Struggling with PhoneGap:
Tomorrow, I get to work on the app submission part for the first time. Sounds like it will be a challenge itself. Wishing that PWA‘s had better support.
Day 2 of GiveCamp is complete. My team is in quite good shape. We shed one member early on. I too left to be re-purposed, but that didn’t last long. I briefly helped one team determine that, after my attempt to help them hack a plugin, it was time to jump ship to another. They didn’t need my further assistance, and the organizers couldn’t find another place for me, so I went back to my original team. Another of our members went home early. Even at a relaxed pace and searching for things to do, we were able to complete their nice-to-haves and improve some things from their quick-setup state. Tomorrow should be easy.
The event of the day more present on my mind at the moment is that my tent pole broke. When I first lay down in it, I saw the pole going at a weird angle. I got out and pulled the fly partly off to find the pole split and rather sharp. The tent was standing alright, but, not wanting the pole to poke through the fly, I attempted to fix it. I spent like an hour between working on and thinking of a field repair. In the end, nothing really got the broken pieces to stay together when the pole was arched. Now I lay in a slightly tilted, wonky tent, tired My tent is a Eureka Midori, and this is the second Eureka I’ve had the pole break on. Neither had I used very many times, maybe a handful each. Disappointing.
Dreamhost must’ve had an outage of some sort this (last) morning. I noticed a little after 11 that I couldn’t upload anything to or log into my (shared) server. My sites were inaccessible. I tried the sites of a couple other people I know using Dreamhost (also shared), and they were also inaccessible, so it must’ve been something somewhat significant. Strangely, nothing relevant was on Dreamhost status. I tweeted about it at 11:20 and got a response from DreamhostCare that they were looking into it. They didn’t say anything more, but I noticed things were up and running again around 11:42. I found later that it must’ve been a DDoS on their nameservers. Outages have been rare, but certainly annoying when they happen.
Gah. Apparently wordpress.com is discouraging ‘https’ for self-hosted blogs: Their redirection service does not allow any protocol but ‘http’. I could swear it did when I first set it up, as I remember typing in my URL with ‘https’ and I thought I tested it with curl -I to make sure it works, but the docs have an explicit note saying:
Note: Site redirects will only point to a non-ssl ( http:// ) url.
I don’t remember seeing it before, but the wayback machine suggests it was there since 2013, well before I switched to self-hosted.
Continue reading post "WordPress.com redirects don’t support HTTPS"Jetpack’s sitemap plugin has gotten an update or two since I found it listing the wrong protocol for my URL’s, so I decided to give it another try. Now the protocol seems to be correct, so I am leaving it enabled and hoping it helps Google to get my URL’s indexed as ‘https’ instead of ‘http’.
I was using Jetpack’s sitemap plugin and even submitted it to Google until I noticed that it had the wrong protocol for all of the post URL’s. Now Google has a bunch of ‘http’ URL’s for my posts in its listings, even though they are available over ‘https’. I couldn’t figure out how to change the protocol (there is no config or documentation about where that is coming from) so I just disabled the sitemap for now.
I think it’s time to move my blog from wordpress.com to my own site. This disappearing content in code blocks is getting old. Can’t post a post I wrote. Project for the week.
I have always had trouble understanding and even believing the proposition of the Monty Hall problem. It feels like it is proposing that the probability of past events affect the probability of future events, like suggesting that a coin landing on heads will be more likely to land on tails the next time. Rather, it’s about the information provided by the circumstances. I still don’t intuitively understand it, but at least I have now verified for myself that the proposed probability approximates outcomes. I have created a PHP simulation of the game and script to iterate it numerous times.
The code allows testing other numbers of doors and number of doors for the host to reveal. Increasing the numbers shows increasing odds. Even if Monty opens less than all but the remaining door (obviously requires more than three total doors), it still increases odds by switching.
Continue reading post "Testing the Monty Hall problem"As mentioned in another post on css rotation, I had some issues with rotating text. On the Amy’s Shoes site, now live [no longer our design], I use transform:rotate(); for CSS3 capable browsers and the matrix filter for IE to rotate various elements.
In IE, I had noticed that the text was somewhat blurry when rotated, especially for smaller font-sizes. I hadn’t noticed, though, that the rotated text also rendered poorly in Firefox for Windows and Safari for Windows. They render the text with messed up kerning and letter positioning, so that it can become illegible on smaller text and even have overlapping letters. Not in Opera in Chrome, just those browsers. I test Firefox and Safari on Mac only, since rendering of most things is exactly the same. Evidently not the case with rotated font rendering though, and I will have to keep this in mind and test the new CSS3 features more thoroughly.
Because of this issue, I made my first ever style sheet targeting an entire operating system (Windows), since the rotation was not working on so many Windows browsers. The stylesheet simply removes the rotation on the main body text and repositions things slightly so that the layout still works. We were considering doing image replacement for the menu and button text on Windows as well, but haven’t gone that far yet, as the larger text doesn’t look nearly as bad. The rendering is also slightly messed up on Firefox for Mac, but not too bad to use.
We’re not sure why the rendering is so bad on those Windows browsers. For IE, it is likely the way it handles the matrix filter. For Safari and Firefox, it may have something to do with the way Windows deals with fonts compared to how Mac does. Maybe Chrome and Opera somehow bypass the rendering issue. I don’t know what’s up, but this and the other issues mentioned in the previous article suggest that, unfortunately, rotation of text is still not to the point where it can be indiscriminately used, and is best used in a way where the unrotated version still works fine, because that will need to be done for some browsers.
After running the utility Onyx on my computer to both clean it up a bit and change some settings, I suddenly found my computer having some troubles. Dialog boxes would just beachball shortly after appearing, and the applications that created them would have to be force quit. After trying to change my volume, I noticed that something was wrong with my audio, so I turned off the text-to-speech I had set up for dialog boxes. After this, the beachball problem stopped.
But I had no audio at all. On further investigation, I noticed the OS was not recognizing any audio devices, input or output. I found a forum thread discussing this issue. I couldn’t find the cause, but I did find a solution. I simply had to download Quicktime from Apple and reinstall it over my current install. Since then, I have full audio and no problems with it, and no unusual beachballing.
I’m not sure what happened that caused this problem, but it might have been related to the permissions check Onyx does on loading. I hope to avoid it in the future. I will be more careful using Onyx in the future anyway.