Recovering your wordpress.com theme: The Internet Archive Way

Well, I intended for this blog to pretty much be dead now, but I suppose I’ll at least bring up this one recent turn of events: A while ago, I had decided that I wanted to make a new blog.  But as I was customizing it, I wasn’t paying quite enough attention and apparently changed the theme of this blog in the process.

So I peeked around the Themes menu to see if I could find my old one.  There are, as I look now… 303 themes available to free users. And since I had made some customizations (e.g. background) I wouldn’t be able to recognize the correct one from the preview thumbnails, even if it was staring back at me right in my face.

Where is the undo button!?

 

Then, as though I already knew the answer… my eyes slowly fell upon my Chrome toolbar.

Yes… or wait, no, a little bit to the left…

Ah, yes.  That’s where they landed.

The internet is ephemeral.  Places come and go, and people move on.  But the Wayback Machine never forgets.  Specifically, I found this archived page, and one “view source” later I am able to identify that the theme used was “Motion:”

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title> The Diagonal Device</title>
	<link rel="pingback" href="https://diagonaldevice.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php" />
	<link rel="stylesheet" href="/web/20120217091028cs_/http://s0.wp.com/wp-content/themes/pub/motion/style.css?m=1325849399g" type="text/css" media="screen" />

…and now I expect someone to show me that there actually is an undo button, or a list of recently used themes.

P.S.: Although I don’t particularly recall my code snippets ever looking… quite so… so… 2000.  Text-shadow, really?

Google Pluses

I don’t remember why I even typed that opening parenthesis any more.

I don’t even remember what I had for breakfast. I hope it was nice, at least.

I need to be kept away from scripts

So I went to work on my Physics Lab that’s a week overdue.

Here’s what I accomplished.

sub setProp(ByRef arg As com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue, name As String, value As Any)
 arg.Name = name
 arg.Value = value
end sub
sub Subscript
 dim document as object
 dim dispatcher as object
 document = ThisComponent.CurrentController.Frame
 dispatcher = createUnoService("com.sun.star.frame.DispatchHelper")

 ' THANKS FOR THE OBSCURE API
 oSelection = ThisComponent.CurrentSelection.getByIndex(0)

 ' xray oSelection   ' <--- Lifesaver

 dim args(2) as new com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue

 if (oSelection.CharEscapement = 0) then
  setProp(args(0),"Escapement.Escapement", -101)
  setProp(args(1),"Escapement.Height", 75)
  setProp(args(2),"Escapement.Auto" ,true)
 else
  setProp(args(0),"Escapement.Escapement", 0)
  setProp(args(1),"Escapement.Height", 100)
  setProp(args(2),"Escapement.Auto", false)
 end if

 dispatcher.executeDispatch(document, ".uno:Escapement", "", 0, args())
end sub

I…

So I kind of got bugged at how tiny subscripts were in LibreOffice.  ‘Cause, you see, no matter what you do, Ctrl+Shift+B ignores your best wishes and always makes 58% height subscripts.  This bug was around back when it was still OpenOffice.org, and it will probably be around forever. >_>

Anyways, I rebound Ctrl+Shift+B and I know actually have a useful subscript keyboard shortcut so I can write V_s=I_sR_s instead of V_s=I_sR_s.

The lab can wait another week, right?

Obnoxious memories

This is a send off to a very special piece of plastic. I’d take a picture of it, but then again, I actually wouldn’t take a picture of it, and I’m tired of coming up with excuses for why I don’t take pictures of things. >_>

It’s in the trash already anyways, so there.

Anyways, you know how hard it is to throw away memories? It’s almost like by throwing out some toy you had as a child, you’re erasing it from your life, throwing away every memory you’ve ever had for it.

Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like when it comes down to it, these sentimental things always end up being the most inordinately large, obnoxiously shaped, conspicuous accidents of man’s creation.

You’ll never use it again. You lost everything that goes with it. Oh, and don’t forget how FREAKING LARGE AND USELESS it is. Come to think of it, the only reason it’s so sentimental is because of how frustrating it was to use in the first place! Working with the thing was a trial, and now you can’t let it go. And not only that, you rationalize it. Because it won’t fit in any of your trash cans, you just have to keep it, right?

…

You wanna know another thing we don’t throw out? Legos.  (I’m going somewhere with this)

Yeah. That’s right. It’s not just you. I know how you feel. ASSUMING *cough* *hack* *spatter* that you are a male living in the continental US who is at least 18 years of age, then you’ve felt it. You’ve felt the passion, the burning lust to have more Legos. It doesn’t matter how many you had (your friends always had more than you, anyways). You wanted to have more. Because without more Legos, you can’t build the best robot, you can’t build the best castle, and, most importantly, you can’t swim in a tub filled with Legos.

And now that you’re an adult and it’s no longer a competition, you realize it would be economically foolish to throw away such overpriced bricks, and you are just glad that you can finally relax with your modest collection that you will never use again.

Okay, well, one of the first Lego sets I picked out myself was this Lego Rock Raiders HQ set, Set #4990-1.

I have lots of memories about this set that I hold dear to my heart. These memories mostly have to do with a certain inordinately large and unusually shaped piece that refuses to sit in a bin of Legos, and that could not possibly lend any aesthetic appeal to any construction project beyond a Headquarters for the Lego Rock Raiders (can you find it?)

It is currently en route to the local trash dump, where it will continue to not decompose, where it still won’t be useful, and where it will possibly be blown around and give brain damage to some poor, flightless bird.

…I never even got to say “I love you.”

You know that feeling when you hit “SEND”

and you immediately see a typo?




[hey, don’t judge. If this was a Tumblr blog, the length of this post would be considered average.]

What is selfish?

I know this is a very unusual and random thing for me to be posting to this blog, especially after such a long absence (although I’ll be frank, the reason for the apparent absence is because the last couple of posts I wanted to make to this blog turned out to all take too long for me to write and I lost interest after taking too long writing them).

But that aside, I have something for you to think about:

Put yourself in the shoes of somebody who creates content that other people can view for free (i.e. somebody on YouTube).  It doesn’t matter whether or not you make ad revenue (although the irony is more pronounced if you do).

You have a dilemma: To continue doing what you do and remain popular, or to betray your fans and do what you truly want to do.

I’ve seen several people face this decision.  And it has always had a… strange impact on how the public sees them.

…

How is it that the second option – being true to one’s self – always seems to be the greater sacrifice?

And how is it that either of these decisions are unequivocally judged as “selfish?”

Dear Windows,

Thanks for informing me about the state of my hard drive.  I must’ve gotten a lemon, because seeing as I’ve only had this hard drive for a year, I never would’ve expected it to be failing this early.  So I thank you for giving me time to back things up!  Had you not informed me this early, I might not have found out until it was too late!

I mean, as soon as I booted into Windows and tried copying a file, I knew something was wrong.  And as soon as I checked the disk management utilities, I could see why:  Because it is failing SMART self-tests, finding bad sectors, and some of these bad sectors can’t even be reallocated!  They’re completely unrecoverable!  And there were about a hundred thousand Read errors logged, and they were all within the last few days!

These are the types of things that signal imminent hard drive failure.  Thanks for the heads up, Windows!

No wait, that was Linux.

Thank goodness something motivated me to move some of my larger video recordings over to my Ubuntu partition.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to deciding which files to let board my 4 GB lifeboat.

“Hey, don’t pick on the poor Russian guy”

[I’m getting a sense of Deja vu as I write this.  But then again, I always do, because I have a tendency to write things out in my head long before I think to write them out in text]

Something recently occurred to me.

So.  In my history, I’ve been a member of a number of online forums (or fora, if you will) and, lately, IRC channels.  And there is one event that occurred at least once on every single one of these fora, and I could never understand it.

Somebody would come onto a forum needing help with a problem, and, not being very good at English, he/she would write a post in his native language, be it Russian or French or Portuguese or whatever.  Of course, all of these fora had a rule about speaking in English.  But even though these people were breaking the rules, I figured they probably had too much trouble reading the [English] rules to know.

So I would think to myself, this looks like it will be a tough guy to help, but I’ll try my best.  And I would use a translator to get the gist of his post, and try to respond using the simplest words possible so that hopefully he could translate it back.

But other people would have a different attitude towards our foreign speaker.  They would treat him with such animosity and reproval for breaking the rules.  “This is an English forum.  Write in English, or don’t write at all.”

And I would think to myself, what an asshole.

I mean, think about it.  Let’s say you were walking down the streets of the city, and some tourist, desperate for help in finding his way, tried to get your attention and started speaking in some language you didn’t understand.  What would you do?  I mean, you probably wouldn’t help him (how could you?), but certainly, you wouldn’t chastise him for not speaking in English.

And I always hated that English-only rule, too.  Most of these fora were official fora for independently published games. They were the most direct way to get help with or learn about these games. And these people who didn’t speak English were essentially locked out.

And getting them to speak in English only made things worse.  Once they started writing in English, you could tell why they chose to speak in their own language.

But something has occurred to me recently:

I, with my limited view of the world as an English-speaking American, know nothing about how people in other countries feel about learning second languages.  I do not see learning a second language as a requirement for anything I want to do in my life.  I took French in High School (and enjoyed it immensely), but in all due honesty, I didn’t need it.  Even if I were to visit some country across the Atlantic, a decent amount of the people there are bound to know what I’m saying since English is so commonly taught as a second language.

 

And this is what I failed to understand on each of these forums.  Because now that I think about it, there was a pattern.

Who demanded that person A on forum B stop speaking in Portuguese?
It was that guy from Germany and that person from the Netherlands.

 Better yet, who refused to help person Foo on the Bar forums when he spoke in Russian?
It was one of the few people who COULD have helped him: Somebody from Russia!

 

Each of these fora had a large number of people from other countries, and I hardly ever even thought about it, because most of them spoke such perfect English that I thought they were Brits or fellow Americans. But in reality, they had to put a lot of effort into writing on these forums, and there was a lot of work that went into them being able to write at the level of everyone else.  And at first, I was always surprised to learn that so-and-so is from Germany, and et cetera.  But it’s become so common lately that I can’t even remember who’s from where anymore.  A good 40% of people have a different native tongue, and they all write such good English that you can’t tell.

And I guess that’s why people don’t take it so lightly when somebody speaks a foreign language on these forums.  I was wrong in thinking that the English-only rule locks people out.  People who make an effort to familiarize themselves with the English language can be a part of the community, and when somebody tries to join without making such an effort, it’s, well… I don’t know what it is…

I guess it’s rude.

Um… Google?

So Google recently changed one of their most important special characters:  The plus, which used to make one-word literals (a search for “+bunny” would not include “rabbit” or “bunnies”).  Now, you have to use quotation marks for one-word literals.

Personally, I think this is for the better.  The plus was sort of redundant (you always could have done the same thing with quotes).  And getting rid of the plus lets Google actually include it in searches.  In other words, searching on Google for Google+ actually brings up results about Google+! Sacre bleu!

But, um, there is one little hitch.  Apparently, nobody told Google about the change.

No, Google, “origin” has a completely different meaning when you’re researching math…

Thanks for the advice Google, I’ll be sure to keep it in mind next time I click an internal link on your site.

 

(it’s been like this for a couple of days.  Think we should tell them?  Or maybe see how long they go without noticing…)

OR NOT

So.

I have an update on the BadJoke situation.

Um.

Now, in my defense, I’ve only used the flash drive once before. Okay?

Alrighty then. So. Um.  The autorun program opens up a website belonging to the organization whose name is printed on the flash drive. They hand these things out at events, and I guess they felt like putting their website on it would be a good idea.

Right, so. I’ve got a couple of things to say.

One.  Putting an autorun thing like that on a storage device is not cool. Nor does it sell your brand.  Nor is it even appropriate.  It’s just a nuisance to everyone who tries to use it.

Two.  The reason it was flagged by MBAM was NOT because it is prank software.  It’s because the vendor, RJL Software, MAKES prank software…… in addition to other things, including an Autorun wizard.  For shame, Malware Bytes.  For shame.

Three.  RJL.  Get with the times.

No, really, I mean it.  Update your software. It’s using old and dodgy coding practices that raise warning flags for any realtime-scanning security software.  By the way, from the vendor’s site:

I’d just like to point something out here, because I’ve kind of been on an “old game” craze as of late, and I’ve noticed a pattern with old software.  Namely, if your software is compatible with pre-NT Windows 95, it does not “work successfully” on Windows 7.  Or 8.  Or Server 2008. Or whatever that second thing listed is.

Four.  I’m not done yet. Like any well designed software, RJL’s autorun has very strict use cases and requires a CD-ROM to put the autorun files on, even though CDs aren’t the only thing that can have autorun. I don’t think there’s any option to just generate the autorun files without putting them on a CD.  I say this because it looks like the people who made my flash drive actually had to put a virtual CD drive on it just so they could use RJL’s software.

By the way, I’m STILL wondering how they did that.

Five.

You know what?  I’m done now.  Just done. You can all go home now.