Anonymous blog?
[This entry updated and edited after I'd taken it off my site. Why? Read below...]
After Dave wrote:
A promising new anonymous weblog. Check out the tagline. Interesting hexadecimal name.
I went and visited the site. Nothing spectacular, another blog, and indeed, the author wasn't very obviously stating his name or even a pseudonym. Normally I wouldn't have thought about it twice, but the adjective "anonymous" in Dave's remark made me curious. So I thought, "Anonymous? Really?"
I logged in on the Unix shell server and perused the WHOIS command. There are several websites that will also allow you to a whois lookup, but I never bother with those. Just too lazy to remember where they are and I know by heart where that shell server is sitting. Anyway, I do a lookup on the blog's domain name and see that it is registered to an individual person's name. Ah... I had also noticed that the blog used the Trackback function of MovableType, but the Trackback URL did not point to the blog's own domain, but to another domain. I also did a WHOIS lookup on that domain name and it was registered to the same person. I put this other domain name in my browser address bar and this person's personal website popped up. Looked like he was into blogging.
So, without thinking too much about it, I figured, well the author is not trying to be all that anonymous and I wrote up a little note for my blog saying that this 'anonymous' blog was registered to such-and-so's name and wasn't all that anonymous after all. The next morning I woke up and found a very polite e-mail from this person in my inbox asking if I would be so kind as to edit out his name from my posting. I hadn't realized he really wanted to remain anonymous and heck, it's not like it was important in the first place, so I took the post offline. And now I have a couple of minutes to update this post and make it available again.
The lesson from this story? It's pretty hard to cover all your tracks and do stuff on the Net really anonymously and it's pretty hard to get something that was available at some point off the net again, especially once Google's been there.
Dec 2, 2002 @ 12:38 » 2 comments » Blogosphere
Constructing/performing identity
This looks like an interesting article (for future reference): Hackers produce more than software, they produce hackers (Previously The Identity Games of Hacker Culture) by Lars Risan.
In the Washington Post, some two years ago: Identity and Ethics Are Just Another Part of The Game Online by Eric Schelzig.
Dec 2, 2002 @ 14:51 » no comments » Research
Teaching blog
Eew... it's been an awfully long time since I posted: a week! End of the year business, deadlines approaching (or having passed with a whoosh), preparations for teaching a course in the new year.
I spend most of yesterday afternoon working on the layout of the blog I have set up for the students of my course next trimester. Have a peek at the teaching blog and let me know if it somehow displays strangely for you. Not everything is functional yet, most links are still going nowhere and the posts are just filler ;-) The design is based almost entirely on percentages and should resize perfectly with screen size (tested from 640x480 to 1600x1200) and should respond well to changing the font size in your browser. Of course, tested with different browsers: Mozilla 1.1/1.2, IE6win and Opera 6. I'm thinking of trying to add Netscape 4 compatibility as a test later, but let me know if this also works on Macs and Unix/Linux, because I took some, so far hypothetical, precautions to have it display okay there as well.
Actually, most of the layout was already done and I really spend yesterday afternoon trying to work around a margin/padding bug in IE6win. It's not a major bug, but I've tried everything I could think of and the only thing that happened was that things got worse and worse in IE. The sign of a solid browser is that you can use different approaches (put margins, paddings and assorted other layout stuff in different places) and still achieve exactly the same layout. Mozilla does this perfectly, but if you start shifting around margins and paddings IE just totally looses it.
In terms of rendering it should not matter whether I give a heading a 1% bottom padding or the following paragraph a 1% top padding, but for IE that matters a lot. Mozilla (and Opera btw) simply render exactly the same 1% gap between the one and the other, but IE starts shifting elements around the screen when you hover over them or simply misplaces them altogether when you move the 1% padding from one element to the other. It's so amazingly frustrating, because you know you're writing decent code and this one bug prevents your design from looking pixel perfect and you simply can't find a way to work around it... arggh!
Dec 9, 2002 @ 13:50 » no comments » Research
Games
Another Slash rehash, this time gaming related articles: the latest part of GameSpy's Future of PC Gaming series, together with an interview with Chris Taylor of Gas Powered Games. And a link to GameSpy Daily, there ya go.
Dec 9, 2002 @ 15:49 » no comments » Research
Bleep
Make your own barcode.
Dec 10, 2002 @ 10:53 » no comments » General
Lawsuit waiting to happen
In Wired and even in my dead tree based morning newspaper:
In a landmark case, Australia's highest court on Tuesday gave a businessman the right to sue for defamation in Australia over an article published in the United States and posted on the Internet.
That could have some interesting/chilling consequences and repercussions. It's pretty amazing that the Australian judges would allow the case to happen in the first place.
Dec 11, 2002 @ 13:42 » no comments » General
IE6win bug
Well, I bumped into a serious bug in how IE6win renders percentage based layouts (Tantek mentions related problems here). Simply put, if you use percentages for paddings or margins, IE6win will mess up royally, disregarding said paddings for some elements but not for others, plus it will interpret a percentage margin completely different from a percentage padding on the same element. That means I will have to rethink the layout for the groupblog for my course. *grumble* *mutter* *kick*
A good guide to CSS units and some unit stuff at W3C.
Dec 12, 2002 @ 12:37 » 2 comments » Webdesign
Two links
RPG Codex, good site.
Cheaters pose threat to the growth of online gaming in USA Today.
Dec 13, 2002 @ 13:48 » no comments » Games
Fixing
I fixed the car; took me about 2 hours.
I fixed Paula's computer, the router and network; took most of last weekend.
I messed up Paula's Outlook; took about 3 seconds.
I fixed Paula's Outlook; took about 4 hours.
Lessons learned? Hmm... If you install Outlook to make use of the Exchange server at work, there is a Delivery tab in the Services menu (under Tools) and you definitely will want to set that to your Exchange server mailbox. If it points to anything local, Outlook will download your mail from the server and then delete it from the server. Without any warning!
More lessons learned? Certainly! If you create an Outlook archive (.pst) file and you burn it to cd-rom, you cannot open that file with Outlook. Outlook can only open writable files. Copy the archive to your harddisk, right-click and choose properties, remove the "read-only" checkmark, and then finally open the file with Outlook to import all the messages you had inadvertently deleted from the Exchange server.
Now tell me, if I'm fixing that much, when am I supposed to work?
I still need to fix the website too...
Dec 17, 2002 @ 16:53 » no comments » General
Anagrams
Just in case it's a rainy morning where you are reading this: the internet anagram server.
Dec 18, 2002 @ 10:01 » no comments » General
Another IE display bug
Ugh... this is a particularly stupid display bug in IE and one that I've bumped into before. So now I finally know why IE will sometimes simply not display some images (via Zeldman). The good thing is that there is a workaround... I'm still butting my head against IE's percentile padding/margin bug without much luck.
Dec 18, 2002 @ 10:28 » no comments » Webdesign
Some privacy please
So, who owns your identity right now?
Dec 18, 2002 @ 16:45 » 1 comment » General
Back from Berlin
Berlin is beautiful. We even got to see it in the snow for one night, but most of that white blanket was gone the next morning. Some observations. Sunday morning we were having breakfast, outside the churchbells were ringing for mass and the radio played the techno-mix of Madonna's Like a Prayer. German tv programming is downright unappetizing and I completely understand why our friends got rid of their tv set. It's so nice to drive on the Autobahn; everything is very organized even without a speed limit. Incidentally, yes, our car really does do 200 km/h as advertised. Whee!
Dec 25, 2002 @ 12:57 » no comments » General
Oh, and...
Happy Christmas!
Dec 25, 2002 @ 13:30 » no comments » General
Online gaming
There's an interesting and somewhat bitter account on Slashdot about What You Really Get From An Online Game like Everquest.
Also a fairly long article about the Xbox Live online gaming service over at Tomshardware.com. It'll be a while before Europe gets to play the Xbox online: March 17th is said to be the launch date for the service in the Netherlands. One of the drawbacks of the service, as I see it, is that you need to register a "Gamertag", or an unique nickname, to play. As the reviewer notes, it took him quite a while to come up with a name that he both liked and that wasn't already taken. It's only going to get more difficult over time to register a sensible, likeable tag... but for the moment the Europeans just will have to wait and see.
Dec 30, 2002 @ 18:21 » 1 comment » Games
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