See attached pict. Caption reads: Hey, your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.
If the current trend continues, a couple of years from now, Facebook going down will be the equivalent of having your router die on you… 😉
But for now, I guess I’ll just have to drown my sorrow in code, since the kids are off to the movies. Or who knows, I might even go… outside… Imagine that!
Since I’m getting wpDirAuth peer reviewed before releasing the first version, due to its security implications, I have released another project as my first official WordPress plugin instead.
You can find more information on wpRedirect, a handy WordPress post and page redirection plugin I developed for my site, on the related project page.
After getting in touch with and having gotten “approval” from its author, I’m attempting to fork off and revive wpLDAP and would like the upgraded code to be peer reviewed by other developers before I release anything into the wild.
The current development version is in my SVN repo at:
http://labs.tekartist.org/wordpress/svn/branches/dev/plugins/wpDirAuth/
If you decide to try and/or review it, please add your constructive criticism and test reports to the related WordPress Forum entry.
Thanks for any help I can get. 🙂
Since we’ve committed to MooTools for our RIA and AJAX development needs in the McGill WPS, I’ve been using it on my recently released personal site as well, so I can experiment outside of work but still try to gain from it professionally.
Therefore, I just opened a new section and repository under tekartist.org to feature little projects I plan to release publicly, as FOSS, for people to download, use, comment on and modify as they please.
You can currently only find more information about my source repository, but I will release a little project I’ve been toying with shortly, after I document it properly.
From the source article, via Digg:
“One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.”
Isn’t it amazing how things you have absolutely nothing to contribute to can titillate your interest to no end? The above article, and countless related references, are perfect examples of a subject I’m going to get lost into for the next few hours, just clicking away until it all sinks in. Simply fascinating.
Tada! I have decided to move away from Blogger and instead leverage features afforded to me by my new web host, DreamHost. I have now acquired the tekArtist.org domain name and set myself up with a WordPress instance to run the present site.
Besides having imported my previous Blogger posts to the new blog section, you can now also browse through two new main sections:
The base page is mostly there as a soft landing pad for visitors just stumbling upon my site, but also serves as an OpenID delegate through myOpenID.
Please bare with me in regards to the domain-wide search, as I’m only using Google’s most basic site search feature. They have not yet picked up my pages in their index, since I just turned off the temporary password I had setup at the root level this morning.
Technologically speaking, the new site features tools and options such as:
You can read more about the WordPress theme I custom develop for this site in the related labs page. Since there is nothing really private in it (sensitive values are protected through more appropriate means), I have also decided to make the theme’s source available publicly, fact which might change at any time if I realize that this leads to abuse or security issues outside of what I originally planned for.
I have been relatively quiet online in the past few years while primarily focusing my energies on my responsibilities as a dad and as a professional. I obviously never stopped playing, but limited my personal publishing activities to blogging and participating in online communities, rather than releasing products or experiments.
Now that my beloved children are starting to require less of my attention (IE: less then 24-7), I now have the opportunity to revert closer to previous levels of contribution to the web and Open Source spheres. Don’t get me wrong though, I still have clear priorities. 🙂
As a final note, I just wanted to mention that my moving away from Blogger had nothing to do with necessity, as they truly have an excellent blogging platform, but stemmed from a desire for the increased flexibility that only a full on web hosting account and a product like WordPress can provide.
I have released a new version of parseMe, my lightweight browser-based RSS/Atom feed reader utility, which main target remains mobile phones and accessibility devices (universal access).
You can find the latest release in the download section, and more information about it in the release log. There is now also a public Subversion repository.
From the source article, via Slashdot:
Ocean City, New Jersey is a nice, family-oriented beach that will apparently soon be the high-tech model for seashore lovers and now perhaps geeks everywhere. The city has on its plate a $3 million variety of public services on tap featuring Internet access and radio-frequency identification chips (RFID) and Wi-Fi wireless technology.
Usually, when I go to the beach, it’s not to be “in range”… Although, for those whose offices are in walking distance of the beach, it’s a dream come true! Nothing than a good old cantenna couldn’t achieve before, in the latter context, but even better.
On a related note, here is the definition of self-control: seeing your neighbours discarding a portable satellite dish, picking it up to convert it in a wi-fi extender, then putting it back because you just know you don’t actually need it.
See embedded video below for a teaser of the FIC Neo 1973 running OpenMoko.
I even like the soundtrack they chose, and they also have more OpenMoko related videos on their dedicated Youtube account. Must… Fight… Urge… And wait until October for the consumer version. Not enough time on my hands to involve myself as a developer unfortunately, but once again, it wouldn’t be the first time I say this and fall for it later on. 😉
Since I was addressing poor online business ethics in my last post, I might as well touch the following, as it came up while I was browsing the upcoming security stories thread on Digg.
I was googling my online trail recently, and was quite stirred that the nickname I use on a lot of online communities started showing up as a registered user of a number of social-networking-flavoured porn sites. Most of them pumping out (pardon the analogy) long lists of sites and videos one allegedly features on their profile as interesting, à la Digg et al.
I thought someone else was simply using the same moniker, but the following article and its author might just have provided me with some valuable insight: Why are my picture and name showing up on porn sites without my permission?
Thankfully, this seems limited to the user name for now, and my real name isn’t returning such search results. But it is definitely of interest to me professionally, since McGill does have, and is looking forward to further develop, people pages. We will definitely have to take this trend in consideration in the upcoming incarnation of the software and content.