The Iggblog

One of my favorite sites that I subscribe to is The Art of Manliness. It’s not like GQ, Maxim, or macho type manliness… More like “the lost art of being a real man and a gentleman”. It centers in on Integrity, physical and mental fitness, style, relationships, career, and everyday tips for things men deal with. It’s really a stellar site. One of the things they do from time to time is historic themed motivational posters that center in on some of history’s greatest men. I thought I’d post a couple here. Of course every man has his foibles, so let’s just leave those at the door. These focus in on what they had to offer as men, and what they did to live their lives as great men.

Theodore Roosevelt

George Patton

Winston Churchill

These all remind me of one of me of some of the Courage Wolf memes. Unlike the original Advice Dog memes, a lot of what courage wolf has to say can be thought of as actual motivation or direction. Among my favorites, and the one that specifically reminds me of the Art of Manliness threads:

The only way I ever excel at anything is by biting off more than I can chew, then chewing it. Failing if I have to, learning from it, and being able to take a bigger bite next time. I rarely excel by slowly building up to an achievement. Resolve: Fuck yeah.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.

Poking my head into the internet to say hi. Two weeks ago I moved into a new place. About goddamn time. The last place I was in, Emily and I were subletting for 4 months while we waited for this place. Thank God it was only 4 months… the place was a hole. Emily and I were like “Hay, lets move in with Lindsey. It’ll only be 4 months, how bad could it be? lololol”. Well, it was bad. The living room was also an entry and a hallway. About 8 feet by 12 feet, minus space for a closet. Kitchen was (I shit you not) about 7 feet by 4 feet, not including counter space. There was no air conditioning, and window units were not allowed. On the day of the move we threw our sheets away, they were (watch me keep this work safe) yucky. There was an elevator, but it was like something out of a horror movie. The thing gave you a new appreciation for life every time you’d successfully exit it.. It was more of a cross between a cage, an electric chair, a bathysphere. Apparently it’s the oldest cage elevator in Boston, and it lets you know for damn sure.

The new place is pretty rockin. We’re right next to the JFK Library and UMass Boston. Technically it’s in Dorchester, but we don’t own up to it. It’s so close to the line that we just call it Boston. We’re on the 6th floor and it has an awesome view of Boston (and Dorchester, depending). It has all new everything. Central AC, even ethernet drops in every room with a patch panel in a central location. Hell yeah. The living room is massive and has floor to ceiling window that might as well be a wall. The elevator doesn’t threaten my life and affront my senses. I’ll try to get some pics of this place up soon, I’ve been too busy unpacking and enjoying downtime in a place that doesn’t give me headaches and make my ears pound from heat.

Anyways… yeah. Checking in. Sup, internet?

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.

Many moons ago I had a “pics” directory on my website full of random crap, with a bunch of subdirectories also full of random crap. Among these was the pics/misc directory full of anything I found on the internet that was remotely funny, useful, or offensive (usually the latter). I knew nothing about scripting at the time, so I wrote a monolithic hack of a script to manage everything. When invoked by browsing to index.cgi, it would check each file, and if it was a picture it would generate a thumbnail and stick it in a thumbnail grid for easy browsing. Pretty much the most basic possible page to take care of thumbnails and gallery functions. It worked well for a while, but my image dump has grown considerably. Loading ~800 images on a single page is bad for a number of reasons… especially when the page is generated on the fly. Originally I used it as a method to learn more about bash scripting, so you can imagine how gracefully it was written.

I decided I wanted something new. First and foremost it had to be ridiculously simple… I didn’t want anything with bloated features, flickr integration, or some kind of drag-and-drop GUI. I wanted a script that got dropped into a directory, and would simply generate a gallery of all the images in that directory, as well as links to subdirectories. Some smaller features I wanted was something that would split thumbnails into a reasonable amount per page, create links to subdirectories, have a big preview pane, and be driven by some sort of sexy javascript. So I basically chopped up my old script, and messed around with some CSS and JQuery till I got it looking how I wanted, learning a ton in the process.

Anyways… here’s how it looks now:

Image dump, now sexier

Its only requirements are a couple jquery files and a few CSS files. Once you have them placed, it’ll work in any directory. It looks in its present working directory for a “thumbs” folder with 75×75 and 500×500 version of each image. I have a script that is a terrible, terrible, awful hack that does this via ImageMagick. It’s basically the guts of my old script when thumbnails were generated on the fly. The CGI script, CSS, Jquery, and thumbnail generation files are all here:

The main sexy: the index script (rename index.php)
The above file is the only one you need to put in every directory. The following only have to be placed once.

Basic CSS file
Gallery specific CSS file.
Dropdown menu CSS file
Main jquery library (current as of 07/2009)
Galleriffic jquery plugin (same caveat as above)

And my own little creeping horror…
Thumbnail generation script, use it if you need it.

I have a link to an upload page in the dropdown menu, which is a feature I was going to include into the page itself. But for now I’m leaving it separate for my own reasons. I leave the menu entry there because it works for me, and as a placeholder for anyone else that wants to use the script. My only gripe is that I’m unwilling to dive deep enough into the javascript to figure out how to make it launch a full sized image in a new tab when you click on the preview… for now you have to click “download original” on the bottom right. It’s still a kludge of a page, I’ll take 9/10 things I wanted accomplished. Feel free to use, redistribute, hack up my script.

Credit to Gallerific for the jquery plugin, this guy for the CSS I stole to make my dropdown menus, and to Dave Taylor for his web gallery CGI script… ancient echoes of which still exist in my index and thumbnail files. My page looks a lot like the Gallerific “advanced example”. The work I did was mostly for the on-the-fly link generation for the thumbnails and directories so that this will work dynamically in any folder.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.

So I’m back from Vegas. Some months ago I decided it’d be cool to see Vegas before I turned 30. Probably after watching CSI or something. So Emily took it upon herself to be awesome and make it happen. She got us plane tickets and a room for relatively cheap on Orbitz or something like that. It’s pretty much exactly what I needed.

I’d been coming to work angry for the last few weeks just due to frustration… There’s a hiring freeze on engineers so I’m stuck in an operator position for now. It’s fine, I like my company but the waiting was getting to me. There hasn’t been much to do except push trash at work recently. I thrive off solving challenging problems, and spending hours troubleshooting something complex that I’ve never touched before. But recently it’s been all boring standardized notification type stuff.

Vegas was impressive. We stayed at Circus Circus, mostly because it was possible to get a big room on the strip for dirt cheap. It’s the place with the massive motherfucking creepy clown outside. It took a day or so to really take it all in. Sure it’s all artificial but the novelty, and sheer density of that novelty, was what was really cool to see. As with most people I didn’t net any wins. Emily and I played a bunch of slots… We’d find the loudest and most ADD/obnoxious machine we could find and we’d rock it for a few hours. All while sucking down free booze of course. I won a little at blackjack, but nothing worth mention. On the last day I got to visit a cousin of mine in the area and his GF. We wound down the vacation with a little BBQ, and leeched a ride to the airport. It was everything I thought it would be and more, and did exactly what I wanted it to. We left Thursday and came back Tuesday, and I returned to work calm and relaxed for once. I even got to do some really fun events at work on Wednesday.

That’s my story. That place is good times, looking forward to going back sometime.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.

This might be nerding out a little more than usual, but it’s also pretty awesome.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.

I dont normally paste whole articles, but this one is pretty short. and pretty awesome. Sourced from http://dizzythinks.net/

Well I have to admit that this is genius. The guys from the Pirate Bay have a a 30million SEK fine which they say they won’t pay. However they have come up with a plan where all their users can join in which works like this.

Welcome to the Distributed Denial of Dollars attack (DDo$)

I’m going to stay on the fence about the legality of pirate bay and all that. But I’m firm in my contempt for how the big music and movie groups conduct themselves.

Found this random bit of awesome on the internet.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.

Saw this the other day on TV. Yes, it’s a legit commercial. I’d completely forgotten about it, but a coworker passed the link around the NOC. I think it might be a bit much for kids, but then I’ve only seen it aired late-ish on TV. It’s pretty awesome, especially if you’re ancient like me and you remember the original vid when it came out. Funny how controversial for one generation is commercial stock for another.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.

Due to a combination of taunts and dares, my breakfast turned out to be…

That’s right. a poptart and brownie sandwich. Clicky for a full force pic of it. It was a little messier than I’d planned on, but totally worth it. Also, fuck you Korey.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.

This vid has been floating around the net getting great reviews for a month or so, but I recently stumbled it again and it was just as cool as the first time I watched it. So I thought I’d share. For the non-nerds, it’s a brief and enjoyable (no kidding, it’s actually pretty cool) history of the internet. Anyone that has a little curiosity about the world around them will probably like it, it’s not a pile of jargon. For the nerds it’s just fun to watch… Lore is a big part of geekdom. The fit and finish on it is top notch. The embedded vid is pretty good, but it’ll probably look better on the host site. Enjoy, let me know what you think.

Originally published at The IggBlog. You can comment here or there.