For the last day and a half, I put some pretty major work into this website. However, the only parts you'll see are in the comments section, and now a News post can have multiple categories associated with it. The thing about the last one is it's not easy at all. You need a few things.

#1 Table structure
#2 Change all your code that uses just a Subject in the news table
#3 Create a dual select box (which I needed anyway)
#4 Create a data list control to list each subject associated with that news post underneath it.

Numbers 1 and 2 were simple, but time consuming. However, numbers 3 and 4, with a new technology and very little documentation out there to go on, can be particularly daunting tasks. In the end, the amount of code written was not at all proportional to the amount of time spent on it, but that's usually the case in Computer Science and programming. You think and think and think, then the easy work begins, unless of course you're using a technology that you aren't too familiar with, like JavaServer Faces. I've written web controls in the technology before. The menu control, for instance, and the calendar control. However, unlike the menu and calendar controls, the Dual Select list is an input control, and the Data List control is an interation control, neither of which I had developed in JSF, up until this weekend.

Here is what the dual select list looks like:



And here is the short amount of JSP code that writes out all of the categories under a news post.



Now the code to "plop" a dual select list onto a page



Simple.

Now I just have to go through all of my news posts and properly categorize them. I'd rather drink gravel.

Wouldn't it be cool if there was a program capable of having you input, say, a news post, and take all of those words and make something really cool out of it? Or just have a different way of showing it? Rather, an alternative way? Maybe a picture made out of words and then you click a button and they move into text form... that would be rad.

One example comes to mind. Say you have a post about the Eagles. The first thing you see is all of the words moved around, twisted, flipped, and mangled to form an Eagles logo. Then, you click a link to make it the actual boring paragraph/sentence form that we are all so used to and loathe, but they move there in an animated, rad way. That would bring to life any web page.

I'm going to try it. Gimme a week on this one. It's probably not too easy :)

You know the things...

"Copy these questions into a new email, answer the questions, and forward it to 10 people and something will pop up on your screen."

Forget about the "believing that something will pop up on your screen" bit... that's just plain gullable. So those things where you answer questions about yourself, they're actually gaining new life, except not in "forwards" of emails, where there was once a mass conspiracy about what happened with those and where they came from... i.e. companies would start them, send them to people, those people would forward them, etc etc etc, and if one branch of the email eventually made it back to the originators, they'd have like 9 gazillion email addresses that they could spam profusely. Now these marketing companies just spider the internet for email addresses, which is probably more successful.

Anyway, so these "forwards" have grown into a culture of sorts. They are answered and plastered on web pages, in forums, and anywhere on the internet where people who are not editors for a major company-that-needs-editors can post. They're email-less, so spammers are not that happy about it. However, these are much more desireable than the email forwarded version. Stemming from my "Freedom to Ignore" Act in the Bill of Rights, it's a lot easier to ignore a post on the internet than one that's stuffed down your throat in an email inbox.

So I have no problems with them. I won't do any though, they are not my cup of tea. I don't think anyone cares what the last 5 movies I watched were, or my last girlfriend's name, or whatever, I can't think of anything funnier than what they actually ask you :)

In a digital handbasket.

Have you ever gone to Blogspot and just clicked "next blog" for an hour? Well, this brings upon some enlightening thoughts about where the internet is going. Every other site is spam. Every third site is some young kid who uses sentences like "ive bin bz lol and work sux lol and my cat dide lol". Once every 10 clicks or so you'll find a nice, intelligible person who writes in proper English (or almost, like me), complete sentences, and has something meaningful to say. The rest of the sites are in some other language, so I have no say on them.

There are numerous sites out there that let people have a website and write thoughts on it. That's all good and dandy. But it's like a guy at the beach wearing a speedo, when you know that guy shouldn't be wearing a speedo, and no one will tell him that he shouldn't be wearing one. So, it's not against the law, but it's not pleasant for anyone... His daughter won't even be on the same beach as him, the wife is hiding under an umbrella, pretending to be asleep and/or reading a book, you know the scene.

I have nothing against free speech, free press, free anything. There are consistently low quality performances in all walks of life. Some movies suck, video games, books, tv shows, the Phillies, etc. Some are expressions of emotion, like a "blog" would be. There are also those on the extreme opposite end of that spectrum. Like, for one thing, the Eagles rule. Also, Plato's books rule, and I'm sure there's a good video game out there somewhere.

Obviously, I don't have to view those websites, and that's the other freedom granted in Free Press, Free Speech, and everything else free. The freedom to ignore. God Bless America.

OK, so while the Internet isn't going to hell from all the n00bs out there posting incoherent ramblings using long-ass sentences consisting of words of no more than 4 characters in length, it's still going to hell.

So, I'm going to look for a domain name to purchase to park this site at, and I try like a hundred different things that might closely resemble something that I would be proud to have as a domain name. I search the WHOIS database like nobody's business, finding all these domain names taken. I have to investigate, right? I visit the first domain name, and it's a "GoDaddy" site. The next one is a "Register.com" site. This happened for about 10 different domain names and at least 4 different registrar sites (like Network Solutions also). So many people, or "abstracts" even, own so many domain names. Luckily I was able to get the ones I wanted because of a cleverly inserted hyphen :) I say abstracts because these people buy domain names, and then try to get a sucker to buy it from them for at least 10 times what they paid. This just sucks for the future of the internet. It only costs $35 (max) a year to keep a domain name and not use it. Domain names are allowed to be pretty long (you can pretty much find the history of the internet on this site), so there are infinite, or close to it, permutations of domain names. I'd hate to know someone at an newly established domain name 20 years from now. Hey what's your website? Oh, it's www.mydomainnameissolongbecausethestupidpeople
inyourdayboughtupallthedomainnamesandididnothaveabazilliondollarstobuytheoneiwanted.com

Great. So, how do I email you? It's bob@my... no, I'm not going to type it again. That wasted 5 minutes already.

Other reasons the internet is going to hell...

Spam is too obvious. Worms are too obvious... Virii is a cool word, but it's still too obvious. Fraud... too obvious. Porn even... what else is bad with the internet?

I'm not a lawyer, but open source is good. Knowledge sharing is good. Being able to easily find something that you're looking for is great. With the internet growing at a rate that it is (google is now indexing 8 BILLION+ websites, just a few years ago it was at 2-3 billion), there won't be any tools capable of searching the internet and bringing back relevant results. I searched for my name, and figuring I'm searching for my name, it should return my website. I got to the 7th page before I gave up. One of these days there will need to be artificial intelligence of the human kind to be able to search the internet. Not that AI is bad (unless you think the Matrix is real :) ), but it's HARD! I'm no genius, but I worked with AI in college. VERY interesting subject. Mind boggling, even. Exciting. Fascinating. It's awesome. But anyways, back to the internet...

One thing that comes to my mind when I hear the words "The internet is going to hell", is the obvious notion of compatibility. Sharing information between sites can now be done in a thousand ways, as long as those sites share their methods of sharing information. Let me list them... SOAP through Web Services, plain XML, RSS, ATOM, XMLRPC, RPC, Remoting, and anything else that someone may want to program. Granted, the WWW Consortium is trying to get a grasp on all of these methods, almost none of them are standardized through them. The happy internet is the standardized internet. Imagine, if google, instead of just reading all of the HTML through a website url, can just ask a website "Yo, what's your deal?!" and the website can respond back "Dude, I am a guitar shop, here are my wares." And google says "Awesome, Jason Connell was searching for guitars the other day, he wanted a new stratocaster, I'll email this to him right away. He found one for $500 but judging by your prices, he's gonna crap his pants. In fact, let's just place the order now, shall we? I have his credit card and mailing address..." Without standardization in server methods and in browsers, we won't even come close to that point :)

So, that was my very compelling argument on why the internet is going to hell. I hope you enjoyed it. Please comment below.

Netscape 8 is out now. I'm set in my ways with the Mozilla Suite, but I'll give my initial reactions on Netscape 8 anyway. From what I've read, it can use Mozilla's rendering engine (which is Netscape's, it's called Gecko) or IE's rendering engine which, from what I know, doesn't have a cool name (Do any of Microsoft's products?? Longhorn, Whistler, Yukon, ... No, none of them have cool code names, and all of their product names suck). So judging from this style of compatibility solution, I wouldn't use it. From what I can tell, Microsoft doesn't have the security background as some people may think, they also piss people off.

I don't think a hybrid solution will work. Ahh, here's a nice piece of crap information. Take the tour of Netscape 8, go into "Security", click the right arrow 2 or 3 times... you'll find that the browser will render safe sites using "the Internet Explorer method" for "maximum compatibility"... Oh man, Netscape's hit the bottom, they're now kissing Microsoft's butt. First off, Mozilla is the "standards compliant" browser, however, most web developers write their Javascript and HTML to pretty much only work in IE. ECMAScript (JavaScript's other name) was invented at Netscape and later taken and seriously altered by Microsoft, so now there are two versions. You can learn about Javascript here.

In conclusion, Netscape 8 uses IE so it inherits all of its flaws with respects to standards compliancy. Eventually, IE will need to conform to these standards, but it will still have the security flaws. Mozilla or FireFox are based on these standards, which make web developing not as complex as it used to be, back when the browser market share was a tight battle between Netscape and Microsoft, coinciding Windows 98 which came with IE4 and Microsoft's version of ECMAScript. Mozilla based code doesn't even know what an "ActiveX" object is, so it gains a TON of security advantages there. It's the safe way to browse the web on a Windows machine.

Now that I have the gmail accounts and domain names all registered, I can start to share them. I'm going to have some logos and images designed so I can be cooler. The names and email addresses are : (drum roll)

Caffeine Fueled
Digital Tattoo
Email Caffeine Fueled
Email Digital Tattoo

Being a non-schizophrenic and also not having all the time in the world, I will pretty much only be using one domain and email, and that will be caffeine fueled, since I am caffeine fueled. The other one was just too cool of a domain name to pass up. I had to get it, Mom, I had to. How cool is a "digital tattoo"?! I can't even grasp the concept. Of course, in that analogy I say a domain name is a digital tattoo.

So, if I get offers for the domain name, I'd consider selling it. It could be a good name for a graphics design company, or software, probably anything in computers. If that's the case, I can't hold back the dreams of an entrepreneur, and will practically give it away. I don't do this for money, do you see ads on here? :-P

I went to sign up for another gmail account today, and the default desired login name made me laugh...

Besides the fact that this site just looks a bazillion times better in Mozilla or Firefox, Internet Explorer has been exploited again. This worm encrypts all of your files and places a ransom note on your computer that tells you to pay $200 to get the files unencrypted and usable again. Use Mozilla for Pete's sake. It's based on standards and it's well implemented. But always be careful when downloading a file, however, with IE you can install software on a client computer without having them download a file...

I don't like blogs, so I'm not going to call this a blog. It's partly to do with the word "blog"... it's a buzzword almost. Everyone's doing it. I've always tried to stay away from stuff that the masses are doing (except that one time in sixth grade when I had to get Reebok Pump sneakers). Look at the big picture of this. When you say "blog" you encapsulate EVERY site out there that has one to a few people's thoughts written in a format that always looks the same. Even down to the font. Of course, there are a lot of thoughts out there, but I'd rather read humorful ones... ones that are like mine, ones that smell nice, ones that talk about Philly sports and guitar and programming... this site isn't another blog. It's a personal site, but not a blog. There's more than a "log". This news part might be called a blog, since it is blog-like. I tend to look at things in terms of technology. In that way, there's no way that the whole site is a blog, blogs don't have s!@#! :) I put too much into the technology behind this site to just have it classified with around a billion other sites :) Now I know how people feel when they are stereotyped. I don't want my little site to be stereotyped!

Ok, I've vented. Thanks for listening. It's not a blog.

I never really refered to this site as a blog. I developed the first version way back in early 2001, even late 2000. I'm not sure when "blog" (short and mangled form of "Web Log") was originally coined, but I only started hearing the term last year. I guess this is a blog though. There are some "blogging technology" that it's missing, but I have more stuff than your average blog... downloads and photos being the major things. I could make it look more like a blog, but there's more to it. Most blogs usually blog about something specific. I've seen ones that are political blogs, music blogs, news blogs, techno blogs, etc. I lack the interest and expertise in any one specific topic to dedicate my blogging to just one topic. The approach I take is just talk about a ton of stuff, let the 1 to 2 people a day read it and criticize it, and post some music and photo albums. My website also lacks a cool (or weird) name. I've got some ideas floating around up there, but they are all based off of Cracker songs or are corny. Yes, corny. Or they are too topic specific. Like if I called my site "Philly Web Hacker", then people would come on here expecting to read about web hacking or something. So the name can't be a noun. Nouns are bad. So I need a good verb or adverb, maybe even an adjective, or a conjunction, or possibly a pronoun. e.g. ifandthe.com is a good one, but it's probably taken. Post your ideas...

[Update] On the topic of a new name, I think I have one. Tonight when I get home, I'm going to write it down on a piece of paper and stare at it for a few hours. That's how I always decide on something. A domain name is like a digital tattoo. You always have to make sure it's what you really want, it will be your mark on the giant body known as the web, but unlike a real tattoo, you can just let it expire.

I have this worm. My computer sent out a ton of emails. I didn't know it was on there until I got emails back from an email server saying that something around 40 email addresses where mail was sent to from my account were not found. If you get emails in German, don't open them. The title of mine was something about the bombing of Dresden 60 years ago, and I'm a sucker for history. I'm not sure if opening the email really caused it, I think somehow it got through somewhere else, because the news site it was linked to was a legit German news site with an interesting article about how bombing Dresden was not necessary, but it's a valid argument from either side. I think I've found the source of the worm and it's gone from my computer now.

So, I have a new debit card that no one else has except me and my bank. The money is back in the account as the company said it would do. Looking back on it, it wasn't that bad of an experience except for having to get cash out against my credit card, but I paid it off since I knew I had money in the bank and the credit card goes against just your routing number and bank account number, not a credit card. I got money out at a branch of our bank before we went to Lewes this weekend, and more importantly I had money for Friday night. That was a great time meeting up with a bunch of people I worked with two jobs ago. We always end up having a good time.

This server now has 1000 GB monthly transfer. I have an 80 GB hard drive on here, if I could fill it up, I could transfer the entire contents of the hard drive twelve and a half times. Or, more practically, if I have 100 MB of stuff on this website, i could have 10,000 people a month view everything I have on here. Even more practically, I'll never use 1000 GB a month. That total, however, includes my FTP and SSH usage, although SSH is really no percentage of 1000 GB. Using SSH, I may transfer 1 GB every 10 years :) The cap used to be 100 GB and I never used it, but the websites I have on here before this one hardly got used, although this one isn't used much either, but I visit it everyday :) Anyway, feel free to hoard my music.

This sucks. I went to deposit a check today, after hours at the branch, and I can't because I realized you need a MAC (ATM) card to do it. And I won't have one until later this week. So, I probably have to go to the one in Center City tomorrow at lunch. That should be fun. I need it in there because I have bills to pay, but every bank has these awful hours, like 9-4. I need to be in Center City by 9, and I can't leave before 5. No way I'm making it to a bank before or after a work day. Saturdays they are open from 9-12 but this past Saturday was rough, and it can't wait until this Saturday.

This fraud person really screwed me this week. The closest bank to my building is half a mile, perhaps I could take the bus because walking is just plain out of the question :) I hardly have the "walk on the sidewalk" part down in the city, crossing the streets is a whole other matter that I'm not ready to partake in.

Today, I log into my bank account to see if I have any money, and there's this charge on there that I didn't make. So I call my bank and they say contact the company on the statement, which turns out to be this internet payment services company. So I call them, not knowing what to expect, and I get this nice girl. We eventually figure out that it was in fact a fraudulent charge, and she cancels the order and says I'll be refunded, and I should just call the bank again and get a new number. So I do that. I call the bank again, tell them it was a fraudulent charge, they shut down the card and are shipping a new card to me this week. All that took less than 25 minutes, and I won't lose any money.

My problem is though, that now I'm all flustered, I didn't think that would happen to me, so I'm typing this all shaky and stuff. Also, what about the person who made the charge... they have records, an address, phone number, and everything. Will that person go to jail? How did they get it? This still sucks. But, I won't get any more charges on that card. I pretty much only order from places with a trustworthy name, encryption, and all the other good secure stuff. My card is completely shut down, I'm going to have to borrow money from someone to get me through the week until this card comes. Those A-HOLES. Plus, they have to be dumber than a box of nails. Like, with the internet, and online banking, anyone can find out anything that goes on with their account in about .00001 seconds. Sucker. Judging from the site, it's a software sales place. I'm sure the company will pursue the fraud because they now have software that they didn't pay for. $81 worth of it.

But, I have to thank the companies involved for being quick to act, being open on a Saturday, and getting things done. Hopefully those A-HOLES will get a job and pay their own money for stuff in the future. Alright, I'm not as shaky as I was when I started typing this. Just, be careful with how you use your credit card. There are cheap, desperate people out there. I like to call them criminals.