Below are the most recent 15 friends' journal entries.

Friday, November 21st, 2008
ashenmote	2:55p	The 'German Joys' guy translated more Max Goldt texts into English. This is one that I have as an audio file and played 290 times, says Itunes. Never mind that I was probably sound asleep most of the time, that's still a proud number. At any rate, I like it, and it's the right time of the year for it too. The translation is maybe a bit clumsy in parts (I even think it's missing a sentence), but it's still better than anything I could do. On the Magic of Walking Past Sideways (Vom Zauber des seitlich daran Vorbeigehens) I'm gone for the weekend, catsitting. Take care and stuff. Current Mood: busy (Comment on this)
chaimonkey	3:57a	twilight review! Well, I rather liked it. Though I'm sure it helped that we had Tonks in the row in front of us - she was awesome. ( Do these really count as spoilers? ) Current Mood: sparkley (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 20th, 2008
system	4:46p	S2 Layout Issues Hi, Guys. I know a good many of the S2 themes are kinda hosed right now. Something changed with the LJ migration to their new data center. The Bloggish and Style Contest themes have their CSS hosted at LJ. That's by LJ's design, with how the code is distributed. The code is set to use LJ's CSS proxy to handle the access and display of the CSS settings. Since LJ's move, though, the CSS proxy has been kaput. But the CSS itself at LJ is still working. Until we can find a way around all this, a couple users have a way that you can use the Custom CSS in your customization area to get your layouts pretty damn close to the original for that layout and theme. You'll enter two sets of code in that area. The first one would be the code from this URL: http://stat.livejournal.com/sixhtml/themes/common/base-weblog.css Just go there, copy it, and paste into the custom CSS box. And the second set you enter will be from the direct CSS URL for your specific theme. You can locate this URL by viewing the source of your journal in your browser (View Source code). If you scroll down to the <link rel="stylesheet" section of the source code, you'll see the direct url to your theme's CSS at livejournal. Go there, copy that code, and paste it after the base-weblog.css code above. Make sure you have "No" selected to use the included base code (it's a dropdown), and that the URL field above the custom CSS box is empty. Click to save changes, and your theme will display much as it is supposed to. There is occasionally an element like a border that doesn't come through, but it's pretty close. As an example of the CSS URLs, this is the one for the Baby theme for the Bloggish layout: http://stat.livejournal.com/sixhtml/themes/lilia/theme-baby.css The CSS URLS will be start with http://stat.livejournal.com/sixhtml with the rest varying by theme and layout. I'll still be looking for an alternative to having to futz with custom CSS, but in the meantime, that method of applying the CSS will get your Bloggish and Style Contest journal themes put back together pretty well. Thanks, Robin
loqia	6:49p	fin. Okay. So JournalPress isn't yet finished but every migration has to be taken in steps, and as an incentive to get me to hurry the fuck along I'm officially declaring this my final post here at the sk.log version of void-star.net. All future posts (and, actually, yesterday's as well) will now go via β. Change is always painful, so those of you who read this via RSS may wish to point to the new feed instead (though it will be "temporary" until the full migration). Those of you who read this via LJ, IJ or JF won't be getting any direct cross-posts for a while, but will instead be receiving updates via Twitter posts (you know, that crap y'all ignore). Comments may, of course, still go on the respective journal entries. And for those of you who just land here randomly, or still live in 2001 and access this site via static links (yeah, I'm looking at you)… well, you'll be seeing an awful lot of this same post. But that's nothing new, right? The actual full site migration is still scheduled for some time in the new year (and yes, all you Ulfrun detractors, it'll even have a new layout, and I'm sure you're all breathless in anticipation), so in the meantime you'll just have to deal with the mess. Which is actually a pretty relevant metaphor for life, really. Hey, maybe I can put up a long, ranty splash page about what I'm doing instead of just leaving this message up. With a progress bar! That's cool nowadays, right? I'm so hipnhappenin! Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original. (Comment on this)
sepiamagpie	1:39a	GUYS GUYS GUYS I've always been jealous of Bernie and his 'bear' friends so I made myself a bear character in city of heroes after being inspired by this other guy and his called Psioni Cub and it's totally cool. Meet... ( Xuan Xuan. She's a bear! A panda bear! ) I think she looks a lot more bear-y than those guys bears. They all just look like big hairy men, they don't even use the teddy bear ears. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 17th, 2008
sepiamagpie	11:08p	More from 2004. It's almost like I'm making sure these are in a nice safe place for future rp purposes. ( 50 Alek Wek icons ) (Comment on this)
sepiamagpie	11:06p	( Just some Johnny Depp in Sleepy Hollow icons I made years ago (four years? Five?) for later reference ) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008
loqia	8:03a	Mage: The Awakening Stolen from severedscythe. Because memes are cool. Go to your bookshelf and take the 6 in from the left. Post the title of the book in your subject bar. Go to page 136, the 3rd paragraph, 3rd sentence and post it here. Since it didn't specify which shelf on which bookshelf… Occasionally, the business of discovering the knowledge of the ancients is better pursued under cover of darkness than with a lantern proudly outstretched to dispel the shadows of ignorance. Fun fax I learnt yesterday; vs.hive does not work on IIS. Well. There you go. Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original. (Comment on this)
Monday, November 17th, 2008
apoplexia	4:07p	Crossover Madness! If you're one of the legions of disenchanted Heroes fans, I have a suggestion that I think will make the show more watchable: simply imagine that the Petrellis are in fact the Bluths. Let's face it, the mother had more than a touch of the Gangys to begin with. And once you start repeating all of Sylar's lines as if he was G(abriel).O.B., you'll find that the show is a lot funnier. (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 16th, 2008
sepiamagpie	10:39p	Oooh. I like this meme. THIS IS MY ONLY BOOK ICON 1. Grab the nearest book. 2. Open the book to page 56. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the text of the next seven sentences in your journal along with these instructions. 5. Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST. "You tell wonderful stories. You can do all the voices and make it exciting and then funny..." Mo crossed his arms over his chest as if hiding behind them. "You could read me Tom Sawyer," suggested Meggie, "or How The Rhinoceros Got His Skin." That was one of Mo's favourite stories. When she was smaller they sometimes played at having crumbs in their clothes, like the crumbs in the rhino's skin. "Yes, an excellent story," murmured Mo, turning his back to her again. Inkheart, by Cornelia Funke, found under a pile of dvds beside my foot. I thought I was going to have to figure out how to do a Schlock Mercenary collection which was on a hatbox about four feet away. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
loqia	3:07p	Swarmed! Check it out! I've got my first fanlisting. Well, okay. It's actually not a fanlisting for me, per se; it's for vs.hive, and it's run by the lovely echo. I'm still totally buzzing over the fact that someone actually thought something I did was good enough to open a fanlisting for, so excuse me while I go squee in the corner for a while. In other news, void-star.net β is up. It's the "second phase" testing platform for the WordPress transition here at v-s.net. At the moment, the plan is to continue to develop JournalPress locally. β is for "live testing", as well as for slowly migrating my posting habits, so I can get used to WordPress' feature-set (I'm typing this at β, for example, and will manually cross-post it later). β also interfaces with my iPhone, so I'll start to get a bunch of "look what I found on the road" type posts. When JournalPress has reached a release state (probably sometime in early 2009), I'll archive the sk.log version of void-star.net, stick up the new WP version and get started on work on the post security plug-in. I figure all that should keep me busy into the new year. Awesome. Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original. Current Music: The Verve, "Love is Noise" (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 13th, 2008
sepiamagpie	9:52p	I KEEP TRYING to remember to tell you guys about what new wacky signs the church by my sister's house has put up. When we last saw them, they were making me worry about having to fight off zombie Jesus as the snow came down. Their delightful halloween sign was this: NO MASK CAN HIDE YOUR SINS FROM GOD Just FYI, I guess. ps: I may have had a 'moment' in regards to mcity. (39 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 10th, 2008
loqia	8:25p	End Year's Resolution (Part I) Sometimes, people out there ask me a question about void-star.net, and I have to give them the following answer; "The CMS made me do it." Hi there, my name's Dee and – at the time of writing, at least – I'm one of the last blogs on Earth that doesn't use WordPress. It's not my fault, honestly. When I started this site – way back in 2001 when it was called synthetickiss.com – WordPress did not exist. Hell, b2 didn't either. PHP, at that time, was a fairly new language and it'd only just started creeping hand-in-hand with its platonic life partner, MySQL, into the web sphere. I knew about the language because it was what Scot had picked to write the revision of grep with, and I figured that if a language was good enough for Scot then it must be A++ awesome. At the time, the idea of using a database-driven engine for a blog was kind of novel. Most everyone at the time used Blogger, which was a very different beast than today. Essentially, you'd give the service your FTP details, and it would push out flat-text files for your posts and archive. Crazes of SSI and PHP includes came around and went, all attempting to add flexibility into what was essentially an inflexible system. The only other system available at the time was a Perl CGI script that I swear was called Greymatter but references to which I can no longer find on the Intrawebs. There was no PHP/MySQL solution. So, in the latter half of 2001, I decided to write one. It was called sk.log; the "sk" in honour of the acronym for my site at the time. I'd originally intended to release it publicly – and even did, for a while – but the development of b2 started shortly after I was mired in my own script, and rocketed to healthy popularity. I stuck with sk.log for the next seven years. Despite its flaws – and there were many – and despite its complete and utter lack of anything even resembling an admin panel, I'd written it and, as such, it was idiosyncratically mine. A while ago, I made a list. Kinda of like New Year's Resolutions, I guess, except it was, like, September. The list contained two things: Join a gym. Migrate v-s.net to WordPress. I looked at my list for all of about a day, before chucking the whole thing into the "too hard" basket. Except… I did end up joining a gym. And I've been going, on average, five times a week for the last three weeks. So that just leaves on thing left to do… Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original. Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 8th, 2008
sepiamagpie	2:22p	The purchase of Pinwheel. Watch as he frantically scrambles to Hobble, ensconced in Doc's arms. I ended up being dropped off at a coffee shop on my way home instead of well, at my house so I made do with the fact I was weighed down by about three little bears. Hobble, Mason, and Pinwheel enjoy their expresso cups which are filled with imagination by a very entertained barista. After they arrived home, all but Mason promptly joined the Teddy Bear Mafia. Mason still believes in justice, poor little furry bastard. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
loqia	1:16p	Dee vs. the Sploggers Wow, okay. Some of you may be aware that a while ago I decided it would be fun to register a domain called Azeroth .ME. It's a WPMU site, specifically created to host my own WarGirl blog so I could write long, tedious posts about World of Warcraft without it upsetting some of my friends who have some (understandable) issues with the game and really don't want to hear about it. Plus, I just like the idea of MU. Anyway, about two or three days ago I started to get my first splog signups. This is not unexpected; they hit MU installs pretty hard, and I know this from past experience. No fear, says I, and I went off to impliment the usual round of things I do when things start getting spammy. That was about 9:30am this morning, after a few days of manually deleting the blogs got old. Noon rolls around and I'm still trying to stop the flood. Nothing is working, and I mean nothing. Step one, Project Honepot. No dice, which, okay, maybe the IPs just aren't in their database yet. All the signups are coming from .info domains, and after some Googling, I find out that theoretically you should be able to block those by adding /.*.info/ into the Banned Email Domains list. Still no luck. I'm starting to get a bit… concerned. I went through no less than two different CAPTCHA plug-ins, with no luck. Grr. Dee angry! Step back, try and think laterally. It's time to do the nasty, and start messing about in MU's code. I don't like doing this in WordPress – since all my hard work will get blown away on the next update – but I'm kinda desperate here, so… I locate is_email_address_unsafe() in wpmu-functions.php; this is the place the Banned Email Domains list is actually implimented, and I throw in the simplest, nastiest, anti-.info domain hack I can think of: if( stripos( $user_email, '.info' ) )   return true; Yuck. But, I test it out and lo and behold, it does actually prevent me from registering at the site with a fake .info email address. Oh. Kay. Good work, I think. Go off to brush my teeth, come back. More splogs. And here's where I start to get a bit… distressed (well, moreso). Because Something Isn't Right Here. This is a function I know is being called and it's still failing to stop these registrations. That's… not good. Not good at all. So I poke around in the code a bit more, and add my anti-.info snippet in a whole bunch of other locations, just to see. And, for good measure, I rename wp-signup.php. That was a while ago, and so far, so good. I've received two new user notifications but they haven't had any information included and no actual new users or blogs have appeared, which is good, and I can still register manually myself, so that's good too. My non-existant wp-signup.php page is getting hammered, so the sploggers are still trying, but for the moment it looks like they're beaten. But it was way, way, way too hard. The CAPTCHA and the regexp on the email validation should've caught them. The fact that neither did… Jesus, it kinda indicates that there's some back-door user registration process and that's a real worry. The last MU update was supposed to be a security patch, but it looks like whatever they tried, it didn't work. Hrm. And, in related news, lol. Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original. Current Mood: angry (Comment on this)