Monthly Archives: November 2006

This week in comics, portable social networking, music, and addictive beverages

After two months of waiting (ground mail is still too-damn-slow), I’ve finally received my copy of Battle Angel Alita “Angel of Chaos” (book 7, 1st edition). And, same as my copy of book 3 (“Killing Angel”) that came two weeks earlier — it’s a used copy, not brand new, as a I thought. That said, I feel really stupid and illiterate. I guess I’ll have to bug some of my American friends to send it to me, after all.

Why is it so hard for people to ship their products worldwide? What’s the difference? I’m the one who’s paying the shipping cost, the seller doesn’t have to do a thing about it, but write ‘Croatia’ instead of ‘USA’.

Never mind, I’m not ready to rant about not being able to order anything but books, CD’s and DVD’s from Amazon. Not even games. Eh.

So, “Angel of Chaos” is a brilliant issue, I must say, a great read. Fun, very humorous, with plenty of action (well, as always), and more intriguing than, for example, issues 4–6 (which, although great, left me feeling unsatisfied). 4.5 stars, out of 5 :)

Continuing with the comics, I’d like to point you to the most recent Sinfest trilogy: “Broke into pieces“, “Broke into pieces 2“, and “Broke into pieces 3“. I love Sinfest, it’s one of the best comics I’ve ever had the pleasure to read, on- or off-line. And this mini trilogy is one perfect example why. It’s so simple and down to earth, yet so touching and über cute :)

Then we have the Penny Arcade folks who reveal how and why those “Wii-mote killed my TV” accidents took place.

And a Wulffmorgenthaler jewel from back in August :)


The problem with social networks friend-list portability was first pointed out by John Hicks (on his Flickr page, which shows no photos now?), expanded on “box of chocolates” by Derek Featherstone and finalized on Adactio by Jeremy Keith. Interesting reads with some good points.


I’m waiting for Breedart.org to come back online bigger, better and badder then ever before. I miss it badly, it’s like losing your address book and your phone. It’s like being stuck in small room with no door or windows, and with nothing in it to inspire you. Emptiness. Until it resurrects, I’ll be posting some of my music right here. I’m working on another piano track and thinking of adding a string quartet to back it up. Also, I’ll put up some of my old tracks in a new “other and unsorted” category :)

Ever heard of Regina Spektor? I’ve just found out about her by watching her video “Fidelity” on YouTube. She reminds me of Feist — a lot. But, when listening to miss Feist, I feel like I’m listening alone. With miss Spektor, I feel like I’m listening to her music with the whole world. I don’t know if that makes any sense, I can’t describe it any better, heh. I’ve been listening to her latest album “Begin to Hope” and I like it very much. It’s easy on the ears, she’s got a great voice and it makes you feel good. Recommended? Yes. I’m gonna go find and listen to her previous stuff now.


One last thing, as the title may suggest, is my Nescafé 3in1 addiction. I’ve successfully dropped the real coffee back in March, but this pest just won’t let me be. No tea feels like a good enough replacement for the sweet taste of this monster early in the morning :( What should I do, oh, how can I overcome this… need? I’m toasted, I get nervous if I don’t see that little brown packet on my kitchen desk when I wake up. Damn you, Nestlé!

I can’t wait to see the first snowflakes falling down. How about you?:D

Got problems with Internet Explorer 7 and StatTraq? Here’s a solution.

*UPDATE: As of December 1st, when version 1.1 is released, this issue is fixed.

I’ve just installed StatTraq, a popular WordPress plugin for tracking your site’s statistics. I like it and I can’t wait to see the first ‘real’ results after a month or so has passed.

But the problem is – Internet Explorer 7 just won’t load the page if you’ve got StatTraq running. I was getting a blank page and a “Internet Explorer cannot open this page” error. No code errors, no warnings, nothing, as if the site is unavailable.

So I searched around a bit and found this post by Avery J. Parker with a small clue in it :) Avery wrote:

…carried this error at the bottom of the page (ONLY in IE7 by the way…) “Fatal error: Call to undefined function:() in /var/www/html/radiotv/wp-content/plugins/stattraq.php on line 90”

Around line 90, there’s a function for browser detection and Internet Explorer 7 wasn’t on the list. I guess IE7 didn’t like that very much, heh. Anyways, all you need to do to fix the problem is:

  1. Open ‘stattraq.php’ file that resides in your ‘wp-content/plugins’ folder
  2. Go to line 80/81 and replace:
    if(strpos($ua, 'MSIE 6')!==false || -->
    strpos($ua, 'MSIE6')!==false)
    $ver = 6;

    with:

    if(strpos($ua, 'MSIE 7')!==false || -->
    strpos($ua, 'MSIE7')!==false)
    $ver = 7;
    else if(strpos($ua, 'MSIE 6')!==false || -->
    strpos($ua, 'MSIE6')!==false)
    $ver = 6;

    *note: –> means that this is not the end of the line, line breaks at ‘$ver = …’

  3. Save the file and you’re done.
  4. Check the page in Internet Explorer 7 and be happy if everything works :)

It worked for me, but if it doesn’t do the trick for you, please leave a comment.

I’ve posted a comment on StatTraq’s page so this will hopefully be fixed in the next version.

An evening as any other

I’ve spent the last 2 hours going through the Extralife comics from the beginning. I’ve stopped at 2004-03-26. I will continue tomorrow because my eyes are starting to hurt. It’s a great comic series, really funny stuff, mostly about geeks and gamers. And games. And superheroes.

Now I’m going out to buy some snacks. I’m gonna need those snacks along with the beer that I’ve already bought earlier, because when I get back, I’m going watch one episode of The X Files before a rerun of the last episode of Seinfeld starts. I wouldn’t want to miss that.
And then I’m going to watch another two episodes of The X Files until I pass out on the couch.

I will probably wake up around 6:13 AM, when the bladder kicks in, do the necessary and move to bed.
I will probably pull the window shades down, too, so I could sleep properly, I can’t sleep if I’m illuminated by sunlight.

I could have probably written this on Twitter too, in steps. But this is easier. I guess.

I’m excited about tomorrow. Frak.

Host body switched in a race for survival

After 3 days (and counting), I finally know who to blame for this huge outage. This is a quote from Abnormis.net:

Everyone can thank the lovely hacker “Jamaycka” for the problems we are currently having. You can see what a wonderful guy he is having hacked over 5700 websites at the following URL: http://www.zone-h.com/component/option,
com_attacks/Itemid,43/filter_defacer,JaMaYcKa/

Wow. That guy certainly has something to be proud of. Shutting down hundreds of websites at once, wow. For what fucking purpose? I’d feel much better leaving Abnormis’ services if it were their fault, if they fucked up something, but now… I want to strap that guy(s) or girl(s) to a splintery wooden chair, naked, and than bring in some small animals or insects that like to crawl themselves into body cavities. OK, maybe that’s a little harsh (hee… >:) ), but this is quite a mess that person has made. A bunch of website is unreachable, (Breedart.org, among others) and Abnormis will be out of business for a while, I presume. And that is wrong on too many levels.
So, I’ve transfered my domain to MediaTemple and it’s all working fine now. Also, I was quite surprised how fast the DNS switch happened — 5 minutes (maybe even less) after I’ve updated the nameservers in GoDaddy‘s control panel, my domain was working once again, e-mail too. I don’t know who to thank for this, I was expecting at least a 24h transfer period. Nice :)

I’ve made another (fairly noticeable?) switch too, I’m now using WordPress. The theme you’re looking at started as a small modification of the default ‘Kubrick’ theme, but I didn’t want it to drown in the sea of similarly looking blogs, so I gave it a touch of… um… me, hehe.

Enjoy your stay, feel free to leave comment, and please report any weird stuff. Thanks for visiting :)

Lately

I’ve watched the first 5 episodes of “Battlestar Galactica” season 3 and, so far — I like it. It’s still very “on the edge” and very intriguing (as opposed to, I don’t know, “Lost”?). But the fifth episode (“Collaborators”) kind of annoyed me. Of course, it all had to happen, it’s a plausible consequence of war, yadda3, but it just seemed a bit…weird. I can’t put a finger on what exactly bugged me, but I know that I don’t usually shout “Oh, come on!” every 5 minutes when watching my favorite TV show.

After reading about “Heroes” on Blogography, I just had to see the show (not because Mr. Simmer didn’t like the first two episodes, but simply because it’s SF — I felt obligated, you know?). So I sat down and watched the first two episodes. And then, a couple days later, I watched the next four in a row. I guess the conclusion is obvious: I like it a lot. And yes, it’s not exactly a fast-paced show, but I feel it’s got just the right tempo. It kept me occupied for 3 hours without even thinking about the time and I’m really looking forward to the next episodes. Hopefully, the creators won’t blow this one.

What else… Oh — it seems that I’m not the only one with a poor purple monkey. Here’s a post on B3TA boards that clearly shows another case of the, ahem, eye disorder.

Industri has entered a beta phase and I’m looking forward to testing it out. Tig has ported it to Doom3 engine and I just hope he’ll find time to finish it one day.

I’ve coded the HTML for Up&Underground magazine’s website. It runs on WordPress 2.0.4 with some minor tweaks. The site is in Croatian. It was designed by my friend Lina Kovacevic.

I’ve ported my own site to WP (locally), but I have yet to find the time and the will to upload it and replace the current version. I didn’t touch the design due to lack of time (I’m back in ‘school‘ once again) and ideas. That also means that I’ve skipped the November CSS Reboot, but it seems I’m not the only one. I guess the event has lost its charm, and it probably takes a B. Adam Howell (where’s he hiding lately?) charisma to pull it off properly.

James Brown performs in Zagreb today. I didn’t want to go. I just don’t like him. He is the funktastic break-the-beat-and-hit-me daddy-o, but I’m not really a fan. I know who he is, and I’m thankful for the beats and inspiration, but that’s it. Also, I must say that I was quite disappointed by Public Enemy’s performance last month. They were so bad that I had to get dead drunk and bow down to the porcelain god the next morning. Their comic sucked too.

Regarding my previous post:
In my own humble words of conclusion, Microsoft’s Expression Web designer (why not stick with Frontpage, eh?) is a solid copy of Dreamweaver, but with standard Office look. It’s a good tool (as far as I can tell, from my brief encounter), but it’ll have to be half the price of Dreamweaver when it comes out, if it’s to succeed. Time will tell.

And my time tells me it’s time to watch TV now ;)