I was trying to clean an external drive for possible giveaway, and needed to ensure no info could be resurrected off said device. Unfortunately, when I began this process (using a Linux boot environment I wasn’t familiar with) it appeared that there were two hard drives detected: my main drive and this little external drive. Well… I was wrong, because as soon as I started the wipe the little external drive sat dormant while my main hard drive light came on full indicating IT was the device being wiped! Oops!

Well… a quick power-down and some sweet, open-source recovery software later I managed to rebuild the partition by rebuilding the master file table through deep file detection… rebuild the master boot record through the backup boot record which was safely undeleted after the master file record was recovered… and ultimately restore my machine from utter oblivion. Props to the Ultimate Boot CD for carrying TestDisk and NTFS Boot Partition.

But be careful with Darik’s Boot and Nuke. In the future I know I will.

This is painfully necessary for anyone like me who is perpetually installing higher-level software suites and virtual development environments that leave various detritus behind when “uninstalled”. I love reformatting my hard drive… it’s like a chemical bath of sorts — a digital enema for desktop workhorse.

BUT, the restoration to normal operation has been rocky and is as yet incomplete. I may need to low-level format my hard drive, which is the Jolt Cola of the hard drive formatting world.

We’ll see…

Okay, I’ve had almost two full weeks to get over the fact that LucasArts — bless their damned souls — released their sweet new game titled Star Wars: The Force Unleashed to every conceivable platform… EXCEPT the PC!? [umm... whiskey tango foxtrot?]

It wouldn’t be so bad if this was any ordinary game… but Lucas (the supreme chancellor himself) has knighted this game as the official canonical storyline falling into the 20 years of time between the actual Star Wars movies Episode III and Episode IV. And the biggest insult is that this game was released for about EVERY platform you’d think of… PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360, iPod touch, iPhone, N-Gage, Nintendo DS, and PSP (PlayStation Portable) — everything but the PC, the most powerful and most ubiquitous platform of them all!

Some schmuck from LucasArts (Cameron Suey) was interviewed by VideoGamer.com and he had the audacity during the interview to consider the Commodore 64 and Apple IIE as more notable absences from supporting his game than the PC!? I’d like to set this fool on fire!!

VideoGamer.com: Force Unleashed is coming to every platform going, except…

CS: No Commodore 64, no Apple IIE…

VideoGamer.com: No PC…

CS: No PC as well, yes.

Hee hee… I’m Cameron Suey and our game supports everything except *yuck yuck* not the Commodore 64, and *yuck yuck* not the AppleIIE. [and not the PC] The what? Oh yeah *quietly* not the PC. Wait. STOP! What are you doing!? Why are you dousing me with jet fuel?! PUT THAT ZIPPO DOWN!!! NNNOOOONONononono AAaaahhhhgggghh AAAaaaiiiaaaaagghhhh… *crackling flames*

Oh yeah… and not the PC. That’s like saying — I have a new novel that’s been translated into EVERY language you can think of… except *yuck yuck* not Klingon, and *yuck yuck* not dolphin… [and not English] Oh yeah… and not English.

The best excuse the fools at LucasArts could come up with as that PCs are too varied in their abilities. Umm… yeah, so? You slap a minimum requirement on the side (as every PC game maker has done for decades!) and press on. Yeah, as if the N-Gage and PS3 AREN’T varied!? Their whole position is the worst kind of tripe… the folks at Kotaku.com put it best.

So tomorrow… as my NFL viewing is interrupted (again) by commercials for this rogue software… I will politely excuse myself from the television and ensure I have sufficient volatiles on hand to immolate Cameron Suey if I ever meet him.

I love WordPress. I use it for several websites (including the one you’re reading and my personal site). It is easy to use, very extensible, is open source, and you can find metric-butt-tonnes of plugins and ready-made themes for it. As a developer and designer I have been able to create websites whose very core functionality is purely built on WordPress and its hefty list of extras built by the masses for creative goodness sake. Trés cool.

Now, version 2.5 really does to the next level. The back-end admin interface is completely rethought from an admin’s perspective. The design is yet more intuitive than before, and the added features blow your mind. How about single click plugin version upgrades? Built-in Gravatars and photo galleries? Pretty sweet.

It’s still in alpha (I keep telling myself) so you won’t see it on Negative99 for a while… and even when you do you might now be able to appreciate from the front all the beauty and genius that went into the inner-workings and into the back-end… but trust me, it’s there.

Here’s a snippet from WeblogToolsCollection.com.

WordPress Development Blog: 2.5 Sneak Peek I love the staccato description Matt uses to start the post: A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? The first Release Candidate for WordPress 2.5 is out for those that have been waiting patiently to try out the new features. Matt details out the updates and the new features of 2.5 on the development blog and the good news is spreading in the WordPress circles.

Another article from BlogHerald article.

Here are some pics (and you can view the full photoset here):

During the conference Adobe released new and highly anticipated versions of many of their software products, the most exciting for me being Flex Builder 3 Beta 2. They also demo’ed some prototype software they are working on for future release, such as an application called Thermo that allowed a developer to convert a designer’s comp into an actual front-end user interface with relative ease [here's a video clip].

Each night of the conference included “After-hours lounges” featuring 8-player LAN Halo 3 on Xbox 360′s, and 4-player LAN Quake 4 on high-powered PC’s. I sampled both with pleasure.

Here are some random observations I made during the conference:

• More guys had pony-tails than girls did
• More female attendees were divorced than were married (I assumed – based on their age, lack of any “ring”, and propensity to prattle on about their kids)
• Many of the featured conference speakers sported the casual look (jeans and a button up shirt)
• There was constantly a source of food and drink from 8am until midnight each day

Then I saw on Lifehacker (an absolute gem of a site) an article on a great little utility called TED (Torrent Episode Downloader). TED, when paired with your friendly BitTorrent client (I like uTorrent), will make watching episodes of today’s most popular shows nearly effortless (we’ll discuss the gray legalities in another post sometime).

Anyways… after getting TED I saw Battlestar Galactica listed and figured – what the heck. I was instantly enthralled… consumed. The plot is aggressive unlike any series I’ve seen. The actors are almost all unknowns and it injects the cast with a refreshing burst of creative believability – as seen in 300, whose cast of mostly unknowns is widely held to have bolstered the film’s success. The special effects are superb, but the acting is even better. The storylines are rarely contrived, and often wildly unpredictable – so much so that the Season 3 finale this past Spring ended with the most intense, cinematic, plot-electrifying 10 minutes of revelations and confrontations I can possibly imagine ever occurring in any movie, TV show, or theatrical presentation.

But alas… I wait for Season 4… but it won’t begin until… November.

Must… h o l d… o n . . .

On the way home there were several traffic signals without power… and in New York negotiating busy intersections freeform – without any signals or traffic cops – is always a social experiment worthy of its own 500-page exhaustive commentary featured in Psychology Today. When I got home my pool was an inch from overflowing! Several branches (the big kind) had been knocked down off my neighbors’ multiple maple-leaf machines.

And as I feared, when I walked in the house – no power. Of course, I’ve been without power before… but this time it was cramping my routine a bit. I’m used to hopping on the ‘puter and catching up on all my emails I can’t read at my top secret laboratory job. But the power was out for a little while and I actually had to occupy myself with other household diversions… odd.

My modern-day electro-junkie dilemma reminded myself of a quote I like:

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
~Susan Ertz, “Anger in the Sky”

For those who don’t know, SOA (often pronounced soh’-uh) stands for Service-oriented Architecture and is a current fad in enterprise information systems. This conference was a buzzword-fest of the highest magnitude. There were more Powerpoint slides with corporate-speak and technology catchphrases than you could garbage-collect with a Cray.

While the breakout sessions proved to be enlightening, the general sessions in the main ballroom were definite snoozers. Almost all of the general sessions were given by “sponsor representatives” who used the time to hock their products and services with an advertising pitch cleverly disguised as a SOA lecture. Normally I would have skipped these sessions to mingle on the expo floor and get vendor demos of SOA software solutions, but they deliberately closed the vendor expo area during these sessions so that attendees had nothing else to do. To further frustrate things, the multiple general sessions pushed the conference schedule past 7pm all three days!

However, not all was lost, and the breakout sessions were really worthwhile. Once you got a corporate lecturer out of the main ballroom and into a breakout room, it was like someone lifted off their managerial sales hat and gave them a developer’s cap… because these smaller venues boasted some brutally honest lectures. Some key principles that were thematic in these more down-to-Earth presentations were:

• Don’t try to boil the ocean.
• If you’re implementing SOA because your boss heard about it from some executive on the golf course, then you WILL fail.
• SOA success stories come from BIG companies with a BIG IT staff and BIG budgets.
• If your business processes aren’t yet aligned across your enterprise, then what good is a SOA?

If SOA is a forest, then web services are the trees. I will be creating a presentation soon on the basics of web services and SOA, and I’ll post it on Negative99 when I do.

I feel like we’re natives living in wood huts on a primitive desert isle. One day a steel I-beam washes ashore, and already people want to start talking about what the skyline’s going to look like.
~ Steve Mooradian

You know… if you’re gonna’ be stupid, you gotta’ be smart about it.

I love one-liners, and the poetry of this one rang true in my ears as soon as it left my lips. I quickly Googled to see if anyone had ever officially said it yet (like Yogi Berra), and to my delight they had not. So I get to have my very own one-liner… my very own Yogiism. Well done me.

The event that stimulated this burst of reason was this – I was told of a group on the website Facebook (a social networking site similar to MySpace) that was entitled “Henry Mills sucks penis” [the name has been changed]. This group was started and joined by current and former members of a local Christian school… and the object of their wrath, Mr. Mills, is a well-respected official of that same school and church. The group’s Facebook page includes disrespectful and insanely inappropriate and infantile content that I won’t share here.

Now… how nervy do you have to be to create and/or join such a group actually using your primary Facebook account with your name and picture displayed for any school official or parent to identify… and to do this while having not yet graduated from the school?! While you’re at it why don’t you just set your diploma on fire right now?! And needless to say, once the school found out about this Facebook group just a few days ago, it was quickly put out of its misery.

So upon hearing this story I exclaimed, “You know… if you’re gonna’ be stupid, you gotta’ be smart about it!” There is harmony in this statement – it’s found in the mix of bumbling wisdom and denotative paradox. But as I pondered, I discerned some “deeper” force at work here. So I put my thoughts down in the form of a socio-algebraic law:

Mooradian’s Law of Multiplicative Idiocy

As the probability of an individual or entity to engage in an idiotic action increases, the faulty cognitive processes driving this increase also propend the same individual or entity to engage in further related idiotic actions, such that the original idiocy is amplified through a mechanism of synergistic multiplication. This described propensity incites a daisy-chain of idiotic action occurring independent of (and possibly in addition to) the coincidental succession of an individual’s or entity’s natural random idiocy as expressed by a Poisson distribution.

As a previous leader of soldiers, I truly saw this law in action. Anyone who’s been in the military knows soldiers and sailors sometimes have an affinity for mayhem. And certain sailors and soldiers have perfected foolishness down to a black art. Now, it amazed me how my soldiers would sometimes commit egregious acts of idiocy, and follow it up by recording their actions in photographic or audio-visual form – thereby supplying incrimination leading to their own demise!? That’s the law of multiplicative idiocy.

Recently, on a local blog, I was conversing with an argumentative and illogical fellow. No sooner had I soundly discounted all his faulty lines of reasoning, when a mysterious second fellow appeared on the blog and echoed the first fellow’s identical illogic. Little did “either” of them know that I’m an admin for the blog… and I could see that “both” fellows were posting from the same IP address! Upon greater inspection, a third and fourth troublesome fellow on the blog were also from this same IP address! When pressed for the truth, the original fellow claimed that the other “three” fellows were indeed real people (housemates) whom he shared his home computer with. Of course, he couldn’t then explain why when I tracerouted his IP address it routed back to a single-point external gateway for a local health insurance company (as verified by their IT security staff). That’s the law of multiplicative idiocy.

How about the lady who tried to pay for her Wal-Mart merchandise with a counterfeit bill? She used a bill of such a high denomination ($1 Million) that not only did the store have no choice but to examine the bill with such scrutiny as would certainly discover the fake… but the store wouldn’t have had nearly enough cash to even make change, anyway! That’s the law of multiplicative idiocy.

The robber who empties the convenience store cash register, but then pays for a soda with his credit card before leaving. The student who vandalizes school property, then brags about it to a teacher. The man who shows up to DUI court drunk. That’s the law of multiplicative idiocy.

In the end I decided to wrap everything about me into one site. The design had to be bold and vivacious, yet clean and classy. Light on dark was a given. In the end, my nuclear engineering roots provided the inspiration for the design (hence the magenta trifoil and glowing green). I titled it, Nuclear Magic.

However, this new website not only serves as my personal site but was also a great proof-of-concept for using WordPress as a CMS. WordPress is widely regarded as the premiere blogging software… but its potential as a CMS is profound. So many web designers and developers already have WordPress blogs and are familiar with skinning and modding them… and the administrator interface is easy-to-use. Pound for pound you won’t get more bang for your buck when developing a dynamic website. WordPress works great, is free, and is easier to use for what it does than anything else I’ve ever even heard of.

Everything you see at SteveMooradian.com that is not part of the site’s physical design is dynamic. This is extremely significant. ALL images are called out in CSS or in MySQL… not the source files. All main textual content is stored in MySQL. On my Web Design, Programming, and Guitar & Music pages the lists of sites, projects, and bands (respectively) are all WordPress posts with categories matching the page title. The links at the bottom of every non-Home page are actual WordPress “Blogroll” links with categories matching the page title. Except for the Home and Gallery pages, each page is built from identical PHP code!

All my coding was done using Notepad++. All graphic work in the design was created by myself using Adobe’s Photoshop and Fireworks software. All markup is valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS3. All of the site conforms to 508 and WAI-A accessibility standards. All dynamic content is semantic. NO TABLES!

I designed the site using progressive enhancement so that I could be search-engine friendly and accessible while also providing a rich user experience to those with Flash and JavaScript-enabled browsers. Examples of progressive enhancement are as follows: I used sIFR to style my headings for users with Flash-enabled browsers. NO images were used for any headings on my site. I used swfIR to style most of my content images for users with Flash-enabled browsers. All drop-shadows and rounding on content images happen dynamically. I used GreyBox for all in-browser popups and image popup galleries for users with JavaScript-enabled browsers.

My new site has already been featured on many CSS and web design galleries… including a prestigious “Editor’s Pick” on the W3CSites.com gallery (which requires strict adherence to valid markup and web accessibility).

I find her show to be a wealth of information. Much of it is basic and the people who call in don’t always ask the hardest questions… but even somebody like me… who lives and breathes computers (and who has a graduate degree in the stuff) can learn a bunch just by listening to her. She always has tons of tips of helpful hints on about any computer related topic you can think of. And her website is loaded with info and links to preferred software.

I get asked a lot of computer questions by people… people from all my circles of life… because they think of me as “the computer guy”. Quite frankly, many times the questions I get asked are simple… not just simple by my standards… but even simple for a layman. People ask me these questions because they want a quick answer and don’t want to take the moment to look up the answer on their own. In fact, you should see the disappointment that falls over someone’s face when I tell them which website has the answer to their question. Now you may say – what do you mean… shouldn’t they be excited to have a website to find their answer. Yes, they SHOULD, but they aren’t… they are disappointed that they actually have to GO to the website THEMSELVES… and they don’t feel like writing the URL down and/or committing it to memory so they usually never go there. Isn’t that crazy?

On Kim’s website and you’ll find much, but the real gem to most people is her downloads section with great links to shareware and freeware applications to perform some of the most important functions on your computer… like spyware detection and virus protection.

I highly recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about their computer (and is not into lots of geek-speak) to listen to Kim Komando’s show. I especially recommend this if you find yourself constantly asking help for routine and basic questions regarding commonly used software and features. I super-mega-recommend this if you know me!

Of course, none of those fake email addresses exist. Like many domain admins, I was forwarding any “stray” emails to an unknown userid to one central account. Now, imagine thousands of mail servers replying back to this catch-all account with “Delivery Failure Notice” and “*SPAM* tracking notice”. Yeah, that’s me right now. I just disabled the catch-all account so I can now begin deleting the 1400 crap emails in my inbox. The only reason it wasn’t 14 million is because my account reached capacity.

Here’s the email that everyone now thinks that Negative99 users spammed out (with profanity edited out):

They passed beyond his sightline. Because it was that bitter taste which brought the high tide in over the piling.

[...here was a graphic image for some moronic pharmaceutical called "Hoodia"...]

And Miswess, she is goan sleep, too. Always granting the eye of childhood, which tends to see anyone over the age of twenty-five as elderly, he thought Shinny must be a11 of seventy-five now. Dull dirty half-shine oh boy you gotta remember that one that one aint half-bad oh boy I am stoned now, all the past was prologue to this sh** hey baby this here is the mainline oh f*** Im tucked but this is crystal top-end sh** this is going out on a mile-high wave in a f***ing Rolls this is — “What do you want first, Paul?
She had dragged him from the wreck of his car and instead of calling the police or an ambulance she had installed him in her guest-room, put IV drips in his arms and a sh**load of dope in his body.

He did not just pass this beneath her nose but pressed it briefly against her lower face. He imagined her laughing.

He had never been as close to her as he was then, as she carried him piggyback down the steep stairs. It was only after midnight, an hour after Geoffrey had ridden into the gathering storm to try and fetch the doctor, that the midwife had grown alarmed.

All that gibberish is supposed to trick spam filters into thinking it’s a legitimate email. And that’s a typical attempt… piecing together portions of novels and other texts.

I suppose this is a happening every website goes through eventually… like a teenager demolishing their parents’ car. So I need to face the fact that I… the WarAxe… the admin of Negative99… he who casts a plague on all your houses… has been attacked! Who would decide to use Negative99.com email addresses? Perhaps a rival blogger? Perhaps some commie atheist? Perhaps a disgruntled target of my jovial cynicism? I hope it’s that last one.

Idiots… on marijuana.

The ever-vigilant web stylist, Ms. Gepner, sent me a screenshot of the bad news that I knew was coming but was living in denial of. Yes, the newly released beta versions of Microsoft’s sucky browser did indeed break my website.

The upcoming style problems with Internet Explorer 7 (the latest aberration in standards compliant web browsing) have been foretold by design gurus for months. The development community has been lamenting the fact that Micro$oft saw fit to only fix a puny smattering of IE6′s bugs (of which there are MANY)… yet at the same time they removed a small “hack”, better known as the Holly Hack, which will now hearby eliminate the primary trick that web designers have been using to work around all of the IE bugs that have plagued it for as long as anyone can remember.

Now web designers have a terrible situation. All their Holly Hacks they’ve been using to beat IE versions 6 and below into submission are now gone… thank you Bill “Enemy At The” Gates. Yet, most of the bugs that we were using those hacks to fix are STILL IN THE BROWSER! You can’t make this stuff up. So now we have to use conditional logic in our webpages to load multiple CSS files… a primary CSS file and then an additional one to handle IE6 and below… and probably a third one to handle IE7. Fortunately, I was able to handle IE7 with one extra line of style so I wrote it in without another CSS file.

Here’s what the circus that was my compliant code looks like now:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" />
<!--[if lte IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css.ie6" type="text/css" />
<![endif]-->
<!--[if gt IE 6]>
<style>
#subcontent {float: right; position:absolute; margin-left: -175px; width:175px;}
</style>
<![endif]-->


Ugly. Very ugly. I hate Internet Explorer. For the love all that is decent and pure and right in this world… please, download and use a compliant web browser.

Well, I’ve caught myself recently pulling these same shenanigans. Today, in particular, I started a sentence with “Back when we had to log into Unix workstations”… and I could have easily added something about not having new-fangled so-called wireless internet. Now, this really isn’t shameful, but I can’t help but wince at myself whenever I hear something like that coming out of my mouth. Lately I’ve taken to starting those sentences in the mimicked voice of the proverbial old man (the one with the weather-forecasting big toe) and in that way almost poking fun at myself before anyone gets the chance.

And why not reminisce about the good ‘ole days of computing? It’s not like I’m telling stories about punch cards (way before my time). The days of hunting around campus for a free workstation in one of my undergraduate institution‘s multiple computer labs was a time of computing excitement. The so-called information superhighway was just starting to flourish and the rise of the first-person shooter had dawned. Them was good days! For fun we’d reset the servers of the freshman dorm workstations… great amusement for upperclassmen, and a belated explanation for the oft random crashes of those pesky freshmen terminals.

I could go on about learning to surf the “command-line” way using a UNIX window running in MIT’s X11R5. Or how about gopher? Or using the brand new Mosaic program to browse something called the world wide web? Ahhh… pure nostalgic geekness.

All information is here: www.microsoftnysettlement.com.

If you’re not from New York, better fortune elsewhere. I’m no fan of Spitzer (our Attorney General) but this is the second check he scored me… the first was against the RIAA which, despite the meager $20, was a sweet smelling rose of a little dagger thrust into the belly of an evil organization of greed and artistic destruction. May the Lord deal with the RIAA be it ever so severely! More on that.