Category: General

Comment Subscriptions

Because people frequently post comments on some of my blog posts asking for help with something the post was talking about, I've added a new feature! You can subscribe to future comments on a blog post now. When adding a comment, there is a new optional e-mail address field, and a checkbox to subscribe to future replies on that comment thread. So you can get an instant update whenever I (or anyone else) posts a comment on that page. All the notification e-mails contain links to unsubscribe your e-mail from the mailing list, and if you want to unsubscribe to all comment threads, there's a way to do that too.

See the comment privacy policy for details and a global unsubscribe form.

Firefox Nightly

If anyone's interested, I wrote a Perl script that downloads and installs Firefox Nightly on a Unix-like operating system.

By default, it installs the application into /opt/firefox-nightly, with a link to run it at /usr/bin/firefox-nightly. This way, it doesn't conflict with your already-installed version of Firefox. Furthermore, it will put a launcher item in your Applications/Internet menu.

You can get it from here: http://sh.kirsle.net/ffnightly

$ mkdir ~/bin
$ wget http://sh.kirsle.net/ffnightly -O bin/ffnightly
$ chmod +x bin/ffnightly
$ ffnightly

Turn off monitor from Linux CLI

I keep looking up this information and then losing track of it, so I'm posting it here for my own reference.

This command will turn off the monitor on a Linux box from the command line (sorta like what happens when you have your power saving options configured to do this automatically after a length of time):

xset dpms force off

The monitor turns off until you hit a keyboard button or move the mouse. With this info you could set up a keyboard shortcut to run this command and have something like a "lock screen button" on your netbook, to turn off the display on command and conserve battery life for a little bit longer than usual.

For a "lock screen button" that also locks the screen in addition to turning it off, a pair of commands like this may be handy:

xset dpms force off; xscreensaver-command --lock

Kirsle CMS Upgrade

I've upgraded the back-end Perl code that powers Kirsle.net.

It is now running on the same code that Siikir runs on. I did this for a few reasons:

• URLs look cleaner now. Instead of /blog.html?u=kirsle&id=114 you get nicer looking URLs like /blog/kirsle/kirsle-cms-upgrade.
• I want to partition off my blogging some more. I've had the "Channels" view where you can narrow posts by topic, but I want further partitioning: I'll have different usernames on kirsle.net, each with their own blogs. So, expect a user to pop up who will write about personal things that most of y'all probably don't care about anyway.
• The new code is more efficient than the old code.

It only took me a couple days to port the site over. I had to go and program in web blog support, and commenting support (for blog posts, photos and my guestbook page). This means that these features are also going to be coming to Siikir in the near future, once I harden them against dumb users first.

All the old links to old pages on kirsle.net will now automatically redirect to their new locations.

Where did all my free time go?

After my recent move back to my hometown, a guy I apparently used to chat with all the time several years ago found me on Grindr. I had no recollection of who this guy is, and the only person I could think of who shared a name with him was a member of one of my super old social networking sites.

Back when I was about 16 or 17 years old, I created a gay social networking site named RainbowBoi. I later rebranded it to XYBois before losing interest in it entirely, and now it's called Siikir. Anyway, I decided to dig up my old backups of this site to dig up the picture of the guy I think I'm talking to. It was him.

But poking around at the user profile data for the old sites, I got the idea to try dusting the code off and get it running again on my local web server... just for nostalgia's sake. Get the site up, dos2unix convert all its data files so that I can log into it, and just click around and see how the site used to be back in its day, back from 2005-06.

Throughout this blog post, all the small screenshot thumbnails can be clicked to view the full size.

(the homepage. click for bigger screenshot)

This version of the site was in the middle of being rebranded. The Perl source code that powers the site is also the same code I had written for my old AiChaos site, which you can see here on my archive subdomain. The code is ugly to look at, because I was relatively new to programming.

But newbie as I was, I was apparently quite ambitious. This site was very featureful: it had social networking features (including photo comments and private messaging and search and friend lists), it had helpful articles to read about coming out of the closet and topics like that, it had some public photo albums which were surely pretty popular, it had a "straight-acting" quiz. It even had a chat room, where I had programmed my own chat protocol, client program and server from scratch.

It even had used Image::Magick to scale the user photos down, and calculated ages based on birthdates, and syndicated RSS feeds for display on the site. I definitely knew my stuff back then, even if I didn't have a good coding style down yet.

I miss the days when I used to have this kind of free time on my hands. Whenever I dust off my old projects and play around with them, I keep seeing really ambitious ideas. The code may not be pretty, but it is featureful. I don't create anything nearly this cool nowadays. I just don't have the free time or the motivation to do it.

Maybe this is the consequence of doing what you love as a job. As a software developer, I spend all day long writing code to get paid and by the time I'm done, I don't feel like writing any more code for the day. And then on the weekends I just wanna relax and try to have a social life, or else just watch TV and play videogames.

/sigh

Here are 6 more screenshots of the old RainbowBoi/XYBois.