With my laptop’s screen problems preventing me from using it during lecture, my old in-lecture doodling habits have gradually begun to resurface. Did a doodle that I’m pretty happy with today, and since we haven’t had any of those here since my blog revived, I decided to just post this one.
It takes up more space than I’d like it to, so I’ll put it after the jump.
Between being swamped with work under very, very hot weather conditions and struggling with steadily worsening laptop screen problems (which, significantly, has the terrifying effect of depriving me of life-giving anime), my weakened will and battered spirit has succumbed to the demands of my greedier self.
I bought an LCD monitor today.
(doesn’t Plasma look gorgeous on it though?)
Yare yare… so my site went under for a day plus, and then resurfaced with some new PHP settings that were unfriendly to WordPress. I got sick of waiting for my host to fix the problem (yes I bugged them) so I rolled up my sleeves today and did some hacking, making minor modifications to the WordPress code and whacking my .htaccess with some workarounds. And we seem to be more or less back online!
Seem to be. I have no way of knowing for sure. If anything acts in a distastefully screwy way, please do let me know.
Back to my rant, I then discovered to my horror that Akismet has ceased to work (chi.. they must have cut off outgoing connections). Knowing full well that I’d be nose-deep in spam before I could say “God Dammit”, I irritably went to quick-shop for a stand-in spam filter. NoSpamNX is now in the house and working its craft, and has apparently already stopped “7 birdbrained Spambots” so far. Hopefully none of you are among the seven – if you are, email me rite nao so that I may unleash wrath and hell! (see comment form below for my email add)
Anyway, if I were a little less pissed I might have been somewhat pleased with this exercise – some of the counter-spam solutions I saw employ techniques which I found very clever and intriguing.
But since I have just spent the last 2 hours on this while procrastinating on that mountain of work I must now return to, I’m in no mood to be indulgent.
Come to think of it, if Akismet doesn’t work, pingbacks probably won’t either. And I’m a big fan of pingbacks -.- Ugh.
The recent disturbances had better be caused by some massive doomsday DDoS attack and not just some badly planned server upgrade. Think I’ll give this host one more week (oh magnanimous I~!) to get their act back together, failing which I’m gonna hostswap. AGAIN!
I like how this picture effectively goes “blog. people. think”. Picture source
So CS3216 is kicking off again with the first lecture starting today and yes, I’m tutoring again. I was just down at the prof’s blog and part of his kick-start post addressed his motivations for emotional-blackmailing asking his students to blog the course. Here is an excerpt:
The thing about blogs is that there’s some ownership. When a student blogs, it makes a statement about who he/she is. Very few people want to make a statement to others that “I’m a loser”.
In this light, when “forced” to blog, students will spend a lot more effort thinking about what to say and how they want to say it. It is not so much the blogging that the learning takes place, but in the agonizing over what to write where people will learn something.
They are forced to take stock of what they have heard/seen and draw conclusions. That’s important. Many people go through life not thinking hard about what they have see or heard.
I’m just gonna muse a little on that here.
These short little moments so simple and true
So full of deep relish, and bursting with hue
Oh were it that I could cast it in spell
How dearly I wish I could give this to you
That this wash of warm musings could water your wounds
This flash of swift radiance could run your soul through
This assuring glow, your darkest deeds to
How dearly I wish I could give this to you
In through those shamed shells, those shackles of slander
Past all of the hate, the pain and the rue
Through withering gates, the gardens of pity
How dearly I wish I could give this to you
Open! Open! Twist not in your tomb!
Deliverance! Wind! They can be yours too!
Take down your walls and fear not! Look!
Salvation is waiting, We give this to you
I made it onto the credits list!
:) I can’t believe it, considering I only had what three fixes to my credit? Thank you for the mention and the fuzzy feelings it brings, Thunderbird! Talk about Christmas coming early.
Anyway, for those of you under a rock, Thunderbird 3 has at long last been unleashed, armed with quite an impressive slew of features and enhancements too. Go get it while it’s hot!
And damn, this sure makes me feel bad about slacking off near the end. Guess I gotta start kicking myself a little and also keep my KDE love affair in check. I’ve got a few bugs I was supposed to fix that are currently lazing around hiatusing, and I guess its about time I got back to them.
Now if only I didn’t have so many other things to do.. :(
People who use community-developed, open source software need to acquaint themselves with a very important principle – everyone has equal responsibility towards the state of the product, because everyone is able to contribute and people who do contribute do it voluntarily.
Don’t get angry and take it out on the contributers when you want a feature and it fails to happen – especially the “LOOK OUTLOOK HAS IT” kind. None of us are any more obliged to spend our time implementing your feature than you are. You are not a customer, and we are not here to serve you. We are a community, and the responsibility for ensuring and improving the quality of our product lies evenly spread upon our joint shoulders.
Some of us have spent hours and hours of our own free time learning how to fix bugs, develop features, triage bugs, write documentation or make any other innumerable kinds of contribution to the community project. The absolute least you can do if you don’t want to learn to join us is to keep your tongue in check when talking to the people who have taken the time off to work on the stuff you use.
And please do not say that something is “easy“. If you actually know that it is easy, please just fix it. If you don’t really know, then please don’t sum up hours of someone else’s effort with that one unflattering, inconsiderate, and completely useless word.
Thank you.
This is kind of random, but I just had a conversation with a friend and ended up telling a ‘story’ of sorts that I think is worth reposting here. Here it is, slightly abridged, after the jump.
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