moeffju.net

Top Web sites visited by US teenagers on IT Facts explains why deviantART is the way it is.

It’s official, my computer is le dead, kaputt,
broken. That means, of course, that my productivity has gone through
the floor, as I am stuck with my old, slow, 256MiB-of-RAM laptop, which
also features a full hard disk (well, with only 20GiB to start with…).

The cause of the troubles, I suspect, is the mainboard. I had defect
RAM before, but I just don’t believe that RAM is burning out every few
weeks. Also, the IDE bus is behaving erratically, and random
bluescreens are the order of the day. When I tried to install a fresh
Windows on a new harddisk, hell broke lose, and well, here I am,
posting from aforementioned laptop.

So, don’t expect any new hacks, user scripts, photos or the likes in
the next weeks, until I can get my hands on a real machine again.
Donations are welcome, but not tax-deductible – feel free to transfer
funds to paypal@moeffju.de.

PS: I lost some data in the crash. It’s a good thing to have backups
– of the wrong disk. Or, asking Murphy, why is the harddisk that
crashes never the one you just backed up? Please mourn for my data.

You probably know GreaseMonkey,
the user-script and power-to-the-people extension for Firefox. Now the
power to change comes to that other browser, too: Enter GreaseMonkIE.

Many scripts work, except for those that use Firefox-specific code,
and some using XPath. In general, it’s far less comfortable to use
GreaseMonkIE – then again, using IE is less comfortable already, so
people might have gotten used to it.

GreaseMonkIE requires the .NET framework.

Update – GreaseMonkIE is no more.

schuehsch schreibt von der Kleingeldprinzessin. Und die Kleingeldprinzessin sollte man auf jeden Fall mal gehört haben.

Die Kleingeldprinzessin ist eine Berliner Straßenmusikerin. Zusammen
mit den Stadtpiraten spielt sie in verschiedenen Clubs und hat auch
bereits drei CDs veröffentlicht (die man auf ihrer Seite direkt
bestellen kann – falls jemand aufstrebende, unabhängige Qualitätsmusik
unterstützen möchte). Und alles andere steht bei schuehsch.

To improve your deviantART browsing experience, have a look at the JavaScript hacks.
There’s one to toggle all deviations by one deviant in the message center (subscribers only), and one
that adds the deviation thumbnail next to the comment box, but more are to come.

This is an update to deviantART.com, the sane way.

To sanitize the layout of deviantART.com, put this in your user stylesheet
(userContent.css in Mozilla/Firefox, use the ChromEdit extension).

/* deviantART: sanitize layout */
body#deviantART { padding: 2px 4px !important; margin: 0 !important; }
body#deviantART div#head h1 { margin-top: -60px !important; }
/* Remove ads */
body#deviantART div#sponsors { display: none; }
/* Move Journal / Settings / Profile links and Search box */
body#deviantART div#deviosity {
    position: absolute !important;
    top: 5px !important;
    left: 150px !important;
}
body#deviantART form#devart-search {
  position: absolute !important;
  top: -20px !important;
  right: 0px !important;
}
/* Remove Christmas bar */
body#deviantART div#bar-countdown { display: none !important; }

So, 2004 is almost over. Let’s see…

World War III did not happen as predicted, but then again, neither did
it in 1998, 1999, 2001, 2002 or 2003. Dear prophets: Please shut the
fuck up in 2005.

In other news, homeopathy still doesn’t work, but maybe the water will
change in 2005. Dear homeopaths: Please shut the fuck up in 2005.

Sorry to break it to you, but astrology is a scam. However, the stars
look good for 2005. Dear astrologers: Please shut the fuck up in 2005.

We’ve had our fair share of scandals and immoral behaviour, be it the
War in Iraq, Food for Oil, Ukraine, Russia, or simply all the people
still dying in Africa, be it from hunger, landmines, or AIDS. Dear
World Leaders, dear Pope: Please help innocent people instead of
killing them, for a change, in 2005.

People are still as careless as ever, and that’s just because I don’t
want to call them all stupid. Oops. Dear general populace: Think, and
check your conscience before you speak, drive, accept money, give
money, shoot people, sue people, buy Snake Oil, promote scams, lie or
betray. It’s quite easy, you don’t even need religion for that. Ethics
not included.

There’s hope. There always is.

Everyone can be strong. Really.

Everyone please love each other. In which ways is up to your interpretation.

Buy My Prints
because they make great gifts for your loved ones, and give me money to
buy gifts for my loved ones. Next year. Or maybe just booze and
hookers, this year. You didn’t hear that.

Thanks to my watchers and everyone who commented or faved. I haven’t
been very motivated to reply lately, but I can change, I can change!

Call to all deviants: Report miscategorized deviations and plain crap.
Photojournalism will be grateful, and so will the devMeet, deviantID,
and the rest of the smaller galleries. Give the gallery admins a hand.

dAmnhack has become quiet, but I have something up my sleeve. If I gave you details, I would have to kill you. However, Bringa has something that might give you a clue.

Also, dAmnhack might bring some nifty dAmn integration to various IM clients in a while. However, we should give mccann some breathing room between fulfilling his CTO duties and jumping at
him with new hacks. If you feel like being in the holiday spirit, you
can send him a note to tell him he’s doing a good job. Even if you
don’t know, just believe me, he does.

dA took away my Pornographic Connoisseur tag after they discovered the
joys of sanitizing input. Everyone reading this could note an $admin of
their choice and beg them to give me back my Pornographic Connoisseur
tag, because I was so nice all year and didn’t make myself an admin
(not for more than a few seconds anyway). Luckily, I can still be a , or feel .

I will be splitting things up to different accounts. My photography will be moved to mattness, my writing (of which there isn’t much yet) will be put on mattah,
and under this account, I’ll act completely indeterministic and lump
everything together. Since that might include completley random poetry
and experimental photography, you might want to adjust your watch lists.

Mysterious remark: Search engine.

Giving of gifts, feasts, singers walking from house to house. What holiday are you thinking of now? Correct, Zagmuk, the festival to assist Marduk (the Sumerian god) in his struggle against Tiamat and the forces of chaos.
Also, the “corn king” ritual first surfaced here, where a criminal is
made king and all his commands are obeyed, until finally, he is
gruesomely killed to assist the gods, or make the crops grow. The
observant reader will note the resemblance to the death and rebirth of
Christ, dying to cleanse from sin, etc.

The Romans celebrated Saturnalia,
a festival to – you guessed it – Saturn, god of fertility and
agriculture. It also included the giving of gifts and decorating green
trees with candles. Since those stubborn Romans refused to stop
celebrating Saturnalia (lovingly nicknamed ‘Orgy’ by Christians of the
time), Bishop Julius I of Rome – practical as ever – declared December
25 Christ’s birthday, and ordered the celebrations to be in his honor.
Oh, he also ordered a “mass”, on that day. Go figure.

The Mithrans also had a holiday on December 25, the birth of Mithras.
Mithras was supposedly created by Ahura-Mazda, the chief deity of
Iranian polytheism, to save the world from its own excesses. By a
strange coincidence, he was also born to a virgin, and died after a
last supper with his disciples. He then ascended to heaven. Unlike
Jesus, followers were baptized in the blood of a bull instead of water.
Then again, water is easier to come by. By the way, followers also ate
bread and wine to represent Mithras’ body and blood, and held Sunday
sacred. Need I say that Mithraism was influential in the Roman Empire,
and the Christian church at the time would have had an interest in
luring Mithras’ followers?

And since you made it this far: Merry local pseudoreligious holiday, and a very british New Year!

If you are looking for high-quality photo prints in sizes from 13x18cm to 50x75cm
(that is 5×7” to 20×30”), then mattness.net is
where you should be heading right now. American customers might want to order
from my deviantART Store instead to save
on shipping (but with fewer size options). Please note that not all photos that
are available for printing are uploaded to all sites — all pictures in
my deviantART gallery can be made
available for printing.

Also, if you have modeling ambitions, or would just like to have some nice photos
of yourself taken, why not send me your model application
and book that plane to Germany?

To sanitize the layout of deviantART.com, put this in your user stylesheet
(userContent.css in Mozilla/Firefox, use the ChromEdit extension).

/* deviantART: sanitize layout */
body#deviantART { padding: 2px 4px !important; margin: 0 !important; }
body#deviantART div#head h1 { padding: 0 !important; height: 20px !important; }
body#deviantART div#head h1 * {
    height: auto !important; padding: 0 !important; margin: 0 !important;
    font-size: 12pt !important; letter-spacing: 2px !important;
    font-weight: bold !important;
}
/* Remove ads */
body#deviantART div#sponsors { display: none; }
/* Move Journal / Settings / Profile links and Search box */
body#deviantART div#deviosity {
    position: absolute !important;
    top: 5px !important;
    left: 150px !important;
}
body#deviantART form#devart-search {
  position: absolute !important;
  top: -20px !important;
  right: 0px !important;
}
/* Remove Christmas bar */
body#deviantART div#bar-countdown { display: none !important; }

This sizes down the header, removes the ad block (though AdBlock is better for that),
and the christmas notice, and finally moves the deviosity block
(Journal | Profile | Settings) and search box back into the header.

Are you tired of people making their URLs look so important?
Do you hate to hear them brag how cool and memorizable their URLs are?
Then this site is for you: Make An Ugly Link – making short URLs look more important since, um, 2004.

You may or may not remember the ‘good’ old days of 1998, when
HTML Tables were new and the technique of using transparent 1-pixel GIF
images was a proper means to create HTML layouts. Luckily, those days
are long gone now, even though sites like the Internet Archive remind many of us about the sins of our youth.

After that ugly era of tables and capitalized HTML tags, the
wonderful age of CSS came into view, heralding great promise. You might
remember when they said CSS would rid us of table-based layouts once
and for all. Guess what, they lied. While you can technically design
pages using only CSS, there’s still a lot lacking. You have to jump
through hoops to properly get float: left|right items to
show. It’s near impossible to do something as simple as having a body
area that takes up at least the full window height, which before was a
matter of saying <table height="100%" width="100%"> and some well-placed <tr>s.

Granted, browser bugs and inconsistencies are responsible for a lot
of the hassles you’re going through with CSS at the moment, but if
you’re creating HTML for a business website, you don’t have much of a
choice other than supporting Internet Explorer version 5.5 upwards at
least. With private websites, you don’t have to bother making it all
shine, it’s sufficient if it doesn’t break (for example, the navigation
on the right is position: fixed and thus breaks on IE,
but it’s still usable — just that it doesn’t scroll with the viewport).
If you have the time, you can hack it to work in other (read:
non-compliant) browsers. I don’t have that time.

The reason for this rant is some fun I had helping a friend on a web
page. The seemingly innocent and simple task of centering the whole
content area of a website already requires CSS hacks for IE. At least
this time, validity was not impaired.

Someone should make Gecko mandatory.