Category: Interweb Elsewhere

W3C Validation and Free Energy

I’ve tweaked the blog theme a bit. Nothing really that will affect you. I added alternate text to all the images, so now the blog validates as W3C compliant, so that’s good. I also fixed the path to an icon that was broken. The HTML pages I made in WordPad way back when are horribly mangled, unsurprisingly.

For some reason, when I pointed the validator at the test page of the theme, it said it was fine. However, when I looked in the code of the test page, it had the same omissions it was nagging me about, even though I had a fresh install of the latest version of the theme. Oh well, that’s over now. I also tried to maybe save W3C a bit of bandwidth like they asked, and hosted the standards definition file on my own server. I cron’d it to update every 3 months or so, as it would typically have a 90 day expiry time, using this line:

0 0 7 */3 0 rm /var/www/wp-content/themes/aqueous-lite/xhtml1-transitional.dtd wget -P /var/www/wp-content/themes/aqueous-lite/ http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd

The remove is to get rid of the previous version so wget can get a new version. If this was not done, a copy would be saved with a “.1” or “.2” ect on the end.

I can’t seem to change the <html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”> without it becoming inavalid, as it would seem that setting is fixed. Anyone with tips on how I can cache this or something, please let me know. I also removed an outdated version number from the footer. Thanks to those who pointed out I was apparently using an outdated version of WordPress!

I’d also like to draw your attention to an interesting demo. As far as I can tell, it’s a way to increase efficiency in motors by piping electromagnetic radiation that would otherwise be lost back into it. There are also claims that the laws of physics have been broken with this thing, so a healthy dose of skepticism wouldn’t hurt.

Google Translate!

I have simultaneously become sympathetic to how hard it is for a computer to translate and very amused at how very wrong it can be. I fed poder to Google Translate, wanting to know what it meant, having forgotten. (I ended up just googling the word and it was in the exerpt of the second result.) It said power. This isn’t right, although in its defense I gave it no context. It wasn’t even close, though. I then fed it Yo podo to see if conjugating it would give any clues. Apparently not, as it then said I podo. Not very helpful. I then added a period, making it Yo podo. Google proclaimed: I shortly. Amazing what modern technology can do! Online translators seem to be very good at producing amusing nonsensical gibberish.

Portal and Leaves

I’ve been reading Portal. No, not Valve’s Portal. I mean Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval. It’s a really interesting online book, and there’s a hardcover available at Barnes and Noble. It’s about a man who was supposed to come out of stasis orbiting a star he was going to study. However, something goes wrong and he wakes up back at Earth, and everyone is gone… Trees are intact, the oceans are fine, animals prosper… No people.

Leaves. How does it feel, being able to rake them in January as the snow melts immediately upon contact with the thawed ground?

MINERVA: Metastasis 3 Released!

Download here, and if you use BitTorrent, please be sure to seed! That brings me to my next topic: how Comcast is messing with BitTorrent traffic! Since I tend to be at Mom’s and subsequently using my much-more-dependable DSL service, I had only been reading about it up until now. Comcast is actively spoofing reset packets to BitTorrent seeds and the peers they attempt to connect with. This means seeding is impossible. Seconds in to establishing a connection, it will be ruthlessly slaughtered by Comcast’s packets sniffers. I find it amazing that Comcast thinks it can sell you a 3MBPs connection, (which they falsely claim is consistently faster than DSL, which it’s not, you can get higher peaks but you can’t depend on them) then tell you with a straight face that you can’t use all of it.

In worse news, it would seem that overheating was not all, or perhaps part, of my server’s problem. It just stopped responding again, and needed a hard reboot. I don’t know what the problem is, but I’m hoping I can find it and fix it. That’s really too bad that I spend $50 on a case that I thought I needed for stability but I guess I didn’t. :\

EDIT: Latest torrent with an exe installer instead of a zip went up on the 2nd of October. I’m seeding the exe now. I had 500 some MB on the zip.