Author: Portfolioso

Image Gallery Layout Fix

March 13, 2006

Website Related

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I had to do something about my image gallery because it looked like ass in Internet Explorer. Even though the CSS (which is a stylesheet that customizes the page layout) validated and followed browser compliancy standards, IE still made a mess of the page. In Firefox, the gallery displayed nicely, but since most fools use Internet Explorer, I had to fix it. You don’t know how many extra hours of coding Internet Explorer has caused me over the past few years. When things looked good in Firefox, I checked in IE and they were messed up. If you search this blog for IE, you will see other posts of me complaining about how IE messed up my pages. Anyway, enough ranting.

Some of the things that were messed up included: Menu image buttons not aligning, ugly and misaligned webbed graphic showing up that didn’t belong, repeating top menu graphic (only one was needed) and some random text that did not belong there.

I also got rid of that @ menu mouseover thing because it confused people. You would have to mouseover the @ to make a submenu show up. The login link was on that submenu login. This was too hard of a concept for most people and I got flooded with email and asked 20 times how to log in. So instead of mousing over the retarded @, I got rid of the @ and made the submenu display at all times. Much easier..

So now that the gallery is more user friendly, I hope you all like it better. (It still looks a bit better in Firefox, but at least it’s decent in IE)

Peer Guardian

March 3, 2006

Computer/ Tech Related

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This is a Portfolioso endorsed advertisement for an awesome program that no one should be without.

PeerGuardian 2 is Phoenixlabs’ premier IP blocker for Windows. PeerGuardian 2 integrates support for multiple lists, list editing, automatic updates, and blocking all of IPv4 (TCP, UDP, ICMP, etc), making it the safest and easiest way to protect your privacy while using P2P applications. What does this mean in English? It just blocks IP addresses from bad ranges. The default IP list that comes with the program is a P2P (peer to peer) list.

So why block P2P? If you download music or other files on the internet, there are a lot of servers with fake data on them. Sometimes you’ll get scrambled music files. As for the bittorrent community, the RIAA and MPAA are hiring tracing companies such as MediaSentry to collect IP addresses so legal action can be taken against those who download illegally.

Note: I am not endorsing the use of P2P for illegal purposes. It is wrong to break copyright laws. I’m just informing why people should use this program. There are a lot of legitimate torrents (such as videos licensed under Creative Commons, for instance, Revision3) and the bad servers can mess around with these legitimate, legal torrents – so it’s good to stay protected. Even if you are downloading legal content, your IP can be confused by tracing companies like Mediasentry (since the other people you’re downloading from may also share illegal stuff, you connect to those peers to download the legal content. If the peer you’re connected to gets traced, you may be pointed the blame even if you are 100% innocent).

If you don’t download illegal stuff to begin with, you will never get caught – keep that in mind. PeerGuardian helps, but nothing is perfect and EVERYTHING you do on the internet is traceable.

Download it here: http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/

RIAA Says Ripping CDs to Your iPod is NOT Fair Use

February 16, 2006

Computer/ Tech Related, Rants

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The RIAA argues in a DMCA rule-making filing that copying for personal use (to an iPod) is not fair-use.

This is complete bullshit. If you buy a CD, as far as I’m concerned, you have the license for personal use. Whether you listen to it on a CD or on an mp3 player makes no difference. You paid for the CD so now you can do whatever you want with it. It’s not like you downloaded it for free. Now they’re targeting people who pay for music. What next? The RIAA doesn’t understand that CDs are a dying technology. They’re assuming that online music stores like Apple’s iTunes music store and others that sell mp3s/other formats of music will be harmed if you rip music off CDs. It’s been proven many times that the movie industry and music industry is not losing money because of downloading. So the fact that someone can’t buy a CD and listen to it on an mp3 player is complete nonsense.

This just enrages people and encourages more piracy. It’s no solution to the problem. The RIAA/MPAA and other retarded organizations need to grow up. They’ve being doing this since the 80s with recording TV and radio onto VHS and cassette tapes.

read more | digg story (#1 story of the week of 2/12)

MouseTrax Beta 2

February 8, 2006

Useless Update

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Ok so I pretty much finished MouseTrax last year and thought it was all good until I randomly used it today in programming and found a bug. For anyone new here, Mousetrax is a program that counts how many keys you pressed, how many times you clicked your mouse and the distance your mouse has travelled on the screen.

So I went home and fixed the bug and while I was looking at the code, realized how much of a noob I was when I wrote it (first program). So basically I cleaned up a lot of useless bloated inefficient code, so it’s a lot smaller. I also fixed other bugs and added in some new minor features. Go to the Programs page to download it and read the latest changelog.

Superbowl Commercials

February 7, 2006

Useless Update

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My favorite four Superbowl commercials:
FedEx – Stick, Bud Lite – Secret Fridge, Godaddy Girl (although the banned ones were better, and last year’s Godaddy commercial was great) and finally, the Ameriquest Heart Paddle one
Very effective advertising. If this site wasn’t registered with Godaddy already, the commercial would make me want to transfer over to it. W00t! Godaddy (and their advertising) is leet. By the way, use FedEx because they send me my crap from newegg.com really quickly.