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- December 4, 2004
Paper Houses
December 4, 2004Concept: a house made of recycled cardboard that can be assembled like a piece of IKEA furniture. When you move, you can pack up your house and take it with you. Inexpensive, saves landfill, and stores rainwater as ballast so the wind doesn’t blow it away by accident. One of six environmentally friendly, pre-fab, and Austrialian Houses of the Future.Read moreVia Slashdot.
- December 4, 2004
Beating the Syndicate
December 4, 2004Read moreIt’s interesting to see how art and commerce collude to make money in an eyeball-driven media marketplace, and just how territorial people can be about protecting those structures. What people forget is how fragile even the mightiest of institutions can be, once people realize they have a better choice, and that choice is freely accessible. Buggywhip and barrel makers may welcome the syndicated cartoonist to their club of outmoded artisans, as entrepreneurial web cartoonists assault the newspaper cartoon page with new business models.
The idea is that popular web cartoonists offer their strips for free to traditional newspapers, in exchange for advertising or exposure. The syndicated cartoonists, described in this WebSnark editorial, are naturally upset. Scott Kurtz kicked the controversy off at SDCC 2004, for those who want to delve back a bit deeper.
- December 3, 2004
ThreeStrikesSpam Mystery
December 3, 2004Read moreI’ve been trying to figure out where these extra escaped slashes were coming from in my comments… I finally tracked it down to some code in ThreeStrikesSpam, the plugin I used to block comment SPAM.
The code activates when a comment is being processed, before
wp-comment-post.php
actually executes and posts the comment into the WordPress database.The problem occurs because there’s some code that calls
add_magic_quotes()
to make sure that everything is “parsed, cleaned, and stripped corrected” in ThreeStrikesSpam.php. The same function is called again inwp-comments-post.php
, which double-encodes slashes and screws up single and double-quotes in the comments.My guess is that I should disable the
add_magic_quotes()
call inwp-coments-post.php
, since some of the function calls in 3SS probably depend on having escaped strings to work properly; I haven’t looked too closely at this yet. - December 3, 2004
- November 30, 2004
Email is for Old Coots
November 30, 2004Read moreI came across this article on the demise of email in Korea:
The ebbing of email is a phenomenon peculiar to Korea, an IT power. Leading the big change, unprecedented in the world, are our teens and those in their 20’s. The perception that “email is an old and formal communication means” is rapidly spreading among them. “I use email when I send messages to elders,” said a college student by the name of Park. For 22-year-old office worker Kim, “I use email only for receiving cellphone and credit card invoices.”
Email does suck… it’s difficult to organize, prone to spam, and lacks the kind of feedback you get from other forms of online communication. There’s got to be a better way.