Geek Speak

O hai. I’ve been paying more attention to FB and Twitter than I have to my poor little old blog here, but I figured I’d keep these comments together:

Yesterday I told my friends they should ditch GoDaddy. This isn’t the first time I’ve joined in on a protest against GoDaddy, but this time because of SOPA, it apparently had some traction. Enough to get GoDaddy to back out on their support. So I tweeted something like this. GoDaddy no longer supports SOPA, but they worked for months to make it what it is? So all of a sudden they’ve had a change of heart? We have to remember here that the heart of any corporation is its profits. Of course they’d back out if their SOPA support began to hurt them where it matters most. But I wouldn’t be surprised if profit isn’t also at the heart of the reason GoDaddy was supporting, and indeed helping to craft SOPA, in the first place.

So when one of my friends posted that Nintendo had also backed SOPA, and asked whether we would boycott them, too, this was my reply:

I can see why Nintendo would support the idea of an anti-piracy act. There is a big difference between a non-US video game manufacturer supporting this and someone like GoDaddy working to tweak this bill to their liking:

- As an ISP, GoDaddy should understand that simply playing around with DNS isn’t going to stop the problem, and could lead to a lot more screwups

- As an ISP, GoDaddy (unlike Nintendo) isn’t having their stuff ripped off. At worst, some of their ads might be spread around the net as some kind of soft porn. Do you think they mind? I realize that very good people don’t have to be personally affected to fight for the right thing, but…

- As a huge ISP, GoDaddy could greatly benefit from shutting down smaller ISPs. I worked at a startup ISP years ago. I know how quickly we had to act to keep our services from getting shut down (by our datacenters, etc) in light of a DMCA violation. There are already laws and rules and standards of conduct in place here for US companies that go far to help this problem. The main “benefit” here would be that it could slightly trip up foreign companies who shouldn’t be affected by those same rules, but at what cost? Do we really want the government (or corporations they appoint) to be in charge of what we can and can’t see on the net? That doesn’t affect Nintendo in Japan. It WOULD affect us. GoDaddy knows this, but like any normal corporation, only “cares” how it affects their bottom line.

By the way, from my perspective, here’s how the DMCA violations typically went: We would get an email reporting a violation on one of our customer’s sites. This could be a video, a picture, a book, or whatever. We’d have only so many hours to fix the problem before they’d go over our heads to our datacenter to have our service shut down, so we would immediately contact the customer AND suspend their site. Of course we’d hear back from them right away, and they’d have X hours from us to remove the infringing material.

If they had a problem with repeat infringements, we’d notice and give them the boot.

How would that process work with SOPA, and how would it be more effective than what we already have?

(quoth the girl in the Mario shirt. So take it with a grain of salt if you’d like. I will hold off on buying Zelda Skyward Sword until this mess is clarified — but that has more to do with my personal finances this Christmas ;-p)

A photobooth shot I happened to take two nights ago... in my mario shirt :-p

Jesse’s argument, by the way, was that we should fight the elected leaders who are pushing this through, particularly Orrin Hatch. I couldn’t agree more that this particular senator’s ride should have been over years ago.

So you might know I love to help out with the local Open Source community. Who doesn’t love giving some time to a cause that could change the world? And yet it’s hard to find time in our schedules. Project Day helps with that, and one of the projects at our last project day involved the theme and branding for the Utah Open Source Conference that’s coming up in May 2012.

As much as all we geeks were somewhat sick of the ambiguous buzzword of the year, none of us can deny that “The Cloud” is a fairly important topic right now. Plus, since it’s such a popular term with business executives, we thought that talking about Open Source technology and the cloud might be a great way to help draw in that audience.

The trick was coming up with a fun way to phrase the theme, and one of the phrases I blurted out was, “The Silver Lining.” Alas; everyone latched onto it. I actually liked “Demystifying the Cloud” a bit better — but we all thought that might be a bit too puntastic, but The Silver Lining just sounded weak. “It’s okay,” Mindjuju reasoned, “The designer will come up with some way to communicate the idea without it looking too cheesy.” The designer == me. And thus I was sent home with the impossible task of coming up with a cool logo using that tagline. And I thought about it a lot, but couldn’t love any of the ideas, and thus kept putting the project off til I was faced with a deadline.

I explained my plight to a friend, and he suggested I might try a big thundercloud instead of a care-bear-ish sort of cloud. I thought that might work, but the tagline still sounded off to me. Walking to my car and staring at the thunderclouds forming above me, I started to brainstorm what I could do. I liked the word storm, not just the image. Storm cloud. Almost, right? So I came up with this, and after talking to Mindjuju and Herlo and their consulting with others, the phrase stuck.

What do you think of it? And what does the phrase Storming the Cloud mean to you?

One we problem I ran into when exporting is that most of my resized images did not pull through. So my post would call for someImage-400×266.jpg though the import only grabbed someImage.jpg and not its variants.

The fix was pretty easy, though. I just used Replace. Do a datadump of your wp_posts table beforehand, just in case, and then:

update `wp_posts` set post_content = replace(post_content,’-400×266.jpg’,’.jpg’);

I had a few other variants like 400×300.jpg or 400×400.jpg depending on the aspect ratio — obviously you’ll want to use sizes that are in use at your own site — but but for the most part this went smashingly. Hoping that helps someone.

So, I’ve divided up my geekiness from my momminess — though, if you know me at all, you’re aware that I am truly a very geeky mom and an equally mommy-esque geek: the differentiation exists on the interwebs alone.

Technically, I’ve got quite a bit of cleanup to do both here and there, as well as a number of hairy redirects (or perhaps I’ll only redirect popular articles and clean up my internal links) but I figure I’ll let cowpaths be cowpaths and let each blog take whatever direction it will before I polish either one.

For those of you who didn’t know, I’ve started a brand new blog: blog.SingleMormonMommy.com, wherein I’ll unabashedly cover subjects from Mormonism to Maryisms without worry that such postings will inadvertently turn up at Utah Open Source Planet or as fodder for highly awkward job interviews. Likewise, I’ll be able to post geeky stuff here without coming across as a mumbler to my non-geeky mom friends.

Anyhow, so whether you fit best here, or there, or still prefer to read both, know that I do hope this will work out well for you as my reader, too. On to geekier matters…

We just downloaded Judo last week so I could figure out how to program. Today I decided to make a spot making program. Mary asked for 999,999 spots and it took a long time, so I wondered how many spots my program could make per second. So at first we just tried counting and calculating, but then I realized that we could use a timer instead. Well, maybe Java isn’t perfect, because we got some pretty funny results! I don’t think this is accurate!

This is the code I made up:


void main(){


// declare variables
int icount = 0; // count
int inum; // number
double seconds; // seconds
double persecond; // spots per second


// ask user how many spots
printLine("How many spots would you like?");
inum = readInt();
startTimer();


// While we need to make more spots, do this...
while(icount<inum) {
setColor (randomColor());
fillCircle(randomInt(400), randomInt(300), randomInt(150));
icount = icount+1;
}


// stop timer and make calculations
seconds = stopTimer();
persecond = inum/seconds;
printLine("That took " + seconds + " seconds... that's " + persecond + " spots per second!");
}


This is what I got.

What I expected

That works. But this?

What I got ... INFINITY spots per second?

LOL!