Like for online casinos. But no more.

However, "people" will still be able to add comments with no problem. It's sort of a "CAPTCHA" (search google for "Turing Test") design, but without the images. My site's not big enough to make actual "people"'s lives a pain, so this will just get rid of the most low tech comment bots.

I've been playing with the idea, as simple as it is, for a while now, trying to figure out if there's a better way to determine if the "thing" posting a comment on my site is actually a "person", and not a bot. I'm sure this method will be hacked, and I'm sure I'll have to write some more complex solution, but for right now, it'll get rid of them. Unless they already have that work around. We'll see. Great thing about them being "bots" is that I could even post the code and they'd have no idea :P

And the ultra-super-best thing about it is it doesn't reveal itself as an error. There won't be any error message, it'll just say "OMG GREAT COMMENTZ!!"! and go to the home page, so if the bot doesn't verify that the comment has actually been posted, the author of the bot will have no idea, and be like "w00t, more free advertising of my uber awesome casino site... man, that jasontconnell is such a sucker."

Just plug in /atom.xml into your feed reader. I'm not sure what version it is (versioning apparently got out of control since the 0.3 version of last year), but it should be "1.0". Maybe. If your feed reader doesn't read Atom, then throw it away and get a new one, because it's w3 baby.

I feel like Beavis and Butthead. That time when there's nothing on TV until many hours later, and they have to find stuff to do to kill the time. "Hey Butthead, I think I have to throw up..." "Cool, that should like, take some time."

I've been working out, playing video games, watching more comedy, playing guitar, etc. I'm running out of stuff to do. I could get in my car and drive around, but that costs gas, e.g. money. I could play more guitar but my finger's about to fall off. I could hit golf balls out front, but that could cost lots of money. I'm golfing tomorrow with my Dad, that should be fun. We're going to Paxon Hollow where I once shot a 41. Err, on the back nine. I had like 4 birdies in a row. Missed 2 putts on 18, else I would have shot 39. Motherf@#$@#$@#. Til tomorrow.

I woke up today and felt like death due to the fact that I've smoked like 4 packs of cigarettes in 2 days. And I hadn't worked out since Monday. I had to work out, it expands my lung capacity if something like that happens. And I have to find something else to do besides sit and drink coffee and smoke.

I could watch TV, but that's boring. I've already seen the first 4 "SportsRise"'s and "SportsCenter"'s on Comcast and ESPN respectively. I have "Syriana" and both times I've watched it, I paused it to go to the bathroom or something, and never got back to watching it. So, as it stands, that movie makes no sense to me. I guess I should see the end eventually. Not today though, I have the attention span of a goldfish. I might work out again, that's about the only beneficial thing I can do, besides program more, but see my note on my temporary ADD in the previous sentence about why that's impossible.

Guitar's fun though. I've been playing more Jimi, learning how he does some stuff that makes his songs sound like no others. I like his Blues album best. I love "Once I had a Woman", and "Bleeding Heart", and "Born Under a Bad Sign". When I first heard them, I had a sliver of an idea of the notes he was playing, but now as I play more and try to immitate, it's becoming more clear. He's just a genius.

Video games are frustrating right now. They're much better enjoyed after a long day of work.

I laugh at the titles of the messages that land in spam in my gmail account.

I'm gonna take a shower.

[Update] It's weird. I got the job WOOHOO!!! But the weird thing.. I'll explain later. Gotta go fill out paperwork and stuff.

First, here's the problem:

When you "subfilter" labels, all of them are returned and there's like a thousand of them.

Second, here's the solution:



And check out all this DOM scripting to accomplish that!

This is different from the last one. I went through, for about 4 hours, painstakingly labeling each and every picture. It led me to a few conclusions:

1.) I take too many damn pictures of the same thing. I guess taking them isn't bad, but I don't have to upload 40 pictures of the Phillies game I went to a year ago. Then every picture gets the same labels "philadelphia, sports, phillies". It was very boring doing that.

2.) There has to be an easier way to label stuff.

3.) Labeling stuff sucks. I'm glad I'm done.

Also, I went ahead and got rid of download categories and replaced them with labels.

Labels are a centralized thing. If I create a label called "ducks" for example (there are pictures under that label!), then that label will show up as a choice for downloads and for pictures (and later news), whether or not there are downloads labeled "ducks" or pictures labeled "ducks". When you search the filter in downloads for labels like "duck" then "ducks" will show up. This will lead me to develop something cool in the future. Like, search a label and list anything that has that label, whether it's a download or a picture or an X or a Y. It will be pluggable.

If you want to see how I input labels, search pictures for the label "labels". Also you can search for "java" and "dev". Those two will give you a bunch, whereas "labels" will give you the four screens I took of "dumb web" and how it handles labels.

I decided to make everything have labels, and pictures are the first to be converted. There's more work to be done, but use the filter for most of your label needs. In fact, with the filter, there's really no more work to be done... I don't know, I'll probably think of something. So, now I have to go and add labels to all of my pictures... 226 of them.

But it took about a day to get the labels up, only because my data list that shows the pictures always goes back to the first record after I save a picture. It's pageable, and the first page was easy :) But after that, it goes back to the first page, so I have to keep track of what page the picture was on that I just added labels to. So I had to fix that. Now it'll keep go back to the last page you were on. That makes life easier. But isn't that what software development is supposed to do?

I've been hacking away at this site and my shared stuff (dumb, dumbweb, filter, etc, etc, etc) that I use on all my websites ever since I told my work that I won't be coming in anymore. Well, I actually just turned down the position offered to me, which was to do with VBScript, which I can't do. Not because I don't know it... it would just be a huge change in how I think when I program. If a language doesn't support standard object oriented features, then I'm f@#%@ed. I have a hammer and everything looks like a nail.

The other day I went to a User group meeting for Philly on Rails. I don't use rails or ruby, but I might start soon. Zatko said he'll play Dawn of War with me if I learn ruby and rails, so I have to since that's the best game ever, and I haven't played multiplayer yet. Actually, we have to play first then I'll learn Ruby. Jared went too. We were the bomb.

First, notice the "Possible count" on the bottom right.

Then filter by this text exactly : Cigarettes and Carrot Juice

Then notice what it says. Cool huh?

Then, notice the help icon! I know they don't look great, I'm a n00b when it comes to CSS and DHTML. Plus, I hate Internet Explorer because I use the w3.org specs and they never work on IE. So, if you use IE, there's no support. Download a real browser.

But you're not a real programmer if you don't support IE!!

I'm a lazy programmer, as I've said many, many times. It might work... I did some standard checks, but haven't tested it. I'm on Linux and a Mac. No IE.

So that's it. I could go on explaining what I did but I'm not terribly proud of the count stuff. I did it and couldn't help but think I hacked it together. It's just not beautiful yet.

Also, you've probably noticed the news categories on the left of the main page are gone

(<---- psst... over there)

This is due to the filter destroying this page and taking up all the landscape, and no need to list categories anymore since you can just filter by them, and Todd wanted to know when I replied to his comment in "The end of the world".

So, now my website seems VERY busy. I want to add more crap...

I started to reply to Todd, then had to go to work, saved the text in a file on my MacMini, went to work, came home a few hours later, then the Phillies were playing the Yankees and our fearless genius leader, Charlie Manuel, had set the lineup so Abreu and Howard were sitting and Chase Utley was playing first... it was something I had to see... they won!! Amazing. I was being sarcastic about Charlie being a genius. Oh, and I watched game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals, and was cheering for Edmonton so that probably doomed them, since Carolina won the Stanley Cup, those b@#tards. So, I had to work on that stuff after those games. Now it's like 2am and I have to go to bed. So, probably tomorrow Todd :)

Out of curiosity, due to the fact that when my web game comes out, it will require probably tons of disk space, I checked the amount of space left on my hard drive on this server. It's an 80 GB drive. There are a few websites on it, and one with lots of images, and this one has lots of images, and there is a lot of data in my databases, and of course Linux and software like Java, Tomcat, GNU tools, etc, etc, etc. Lots of stuff. There are three partitions, and one's not a file system (maybe it's a backup?). Here's what the "df" command in Linux returns. I was like "SWEET!"

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2             75790304   4175216  67765112   6% /
/dev/hda1               101089      9324     86546  10% /boot
none                    252864         0    252864   0% /dev/shm

So far I am 0% done my web game. This is as of Friday night at 10:20 (or as my Linux box shows the time, 22:20). So far, I have two documents written on it though. One is a functional specification. The other is a technical specification. Working in the software world, you learn to depend on these two documents. Here is what they are:

Functional Spec: (Sometimes refered to as the f@#%ing spec... by me only apparently. Commonly refered to as the Design Document) This document gives an overview of the various use cases of the software. During the functional spec, you lay out that this is indeed a software solution to an otherwise real world problem. Say you are designing an email program. You will say that the user will be able to send and receive emails, using at least one server. They will be able to view the entire contents of emails, and have a hierarchy of folders to hold archived emails. They will be able to flag emails by importance. The solution should filter spam automatically, determined by a number of factors, some of them user specified.

Now, a technical spec, on the other hand, takes the functional spec and builds out, in detail (as much detail as you can before you start writing actual code in an [in this case] OpenDocument text document), each high level feature of the functional spec, and defines exactly how each feature will interact with other features. This makes it simple to write software. If you hand me a functional spec and a tech spec, and say "Get to work, you lazy bearded b@#%^@", I will reply with "Yes, Sir, may I have another?!?" As you can see, these are highly desireable in the field of software design and development.

Note also, that when "speccing" (actual word in IT) out a set of "Design Documents" (you can also refer to the whole set as "Design Documents", as well as just the functional spec... Software is flexible like that, and everyone knows what you mean by the singular form, and that you mean the group in the plural form)... where the f*@#! was I? Too many parentheses. Oh right. When speccing out design documents for your own, home brewed project, it is a much more enjoyable scenario. Like, I can be going through and say "You know what... f@%! that feature, no one will use it and they'll all probably send hate mail to me if I include it", whereas in work, you have to do it because it was predetermined that we don't care about customers enough to make them happy, therefore the feature must stay. Also what makes home project docs more enjoyable is that it's your s@#%. You get full credit, people worship you, girls send you pictures of themselves in bikinis, guys question their sexuality, etc. It's just cool.

Anyway, I have to get back to work. It's speccing out to be much more complex and detailed than what I first imagined, however, I'm speccin' I won't go past my two week estimate. (O Brother, Where Art Thou shout-out : "I'm speccin' you'll be wantin' them chains knocked off". Great movie).

My web game. I'm becoming increasingly sick of the internet and it's "nothing fun to do for a 5 minute window of time to waste". I was looking for something to easily scan images in that I create on paper, but the only thing I can find got bad reviews. It was a "pen scanner", literally 8.5 inches wide and about 1/2 inch thick, and you roll it on paper to scan it, but people were saying how the quality was diminished. I do have a flatbed scanner, but it's a POS. Basically, I wanted to make the site look professional, since I can't draw with a mouse. I used to draw as a kid, and was pretty good at copying images from, say, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trading card, and scaling it up to fit onto a standard art pad (10x14 i think). I would color it in and show it off. One time I drew a picture of Homer Simpson and said to my oldest brother, "Want to see a picture I drew of Homer?" He said sure, so I showed him, and he was like "Man, I was expecting something pretty bad but that looks just like him!" I also did pictures from Marvel comics like Wolverine and the Fantastic Four. They were fun. Point is, I used to be able to draw, and remember enjoying it a bit, and think I can still do it with the right equipment. Like this picture I drew in work at my last job:

Pretty f@#%@ing sweet, huh?!? Anyway, I'm going to just program the site this weekend during times of soberness (Three day weekend!!!), see how far I get, then do some art for it later. It'll be fun, and like the original post says, there's nothing like it out there.

I just got through a round of updates. Now it's much awesomer than it was before. For instance, blah blah blah something internal that you won't see, and on top of that blah blah blah more geeky stuff blah blah, and not to mention blah blah my night was incredibly boring.

But honestly, I made a bunch of fixes and changes, and have a bunch more to do. Then this site will RULE. Or at least the software will.

And I HAVE to fix that system clock so posts that I make at 10:45 on May 10th don't get listed as May 11th by default. I can modify the date value on the News item through the website now, sorta.... only the date since that's how it's configured. Damn... what good is awesome software if you don't use it to its fullest capacity?!

Don't click on the news subjects on the left. I forgot to update that when I did the huge site update. I didn't test that either since testing is for losers. And I haven't been home for like 3 days... well, I have but yesterday I watched the Phillies game. They won 9 straight. Longest streak in baseball this year. The age old question is whether this train will stay on its tracks or will explode in a spectacular derailment. Stay tuned.

[Update] Site's fixed. My new "dumb" doesn't require a link object and my old site code was trying to use the link object, resulting in an invalid cast. English: It was f@#%@ed up but now it's fine.

This website was version 2.0 when it first came out. While nothing has changed about what you see, there's a whole buttload of new stuff that I get to use to make it easier... not necessarily easier to add data to the page (like for existing things like News and Polls, etc), but easier to add new stuff to the page. If I wanted to add a forum, for instance. Or, create my attachments thing. Or other stuff that I had in mind.

The software will need more updating now that I see it with a lot of data on the page. My news list is 19 pages long. What's good about that is that I'm now paging the data, and wasn't before. But what's bad about that is it's sorting in the wrong way!! I see the very first news I posted first.

I do get a lot of added functionality though. Due to a constantly increasing level of laziness, I never had functionality for things like viewing all the comments in News, or deleting them. I would log into my server, start up "MySQL", and find the comment that was anti-JTC and either edit it to make it pro-JTC, or just delete it due to that laziness factor mentioned earlier. Now, I have all that functionality, and more to come in the future as I whip together some more XML files. It's so easy, and if you go to stringed.org, you can see the software by logging in with username = demo and password = demo123. I just configured it for my data on this site, and it's all I need. It's awesome.

So look for more updates since updating this site in the immediate future will be as easy as falling asleep in a long meeting after lunch.

I'm upgrading this site to use the software found behind stringed.org. Who knows what'll happen after that. I might even get around to fixing the poll bugs and possibly change the site to resemble something awesome. I have ideas.

I'm still looking for a house. It's fun, since Mara is my Real Estate Agent! We're like the coolest people in the world, and here we get to go together and look at houses! Billy doesn't come with us, or else it'd be like cool overload for anyone in our path.

I've recently been linked by some websites out there. One is at the Philadelphia newspaper, the Inquirer. Dan Rubin is a writer there, and has a "blog", and was "anonymously" tipped about an article here. The post that links it is here.

Also, one of my videos on here, which I uploaded to MySpace, was linked. Actually, they linked it from MySpace. But it's linked on a guitar learning site, here. So that's cool.

Megan has linked me for like months and I haven't returned the favor. I know, I'm horrible. Head on over to read a bunch of funny stuff and drop her a line.

And, I just got asked to go to Berkeley for work, but it's optional. Either this month or next. Should I go??!