Seth Kinast’s Blog

I have a psychology test tomorrow. The first one was insanely easy and I got a 96 without studying hardly at all. This second one seems about the same. I do not want to study. I want to sleep. However, my brain, upstanding citizen that it is, refuses to stop feeling guilty until I do some studying. Or at least pretend to. Not sure. So here I sit, idly flipping through pages, when I could be doing something productive. Like picking lint off the carpet. With my teeth.

Heh, this sort of webvertising is becoming more and more common… but this one has one of the highest payouts of any of them I’ve tried. SurfJunky pays you 50 cents an hour to let popup ads appear. But with a bit of Firefox tweaking, you can just minimize it and let it run, generating money with 0 work. I just put it on a secondary desktop in Linux and then ignore it… but I’m already making money O_O ’tis a scam…

How:

1. Sign up and create an account.
2. Get the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox and turn yourself into IE6. If you like, create a separate profile just for being IE6.
3. Get Adblock if you’d like, a couple of the ads don’t work and will 404 every time they come up unless you Adblock them.
4. In Firefox Options, turn off Javascript’s ability to move and resize windows.
5. Now fire up the SurfJunky browser and minimize it. You’ll want to watch it for a bit to find those 404′d ads so you can Adblock them, but then you’ll have a 100% unattended SurfJunky installed.
6. …
7. Profit!

Rawr!

That is all.

This last week has been so wonderful. I’ve gotten all sorts of things accomplished, and I’ve just had a fun, happy few days. Sam has been such a goodness. When I met her through Hannah last semester, it was kind of scary… she just gave me a half-bemused, half-rolleyes look every time she saw me. But this semester, we have ballroom and physics together, so I think she figured out I’m not all that bad. I’ve spent some wonderful evenings with her, just hanging out… makes things seem not-so-lonely, anymore. It’s a completely platonic relationship, yet we’ve grown so close so fast. She’s just so similar to me. Funny, though… when I first was getting to know her, I asked if she were a huggy sort of person. She quickly replied with, “I’m more of a don’t-touch-me sort of person.” Resigned to making friends with another Hannah, I was surprised when she came up to me one day and gave me a huge hug! She accuses me of being magic and transforming non-touchy people into snuggly huggy ones. I plead innocence.

I went in for my psych testing last week, and I go again tomorrow. We are required to have 5 hours of research participation (read: guinea pig) as part of the intro psych course. Looking down the list of available experiments I saw:

• Questionnaires: Self-Image and Leadership
  2 credits. Answer a set of surveys about how you perceive yourself and others.
• Survey: Business Decisions in the Real World
  1.5 credits. Perform tasks and answer questionnaires regarding business decisions.
• Groupwork in Gendered Groups
  1 credit. Work through puzzles and solve problems with groups of your peers.

And on, and on. Booooring stuff, and only worth 1/3 or so of the total credit I needed! But then… I saw it!

• PLAY VIDEO GAMES
  5 credits. Play a video game and develop teamwork and critical thinking.

Hello Dolly! How good can it get! So I signed up (for the LAST available slot!) and off I went to play… Space Fortress. An incredibly complex DOS-based game. Simple at first… move the ship, shoot the fortress, don’t die. But there were SO many rules! “If a spaceship showing one of the three callsigns shown before the game appears, click the right mouse button twice, then shoot it. Otherwise you may shoot it if moving in a clockwise direction, but if you press any mouse button your gun will stop working. Meanwhile if moving at a speed greater than 50 kmps you will lose 7 points per second, otherwise gain 5 points per second. The fortress can be destroyed after VOE reaches 10 but only when receiving two shots fired withing 250-400 ms of each other…” and on for 8 pages. Of rules. Single-spaced.

Way, way worth it though. I was entertained for my 2.5 hours last week, and I figure it’ll be fun this week too. Way better than surveys!

In other news, I got served a letter of cease-and-desist today for using the Windows trademark. I wondered how long it’d take, but I think as long as I took down the domain I was using I can lie low and be safe. Click Read More to see it.

The rest of this week promises to be quite happy. Next week, though… test city. Boo.

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I’m now serving my website with a MIME type of application/xhtml+xml, rather than text/html as it used to be (and as 99% of websites are). What does this mean, you ask? Anything important?

Well, not really for you. Mostly for me. But those reasons are the same ones that mean you should be implementing application/xhtml+xml on YOUR site, too.

1. XHTML served as text/html is tag soup.
   Yes kids, it’s true. XHTML does not exist in HTML, so no matter what DOCTYPE you’re using, you’re still getting nothing but HTML. There is no such thing as <br /> in HTML. All one-sided tags close themselves. Many other examples as well. So why is this important? Because browsers are happiest about rendering XHTML when you tell them it’s XHTML. This forced rendering has as its side effect…
2. Write good code or die.
   If you have just one bad tag or misplaced identifier, your site will die. This is good. It forces you to write good code and not get sloppy. You’ll notice sometimes my site dies because I need to fix IdioQuote to output characters like & and > in their encoded forms. Being forced to code correctly means your site will always be valid.
3. You can create your own selectors easily.
   With a true XHTML page, it’s easy to create custom tags that you can use in special ways. Check out this excellent article on creating your own XML namespace. Want to mark up PHP code with syntax coloring? Yes please.
4. IE users will cry won’t care.
   Guess who doesn’t support true XHTML? Yes, yes. Commence grumbling. Internet Explorer will scream and run at the mere sight of application/xhtml+xml, so you must use PHP to sniff for it and deliver good old HTML 4.01 Strict to that evil browser. Not so hard… but they’ll miss all the eye candy. Chances are though, if they’re using Internet Explorer, they’re too dense unenlightened to notice that there was any hope of eye candy to begin with. (Note to self, get an annoying popup for IE users soon!

But in the end, the benefits are almost entirely for me, the developer. And they could be yours too… if you learn to use MIME types.

See also

Fix your site with the right DOCTYPE
Mozilla Docs on application/xhtml+xml
W3C Recs on XHTML
Anne on MIME types matter, DOCTYPEs don’t
The perils of using XHTML properly