Adam's Blog

This may well be the dumbest eBay auction ever (link available... while it lasts). I mean, who hasn't wanted to own a strawberry shaped like the United States... well... kinda... if you squint your eyes and just imagine it a little bit, you can almost sorta see it... a little. Click the image for a full size version Here is the text of the auction: AMERICA ROCKS! This delicious and amazing strawberry is shaped like the USA! How totally cool is that? Show your love for our country and bid on this one of a kind berry! A must for any serious collector of fruits and veggies in a unique shape. A perfect gift for that special someone who has everything already! I pledge to donate 25% of the proceeds of this sale to chairity (sic) - most likely I will donate to the one laptop per child foundation. even if you dont bid, google this charity and help them out... pretty cool idea for a charity. (I am not affiliated with them at all) This is the most amazing strawberry ever to be found. The strawberry has been immediately wrapped up and frozen in a freezer inside a deep...

It's over. My referrer experiment is over... at least, in its current form. Today, I roll out sethadam1.com referrer gateway version 1.0. That makes it sound fancy, but it's not. Basically, it's PHP to prevent trackback spam. Traffic at sethadam1.com has grown steadily, for some reason, and the logs reveal it: we get a TON of traffic from search engines, and the most popular terms are surprising - sensitive readers beware - here are the terms that most frequently drive people here: cumtube, red-tube, uporn, adult youtube, milf, gay tube, tube 8 and many more equally odd terms. You know why? Because, in a shrewd move that search engines seem to love, I display links back to my referrers, thinking they are trackbacks. But when it's not from Google, Yahoo, Live.com, or OSNews, it's most often spam. Why? Because not only are we using the name "tube" in our title, but with each erroneous entry, we tell the search engine it's a good thing by back-linking to that search. In short, I'm perpetuating the problem. As a result, dozens of spammers have begun issuing basic GET requests in the hundreds placing their sites in my referrer lists. Some time ago,...

It was reported by several sources this week that after an embarassing affair with a prostitute, the Facebook logo has gone into hiding. Actually, what has been happening for me is that the Facebook logo has been randomly disappearing for me in my browser. In fact, most days, lately, in Opera 9.26, this is what I see: When I dug around, I found the Facebook logo actually has the "on" and "off" image in one file and uses a CSS and "hover" trick to create the little home icon next to the logo. Neat. Has anyone else experienced the mystery of the disappearing Facebook logo? Other Opera users maybe?

The Acid 2 test has, for a few years now, been the de facto test for your browser's CSS capabilities. The Acid test, fewer people know, is not really about conforming to standards - passing it does not make your browser standards compliant or complete, so it's best to understand that all it really means is that it properly handles the elements tested as well as certain errors properly. Sometime in 2005, Safari passed Acid 2, becoming the first mainline browser so earn that honor. A few years later, the current or development versions of all major browsers - including Firefox 3, IE8, Opera 9.5 - all pass the Acid 2 test. Enter Acid 3. Acid 3 measure even more goodness, including these six "buckets": Bucket 1: DOM Traversal, DOM Range, HTTPBucket 2: DOM2 Core and DOM2 EventsBucket 3: DOM2 Views, DOM2 Style, CSS 3 selectors and Media QueriesBucket 4: Behavior of HTML tables and forms when manipulated by script and DOM2 HTMLBucket 5: Tests from the Acid3 Competition (SVG,[5] HTML, SMIL, Unicode...)Bucket 6: ECMAScript Using recent browsers, everything fails pretty spectacularly. My Opera 9.26 install gets a 42/100. Safari (including iPhone) does 39/100. IE7 does 12/100, Firefox 2 does...

As a many-decade-devotee of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Deluxe, aka "Kraft Dinner," I have always hesitated to make my own Mac n' Cheese. It's hard to top what's already damned close to perfect. Turns out I was wrong. I modded a few recipes out there and ended up with a damned tasty dish. Jenn and I tore through 4 servings in 2 days, and last night I made another massive batch. 6 dudes ate 10 servings and 2 asked me for the recipe. Creamy mac and cheese, I now know, is overrated. Real baked and mac and cheese is light and cheesy and doesn't leave you feeling like you just ate a brick. I'm still perfecting it, but when I think I have, I will post the recipe. Mac n Cheese, originally uploaded by firsttubedotcom.

So, I updated sethadam1.com to "revision 9" on Friday, and when I went to show someone last night, imagine my surprise when I found the whole thing hosed. The site was missing entire chunks - random, non-sequential directories, missing entirely. I'll spare you the details: I got hacked. Someone either brute forced their way into the admin site (which is now pretty locked down, until I figure this all out) or brute forced into SSH and uploaded several malicious PHP scripts. They are scary, I actually have them intact in a backup from a few days ago. How much has been revealed? My MySQL passwords? It's impossible to tell. Virtually everything will need scrubbing. In the meantime, excuse any wonkiness until all is repaired. The good news is this finally forces me to finish work on the new administrative area I've been playing with.

Is it possible that Widmore is the developer of a large scale weapon (the black smoke) and that Benjamin Linus is not the enemy we all have envisioned, but rather, a wary do-gooder hippie type afraid that Widmore will destroy the island in the process? Could Ben be protecting the island? Is it possible that his secrecy is because he knows that anyone, anywhere, under any circumstance, could be a Widmore spy? If Ben knew and understood the evil of Widmore, he might not trust ANY of the Losties. In fact, if this were the case, imagine the big reveal when we find out that one of our own is, and always has been, a Widmore spy! What if it were revealed that Bernard or Juliet or Sawyer was undercover the whole time? Better yet - Sun's father has worked with Widmore, Jin works for him... could Jin be the one? Ben seems to have some evil ways, but if he knew that someone intended to purge the island to resume development of the greatest weapon the world has ever known, he might be suspicious of everyone - even in his own camp before the crash of 815. Here are...

Here it is: sethadam1.com, once again, entirely redesigned. Unlike previous redesigns, this one is interface only, there are no backend modifications. Enjoy.

First, there was the PC. Then, there was the web. Now, there is the iPhone. At long last, the iPhone will become what it was destined to be. In June, when the iPhone 2.0 update is released, the iPhone's true potential will be unlocked. VoIP? Sure, why not!? Games? You betcha. Exchange, ActiveSync, Remote Wipe, 802.1X? Check. How about access to the entire SDK via XCode, a compact framework (Cocoa Touch), a native emulator, and access to the SQLite databases present in the iPhone file system? Yup. Lastly, how about the most innovative platform in the last 20 years that has single handedly made the mobile web viable? Present and accounted for. In fact, the iPhone is a new generation, and it's been grunting along the sidelines as a gloried browser. But come iPhone 2.0, it will validate itself as one of the most amazing devices out there.

The word "another" is quote obvious born from a contraction of "an other." I want "an other" opinion. Strangely, it has a different meaning when split apart, at least in colloquial use. If I have a cookie and I want "another," you would likely extrapolate that I would like a second cookie of the same type. Whereas if I wanted "an other," you might believe I wanted a different cookie, perhaps even in place of this one. Lately, I heard a phrase - not a new phrase, but certainly it's gaining in popularity - "a whole nother." "Nother" is not a word, so the phrase makes no sense in a literal translation. But how it's used is interesting, because it actually has no true translation to an existing phrase that is quite as concise. If I have a cookie and I want "another," as we discussed, I might want a second. If I want "an other," I might want a second, or possibly a different type. But if I tell you I want "a whole nother" cookie, you might believe I want an entirely different type of cookie - not merely another variation. If we're discussing movies, and I bring...