Aaron Parecki

The top trending topic on Twitter the other day was #twitterpornname. This seemingly innocent meme prompts you to find your Twitter porn name by combining the name of your first pet with the street you grew up on, or some variation. Thousands of people began shouting out this information on their Twitter profiles.

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I've had a bit of fun using MediaWiki to power a few websites! Check out cyborganthropology.com, caseorganic.com/wiki, and indiewebcamp.com for a few examples. A default install of MediaWiki looks like wikipedia.org, and you probably don't want your website to look like that. However, MediaWiki is a powerful platform for building your site, even if it's just being edited by one person!

Introduction

A computer program generated the image you see above. There were two goals: create a program that can generate pieces of artwork which will look different every time it is run. The generated art should not look obviously like it came from a computer at first glance. There are five steps to creating the above piece.

Quicksilver Real Estate Solutions

MediaWiki Skin

Due to some significant changes to the Wordpress authentication mechanism, my original IMAP Authentication plugin stopped working in version 2.7.1. I have updated the plugin to work in 2.7.1. The only difference is that users are no longer automatically created in Wordpress if they have a valid IMAP account. I will try to add that back in soon, but for now this will do.

UPDATE

Why, you ask?

I keep seeing people writing scripts that embed their Twitter feed into their websites. The "easy" way is to use Javascript, which means you don't need to have PHP installed on your server. Doing it this way means your tweets will not be visible to visitors with Javascript disabled.

Background

In a semi-private wiki I maintain, we are using whitelisting to make some pages visible to the public but not others. Authentication is done off of an IMAP server, and only registered users have full access tothe wiki. We still run in to the occasional page where most info should be public, but only certain bits should not appear to the public. Things like server passwords, or phone numbers should be hidden except to registered users. I created this plugin so that we can hide bits and pieces of pages from non-registered users, while making the rest of the page public. Just add a <private> tag around the text you want hidden, and you're good to go.

UPDATE 2/13/09: There is a newer version of the IMAP Authentication plugin for Wordpress 2.7.1.

I am setting up a security camera mounted under the eve of my roof. Rather than running an ethernet cable and an extension cord up there, I figured I could use the four unused wires in an ethernet cable to provide the camera with power. The camera only uses 9v, so it should be pretty safe. I had a couple extra 1ft patch cables lying around, so I spliced the transformer into two patch cables. This will let me run a long CAT 5 cable from end-to-end, and attach it to the camera and ethernet/power.

This morning after waking up to lots of thunder and lightning, I got a text message saying my raid5 array had failed. Only this time, 2 of the 3 drives were missing. Since both of those drives were actually mounted via a vblade share (on a different physical machine), I assumed that the other server had freaked out during a power surge. I quickly rebooted the machine to bring back the vblade shares, but then the trouble started.

This is primarily targeted towards graphic designers, although anyone can benefit from the information here as well. This post focuses on the hardware of a laptop rather than the software. I figure I’ll save a talk about software for a different day.

presented by Aaron Parecki & Effie Siverts

I just stumbled across Google's Treasure Hunt. They're always doing neat things, so I checked it out. It's a series of four problem-solving puzzles released one week at a time. I found out about it after the first question was already over, so I jumped in starting with the second question.

When you have a database of books or movies, some of the titles begin with "The." If you do a regular ORDER BY on the table, all the titles that start with "the" get clumped together. One option is running an unsorted query and sorting in PHP, but it would be better to sort at the database level. Here is a query I came up with to do that, using an IF function in MySQL!