Dawn of the Geeks

Elizabeth Book

Another “This Is True” gem:

GOTCHA: After a year-long court battle, Elizabeth Book of Daytona Beach, Fla., won a ruling that she was within her rights to go topless in public during a political protest. She immediately announced a demonstration. “I will be as top-free as the statues”– statues she would pose with in her protest of “ordinances and statutes aimed at the American woman’s breasts.” Daytona officials urged caution. “She should probably save her exuberance for a time when all the appeals have ended,” said Assistant City Attorney Greg McDole. But Book dropped top as promised — and was immediately arrested. Not for indecent exposure, but for disorderly conduct since her demonstration “caused a traffic jam (approximately seven vehicles) at the intersection” and “corrupted the public morals and outraged the sense of public decency … in a tourist area.” (Orlando Sentinel, Daytona Beach News-Journal) …But isn’t that what the tourists were there to see?

What I’ve found is that women who demand to go topless tend to be the type of women who have no brains or no body or neither. Elizabeth Book is no exception. You can find her picture on Google Images but I recommend not. *shudder*

Jesus is My Homeboy

Normally I’m right on top of the latest trend (this is a lie) but this one slipped by. Like religions that demand payment for salvation, Teenage Millionaire is cashing in on our Lord and Saviour. This came after Mel Gibson put out Passion of the Christ, a graphic depiction of final hours of Christ’s life.

Even Madonna was wearing the “Mary is my Homegirl” t-shirt which probably explains why it didn’t take off all that big. Besides costing $36 a pop. I don’t pay $36 for any shirt and neither do most people. Especially one that Madonna likes. If Madonna thinks it’s cool, it most definitly is not. Jesus is definitly all right with me but I’m not about to shell out $36 for some rediculous shirt.

Saaya Irie

The Chinese are upset by a new Japanese school history textbook which, they say, whitewashes Japanese crimes during WWII. But photos of a little Japanese girl are helping to melt Chinese hearts. Saaya Irie is “pacifying a certain segment of China’s population” with her photos, especially those showing her in a bikini. The 11-year-old budding actress fills an F-cup bra, and her photos have swept Chinese web sites. A message with the photos, surely not written by the girl, begs the Chinese to “stop these anti-Japanese hijinks” since “if you don’t, I won’t like you anymore.” But if people “unite for the sake of China’s democracy,” the message says, her breasts will “rise up.”

Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act

I was with my girlfriend at Lenscrafters trying to sort out her prescription. They were trying to charge her $80 for a year of contacts so I told her to just get the prescription and then check prices elsewhere. Turns out they prescribed her Proclear. They claimed it was the law that they put on a brand on the prescription. I disagreed with that and when I got home I looked it up. Turns out that a brand must be on the prescription but congress is looking into how that affects consumers. Hmmm…. forcing a brand on consumers, I wonder how that could possibly be a negative. So now she’s forced to buy only Lenscrafters brand lenses. It’s probably one of the most idiotic things I’ve ever heard of. Lenscrafters peddles this lie that contacts are somehow custom made per person per prescription and it’s somehow dangerous to go with alternate brands for your prescription. When they told me that I promptly got my prescription elsewhere.

For those who don’t know, contacts are mass produced. Where I go and most places have boxes and boxes of contacts all ready to go for their customers. The only form of vision correction not mass produced are glasses. Those are custom made per customer. Lasik is also obviously custom performed per customer. No two eyes are alike. But that’s what makes contacts so cheap, the variation in eyes isn’t significant enough to warrent custom made contacts. They’re approximations based on two key parameters. If you notice, there are generally only two numbers on your prescription per eye and maybe the diameter which actually doesn’t matter. The diameter is purely a comfort issue. Nationwide Vision locked me into an expensive brand of contacts using the diameter. Fortunatly I found another company that was kind enough to change the diameter free of charge and sell me a much cheaper contact which turned out to be far superior to the crap that Nationwide was peddling.

Coincidently I found out that Proclear is a brand of Coopervision which is what Nationwide pushed on me.

So word of warning, before you pay money to some eye care provider to get a prescription, ask them what brand of contacts they intend to push on you. Then do research. Or simply demand a brand before the prescription is filled. If they won’t give you Acuvue or whatever you want, go somewhere else.

The Head Mounted Virtual Boy

The web-site dates to 1999 but I’m pretty sure it was up long before that in various forms. It was actually my first claim to fame: a practical and comfortable way to make the Virtual Boy head mounted. Even Nintendo visited my site and I was featured on some Asian hacker site and got bombarded with hits.

It’s here just for historical purposes now. The VB is quite dead. At best it’s the pong of consumer level virtual reality game systems. People seem to be perfectly content with 2D screens so I’m not so sure it’s going to be a short time before we see some kind of advanced version that’s actually head mounted and full color. What I’d like to see is console systems with dual video outs so it’s possible to buy an HMD accessory to play the games in 3D. The biggest mistake Nintendo made was combining the display with the system itself. That’s what made it unwearable. What I found out though is that it was necessary for the timing of the mirrors. I tried lengthening the wires and the mirrors couldn’t sync up.

If they had used standard RCA jacks and real LCD screens that wouldn’t have been an issue.

The DevCenter is now fully operational and all sections it composes have been forwarded to the new location. Hopefully this will keep people from getting too lost while Google reindexes everything. One of the things I’ve noticed about Google is that it has a hard time letting things go. I still get hits to the locations of files two generations ago. Two gens ago everything was here at www.icarusindie.com, then it was broken into distinct subdomains and now sections are being combined back together. The net result however is a lot of hits to the front page since the front page is also the 404 page. Most requests do get forwarded since Google had them properly linked to the index.php file for the section. Others are still going directly to the files which no longer exist so the user is forwarded here.

The only thing I know of that isn’t done is the Virtual Boy section. I was using server side includes which my new server doesn’t process. I need to download the entire site and then redo it using PHP. Back in the day (1996 or so) it was a popular site (even visited by Nintendo) since I was the first to provide a practical solution to making the VB wearable and comfortable. A number of people tried uses helemts and counterweights which didn’t work well at all and made it far less comfortable. I also had my screenshots stolen and published without my permission in a German game magazine. Pretty exciting times.

One other issue is with the ringtone sites. The Javascript check is messing up being able to download the ringtones to cell phones. You can still download them to your computer. I need to fix that pretty quick. myMobile isn’t affected. myMobile has another issue which is the wall paper generator. Apparently PHP’d GD library saves JPEGs wrong or something because they don’t work with the phone. I have to use another image editing program like Photoshop to get a usable files. Anyway, I’ll get these issues worked out eventually.

Thanks to a few idiots I’ve shut down the Wiki to all users except one; me. It’s no longer possible to register accounts and all accounts but mine have been deleted. If you’d like to post something in the wiki, use the contact form. I’ll review it and if it’s interesting I’ll post it. It’s not so bad when idiots post spam in the wiki except when it screws with my Google ranking. Normally you can edit existing pages without an account but I always lock any pages I create.

Saaya Irie sat comfortably in the number two spot on Google until some jerk decided to post garbage in a similarly named wiki entry which dropped my ranking down to 8. That cost hundreds of hits a day. Hopefully it’ll be a fast recovery. This is exactly why I don’t run a forum. I don’t care to have to constantly clean up after a bunch of drooling, diaper wearing douchebags.

The Compilers, SDKs, Source Code and Programming books are being consolidated into DevCenter. The Programming books are still available in the old section for now. They’ll be moved over in a day or so. The files have been removed from the other sections already. The old sections will forward requests soon so the transition is smoother.

The motivation for this is complex. The main motivation is the fact that nearly half my visitors don’t have javascript enabled and therefore aren’t seeing the ads and hence costing me money without any chance of recouping those costs through ad revenue. The other motivation is that this site is huge. It’s time to start simplifying things. Having four large sections combined into one site makes it a lot easier to maintain. If I want to change the look of the site I no longer have four sites to mess with. I have a single site to update.

The new challenge however is handling a single large database. But this is a good excercise in learning how to effectively and efficiently make use of mySQL. Anyway I think that’s enough of a heads up for now. If you’re here looking for compilers, sdks or source code, head to the DevCenter. It’ll all be there within a day or so. It’s rediculous number of files I have to get added to the database and it takes quite awhile to do.

GetDataBack for both FAT and NTFS drives is probably the greatest tool ever. Last year my colocated server drive bombed. I debated whether or not to just let it go. Then I RD’d my own drive accidently while messing with DMOZ stuff. So I forked over the money and bought it. It recovered everything from both drives.

It just came into use again today when a coworker told me about creating “.. ” directories (two periods with a space). The interface created the short cut just fine but when I went to delete the folder it whiped much of the server programs. Whoops. Fortunatly GetDataBack NTFS has once again come to the rescue.

I highly recommend the program.

After running the server side javascript check for awhile I found out that approximately 48% of my visitors have Javascript disabled. IcarusIndie.com relies on Javascript in order for Google Adsense ads to display. I didn’t expect everyone to have javascript enabled. I didn’t expect nearly this many to not have it enabled.

Server-Side Javascript Check was written February 3rd of 2005 and is a theory on how to detect javascript on the server side. You can’t trust the client and so I devised a way that I wouldn’t have to. The wiki entry is actually a little incomplete but it turns out it works like a charm when properly implemented. It’s currently in use for Indie-Mobile. If you go there and javascript is enabled then a little banner will show up on the right side indicating as such. That’s just an indicator for the user. If it doesn’t show up then the server has figured out that JS isn’t enabled and you won’t be able to download any ringtones.

I’m going to test it out for a week or so before implementing this block in other sections. The way this site operates is that visitors get loads of free stuff and in exchange they view ads. If users fail to uphold their end of the bargain then I feel no obligation to uphold my end. It costs money to run a web-site. I’d rather advertisers cover costs than have to charge visitors directly.