woolie t.

BookMooch looks seriously cool. I can’t help but think I’ve come across this before (a long time ago) but whatever…I’ve made new contact.

Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you’ve read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish.
….

Points for entering books: you receive a tenth-of-a-point for every book you type into our system, and one point each time you give a book away. In order to keep receiving books, you need to give away at least one book for every three you receive.

The only cost associated with all of this that of shipping your books to those who’ve made the request. The site itself appears to do nothing more than serve as a matchmaker.

As enthusiastic as I am right now about doing this, I have a long and sordid history of initial energy for something followed by little to no follow through. But this time will be different! My fingers are in the crossed position!

Merci Scott Klarr

Most of us are by now fully aware that sex sells (slightly NSFW). The animalistic instinct is always operating in the background, eager to influence our purchasing decisions. In addition, it has become pretty well acknowledged in blogtopia that lists help drive traffic to your site (did you follow the first link of this post?).

I now direct you towards the mother of all traffic binging posts. The ingeniously devised packet vacuuming blog entry that is 10 Movies Sold on a Sex Scene.

Looking through the CodeIgniter site (very cool…be sure to check out their two video tutorials), I came across a link to something pretty novel: Clever Andy. It’s a business that allows you to upload a site design. If they find it acceptable, and know of a potential client, they put in all of the leg work to get that design fully implemented and (hopefully) sold. You get 25% of the sale price. Pretty neat, eh?

Fuel Your Creativity posted about this a month ago and one of the commenters expressed some doubts, one of which was proof of its effectiveness. Lee Tengum (the man behind Clever Andy) responded:

…we have already moved some user submitted designs to production so you will see proof soon!

Assuming success stories are made available, this seems like a great resource for designers out there looking to cash in on some of their unused work.

Did you think woolie had something to do with clothes or sheep? Not anymore, for it hath been redefunned.

The Big Word Project is a website to be set in your “my brain no ideas make” bag alongside The Million Dollar Homepage. The nuts and bolts of it is this: you pay a buck a letter to buy any valid word from them, and their site will link to your site using that word. I’ll let Paddy and Lee run a use-case by you:

For example, you may buy the word ‘Donkey’ for $6 and it will link to your site dedicated to donkeys. The word ‘Donkey’ will then be the gateway to your site and the definition will be changed. No longer will the word Donkey mean ‘a woodworking apparatus consisting of a clamping frame and saw, used for cutting marquetry veneers’, instead it will now be represented visually by ‘Chris’s Donkey Site’.

I bought woolie. Like donkey, it’s a six dollar investment. Here’s my badge:

What’s funny about all this is that I had a pretty strong desire to buy the word. There was, of course, the powerful incentive to experiment with link purchasing, and I’m sure that was the push that put me over the top. But there was also a strange need to buy it…some weird send of ownership I had to fulfill.

Kudos to the guys behind this. Great idea.

Dr. Dobb’s Journal is a pretty well-known magazine geared towards software engineers, and they’ve been at it for more than thirty years. The articles are generally pretty hit or miss for my taste. I was just reading the August 2008 print edition, specifically Disentangling Concepts in Object-Oriented Systems. It’s pretty meh in my opinion, but that’s neither here nor there. The problem I found is something I’ve come across before in this magazine, but this time it was just plain absurd.

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A few months ago I posted about my purchase at Torrent Freedom. I bought three months worth of the service, and only three months. Three months have passed and I went back to their “Buy It” page to perhaps buy more time. But now, for some reason, they only offer recurring plans (i.e. there’s an automatic recharge). Why? I really dislike handing over my payment info and allowing it to be automatically billed at every cycle. The “News” section hasn’t been updated since mid-March. This stinks.

I really like this: bomomo. To be honest, I feel a twinge of jealousy because I wish I had created it. You will need to be using a browser that supports the canvas element (part of HTML5) because this baby is nothing but javascript (no flash required).

A few factors converged and I made what it a pretty rare decision to try out a paid online service, Torrent Freedom. It’s really a great idea for a business (I wonder if it’s working out for them money-wise). The short form summary is that they create a sort of “ISP within an ISP”. The purpose of which is two-fold: 1. all of your traffic is encrypted 2. all of your traffic appears to originate from, and end at, their servers.

The first impetus towards wanting something like this was the news late last year that Comcast (my ISP) was screwing with their customer’s traffic.

Comcast is forging TCP RST packets which cause connections to drop (a technique also used by Internet censorship systems in China). These packets cause software at both ends to believe, mistakenly, that the software on the other side doesn’t want to continue communicating.

I knew this to be true because while running my Bittorrent client (Azureus), I noticed that once I was seeding, I had practically zero upstream traffic. In other words, my share ratio was close to nil. I, of course, figured I had messed something up, though for the life of me couldn’t figure out what. Not to mention it worked fine when used with another ISP. Comcast recently announced they would, by the end of the year, end that practice. But as this EFF article points out, ISPs will probably continue to fuddle with your traffic in some form without your knowledge. So, unless Comcast decides to start throttling all encrypted traffic (i.e. Canadian ISP Rogers), Torrent Freedom is a nice fix.

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Running Wordpress locally and not sure why the permalink or category pages are resulting in 404 errors?

It’s more than likely due to mod_rewrite not being allowed to do its job. If you don’t know anything about mod_rewrite, here is a nice howto. Also, of course, is Apache’s own documentation.

In a nutshell, the redirects created by Wordpress in your .htaccess need the authority to send a page request elsewheres. Open httpd.conf and make sure that you have AllowOverride set to All.

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Humorless Metalheads Shut Down Popular YouTuber:

Three humorless guitar heroes who were lampooned in a series of YouTube “shredding” videos have had the clips pulled offline after citing copyright infringement.

What really stinks here has nothing to do with copyright laws or ridiculously luddite guitarists. No, the tragedy is that I previously posted a crap-your-pants-laughing video by the guy who created the shredder videos, and now my embedded U-tube clip is dead.

UPDATE: If you’ haven’t yet seen them, and wonder what the fuss is about, Wired has made the shredding series available at their site.

niffty idea: create a new city which can then grow only via traffic to the site. Once you’ve reached a certain level with one category (e.g. population), you then have a new link available to work on another aspect (e.g. industry).

Allow my isometric paradise to grow and prosper by taking a journey to Woolieopolis.

Did you hear? Major Labels Allow P2P Music Sharing on Qtrax:

Of course, DRM sticks itself out like a big red flag, and you know what that mean! Its time to head over to BoingBoing to see what Cory Doctorow has to say about all this (which I’m sure will be very interesting). So, free and legal PtoP music? I’m sorta excited.

UDATE: whoops!

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Via Wired, here’s the current draft HTML5, representing “the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML“. It was published this past Tuesday (1/22) as their first draft. I don’t know if it’s common to have such language included as part of these documents, but close to the opening one starts to get the distinct feeling that reaching this point in the document’s life was not easily accomplished:

The publication of this document by the W3C as a W3C Working Draft does not imply that all of the participants in the W3C HTML working group endorse the contents of the specification. Indeed, for any section of the specification, one can usually find many members of the working group or of the W3C as a whole who object strongly to the current text, the existence of the section at all, or the idea that the working group should even spend time discussing the concept of that section.

Got it…(awkward)

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I just deleted the three accounts I had created at Wesabe. I don’t remember when I started, but it was probably sometime around 1.5 to 2 years ago. And up until about four months ago, I kept them pretty well updated and maintained. There were a few of my OCD style obsessive rounds of updating/adding/removing tags here and there for the sake of consistency and data organization. It was one of those nights of reworking when I encountered a problem.

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