Penguicon 7 Post-con report

May 4th, 2009

I’m settling back into my normal routine after getting back from Penguicon, but thought I’d post a few words about my experience.

First off, the hotel. It was pretty much teh fail. I couldn’t get on wifi at all, which caused me to approach my MythTV presentation much differently than I would have otherwise. Also, my room was directly across from the lounge-side rooms, which meant much merry-making just outside my room while I was trying to get much sleep. I bet the party floor was less noisy. And the AC in my room - it filled my with teh angers! It basically worked when it wanted to, and upped the humidity in the room as well. Oh, and did I mention that I reserved a non-smoking room, but the room smelled otherwise? So yeah. I’ll attend even if it’s at the same hotel next year, but will probably stay at the hotel next door.

Second, my talk on MythTV. There was a bit of scheduling confusion. The program guide, and the official schedule on the wall by the consuite, both had me down for my requested two hours. The single-page handout, the one that everyone planned when they wanted to be where, had me down for one hour. I checked with ops, and was given the go-ahead for two hours. I mentally prepared myself for one hour, anyhow. Good thing, because I polled the room when I started, and the consensus was that everyone had planned to be somewhere else by the time I was supposed to be half-way through. Turnout was better than I expected, considering I was scheduled opposite the charity auction. Maybe 20-30 people overall. I let them know it was my first time presenting anywhere, and was told by at least one person that he couldn’t tell it. Maybe he was being nice ;)

Finally, on with the con! Overall, it was much better than last year, starting with opening ceremonies. Apparently Wil Wheaton was kidnapped by Dr. Horrible, or had swine flu, or something, but he managed to prepare something for his editor, Andrew, to read in his absence, and it was teh awesome! The rest of the opening ceremonies were excellent as well.

After opening ceremonies, I stuck around for John “Maddog” Hall’s talk on Sustainable Computing. This is the second time I’ve seen Maddog, the first being at the Ohio Linux Fest a few years ago. It was a very interesting talk.

After that, I just walked the con floor until “Midnight Mind Merge.” I didn’t stay long, as I was planning on being up early the next day, but had fun none-the-less.

Saturday started with “Making Fiction Work In Audio.” I learned that I should definitely listen to more podcasts ;)

I followed this panel with a panel titled “Can I Be Your Friend? Bringing Authors and Readers Together,” where that I learned that John Scalzi has a vanity search set up, so that last sentence was just for him ;)

The next panel was “How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” but didn’t mention universe building much at all. It was still a good time.

Then I attended “Building Community in a Free/Open Source Software Project.” I learned exactly what I need to do with WP-United, so this was probably one of the most directly helpful talks I attended.

From there, I went to “So You Want to Quit Your Day Job?” which was aimed at writers, but was very informative. I also stalked Elizabeth Bear (who’s real name is much longer) to her next panel, which was called “To See a Universe in a Grain of Sand.” This panel was put on by four Sarahs and two Dans, one of whom was an honorary Sarah for the panel. Very entertaining panel.

I then tried to get back into Poolside 1 for “What’s So Funny?!” but it was too crowded, so I headed off to get some grub at the consuite instead. I headed back to Poolside 1 to see “Copywhat? Copyrights! Open Source Licensing in Literature,” but left early to gather my items and then mentally prepare for my talk on MythTV.

While waiting for my timeslot to come up, I was approached by a very pleasant gentleman with questions about MythTV. This helped to calm my nerves immensely. Then I did my thing and enjoyed myself so much that when I got home from the con, I immediately volunteered to present at Ohio Linux Fest this fall. I haven’t heard back yet, but I hope my presentation is approved. I also spent much of the extra hour chatting with a few folks who attended my presentation.

From there, I dropped my equipment at my room and headed back out for a talk on PHP by its creator, Rasmus Lerdorf.

Finally, I finished Saturday with Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog live performance. As described elsewhere, the original was great. The live Pengicon version was “Awesome with Awesome Sauce!”

Sunday, I had planned on going to the discussion on National Novel Writing Month. However, my aforementioned noisy hall kept me away way too late to get up early enough for it, and I decided to cut out shortly after I got up mid-morning. So I pretty much skipped the last day of the con, but enjoyed myself greatly.

One last thing - I stopped by the consuite several times, and it was nearly always one of two situations. 1) too crowded to make it in and get some food, or 2) no actual food to be gotten. I did manage to score a sandwich once or twice. I was probably just lucky, though.

edited on May 7 to add: Despite the criticisms above, I wanted to make it absolutely clear that I had a blast. I’ve attended the past two years and plan on attending every year for years to come. Any scheduling snafus are a result of the sheer scope of the con, I’m sure. So many things going on at once that it has to be near-impossible to coordinate. So, to those who put this thing on every year, many, many thanks for such a wonderful time. Oh, and did I mention? I already have the perfect costume planned for next year! And a different talk to volunteer for.

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Penguicon

April 23rd, 2009

That time of year is upon us again. Yes, I’m talking about Penguicon, that three day festival of sci-fi, gaming, and open source. You know, the stuff that makes us all geeks. This year, I’m going as more than just an attendee. I will be giving a talk on installing and configuring MythTV.

Penguicon runs from May 1 - 3 in Romulus, MI. My presentation is on May 2 at 6pm. If you’re attending Penguicon, feel free to stop by to see my first-ever public speaking engagement.

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Funny if it weren’t true

April 22nd, 2009

This story would be funny if it weren’t true.

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Some tools

April 5th, 2009

Here are some interesting tools:

http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/
http://www.paulschou.com/tools/xlate/
http://www.ssynth.co.uk/~gay/anagram.html
http://wordsmith.org/anagram/
http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/vigenere-autokey.php
http://makcoder.sourceforge.net/demo/vigenere.php
http://www.unfiction.com/resource/rot-it/
http://morsecode.scphillips.com/translator.html
http://www.paulschou.com/tools/xlate/
http://www.unfiction.com/resource/otools/
http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/index.php
http://www.purplehell.com/riddletools/
http://boulter.com/anagram/
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/nyquistplugins
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/770

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Digsby

March 23rd, 2009

Just thought everyone might want to check out Digsby, a universal IM client and email notifier and social network client. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks, and I’ve been impressed so far.

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WP-United 0.6.1 RC 1 Released!

February 20th, 2009

WP-United 0.6.1 RC1 RELEASED!!!
This is an unofficial release developed by Japgalaxy and Wintermute!

Changelog:
+ Updated to work with phpBB3.0.4 & WordPress 2.7(.1)!!!
+ Compatible with phpBB SEO Mod 0.4.8!
+ FIXED Cross-posting of blog posts to forums
+ FIXED WPU Widgets
+ FIXED Tags line blank in forum cross-post
+ FIXED Cross-posting error, even if the phpBB SEO Mod is installed
+ FIXED If the sanitized username is blank, WP-United create a username in WordPress that begins with a prefix of “WPU-” and is followed by between 1 and 10 random digits (for non-ASCII usernames, such as Chinese names in UTF-8)
+ FIXED Error of Your Blog page (when user own their blogs)
+ NEW: Wordpress user profile panel is replaced by the user control panel of phpBB (only WordPress subscriber)
+ NEW: Latest phpBB post function is now available!
+ NEW: Latest phpBB post function is now available also as Widget!
+ NEW: the new wpu_login_user_info function replace the old readerdetails function. The wpu_login_user_info function can be used in the sidebar (using its widget or without) or in the header!!!;

Todo:
Change all headers to reflect new version
Remove PayPal link
Replace link to official site

To install, extract to local drive and open the included install.xml in your web browser. Note - If you are using the phpBB-SEO mod, uncomment lines 648-652 of the included wpu-plugin.php.

Finally, credit where credit is due - this version would not be possible without the help of Japgalaxy. He has done most of the coding. I have simply verified his changes and provided some minor fixes. Many thanks!

Download the mod from here.

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How to install WP-United, step by step

February 2nd, 2009

Looking through some blog statistics, it looks like the title of this post matched a popular search term. Since I’m really into site integration at the moment, here is how I did things on my test server (this server is configured only slightly differently):

Planning for the install - It might make sense to plan your installation before you begin. One item to consider are whether or not you will be using a single database or multiple ones. I’ve done so both ways, and both ways work equally well. Also, what folders will you be installing everything into? I installed phpBB into /phpBB3 and Wordpress into /blog. Will you be offering blogs to your users? Will you make your blog the front page of your site or your forums? Will you allow cross-posting?

Install phpBB - The latest version is 3.0.4, which is what I’m using both here and on my test server. Install according to the instructions at phpBB.com.

Install phpBB-SEO - Now is the best time to decide if you’re going to install the phpBB-SEO mod or not, as it is easier to install if it is the first mod. On my test server, I chose the advanced version of the mod and uploaded the replacement files instead of doing the file edits. The version I installed on my test server is the Advanced phpBB3 SEO mod Rewrite version 0.4.8. On this server, I’ve obviously not installed the SEO mod.

Install WordPress - The latest version, and the version in use on my test server, is version 2.7. Again, follow the instructions at Wordpress.org.

Install WP-United - Download the version I am using from here. Extract the files and open install.xml in your browser. Follow the instructions contained within precisely, and you should be able to get things going. Some caveats I’ve discovered:

      Integrating phpBB3 within Wordpress results in a title of “Page not found” while browsing the forums. For this reason, I recommend integrating Wordpress inside phpBB3 as a work-around. This results in pages being titled properly.

      Doing the above resulted in my blog (which is copied to the root of my site as index.php) rendering without any styles at all. Setting “Include phpBB Styles First?” to “No” restored the styles. This occurred on my production server, and I haven’t tried to recreate it on my test server. I’m using non-default styles on the production server, so this may make a difference.

      Alternatively, you can integrate phpBB3 inside of WordPress, and follow the instructions here and here as another work-around. (Thanks, japgalaxy, for the CSS fixes.)

      There are still bugs that need fixed, one of which is with cross-posting. There’s an error when you cross-post, but the post goes through properly.

      If you’re going to allow users to have their own blogs, I recommend that you let phpBB automatically handle WordPress logins. It just seems easier this way.

      There seems to be an issue with some WP plugins interfering with the WP-United install. The solution is to disable all of your WP plugins during installation, then re-install them one-by-one afterwards.

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WP-United

January 30th, 2009

I’m considering continuing development of WP-United, using the modifications at linmo.org as the starting point. Any thoughts?

FWIW, the current version that I’m using is available here.

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Screw you, Washington Mutual (and Chase)

January 29th, 2009

In 2007, my wife opened a credit card with Washington Mutual, and everything was fine - until last month. Last month, my wife noticed that the interest rate had jumped to about twice the original rate, and when she called for an explanation, no one, not even a manager, could tell her why the rate had jumped. The manager did, however, offer to drop the rate back to the original if my wife would close the account. My wife agreed, and all was fine again.

Then she got this month’s bill. The rate went up yet another percentage point. So, she called again. The first person she talked to said the person last month put a note in her account that he was unable to help her. The second person said the same thing. Finally, a supervisor gets on the line, and she simple asks him to honor the agreement. He no longer denied that the agreement was in place, but instead insisted that no one had the authority to make that offer. She tells the gentleman to hold on, that she’s done talking to him. Please talk to her husband.

I get on the line and begin to politely ask “Is it possible to pull the audio from that ca…” at which time the guy cuts me off and says, quite rudely, “Not gonna happen.” Not “I’m sorry, but not all calls are recorded,” which he does say (minus the “I’m sorry”) when pressed, but “not gonna happen.” That’s great CSR skills right there! Then I complain that he cut me off, and he says that I got on the line screaming and cutting him off. This is simply not true, even though I’m more than capable of making an ass of myself if the situation calls for it ;) And with the accusation out there that I’m already being an ass, I politely ask him to quit being a jerk. His response was “let’s not resort to name calling. Let’s be professional.” Great. After being an ass, he now wants to be “professional.” Sorry. Too late. My response was, naturally, something along the lines of “I’m not the CSR, I’m the customer. I don’t *HAVE* to remain professional.” *raising voice into a yell* “Since you wanna accuse me of screaming at you, how do you like it when I actually am?!” *raising voice even louder* “Quit being ass and just honor the agreement you have with my wife. And if you’re not going to, I want to speak with your boss.” At this point, I’m not actually upset. I’m just having fun roleplaying being the ass he’s already accused me of being. Needless to say, he wanted to cover his own ass and refused to give me anyone above him.

That’s OK. I’m retaliating by writing this blog post urging everyone not to use Chase (because they bought WaMu and are ultimately responsible for this) and writing their corporate offices with the entire episode. My advise to all CSRs: don’t be a jerk to your customers. The economy is too messed up to risk becoming unemployed.

Oh yeah. I almost forgot. I’m currently looking for a new bank, because the folks at Fairfield National Bank have been jerks lately as well and I’ve vowed to take my business elsewhere. Guess who I am *not* going to be opening a checking account with? That’s right - Chase. Unless someone from corporate A) wants to offer to lower the rate as one of their representatives had promised; and B) fired both the guy who made the offer (for lying to the customer) and the guy that was a jerk. Neither of these gentleman have any business in customer service.

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Security breach at Monster.com

January 25th, 2009

According to this article at PC-World, Monsert.com has reported the theft of information from it’s database, including usernames, passwords, email addresses, etc. They are not sending out notifications to their users, so I thought I’d help spread the word.

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