQL database in not set to handle 4 byte Unicode and would take a major change to make it comparable, so we are using html entities to handle these characters as needed. We also determined that the filter on submissions and comments were not coded with utf8 in mind. As many of these would be impossible to make utf8 friendly, we removed them. This will make most of you very happy as you will see very few filter errors from now on.
We are currently doing some ongoing testing on utf8 to make sure it works properly. Many thanks to Bytram who is heading up the QA on this. We are hoping that when we release this we do not break anything permanently.
Late in July we were given a mandate to get subscriptions working. As NCommander was taking a much needed vacation the bulk of the work fell on me. NCommander had indicated the changes we wanted to make would be relatively easy. The old slash subscription code was designed to give users that subscribe ad free pages as well as early access to stories. The majority of our community did not want subscribers to have early access to post, because it was thought that some users would abuse this functionality. Also since we do not have ads, we wanted to change the subscription length from number of pages to number of days. These two changes should have been easy to do.
The problem was that the slash subscription module was missing functionality like many of the systems that we have fixed. The PayPal payment system was missing the back end payment processing code, so although a user could pay for a subscription there was nothing to tie the completed transaction back to the website to give the user their subscription. Being PayPal this code was not straight forward to implement, and as of this writing we only have the real-time component working. The back end processor, which would catch payments that complete but fail to reach our systems due issues on redirect, is being hammered out right now by The Mighty Buzzard. It is its own little web engine in Perl that listens for PayPal transactions, verifies, then processes them.
Other subscriber bonuses were also added to the code. One of the biggest is that subscribers will not be throttled by slash's formkeys. They will no longer get the "Slow down cowboy" messages. Another bonus was already in the code and just needed to be turned on. This bonus allows the user to see their entire comment history on their info page. This was a Easter egg to me as I was unaware that it was available until I read the code. The final community requested feature was the ability to turn off the subscriber indication. This was a * that was beside a user name next to a comment. It is now a star and goes well with our new Zoo icons (see below). But the indicator status was stored with the comment at the time it was made. I had to rewrite the code so that the check would happen at display time and it would check the author of the comment to see if they are a subscriber and they do not have the hide_subscription status checked.
As work was being done on the swag store with a bunch of versions of the SoylentNews logo, we noticed that the main site logo on the Wiki was a nicer version than the one on the main site. We used the newly obtained logo source files to update all of the site logos with cleaner ones based on the Wiki logo. This also lead us to pump out two quick site themes. Bada55 and Black IcIcle are based on the two colors used in the logo on each #bada55, and #1c1c1c.
We also had some new topic icons made by user rand. We used some of our original icons, some of rand's, and some that I made, to get our new set of topic icons that are all transparent png files so they will work on the dark themes. This made our Zoo icons (Friend and Foe) look bad, so a quick trip to the internet, to find a free set of similies that would look good at 15px x 15px, fixed that issue.
So as The Mighty Buzzard would say, thank The Mighty Buzzard it you like the changes and blame paulej72 it you hate them :).
