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Life, Another One of Those Episodes
2008-04-05 02:07:00
So after nine weeks, my web design course is over. It started with two dozen enthusiastic students from all classes, and ended up with five. Perhaps the most proudest end result is the Nolarize! website, created by Greg Albright ‘10. It’s pretty amazing what a nine-week, three hour a week program can do. There were a lot of things I didn’t quite cover to the extent I had hoped, and a lot of things that ended up being shuffled around (and it became difficult to handle the ins and outs of students who weren’t sure if they could attend all the classes) but I think in the end it did give me a lot to learn about too. Teaching is fun in part because the rewards reaped from it are so much more than the simple transmission of knowledge from one person to another. You really need to be prepared. I think I wasn’t as well prepared for the class most of the time, and when you hear about professors who spend forty hours preparing for a single class, you wonder wher...
More About: Life , Episodes

YouTube in HD
2008-03-15 23:12:00
I hope you can see the difference between the left and the right side of the image below: One, we’re used to, the other is an omg-that’s-so-amazing thing called *higher quality*. YouTube has conveniently kept it hidden from us, but all you need to do as append &fmt=18 to the URL of the video to see it in ...
More About: Youtube , Web Design

3/14: Pi Day
2008-03-14 14:27:00
In honor of π day, listen to comedy/parody musical duo Hard N Phirm’s Pi: When ink and pen in hands of men Inscribe your form, bipedal “P” They draw an altar on which God has slaughtered all stability No eyes could ever soak in all the places you anoint And yet to see you all at once we only need the ...

Scandalous
2008-03-12 02:58:00
New York governor Eliot Spitzer has been named as a client of Emperor’s Club VIP, a high-end prostitution agency, after a FBI wire-tap caught him with 23-year-old call-girl ‘Kristen’ last month in a Washington hotel. The headlines have exploded over the scandal, in particular because he made a name for himself as State Attorney General ...
More About: Life

Murphy?s Law: New York
2008-03-09 22:22:00
On the subway: If you run down the stairs and race through the turnstile, the train going in the opposite direction will just be pulling in. You will have to explain how a Metro Card vending machine works to a bunch of tourists right as your train pulls up. On a bike: A group of school children ...
More About: Life , New York , York , Murphy , New-York

Fujitsu Lifebook S7110 Review
2008-03-08 21:41:00
In one line: A powerful, lightweight and versatile device geared towards medium memory-intensive multi-taskers or the business/corporate individual. Pros: Excellent battery life, superior specs packed into lightweight device, expandable memory/drives, unique button-based security options Cons: Side vents get very warm, overall construction could be more solid, fairly loud hard drive operation, mediocre speakers Oddities: Left and right buttons above and below keypad No ...
More About: Review , Fujitsu

A Sense of Cohesion
2008-01-29 04:35:00
There comes a moment in time when you feel like everything comes together, even though there seems to be no coherent way to explain how exactly they fit together. It’s like that hunch, that feeling you have as you pick up a puzzle piece and find out it actually does fit in the particular spot ...
More About: Life , Sense

The Kite Runner and Atonement Compared
2008-01-18 03:53:00
It’s interesting to observe similarities between movies, and while common themes as seen before like between The Illusionist and The Prestige are classic examples, there are more subtle approaches to movie plots that I’d like to discuss, highlighting ‘the presence of it in two recent releases, The Kite Runner and Atonement . The premise is simple: ...
More About: Movie Reviews , Kite Runner

Why I hate Unix
2008-01-15 20:28:00
I didn’t want to make this so dramatic but during the first day of my wonderful externship at the Music Entertainment Technology laboratory I came to one painful, painful realization: development in the Unix environment sucks. Allow me to elaborate. I was working on compiling the source for the amazing Frets on Fire, an open-source computer-based ...
More About: Web Design , Hate

Free AJAX and Flash Packages
2008-01-12 05:37:00
In order to commemorate the launching of two of my best winter 2007 projects, I have decided to go ahead and provide, at no cost, a collection of free ajax and flash tools I’m sure you’ll like and that I, over the course of the site’s development, searched for at length and acquired. Many of these ...
More About: Web Design , Flash , Free , Ajax , Ages

I Present To Thee
2008-01-12 04:57:00
It is with great pride that I present to the world my latest project, ArcadeKill.com. Purchased for a figure I will not disclose, I redid the design, added lots more games, added a radio and a clip feature, and am in the process of making adjustments to grammar and minor errors. This is by far the ...
More About: Web Design , Present , Resent

How to Lose $750 a Month
2008-01-09 20:24:00
Here’s a textbook example of what not do when you’re earning $750 a month in text link advertising. I’m the online ads director for the Daily Gazette, Swarthmore College’s only online, updates-as-things-happen newspaper. Everything was picture perfect before school ended for the semester towards the end of December: through Text-Link-Ads.com ($300), LinkWorth ($450), and LiveCustomer ($20), ...
More About: Web Design , Month , Mont

The Magic Triangle
2008-01-08 00:51:00
The Rule of Thirds is a principle applied to paintings and photographs in which the canvas is divided into thirds and the subject of interest is placed at one of the intersections of the lines in order to create a more aesthetically pleasing and balanced result. Now I was visiting the Frick Collection on the ...
More About: Web Design , Magic , Triangle

Critique: Presidential Candidate Websites
2008-01-05 07:40:00
With politics such a hot issue as of late, I’ve decided to critique websites of some of the major political candidates. In order to be fair and unbiased, each website will be considered on the basis of the following criteria: Accessibility: How well does it integrate accessibility tools? Does it have foreign language translations of the ...
More About: Web Design , Presidential , Websites , Critique , Candidate

Obama Ron Paul 2008
2008-01-05 05:06:00
…because we are not a collection of Red States and Blue States, we are the United States of America; and at this moment, in tthis election, we are ready to believe again. Oh boy. Did you notice the similarity in fonts and colors? I also found, purely by accident, that Ron Paul 2008 uses the font AGOpus ...
More About: Obama

2008 - The Year of Online Security?
2008-01-04 20:31:00
I’ve been musing over the past few days about what this upcoming year might be. I’ve tossed out the New Year s resolutions, the predictions about what is to come (hey, Barack is going to win, right?) and all the things the newspapers, the doomsayers, the warmongers, the peacemongers, and the politicians say about 2008. That ...
More About: Security , Web Design , Life , Online

Mobile edition and hosting
2008-01-04 03:08:00
Just a plug - rioleo.org is now available in mobile form for viewing on smaller screens and browsers. Also, if you’re considering hosting, I’m offering an unprecedented promotion: get your setup fee waived (a $49.95 value) or $50.00 free and a free domain (a $9.95 value) when you sign up for DreamHost using promo code rioleo. ...
More About: Mobile , Hosting , Edition

The PageRank Checker Demystified
2008-01-02 23:40:00
I feel as though I cracked a big riddle, but in retrospect I should’ve seen it coming. The problem with the aforementioned PageRank not working on some hosts was not about cURL, not about errors in the script (though I fixed a few). It was about Google, and the host you’re using. See, Google wants to make sure that its PageRank works nicely with the Toolbar they have. A few years ago an intrepid coder by the name of David Cicalo broke apart the toolbar and found the key to the algorithm- a 10 digit value called a checksum, and when that too was changed, Dirson cracked it again. The checksum is unique to each domain query (on the surface level I noted that it starts with ‘6-’ for a domain without the protocol identifier ‘http://’, while it is another different value with it). http://www.google.com/search?client=navcl ient-auto &features=Rank:&q=info:www.rioleo .org&ch=6-2130221911 (Try visiting the page - the last number on that page is t...
More About: Pagerank , Checker

cURL in Ajax PageRank Checker with GoDaddy
2008-01-01 17:41:00
It turns out that Google’s PageRank algorithm is pretty fickle and unreliable- the code below is guaranteed to work, but there are times when Google will flat out deny any queries. I wonder if there’s any way to disguise one’s route to their algorithm? I’m pretty sure sending multiple queries at a time disables the pageRank part for a bit of time. After literally hours spent toiling over this, I have successfully managed to make my Ajax Google PageRank checker work using cURL in GoDaddy’s stupid servers. When you first obtain the script, you’ll see in pagerank.class.php the following code: function getPage ($url) { if (function_exists('curl_init')) { $ch = curl_init($url); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); @curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']); return curl_exec($ch); } else { return file_get_contents($url); } } replace that with functio...
More About: Pagerank , Curl , Checker

Firefighters of Edo
2007-12-31 01:14:00
Firefighting is based upon years of tried and tested experience, building upon prior mistakes in order to safeguard against tomorrow’s disasters. That’s why it’s so interesting to read about the firemen, the hikeshi as they were known, of Edo, what is now Tokyo, during the Edo period (1603-1867). A flagbearer (matoimochi) holding onto his pole as ...

Ten Past Ten?
2007-12-28 19:44:00
In this day in digital age it’s almost too easy to forget that there’s something exquisite about analog devices. There’s a question that many people ask: Why is it that on advertisements and posters relatively expensive watches invariably show ten past ten? Apparently the reason is purely aesthetic, which I’m sure many of you ...
More About: Past

The True Origins of the Telegraph
2007-12-24 23:27:00
Man has sought to communicate between large distances for a long time now, and with the advent of the Internet, email and chat it seems ridiculous to imagine a time when a message of any level of urgency would take four days to travel a distance of 500km. The late 18th century saw the rise ...
More About: True , The Telegraph , Origin

Artificial Artificial Intelligence
2007-12-23 22:10:00
Sometime during the year 1770, author and inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled the chess-playing automaton called “The Turk” which he claimed incorporated a mechanism that would be a strong opponent to a human player. He had invented it to impress the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, and while it no doubt stupefied her, among other notables ...
More About: Intelligence , Artificial Intelligence