Over the past couple days, I have made a metric ton of changes to incorporeal.org and its services, many related to Apache and SSL. Notably, website access was probably a bit brittle over the past 24 hours. If anything seems out of the ordinary, please let me know.

In case you were wondering, yes, I broke https on my site for around 24 hours. It’s fixed now.

As I’m using Twitter more these days, I decided that the multiple tweets per day were probably making the front page here overly noisy. With that, I’ve temporarily removed it from the feed, updates will appear there no longer. If it turns out that you really did like them being there (or are pleased that they’re now gone), please, tell me and I’ll act accordingly.

After putting it off for a while, I’ve decided to start merging the emptymatter.org and incorporeal.org domains, so that they all share the same services. (This has mostly been working for a while now.) I think I’ve always preferred the incorporeal.org domain name, so this will let me start advertising that again, hopefully without breaking what people are used to.

It may be a rocky ride for a bit.

A month goes by and I barely even look at the blog. Madness. (If only; as is well-known by now, this kind of outage is nothing exceptional.)

At least this time I have an excuse (an excuse almost everyone realspace knows about by now, but for the benefit of those mystery readers, I shall explain).

Oh. I had a technical interview over the phone today for a job. I think it went fairly well.

— Me, a month ago

It turns out it did. On the 1st of June I had two in-person interviews at TDS Telecom in Madison, and on the 4th, I was given a job offer which I merrily accepted. So that’s it, all of a sudden, I’m working for the Man, and even worse, a telecom.

I kid, of course, it’s been a hell of a lot of fun so far, and it’s a really great environment with a bunch of bright people. TDS, in part an ISP (obviously, my gig is doing various software support and product development), is a very multi-headed beast, and it shows — in two weeks I’ve been bounced around to webmail, web portal, and DHCP server projects. It’s kind of amazing watching all the projects come together; even in my department, there are projects upon projects, a hydra with its heads going in all directions, yet it is obvious it is still one unit, with the body in control. Definitely a shift from the university work in the past. Every day there is another crisis, another problem that needs to be solved immediately, and the floor is almost always a miniature human beehive — people flying from cubicle to cubicle, engineer to engineer, angry buzzing made into phones while talking to uncooperative vendors, and always a sense of urgency.

So that’s been the working life. I’m two weeks in, and three weeks into the other big time consuming event: moving to Madison. As it turned out, both the Rutzes and the Schucks were moving into new homes and were welcoming roommates, and I went with the Schucks so as to stay out of the Rutzes’ married life hair. Maybe the Ultimate Gaming Table helped.

Yup. Here I am. New job, new city, new income, roommates, a couple new projects on the side. The blog had to suffer. Hopefully, it needn’t for much longer.

Other things on the calendar: I’m going to run a Star Wars: Saga Edition game soon, I’m going to see Tool on the 4th, and one of these weeks, we’ll finish that Ultimate Gaming Table.

And one last note, some crazy PHP accelerator module was loaded on my hosting and just activated by me, so you may see a more responsive incorporeal.org, and hopefully you will not see any problems.

Prodded by “When fighting spam becomes censorship”, a post by Jürgen Geuter (who has already done a bit of back and forth here), I removed the b2evolution blacklist, which was quite expansive, although it was only barely solving the problem.

Part of the motivation for removing the blacklist was that, embarrassingly, my blog would have been one that didn’t allow his comments; he only wasn’t aware of it when he posted because I had to remove an overzealous entry — yes, triggering on “gay” — before I could submit my post which started our communications. So as an in the wild example of exactly what he wrote of, honest communication being thwarted by automatons, I decided it was only prudent to correct the error and own up to it.

So with that out of the way, between the above post and this local comment, I thought I would do a quick and dirty usability test and see what people thought of the current captcha engine. I’ve included a sample image, this is what anonymous users would be expected to decipher:

To my eyes this is pretty good; it’s mostly clear which letters are those to enter in the field, and it uses colors, rotates, and shadows on TrueType text instead of some of the more obnoxious morphs seen on the ‘net. However, I’d be interested to know what other eyes think. I want something which defeats spam bots without getting in the way of humans — and I can certainly relate to the feeling of “I can’t make out WTF this captcha is supposed to be.”

I’ve also been looking into common sense questions, such as the one ciaranm uses. Their weakness is of course once a spammer has picked up on the question(s), they’re trivial to defeat, but the question is how likely is it that a spammer will care enough to tweak their botnet for little ol’ sites like ours?

Well, I finally caved and enabled captchas on anonymous comments and trackbacks. Actually, I snuck them in yesterday some time, and haven’t seen any spam since. I’m not a big fan of captchas, but they seem to be the nature of the beast on these Intertubes. Bots can easily access the backend functions, it seems, leading to such volume. Hopefully, no longer.

How it captchas trackbacks is actually somewhat clever, but perhaps a little prohibitive to anyone actually wanting to leave a trackback — a person enters their generated captcha and is given a trackback URL with a unique key which is valid long enough for most people to write their post and submit their trackback as usual. Invalid key in the URL, no trackback. Unfortunately annoying, but it should save me having to keep an eye on the site constantly, looking for a valid comment needle in the spam haystack.

At the moment, moderation is still necessary on comments and trackbacks, but if things last a week or so without any spam, I’ll probably disable it.

Fueled by a reminder that I never really liked the default theme for my blog, and that my theme of choice was only a stop-gap solution, I started work on a new theme, my first for b2evolution. I was originally going to make a CSS overhaul of one of the existing themes, but me being the tinkerer I am, I ended up rewriting most of the template too.

So, that’s up now. It’s the default, so visitors will see it immediately unless they previously set a preference, in which case they have to select the “bss” theme if they want to check it out. The theme itself goes back to a very sane, very barebones layout that is fairly light on the CSS styling, and doesn’t drag in any additional images. I’m hoping it will be more palatable for those people who just want a low-frills presentation of the data. And for the crazy types, “basic” still exists.

In other news, and since it’s getting some chatter on Planet Larry, I installed Paludis last night on my desktop, and it’s been pretty pleasant so far. The migration guide is straightforward, and when making large leaps into new software, good documentation is critical (just look at the installation docs for Gentoo, which practically hold your hand through the process). It’s a very comforting thing when documentation tells you up front what to expect, and what should work at what point in time. And Paludis’ status/warning/error messages are helpful, instead of being totally meaningless like half of Portage’s faults.

So without throwing into the back and forth going on PL, I was half expecting to have to wrangle everything back to a working state (perhaps years of breaks have made me cynical), but so far it’s been smooth sailing. I’ll obviously have to play with it more, but I think I might eventually switch on a couple other boxes, such as the VIA where Portage can be dog slow.

Woo, excuse for posting an entry. Bluehost is upgrading their tubes, which is good, because it looks like it’ll decrease some of the extra-long response times we’ve been getting on very rare occasion. In any event, pings are down, and that’s always a happy thing. The IP changes shouldn’t need to propagate the entire Internet, so this should have absolutely zero influence on your browsing; in fact, you’re probably already on the new IP and everything is hunky dorey.

I swear. The next version of my website is going to be a series of text files. In updating the d20 experience calculator (thanks Pants, despite the headache the comment caused), I have assembled a list of gripes, complaints, and pleas regarding our friend the HTML specification, and more pressingly, Internet Explorer’s horrible implementation of supporting it.

Internet Explorer just makes it worse. Oh, so vividly worse. Do I have to come to people’s houses and poke them in the eye until they start using Firefox?

Gripe #1: Whitespace in the DOM

In a general “this is stupid” complaint, I’ve learned over the past couple days, in working with the JavaScript behind the calculator, whitespace in the markup creates text children in the DOM tree. The DOM is a critical part of any sort of interaction with the HTML page, and manipulating elements (and their children) breaks in annoyingly stupid ways if you have whitespace in the HTML file itself.

As a quick and dirty example:

<div id="out"><div id="in"></div></div>

The “out” div has one child — “in". However, in…

<div id="out">
<div id="in">
</div>
</div>

“in” has three children — text (the first whitespace between <div id="out"> and <div id="in">), the “in” div, and more text (the remaining whitespace between </div> and </div>).

This is so amazingly stupid. Of course, the problem can be avoided by writing all your HTML sensitive to this problem, without whitespace, or by employing some JavaScript hacks to work around the problem, but why can’t things be sane and promote readable HTML markup?

Gripe #2: IE’s Crippled DOM

When working with JavaScript, you can check the object type (say, to determine if it is text, or a div node) with a simple line of code. For our example above, if we are looking at “out"’s children and trying to do something with all HTML elements (not text), we could traverse the list of children and make this check:

if (children[i].nodeType == Node.ELEMENT_NODE)
…

…unless, of course, the code is meant to be executed in Internet Explorer. IE doesn’t understand Node and thus bails, leaving the entirety of the code unexecuted.

Gripe #3: IE and <script>

Just another of many complaints from a day of poking around in Internet Explorer: The HTML specification, and indeed, IE itself, allow specifying a HTML tag without children or contained text in the following manner:

<img src="..." />

Unless, of course, the tag is script. When IE sees, say,

<script type="text/javascript" src="..." />,

it bails, entirely, and totally gives up rendering the rest of the page. Even the parts unrelated to the JavaScript are ignored. IE stops all rendering due to a supported tag that is specified in a manner supported perfectly fine in other situations by IE. A+. (This is the problem that Pants uncovered. The calculator page was blank, aside from the background image, in IE.)

Gripe #4: IE’s awful CSS support.

Internet Explorer 7 still doesn’t support display: table. So here’s the kicker, and the end of my rant: although the d20 calculator is “fixed", if you’re using IE, you are intentionally wanting it to look like crap. I can’t put it any other way. There are alternatives. Better alternatives. I’ve worked around IE’s stupidity so many times over my many years, but on this point, I’ve had it.

I welcome clean HTML/CSS submissions that render that page correctly in IE, but otherwise, if you don’t want the d20 experience calculator to display in one giant column, use any of the other popular browsers. They all get it right.