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.

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?

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.

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…

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!

So far they’ve scraped together 60 dollars or so and have been trying to think of ways to earn more. Then they heard about that kid who outdid Angry Birds. “Maybe we could write an app too!” I couldn’t care less about money. Still, being the geeky mom I am, I told them they’d have to learn to program.

“What language would you like to try first?” Mary suggested English, Spanish, or Arabic. My bad. So after a quick explanation and some poking around for kid-friendly programming introductions in Google, they decided to start with Java in Judo, and try new a language and another IDE in a week or two.

Last night after Ethan discovered the graphics capabilities and had played around with it a bit, I thought I’d show him how to change colors based on user input. But I was getting errors, and it was time to read scriptures, so we left it for the night. Immediately after school today:

“Hey look! It compiled… and… come on… yup! It works!”
“Oh yeah? What was wrong?”
“You had the favColor variable as a String, and it should have been a Color.”
“Got ya. How’d you figure that out?”
“I checked the manual.”

Warms my nerdy little heart.

The problem:. I’d been developing from another path than the default MAMP installation and had changed this easily enough through MAMPs gui. I just didn’t realize that the DocumentRoot path for the SSL virtual host would also need to be changed. So, if you’re running into this same issue (or in case I run into the same issue again on another computer), simply go back to editing your ssl.conf, comment out the existing DocumentRoot site, and change it to your own real path, like so:


# General setup for the virtual host
# DocumentRoot "/Applications/MAMP/htdocs_ssl"
DocumentRoot "/your/real/path/goes/here/"

Save that and restart your apache service, and you should be good. And if that doesn’t work and you need to troubleshoot, have a look over your SSL error logs for more info. Good luck…

But many of you, particularly my girl friends, have never heard of “Will It Blend” or Blendtec. And when I say “Oh! It’s so cool! They have these super tough blenders that blend stuff, like magnets and silly putty and iPhones!” you look at me like I’m from another planet.

So here are a few links to fill you in.

Blendtec on Modern Marvels: Super awesome behind-the scenes stuff, and a great overview, too.

Total Blender on Time Warp: Blending stuff is even cooler when it’s filmed at 10,000 frames per second and then played back in high definition slow mo! On this one they blend strawberries, gum balls, a video camera, and butane lighters. Parental discretion advised if your kid is a pyro. Otherwise, be sure to watch it in HD!

Bad guys, good guy, and a blender: A notoriously tough guy gets in the blender with the bad guys. Who will win? Blendtec had to remove this after the tough guy (whose name I dare not mention since I work for BT now, but you can find one of his many fan sites here) sent a cease and desist. But several youtube users had re-posted the original video, including this one. Too funny.

And of course we have Will It Blend? — a huge video collection of Tom Dickson blending stuff. And last but not least, blendtec.com — which is going to look awesome before the summer’s through.

And the best part of all of it? They Gave Me A Blender! Anyone up for smoothies?

We’re asked to review on the following criteria:

• Is the article well-written?
• Is the article applicable?
• Are arguments in the article valid and sound?
• How is information in the article applicable to Web designers?
• How can we interpret the article’s information with respect to visual design, usability, Web standards, etc?

To the first three questions: YES, YES, and YES! Here’s a seven year old article that is still perfectly applicable to web designers and the clients they serve today.

In fact I’m currently encouraging my clients to get more, not less, content on their pages, both so that search engine spiders are more likely to find them, and so that the folks who find them will find what they’re looking for. More often than not, they’re looking for information, not for an immediate purchase, and we want them to stay on the site, remember it, and use our information to make a good purchase decision.

The Bottom-Up development Cameron Moll mentions is just another way of explaining what we were taught to do in this class: create the content first and then use the home page to create logical, easy-to-use paths to that content. “Determine the final pages on which your visitors should land, and emphasize those pages on your homepage.” I remember hearing Cameron speak on Good vs Great design. Well, this article isn’t just good, it’s great, because it’s so brilliant and simple. I love it.

As far as web standards go, this thinking applies well here, too. After, if users can’t get at the content, it doesn’t matter how “flashy” the home page might be.

While the particular design suggested for his example, Salisbury, doesn’t look trendy by todays standards, that was SEVEN years ago. The principles still apply perfectly, and many of the features he’d suggested are in fact being used on Salisbury’s site today with an updated look and feel.

Personally speaking, I was glad to read this today; it reinforces exactly what I’ve been trying to do with my clients. This is a classic article for the ages.

I guess I’d always pictured gophers when I said that, but I laughed and told them about the pop up windows we had to endure back in the day. “But most modern browsers take care of them for you, so you guys probably don’t know what I’m talking about.” My oldest isn’t nine yet and I’m sure pop-up blockers have been around at least that long!

“Oh, I’ve dealt with pop ups before,” Mary sighed. “Especially if I can’t get Firefox out of Safemode and I have to use Internet Explorer. It’s so annoying when I’ve got ten windows to close”

Ethan nodded. “Internet Explorer IS a pop up.”

To do when they’re home again: Check for malware & install Chrome. :-p