Zhanga: November 9, 2005

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Wednesday, November 9, 2005 (11 comments)

A couple of days ago, I checked my mail and found that I actually got something! (Whoa!) Turns out it's the "Balanced Man" scholarship competition that awards freshmen "in light of their LEADERSHIP, SCHOLARSHIP, ATHLETICISM, and lives as GENTLEMEN" (emphasis not mine)(wtf parallel structure n00b). I was pretty much done reading after the R in "LEADER," and when I saw "GENTLEMAN," I just about tripped down the steps of the Marketplace. Gentleman. This reminds me of Ronjon and the Sportsmanship Award on these two past trips to DC.

After I saw this comic, I hit myself on the head for being so n00b and not being exactly like this for the past couple of years. I mean, I can see Ronjon, Dragos, me, and definitely Yujing doing this, and especially in late April. Gene would probably try to rebel against something like this, though. On a different note, it's kind of odd to think that I'm probably never going to seriously take a science class here. Why do I make such illogical choices?

On with the randomness. I got some spam two nights ago with "Jennifer Aniston" as its subject line. The email consisted of six lines of text, with the first line being "best made rplicas." I wonder how big the market for replicas of her is. I also found a gem on bash.org. You know the classic story (one of these is on bash, too) when the biology teacher talks about semen, and then some ridiculously worthless girl asks something stupid like "why does it taste salty," declaring to her class that she is a whore? This is a hundred times better. I only wish it had happened at Walton. I can't even begin to fathom what kind of reaction Greenberg would give to one of these:

#576017 (86)

Promisemememphis: there was a girl in one of my bio teachers classes and they had to put a cotton swab in their mouth and look at the slide
Promisemememphis: he went to look at hers because she saw something moving and told her it was a sperm
Promisemememphis: which meant that she'd just given some guy head in lunch like fifteen minutes before hand
Promisemememphis: he wouldn't let her leave the class either

And once again, bash has caused me to fall out of my chair.

I made some major changes to the Xanga Tracker last weekend. Since most people who use it read this Zhanga regularly, I figure I'll just post the updates here. Here's a screenshot:

Changes:

• The default sort order is descending, by ID. This equates to newest first. It used to be ascending due to a bug; it now operates as it was originally designed to.
• If you push the logout button, it will actually save your sort order now (and I think also page number & rows per page) This was supposed to have happened in the past, but the above bug killed this too. It's so hard for me to thoroughly test the tracker because I don't use it realistically. I don't track hits to my Xanga (there is like 1 hit/day), and I use it for synthetic testing, which may not be good enough. That is why I ask my users to constantly whine to me about it. How else will I ever know something needs fixing?
• Sorting is now done by the two drop-down menus at the bottom of the form. The only reason I did this is that it cleans up my code a lot. This way, it's easier for me to spot bugs and add new things later. On the other hand, I do think it looks better this way, but I don't think my opinion counts.
• There's now a "500" choice in the drop-down menu for number of rows per page. Note that choosing a higher setting here causes pages to load more slowly.
• You can now filter what is displayed. If you only want to see hits from me, then type icydog in the box labeled Xanga Username. If you want to search for hits from unidentified Xanga users (as far as I know, this is always caused by the hit coming from a user who is not logged in to Xanga), then fill the box with an exclamation mark (!). In the screenshot above, the hits are filtered so that only AV's show up. (Random choice.)
• Likewise, if you only want to see hits from a particular IP address, then enter that address (in regular aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd format) into the IP Address box.
• You can use both filters at once if you would like. To not filter, then clear the box(es) that you don't want to filter with. So if you don't want to restrict by IP Address, then clear that box. Wildcards are not yet supported, and won't be supported unless people ask for them. They're pretty gay to code.

Other geek thing... If you use gaim (if you don't, then you should), then you've probably noticed that a new log file is created each time you open an IM window and is stored in a folder named after your buddy's IM handle (aka screenname). Gene motivated me to create a program that will read all of these logs and output a big pile of flat log files, one file for each buddy. For example, gaim makes a bunch of logs in each of logs/your_sn/buddy1/, logs/your_sn/buddy2, logs/your_sn/buddy3... etc, and this program will read all these and produce logs/your_sn/buddy1.txt, logs/your_sn/buddy2.txt, logs/your_sn/buddy3.txt... etc. For each buddy, it creates one file containing everything from every log for that buddy. I will probably keep this as an ongoing project, and maybe turn it into a gaim log viewer in the future.

Basically the reason I'm posting this is to find out if anybody I know uses gaim, so I'll know if there's actually a point in writing this program other than for the personal entertainment of Gene and me (well, it's not as entertaining for him, I guess). Right now it works but isn't guaranteed to do anything. In particular, it may crash your computer and then wipe your hard drive while displaying happy faces and success messages. But if it sounds interesting, give me a poke. (Or in *nix lingo, touch me.)

3:35AM

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