In which I may be the only one who cares

Posted on September 7, 2009 in: Life Experience, Musing, Myself, Nerdy and Geeky, Opinion, Rant

Warning: If you’re (a) Someone whose site is laden with google ads or whatever other type of sponsorships, (b) someone whose online presence is only (read that again: ONLY) for business and making money, (c) someone who obsesses over SEO, pagerank and all the publicity-related stuff, and/or (c) work for webhosting/SEO companies or similar sites, then please do skip this entry. Well, not that anyone reads my rambling. I just feel the need to put a warning there first.

Writing For People vs Writing For Oneself

People are hard to please. When you write for an audience, you lose your freedom of speech. What started out as ‘I write because I like this topic’ becomes ‘I write this because many people like it’. It’s horrible. It’s like you’re doing a 3000-word assignment and hoping to get A+, but in the end managing to scrap only a B+ at most (Oh my, why am I comparing this to assignments? I really need to get mine done ASAP.)

My biggest pet peeve when it comes to writing: People who literally begs for comments and reviews.

Let’s take good ol’ dumpster Fanfiction.Net. You find people begging for reviews everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Worse still, there are noobs who write comments like ‘I won’t update the story/add a new chapter until I get at least [insert number here] reviews, so READ AND REVIEW PEEPS. Kthnxbai!’. Seriously, what the effing hell is wrong with those people? That’s even worse than begging. Ordering readers you don’t even know to review your story, especially when you’re new and still struggling with grammar building readership, is a big no no. Ugh.

Right. I’m rambling. My point is that when we write for the purpose of meeting someone else’s expectations, our tone of writing is noticeably different.

The Web Hosting Scene

Why can’t we have subdomain hosting that rocks on the English speaking side of the world too? I don’t need more domain name. I want something nice and cool and isn’t long like thisismydomainlolz.TLD

I’m kind of dismayed that we don’t have services like the ones offered by Japanese companies like Lolipop, Chicappa (and all other services under GMO), Stepserver, Sakura Internet and some other hosts. They provide pretty list of domain names to choose from for your subdomain. It’s paid service, I know that. I also know that many people frown at having to pay for a subdomain hosting. Random reader who accidentally stumble upon this entry might think I’m crazy, huh.

Yes, we have many free hosting services. You can have subdomains if you don’t have a domain name but your host would have lame names that don’t mean anything to you. I wouldn’t want my site to be hosted on a subdomain with the word ‘host’ in it. It’s just so uncool. So not unique. If there’s a company offering paid subdomain hosting with great support, with choices of domain names that actually have wonderful meanings, I’d be glad to pay. What we have over here is domain name squatting. I fucking hate that lame ass strategy of buying domain names and keeping it, looking to sell it for 1 million bucks (excuse the exaggeration, please). At least develop the damn domain OR design a better looking ‘parking lot’ for the ‘oh so beautiful’ domain names. The closest I could find is the cute free hosting at Bubble.Nu. Some pretty awesome domain names available there.

The practice of holding back expired domains for years and years and years is another infuriating thing. After estdomains went poof, and the registrar of one of my domain names disappeared along with it, keeping me from renewing the domain (That guy I was dealing with was Malaysian!), I’ve been waiting for that domain name to be released. But nooooo, it just had to be kept. Fuckers.

Okay. Signing off now before I get more too aggressive offensive.

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From MediaTemple to SharkSpace + WP Issues

Posted on September 5, 2009 in: Blog Updates, Life Experience, Nerdy and Geeky

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-Before moving to Sharkspace. With WP-Super Cache half-on. Last straw? Lol -

As much as I love Media Temple, the move just needed to be made because I won’t be able to support the hosting cost. Maybe I’ll go back to it after graduating and getting my first pay, but it’s goodbye for now. Anyways, after two months of hesitating, I’ve finally made the move. I’ve moved to Shark Space because observing it for two days shows that sites hosted by Sharkspace loads faster than some other hosts I’ve been eyeing. The move, however, is not flawless.

1. Missing visual editor in Wordpress 2.8.4
I was frustrated when I couldn’t get anything done to restore it back to how it originally was. I tried re-installing wordpress, deleting and replacing wp-admin and wp-includes folder – nothing works. I thought it was permission problem. Checked the permissions and saw everything CHMODED perfectly. The SCP transfer from {mt} didn’t have trouble at all.

The only thing that worked for CT to restore the visual editor was to add the following line to wp-config.php

define( ‘CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS’, false );

I’ve never used this line before.

Oh well, I’m not the type to bother my web host until I’m damn sure it’s beyond my capabilities (but hey, Shark Space has this utterly amazing response time! I’m totally impressed~). It’s not pride. It’s just learning to be independent. For now, this seems to work. When things stop working, maybe then ‘ll find another solution or finally relent and plead for some help from the technical team XD

2. Missing directories for Add-on Domains & Subdomains
To avoid clutter, my add-on domains and subdomains are always placed outside public_html folder. The weird thing is… I couldn’t access the files inside the folders. They all seem to be missing. I thought I’d get 500 or 503 error messages when I tried to access some files directly (files that I know are there), but I got 404! I’ve deleted the domains and subdomains. I’ll try again and see what happens then.

3. SMF Database Restoration Error
Apparently, the new database doesn’t like all strings connected to the smf_shop plugin. Everything else worked fine. Just that one plugin. Something about MySQL version. I should have see this coming.  I was moving the databases from version mySQL 4 to mySQL 5. Ugh.

It would be wonderful if I can solve the missing post body problems with Junjou. If thep problem persists after the move, then maybe I’ll consider starting afresh with new content and keep the old entries in a subdirectory in case someone wants to access the old contents still.

Right. Back to work.

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Making the Move

Posted on September 4, 2009 in: Blog Updates

If you can see this post, that means Caramel Toffee is now safely residing on a new server provided by SharkSpace. I’m stil in the process of transferring files. I still need to get Wordpress to display the visual editor because it doesn’t work at all for the time being. So depressing.

I’ll blog later when the transfer processes are all done.

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Cracking Open the Brain Jar

Posted on August 25, 2009 in: Life Experience

- Me, with Mira and Dyau’s ’special appearances’ in the mirrors on the wall -

I totally meant my brain in the title up there. The past few days and this whole week have been filled to the brim with assignments, test, coding and whatnot. It’s a little bit overwheming and I’m getting bored of just about everything. It doesn’t make sense, but who cares?

Photoshoot: This morning, our planned class photoshoot for the Salam Perantauan was foiled by the sudden morning rain. Instead of Albert Park, we had the brief session at the Old Government House. Well, the rooms there are awesome, so I don’t actually mind. Those super cushy I’m-A-Mafia-Boss armchairs are pretty awesome too. Haha~

Dinner Slideshow: Flash died on me two hours ago when I was trying a few tricks that I thought I’d put on the dinner video (retro effects, remember?). I guess I’d give up flash for the time being and go with After Effects instead. I have the concept all planned out, but I seriously need lots of videos instead of just photos to make the video more appealing. See, I’m already calling it a video instead of a slideshow. I blame it on the awesomenes of After Effects. Totally.  Since I’ll probably be withdrawing myself from most multimedia-related works next year, I’ll try to make this slideshow stands out.

Paint Tool SAI: I have no idea why I didn’t use this software before. It’s beyond awesome. I love how easy the drawing tools glide on the canvas. The fact that it doesn’t consume a lot of memory is a big plus. Photoshop always slows down my computer and Painter loves to die on me every once in a while. Heck, Gimp sometimes performs better than Photoshop itself; that or Vista is too much of an idiot to go properly with those softwares. In just a day, SAI moves up to be the number 1 on my list of favourite softwares of all time alongside Manga Studio and Comicworks.

I have a test tomorrow and I waste my time on random things? Great.

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In Which I’ve Been Up to No Good Again

Posted on August 22, 2009 in: Education, Interests, Life Experience, Random

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My Good Ol’ Photoshop in Action (Painter tab is minimised there)
Again, it’s a Reborn! fanart. What else do I draw this past few months? Lol.

I’m finally updating this blog after a long while. My inconsistency astounds even myself, and that’s pure sarcasm right there. Hur. I’ve been updating my Livejournal, Dreamwidth and some other logs, but not my main blog. What a shame. Since I’m still lazy to construct proper paragraphs, I’ll just write in bullet points.

  • Rikaichan has been pampering me way too much and now I’m lazier than ever to browse through my dictionary for unfamiliar kanji characters.
  • I just realised that I can now understand 98% of fast Japanese speech in J-Dramas/Anime without looking at the dictionary. This helps when I’m watching (more like listening to, actually) Zetsubou-sensei’s random tales dripping with pure poisonous sarcasm. Who said self-teaching doesn’t pay off, huh?
  • Japanese writing skills have improved at least 50% more now that I have a bilingual Japanese/English fanwork site to maintain. Replying to visitor comments, e-mails and webclap comments helps a lot.
  • My drawing skills are improving steadily although they still suck like there’s no tomorrow.
  • I may need to buy a new tablet before going back to Malaysia. Problem? I’m broke. Broke. BROKE!! *sobs*
  • I think my Linguist 307 assignment was CRAP. Oh well, the subject IS crap anyway.
  • I should be doing my Langtchg 302 assignment, but I’m still procrastinating
  • I’ve been reclaiming all blog posts that I can retrieve from my old domains via Wayback Machine. It’s a great, great help. I’m feeling nostalgic just looking at those old sites. Greymatter, b2, Movable Type and Newspro days! How nostalgic indeed~
  • Services offered by FC2, Ninja Tools and a few other sites ROCK!! I’ll be perusing the web for more similar awesomeness.

Before I forget:

HAPPY RAMADHAN AND HAPPY FASTING TO MYSELF AND ALL MY MUSLIM FRIENDS!

Now I wonder how long it’s going to take until my next update.

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