I am a wee bit late in posting this, but we have kitty’s now!

I grew up with lots of animals. Dogs, birds, tarantualas, and more. However, our real stock of animal was cats. So much so that at one point our house was home to 11 cats! Since moving out on my own, I’ve really been missing having cats around. Between owning a bird and living with an allergic roommate, I had no opportunities.

Moving to Sweden, however, changed that. Within about 3 weeks of my arriving we found an adoption center, laid down a few bucks, and brought home two rambunctious fun kittens. They are brother and sister, commonly referred to as “boy” and “girl” since it took us nearly 2 weeks to name them (now Sam and Lucy).

Anyway, Kim has taken tons of pictures of them, but I figured I’d pull a few from the group.

So small!

Amazingly blue eyes — they have since changed to a yellow brown. :(

“Gimme dat!”

Lazy bums.

She likes to jump up and sit on my shoulder. I call her Pirate Kitty.

He likes to hang out in front of me at my desk. In fact, as I write this, both of them are laying in the space under the monitors you see there. :)

Terribly adorable!

I think what I find most unique about the Hydra Project is that it uses the same developmental mentality of open source (more eyes == less holes) to create a project solely aimed at piracy.

Real encryption standards all have their entire source published. The basis of this idea is that “security through obscurity“ is a fallacy. Simply because someone doesn’t know your password is “lovemydog” does not make it a good password. In fact, it leads you to an entirely false sense of security. In this same way, THP is making the development of the project open so that no one tries to make it secure by saying “well, no one knows XYZ, so they couldn’t possibly break in!”

I wonder how long the **AA will let this project live on Google code and, when they begin file papers (as they are so good at), if Google will ask that the project be removed from their system.

Are you visiting for one of the old YouthOutlook archive pages?

They’ve all been taken down from my site, sorry! Please head to the official YO! site and run a search:

Having only been here something like two weeks, there are already a few things that I desperately miss about the US.

• Family & Friends
  Duh. I miss being able to see my family. Admittedly, I wasn't around that much, but it was always possible, not a 18 hour trip for 700$ each way which throws you completely in a reverse timezone sleep schedule. And I miss living at HQ. Honestly, I really like living with lots of people. It certainly has it's downsides (messes and dishes, for the love of god...), but I like that there's always something going on, the social feel of it, and having people to game with right there with you. I know I'll still be able to work it out with VOIP etc, but it's just not going to be the same.
• Fry's
  God how I miss that store. There's nothing like it here. Loads of "Best Buy"-alikes, but nothing near Fry's in quality, selection, and plain girth. Almost all of the "electronics" stores are exactly the same. Same stock, that is, which is very frustrating -- especially considering the fact that none of these places have any "prosumer" type devices. It's very saddening.
• Starbucks
  The convenience of knowing there's always at least one place you can get a semi-decent drink is really nice. It's not like that at all here. (This is more Kimmy's item than mine, but I can agree.)
• Speaking the Language
  Given, the vast majority of people here actually speak English, and pretty damn well, it is still slightly embarrassing forcing them to switch modes to accommodate me.
• Target/Walmart/Kmart
  Cheap, simple clothing and loads of it. Perhaps we simply aren't hip to these stores here, or don't have the means (transportation and local knowledge) to find them, but so far department store shopping looks like it's going to KILL my wallet. Looking for a scarf...simple, nice feeling, scarf. Closest I found so far was a 600SEK ... 100 DOLLARS. Eeesh.
• Netflix, Newegg, Amazon
  FUCK, it is unbelievable how America-centric the internet is. Maybe if I spoke the language here I'd know the sites and not feel so left out, but being such a tech head not having all these sites really makes you want to cry. Almost enough to move back!
• Standard Power Adapters
  What really gets you about this part is that, now living in another country, you have two choices:
  1) Buy everything from the US, pay HUGE shipping fees and pay a small fortune for adapters so that one day, when you return, everything will work just fine or...
  2) Buy things with power cords made for this place and pray that you can get them back to working should you move back, but enjoy the hodgepodge of connectors and converters from there on out. Yay!
  
  
  *Addendum* What we have actually discovered is that this is not as huge a dilemma as first perceived. As it turns out, many if not most of our appliances are rated for 110-240v 50/60hz input, so all we need is plug adapters, not full blown power houses. I have, of course, ordered one in case some of the things coming are not compatible, but it's not quite as necessary as I first thought.
• Wendy's
  Yeah yea, but it's so tasty!
• Soda (Dr. Pepper and the rest...)
  This country is "Caffeine via Coffee" addicted. America is more about caffeine via soda. As such, here you can get the majors, like Coke, Pepsi, Sprite, and 7up pretty much everywhere. However, if you aren't a major brand drinker (like me) forget about it. After the aforementioned selection, you have a few off taste Fanta's to pick from (if you're lucky), possibly diet variations of the same or nothing at all. Even on the rare occasion you can find "Dr. Pepper" here, it's nothing the same. Apparently the recipe is packaged up, shipped over, and mixed here by some company that does it totally different. End result is that US Dr. and EU Dr. are nothing the same, and since I'm used to US Dr., the EU variant is plain unsatisfying. Damnit.
  
  *Side Note* Apparently there is a store here called Gray's which specifically imports American food stuffs like Dr. Pepper, Mt. Dew, RootBeers, etc. Haven't found the place yet, but I understand it's an american import's mecca of sorts here.
• Understanding Value
  You don't realize how vital a skill it is understanding the value of things till you have no idea what the value of things are. A bit vague, yes, let me expound... In the us, when I went into a store, or a gas station, or corner mart, I could look at the food stuffs and know if the price I was paying for something was a good deal or not. When you jump to another country, and another monetary system, you are totally out of comparison mode. And here it's a very stark difference -- since a 10 $ item is 60 SEK, the numbers are very different and difficult to calculate. It's a very uneasy feeling never knowing if what you are buying is under/or/over-valued.
• Walking
  Not that I lost my legs or something, and in fact, walking is more common here than it is in the US it seems. So I get lots of it. What I mean is that I miss knowing how to walk among crowds. See, in the US, stay on the right in the rule, and even when you have to break that rule, I understand the flow of people -- how they move. It makes sense to me, I've grown up in the culture and understand how people in the US navigate themselves in crowds. Here in Sweden, I am constantly bumping into people, getting frustrated by the person(s) in front of me, getting stuck, or back tracking because I made a wrong movement choice. It's incredibly frustrating, and when I'm out walking with Kimmy, adding another body to the mix just seems to compound things.

It would only be fair that, next time I write, it will be a list of things that I really like about being here. ;)

• They have blankets outside restaurants in the chairs. So if there’s even the remotest ability to sit outside, these Swedes will.
• They have an unhealthy obsession with ice cream. Which makes no sense considering how damn cold it gets.
• No one owns cats — lots of dogs. Which makes me wonder, why own an animal which must be taken outside to frolic when you spend long months inside hiding from the cold? Again, no idea. (I’ve been told it’s because people spend so much time indoors that they have no allergy resistance, and cats just set people off like crazy. Bummer!)
• The Tube (underground system) here is the best I’ve ever been on. It’s less crowded than in Japan (from the videos I’ve seen), faster and on-time (compared to Muni in San Francisco) and not 8 miles under ground, tiny, and stanky like in London. However, it’s SUPER expensive. $100 for a monthly pass, but the pass is literally good for one month from the time you buy it, which is decent at least.
• Coffee is a big deal here. Like, $1000 coffee machines in kitchens is very much not uncommon. Too bad I don’t drink coffee
• The keyboards are kicking. my. ass. Seriously, my main gripes are * / is Shift-7, which really sucks for web people. A lot. * @ is a special-alt-2 key, which keeps throwing me off * There are several extra ö type keys on the keyboard, which makes all the punctuation shift around. I’m constantly retyping things because I hit a random key that wasn’t what I wanted.

More as I explore more.

I’m now in Stockholm, Sweden. Apartment hunting, setting up bank accounts, starting work, and generally sleeping at 3 in the afternoon. Having someone to share this with makes it much better :)

Yes. It’s simple, get over it.

I like simple. I also like that this design has ZERO non-content images*. Even the logo is done with some fancy CSS and one of the best fonts ever.

I spent a lot of time taking OUT textile, markdown, and all the other various formatting mark ups I’ve used in the past and rewriting everything to be in plain ‘ol HTML since it’s much, much easier to maintain and continue using as the web moves forward.

I cleaned up my portfolio, removed some dead links, and should hopefully be updating it soon with Help.com (if given CNET permission) and BF2S.com. I also took some time to duplicate the “Jeff is something“ feature that’s starting to spring up all over the place. You can subscribe to my updates feed for quick, short updates on what I’m doing. Finally, I made the thumbnails for the portfolio section a little larger.

Also, while working on this new theme, I found that developing a fresh theme for Wordpress pretty much totally sucks. The problem is that there is no way to truly preview a theme. Instead, I read lots of people talking about setting up “sandboxes” and duplicating databases and a whole lot of nonsense work that, in most cases, is waaaay too much work.

So, I made a very quick, very hacky plugin which will override your current theme with another for a given user (admin) or IP address. Here’s the quick and dirty of it:

<?php

/*

Plugin Name: Theme Trial

Plugin URI: http://jrm.cc

Description: Loads a custom defined theme for admins/users from ip instead of the publicly viewable setting

Version: 1.0

Author: Jeff Minard

Author URI: http://jrm.cc/
*/


	
function tt_replace($template=’‘) {	
	// ip based
	return( $_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’]  'YOUR_IP_HERE' ) ? 'YOUR_NEW_TEMPLATE' : $template;
	// user profile based
//	return( get_profile('ID')  1 ) ? ‘YOUR_NEW_TEMPLATE’ : $template;	

}

	
add_filter(‘template’, ‘tt_replace’);

add_filter(‘stylesheet’, ‘tt_replace’);

	
?>

It does the trick pretty dang nicely, if I do say so. Just make sure to change the uppercased variables as noted to match your environment. I also made one other small plugin which simply kills off the upload pane (which is really if you never, ever use it. FTP ftw.) If you are interested, ask and I’ll put it up.

* = Untrue if using IE. Try the site in IE less than 7 (which still has CSS bugs/missing items). My sentiments with that browser are established and documented — I’m tired of “fixing” for it on my own personal site. Just. Don’t. Care.

I’ve been drooling over the possibility of ultra wide screen gaming for a while now. When I first went to dual monitors, the difference was staggering. I was more productive, I had more room to mentally breathe instead of constantly switching monitors around and it was just a huge boost in almost every area of computer use. For anyone who spends a few hours a day at their PC, a dual monitor setup is really useful.

Naturally, I thought it would be totally sweet if I could watch a video across them both or game across them. However, even if I got it setup, with only two monitors, you end up with a cross hair right split down the middle which would suck.

Solution? Three monitors!

Kewl, cept the only cards that support three monitors are ultra high end 3d cards. DirectX9? I don’t think so, my friend. No, you have to get a separate device to accomplish this feat.

Enter the Matrox TripleHead2Go DVI. In a nutshell, this product plugs into your video card and tell’s the computer “I’m a really, really big monitor, kthnxbai!” and then when the computer outputs a large image, the box splits it up to your 3 monitors.

Pretty slick idea. Except, I’m not to impressed by it.

I spent the evening playing CS:S on it and wasn’t really awed at the extra “view space” that the edge monitors afforded me. Additionally, support for such a HUGELY wide screen is really poor (not to mention the current rendering solutions leave a great deal to be desired for accommodating the extra width.)

Additionally, when “maximizing” windows now, I still end up with the bordered edges. Small complaint, but this works better on a normal “dual video card + three monitors” setup.

The ultimate disappointment, however, is the MPlayer doesn’t play video anymore. I watch pretty much every single thing I own through MPlayer, so this is really a deal breaker for me. VideoLan Client seems to come through and work, but MPlayer is better and even VLC can’t maximize to the screen correctly.

In the end, I’m not sure I’ll keep it. If you have a really, really good reason to need to span 3 monitors, this is a great card, but for gaming a simple wide screen monitor will probably satisfy you fine and avoid all the little annoyances that come along with this software/technology.

CNET's color is orange. It's been orange since they pretty much started and have always kept it, in more or less forms. CNET's other claim is the type-in-a-circle logo. Between the two of these items, the front lobby at the CNET building has a large, circular hole in the wall pointing to a room in which there is orange flood lighting. It's quite fun.

For the two years I worked at CNET, I've walked by that every day and thought about jumping in it. Today was my last day, and I didn't want to miss the chance.

CNET has been an amazing home to me. I had the most awesome boss who not only got internet technology but worked with me to achieve some really great things. The people I interacted with and worked with at CNET were of amazing caliber and I was always impressed by how knowledgeable and intelligent they were. I'm truly going to miss working there.

A good bye.

This is pretty well done. The 3D isn't the best ever, but the live action portion is much nicer than what you typically see.

Website: Metal Gear Solid: Philanthropy

Yeah, you need the DIVX plugin to watch it, but really, it's a whole lot better at streaming quality video. At least until Adobe makes their next release. Word of advice, once you install the plugin, uninstall the junk it leaves around. Bleg.

San Francisco's Mayor, Gavin Newsom, just announced his concrete intention to get gun shows banned from the Cow Palace. Gun shows are already banned on city and county land, but the CP is on state land, under which the gun shows are fine.

Newsom's reasoning for getting rid of the gun shows? I have no quotes from it, but the several articles I read state that he is "worried about illegal gun sales in the parking lot".

I'd like to tell you what a load of bullcrap that is. First off, I bought my first rifle at a gun show. I got a better price when I went to it, as happens at the events. But I was a long shot from walking out with it to sell. No my friend, you need to have all the right paper work, ID's, and permits signed and complete. Even after you give them your cash, you have to wait 10 days before they'll hand you the gun. So no, you don't go to a gun show, buy a gun, and walk out to resell it to "thugs" for 150% markup.

Realistically, why not post a few foot patrols in the parking lot. The gun show lasts half a day or so and 2 officers could probably keep the parking lot in lock down anway. I've been to the show -- ain't THAT big.

However, even if you are committing strawman sales, the gun's are all individually coded and can be traced back to you via the first legal sale. (Scratching off the serial numbers doesn't often work because a simple acid etching will reveal the number again anyway.) You lose a gun once, perhaps you really were careless. Two of your guns show up in crimes you best expect a very stern detective to be going over your entire life.

And Newsom is backed by one of our local D.A.'s, Kamala Harris, who goes as far as saying,

"There's an absolute, direct connection between [the] deaths [of citizens] and the sale of guns happening here at the Cow Palace." ref

Is there? Really? So you know how guns are getting from these legally licensed dealers into criminals hands? Good. Let's start putting those assholes in jail right along with the people they sold guns to illegally. That's a solution. Making me have to travel yet another 50 miles in order to purchase supplies for my rifle is ludicrous.

At least the majority of commenters on the SFGate article understand the issue, but how many other people really will?

BluePrint

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.

On the surface, this could save you some time and work -- that is, until you realize what a bad idea it is.

After you get past the basic "oh, neato" link hovering effects of CSS, you learn that its true power (and purpose) lies in its ability to separate the content and design layer. This "framework" undoes all of that careful crafting and smashes them right back together. Let me illustrate:

You have a 300 page website. Each page is a two column layout. You set it up with blueprint, span-4's, rights, and all those layout classes and get it worked out just right. Cool. 3 months later, you need to switch the column positions and change the sizes. Uh oh! Better get your find-n-replace skills out of the cupboard because it's now time to get find all those classes that define the width and floats and change them around. You end up editing 300 files and hating life. Nice.

How about, instead, you do what CSS is SUPPOSED to do and title those two columns for their CONTENT and not their PRESENTATION. Then you can edit a single CSS file, target the content layer, and change presentation quickly. Entire site change: 5 minutes. Hair saved: Entire scalp.

I will commend the Blueprint author for putting so much work into it -- this tool will certainly allow you to quickly setup a site, but it comes at the price of completely obliterating the entire point of CSS for which I could never recommend this tool.

I've been very on the fence about net neutrality for a while now, but I think I'm ending up on the "must have" side of things. I think I'm falling into that category because it is what makes the Internet great.

I read about a guys experience trying to remove himself -- completely -- from facebook. That was the boring part, instead the interesting part is why he wanted to do it. I've seen the motivation hinted at a few times here and there, and small ruminations of it coming back up.

In this world of Web 2.0 and large community "social networking" sites, it has become a very 'in-thing' to entrust your network, your photos, your stories, your communications, your e-life and large portions of your real life to these ginourmous, usually faceless entities. And they make it so easy: They're slick, they work, they're fast and fluid and they enable you to share with all your friends when you or they aren't tech savvy enough to setup your own websites with interlocking RSS feeds. However, this is not what the Internet is. This isn't what it was meant to be. The Internet is the end points, not the singular.

The greatest thing about the Internet is that you can hook a computer in and create your own territory. You needn't claim a piece of the pie, you can just bring your own picnic basket (and retain ownership and copyright of your food stuffs, to extend a metaphor too far.) The Internet grows outwards, not by grouping around a few single points. But that's what happens with social networks -- you totally integrate there. We're losing what the Internet is about by falling under one site or another's corporate, lawyered, and TOS'ed umbrella. You don't have freedom of speech there. You can't say what you want. Shoot, most of these places you give up exclusive republishing rights to your content for just about anything the host company wants.

This centralized system is the anti-Internet. AOL is no better than what Facebook or MySpace thrives to be -- the all-and-everything Internet stop for your browser. The real question is thus, how do you keep the heart of the internet beating, while still allowing people to congregate in ways that social networking sites so well facilitate -- or is having 500 friends really just superficial fluff?

While this decision has been brewing for a while, what really drew me to it today was an article about a senator from Alaska saying we should install Internet filters to protect the children. Always with the damn children...

Not only that, but if you think this is just something light and fluffy to argue about, check out this article on Ars about the companies selling DPI, Deep Packet Inspection devices today, and exactly how this plays into net neutrality.

I think of categories as a table of contents and tags as the index page of a book. If I'm searching for a broad topic, unsure of exactly what I need to find or the keywords, then I will hit the table of contents (categories). If I know the exact word I need in order to find the information I want, then I will hit the index page (tags).

- Lorelle on WordPress, Tags Are Not Categories - Got It?

A distinction I'd long had trouble grasping with myself.

While nothing has been heard back from Earthlink about the new changes to the SF WiFi plan, perhaps we can skip that year long environmental audit which spuriously claims that radio waves make you sick.