kjcoop.org

Web Developers Do it on the Internet

KJ Coop — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 20:13:38 +0000

According to Google, there is no other instance of “Web developers do it on the Internet” on the entire internet. I had to rectify that.

If you’re perplexed, allow me to introduce you to an ancient meme that is so old, it predates the internet. Expressions of this meme follow the format: [professional or hobbyist title]s do it [thing relating to that profession]. For example, “Swimmers do it in the water”, “Nuns do it out of habit”, etc.

Freelancing is hard: How many web sites do I need?

KJ Coop — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 22:03:07 +0000

I’ve lamented before about separation of online identities, but now I’m wondering how many web sites I need.

I have about two web sites: kjcoop.com and this one. This one is exclusively for my own enjoyment. If it stops amusing me, I’ll stop maintaining/hosting it. The purpose of kjcoop.com is to sell myself as a skilled web developer.

My business license is under the name KJ Coop Web Development. I didn’t come up with something more creative for the same reason I don’t have any tattoos: I couldn’t think of anything I wouldn’t be sick of in 2 years or less. My Facebook page is KJ Coop Web Development. In the interest of covering all my bases, I bought kjcoopwebdevelopment.com and a couple variants on it. Now I find myself wondering if I should develop it separately than kjcoop.com.

In short, I’ve developed a learned form of schizophrenia wherein I ask myself if I-the-human am acting, or if I-the-business-owner am doing the acting. I-the-human have a portfolio. I-the-business-owner have services. Code samples might apply to both. Both might have some kind of “about” section, but they’ll contain different things.

As much as I enjoy freelancing, I-the-human may someday seek to return to stable, nine-to-five employment. I’ll still want to impress potential employers with my portfolio and code samples. I-the-business-owner will be mostly dormant, maybe coming to life on the odd occasion that freelance work finds me. Maybe I will let kjcoopwebdevelopment.com lapse, maybe not.

Meanwhile, I have only so many hours in my day. It means one more web site to maintain, one more ongoing project on my list. Having one more web site sounds like a great way to be busy without being productive.

I don’t have a conclusion. I’m still going back and forth in my own head. I suspect that it’s not hugely important which way I choose, which means it’s probably not worth the effort. Maybe some day, when I-the-human and I-the-business owner have grown apart, the need for separate sites will be obvious.

Silly spam

KJ Coop — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 12:40:13 +0000

I’ve currently got 3 spam messages in my Yahoo spam box, and they’ve all got pretty hilarious senders:

In order to be taken seriously, I always include my profession and extraneous punctuation after my name: KJ COOP! AMERICAN PROGRAMMER™

I also how I could the first one indicates the upper limit as 3+. So, 4?

Links for the week – I want to want a tablet, but I don’t.

KJ Coop — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:31:18 +0000

After missing last week, I was determined to get this published Sunday night. I consider myself successful, because for me, it’s still Sunday night, even though most of the other people in my time zone are arriving at their Monday workday about now.

Fark: Proposition 8 goes down Comments – Everybody’s probably heard this by now, but the news is so overdue, I don’t feel that late to the party.
Related Topics: When Adoption Shouldn’t Stand – Apropos of redefining family, this is an interesting case of a fellow who adopted his girlfriend apparently as a way of getting around a freeze on his assets. Even though I’m an advocate of creating our their own families, I’m inclined to agree with the author: it’s an abuse of one of the few ways the law gives us to create our own families.
Upcoming Web Design And Development Conferences For 2012 – If I were flush with cash from freelancing, I would love to attend some of these. That’s one thing I’m looking forward to as a freelancer: being able to convince my boss to send me to conferences because my boss knows full well I’m there to learn, not pick up chicks (interacting with strangers IRL scares me) or drink beer (I’m a teetotaller).
Fark: “The burrito’s rightful owner walked up to the men and said he wanted his burrito back” Comments
Fark: Sex Week vs. True Love Week, otherwise known as the loose free for all’s against the prudes sparks debate on Yale campus Comments
Slashdot: Details Emerge About Spark Linux-Based Tablet – I am watching this develop with keen interest. I can’t quite get excited about tablet computing because I don’t feel there’s a significant function gap between my laptop (versatile but heavy and fragile) and my phone (very portable, but useless for programming). When this tablet makes it to market, my curiosity might get the best of me even though I know that as a tablet, it represents the worst of all my computing options: won’t fit in my pocket and is useless for programming.
Phyrangula: Will There Be Blood? – is basically a link to #149 There Will Be Blood: Evolution and Function of Menstruation
Fark: Amtrak to TSA: How about no Comments
Slashdot: Hacking the NES With Lisp
No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz?: What Men Like In Bed

Cosmo…is in the midst of a multiyear project to ask a bunch of men what they think about various traits and thus access the Great Male Hivemind and discover the true secrets of male sexuality.

As far as I can determine from my extensive research in reading Cosmo and watching romantic comedies, in Hegemonic Heterosexuality Land, sex is a war between men and women. Women, of course, don’t want sex except with a loving, committed partner and/or a loving, committed vampire; in those circumstances, women basically crave cunnilingus and cuddles. Men, however, like Kinky Sex.
Slashdot: KDE Publishes a Book For Beginner Developers – If I find myself in love with a tablet that runs KDE, this is the next logical step.
Fark: “Institutionalizing juveniles and branding this as criminal behavior rather than dealing with it as normal behavior wrongly places juveniles in places they should not be” Comments
Tiger Beatdown: I sing Video Games for the fourteen year old girl I once was – The author is talking about some musical act called Lana del Rey. I’m unfamiliar with the music, but after reading this essay, I’m going to have to check it out:

So now, I listen to Lana del Rey, not because I still want to be her, but because I have not yet learned to love the fourteen year old I once was.
Fark: Do you have $87? Do you want to be chased on a 5 kilometer obstacle course by zombies? Then have we got a deal for you Comments – I was really excited about this when I first read it. Apparently, the course is a bit of a puzzel, so you could wind up running a 10K instead of a 5K. I got tired just reading that, so I decided perhaps I ought to sit it out.
Fark: If at the age of 15, you knew what you know now, how do you think things would have turned out? – Linked to primarily for the following line:

[After the first time I had sex] there was a victory dance. A real honest-to-goodness dance. I did everything but spike the condom.
Fark: Mexico wants to be less decapitatey, more touristy Comments – I’m pretty sure everyone wants that.
Slashdot: Ask Slashdot: Where Are the Open Source Jobs?
No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz?: Open Thread, Batman Edition – The graphic makes me lol, I haven’t even bothered tried to reading the comments.
Stepcase Lifehack: Setup Restricted User Accounts to Focus and Get Things Done – I’ve tried this briefly, creating different user accounts for each client. I found it surprisingly useful. I’m not sure why I didn’t stick with it.
Smashing Magazine: A Beginner’s Guide To jQuery-Based JSON API Clients
Slashdot: What Does a Software Tester’s Job Constitute? – Linked for this comment
Sociologial Images: Urinals for Women: An Alternative Reality
Fark: Meet Jack Kevorkian’s successor, Lawrence Egbert Comments
Fark: Having spent millions on #Occupy hassles, NYC plans construction of giant urban campground Comments – I would love to stay in an urban campground. It seems like a cheap way to experience the heart of a potentially expensive city. If it had free wifi, I don’t think I’d even miss having a bed.

Twilight Brain Dump #1: Introduction and Links

KJ Coop — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:38:39 +0000

For a while, my favorite hobby was embarrassing Eric when he had friends over by telling all his friends how much I love Twilight. There are three major components to my love for it:

I enjoyed it as a brainless romance novel.
I enjoy snarking on it, because despite my sincere enjoyment of it, there are quite a few areas one can legitimately poke fun at
Analyzing the messages presented in the book.

This whole post is full of spoilers, and if you have any intention to read the book, you should go do that before you read this post.

The most salient of the many criticisms I’ve read of the series is the way it idealizes abusive relationships. I would think long and hard before I’d give this to a tween or any impressionable person. It also glorifies the failure to (as cleolinda so charmingly put it) put on your big girl panties and deal with things.

Links

For the lulz

Cleolinda Jones has snarked Twilight hard and hilarious.
- Summary of all her works with comments. All the links below are also linked from this page, but them here for easy listing.
- Her Twilight summary is not actually out to be hilarious, but this list would be incomplete without it.
- New Moon
- Eclipse
- Breaking Dawn, 1 2 3
- Midnight Sun 1 2
- Movies in 15 Minutes: Twilight
- Movies in 15 Minutes: New Moon
- As a general rule, I don’t link straight to comments, but this one is awesome enough that you really should just skip right to it.
- Movies in 15 Minutes: Eclipse
- Movies in 15 Minutes: Breaking Dawn part 1
New Moon’s Valuable Lesson For Today’s Youth
LiveJournal user stoney123 gave a detailed and hilarious accounting for the similarities between the books and Mormon teachings.
- Twilight (about half way down there’s a picture that made me laugh a lot, so even if you’re not interested in reading about it, I recommend going to look at the pictures.)
- New Moon
- Eclipse
- Breaking Dawn

Serious internet

Seduced By Twilight, I lul’d about it’s suggested New Year’s Resolution for Carlisle, “I will dye my hair a more pleasing shade. This yellow blond has got to go.”
Edward and Bella’s relationship rated against National Domestic Violence Hotline’s warning signs of abuse
Basically, everything Racialicious has ever written about it:

How to never again see WordPress’ update nag – no plugin necessary

KJ Coop — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 02:08:41 +0000

One reason I like WordPress is because they come out with frequent updates. When you run a WordPress site, it checks periodically for new versions. It reminds you with a helpful little yellow bar at the top. It feels great to install a new version, be up to date, and get rid of the nag. However, because of their awesome frequent updates, it also means you’re only ever free of that annoying reminder for a couple days.

While it’s important to keep software up to date, I do have a life beyond updating WordPress. I wanted to get rid of that yellow nag once and for all. There are a couple plugins to disable it, but I don’t see any sense in adding more code (and more plugins to update) when I can just add one line to a stylesheet. So, here is how to rid of it at the cost of 13 characters per page load*:

Open wp-admin/css/colors-fresh.css. All newlines and extraneous spaces have been stripped from the file in the interest of speedier loading (this file loads anew every time you load a page in your Dashboard). Search for: #update-nag

In my version of WordPress, it starts on line 11593 of 34572. Expanded, it looks like the following:
#update-nag, .update-nag { background-color: #FFFBCC; border-color: #E6DB55; color: #555555; }

Add the following after the opening curly bracket:
display: none;

When you refresh the admin page, the update nag will be gone forever.

However! With great ~~power~~ ~~moustache~~ CSS comes great responsibility. The WordPress developers made such a prominent prompt because keeping software up to date is important. There are often important security improvements between versions. If you turn off the nag, you still have a responsibility to yourself, your users and The Internet at large to keep WordPress reasonably up to date. Put a recurring item in your calendar to update about once a month.

*You could also eliminate all the other styling applied to the now-invisible element and end up with fewer characters than you started.

How people perceive California

KJ Coop — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:53:11 +0000

After a friend posted this on Facebook, I was moved to create this graph that has been bouncing around in my head for a while:

In contrast with reality

Also, can we all realize that San Francisco is in the middle of California and stop using using “San Francisco” and “Northern California” as synonyms? There are 300 miles of California north of San Francisco.

Similar to My Little Pony

KJ Coop — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 07:51:40 +0000

After hearing many good things about the latest My Little Pony incarnation, Friendship is Magic, I looked it up on Netflix. It offered some unexpected similar titles:

Links for this week – productivity pr0n and vagina. Not productivity vagina, just regular vagina

KJ Coop — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:20:20 +0000

Fark: The vagina game: insert the word vagina into a movie title – Everything is funnier with more vagina.
The Pervocracy: Rescripting sex. – I am linking to this exclusively for the phrase “emergency vagina-attack situation”.
Apartment Therapy: How to Pick the Perfect Home Office Task Chair – I’ve recently realized that my chair is terrible. I can’t actually touch the keyboard and the back of the chair at the same time. I’m hoping to replace it, but I’m also cheap, so I’ll probably keep slouching instead.
Stepcase Lifehack: How to Become Clutter-Free for Greater Happiness and Productivity – I am a total sucker for productivity pr0n. I like to get organized and get rid of a bunch of clutter to make room for new clutter. Sometimes, that’s all you can hope for.
Apartment Therapy: How To: Build A Habit
Stepcase Lifehack: Productivity Made Simple: How To Keep Your Projects from Killing You
Although not from this week, this seems germane given the focus of most of these links: The Ultimate Productivity Blog
Fark: Pics of herd of elephants bidding farewell to three-month-old calf that died of congenital heart defect Comments
The Itty Bitty Kitty Committee: Opal in Snow – To make up for the above sad link, please enjoy this cat in snow.
Kate Bornstein’s Blog for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws: Toward A Politic of Desire – If I didn’t already love Kate Bornstein, this is all I would need to know about her to love her: “The next day, I got dressed in my Battlestar Galactica Colonial Fleet fatigues—I was being old lady Starbuck—I needed her madness and her courage to help me get through the talk…”
Slashdot: Pirate Party Releases Book of Pirate Politics – Speaking of love, here’s another reason to love the US Pirate Party. Naturally the book has been released free/libre. Download and enjoy, no eye patch needed.
FreelanceSwitch: Starting a Freelance Business in 2012: Planning Ahead – It’s actually planning behind for me, as I got all paperwork official in December 2011, but this list was a helpful reminder to make sure I’m not missing anything.
Coderholic: My Startup Failed, But It’s OK – Even though my venture hasn’t (yet?) failed, he echoed some of the thought’s I’ve been having regarding the anxiety that it will fail:

As valuable as reading all the books, reading all the blogs, and doing all your research is, sometimes it’s just a case of getting hard earned experience. The only way to do that is to jump in, and get your hands dirty.
These two articles from Ars Technica are interesting in stereo:
- Europe proposes a right to be forgotten
- Google already knows you’re a 24-year old woman who loves wombats.
You can opt out by blocking cookies in your browser. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t interfere with maps or search. Blocking cookies will cause problems using Gmail, but you can always log in on a separate browser so they can’t match your search habits to your gmail account (at least not as easily).
Ars Technica: “Blackhole” toolkit dominates Web malware attacks, says Sophos
Ars Technica: The Great Disk Drive in the Sky: How Web giants store big–and we mean big–data – Scalability is one of those topics that seems like, no matter how much you know, you can always improve. In terms of day to day programming, I tend to think of making an application scalable by limiting database calls or caching, but that is a tiny flick in the type of scaling these systems require.

The need for this kind of perpetually scalable, durable storage has driven the giants of the Web—Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and others—to adopt a different sort of storage solution: distributed file systems based on object-based storage.
Fark: Obama proposes all states require students to stay in school until they are 18. Alabama immediately objects, fears overcrowding of 5th and 6th grades. Comments – I could – and may – write a whole post about my cynicism and shy hope regarding school and academia, but couldn’t let this pass without comment. This is a literal nightmare for all kinds of kids who for one reason or another don’t fit into academic circles. By all means, encourage and increase education! But not with increased incarceration.
Slashdot: Man Who Downloaded Bomb Recipes Jailed For 2 Years – This is some serious bullshit. I have no interest in bombs, but I think it’s totally reasonable that a person could be curious how they’re made. There may be more to it than I realize, but the article gives no indication that he attempted or thought about using his newfound-knowledge. They quote someone from the Counter-Terrorism Unit as saying, “I also want to stress that this case is not about policing people’s freedom to browse the Internet…” it’s about people finding information I don’t like and making a federal case out of it.
Fark: School changes mascot back to original, non-PC Indian. “It’s hard to cheer for a lighthouse” Comments – I won’t repeat the oft heard refrains as to how problematic the native mascot is, but I do wonder why, if a Lighthouse is such am insufferable mascot, how it got to be the old new mascot in the first place? Nobody there ever heard of Cobras or Jaguars or other non-human carnivores that every other school uses as a mascot?

Someone pro-Indian mascot is quoted as saying, “principal can design their school philosophy around a good mascot.” Yes, let us build our camaraderie and sense of belonging around a symbol dehumanizing the noble people who inhabited this land until we slaughtered them and now the don’t exist at all, so we don’t have to worry about hurting their feelings.
The Wild Hunt: The Wicker Tree and the Wicker Man’s Legacy
Slashdot: Ask Slashdot: Money-Making Home-Based Tech Skills? – When you find out what those are, you be sure to let me know. My investments in Nigerian royalty don’t seem to be paying off just yet.

I did learn from that article that apparently PHP now has namespaces. I guess it’s time for me to try and dredge up my vague memories of C++ to try and ascertain exactly what that means for me as a programmer. Or, God forbid, RTFM.
Fark: Boston to boost the attractiveness of public transportation by raising prices 40% and eliminating night and weekend service Comments – Yes, that sounds like a typical public transportation manuver. They’re competing with the post office and the DMV in a race to the customer service bottom.