The above video is very informative. Everyone should help to fight companies from taking over the internet.

Well, over 24 hours and almost 1000 unique hits (that’s a lot for my site) later, the truth is revealed. Turns out, it was just some 23 year old guy from Florida, named Mike, playing a trick on the masses of the internet.

Eon8.com was a work of pure genius. It accomplished exactly what it set out to do; act as a social experiment to guage the reactions of the masses. Whether or not you felt let down after the whole thing finished, is up to you. But I for one, think it was a great hit. It was a wrench thrown into the machine of mundane internet browsing. People all over the world were posting on forums, IRC channels and AIM chat rooms trying to figure out exactly what was going on. And I’ll be the first to admit, there were some pretty obscure ideas thrown around, but all in all, the major consensus was that it was probably a viral marketing campaign.

Applying occam’s razor, the advertising bit was probably the reason for the whole thing, but something about it didn’t sit right with me. It didn’t have advertising written on it. Maybe if there were a bunch of AdWords posted on there, I could have understood, but it didn’t have that kind of large-scale “HAHA we tricked you!” feel. Oh well, in the end, no one was adversly affected by the whole thing, save for a few sleep-deprived geeks. Whether or not you’re pissed is up to you, but I for one can accept the fact that I was an unknowing pawn in Mike’s social experiment. No harm, no foul.

If you would like to read up on the history of www.eon8.com you can see my previous post, eon8.com — WTF!?!

By the way, if anyone’s interested, you can get some merchandise at cafepress.

Here are some screenshots from the resulting page:

237
A screenshot of the deployment page of eon8.

240
Eon8.com stats since 2005.

Here is all the information which was posted under the “Reveal the Truth…” link in the above picture:
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UPDATE!!! Eon8 has been deployed!! Read about it here!!

So, browsing online tonight, I ran across eon8.com. If you ask me, the whole thing kinda creeps me out. But then again, I’m somewhat of a conspiracy theorist.

Ok, so here’s what I’ve gathered from different sources on the internet:

1. The site includes a countdown timer to 12 midnight on July 1st 2006 (00:00:00 2006/07/01)
2. The site logs the ip address of all users and any http referers that link to the site
3. An MD5 hash of a date and time are then created and stamped on the site when a visitor displays the main page.
4. The Distribution List contains MD5 hashed dates as well. (Maybe… the last one usually isn’t the correct length for a hash, i.e. 32 characters)
5. IP addresses of visitors are probably logged and displayed on a world map using red dots for indicators.
6. Speculated that the dots on the map correspond to nuclear power plants/missle silos.
7. There are several links on the main page which forward the user to protected areas of the site.
8. The server is running Apache 1.3.33 at a colocation hosted by The Planet.

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This is one I struggled with for a long time. The menu at the top of my site was always giving me trouble. It would always be two pixels off when I looked at it in firefox vs. IE. This is because IE screws up the box-model. I won’t go into what exactly it screws up, but I’m telling you it does.

There is a simple fix to the problem though. It requires the use of a wrapper div. By creating a wrapper div, the two pixel difference is correctly compensated in both IE and other CSS2 compliant browsers. Here is the code:

#wrapper {
  border-style : none;
  width : 750px;
}

#mydiv {
  width : 100%;
}

Then the HTML is pretty straight forward too:

<div id="wrapper">
  <div id="mydiv">
    
  </div>
</div>

This is a problem I ran into recently while working on a new website. How do you make a div extend the full length of the browser window? This used to be the domain of tables (yuck!), but CSS comes to save the day. Here’s the code:

html, body {
  /* We'll tell the browser to use the whole window to display our
      site, not just the space the content takes up. */
  height : 100%;
}

#wrapper {
  /* Now, we tell the div to be the full length of the window. */
  height : 100%;
}

I did run into a little snag. When the div is 100% of the window, setting a border(i.e. border : 1px solid #666;), bumps the div to be just a little too big, creating a vertical scroll bar. To fix this, only define the left and right borders(i.e. border-left : 1px solid #666; border-right : 1px solid #666;) This way, the top and bottom don’t have borders.

This is an often asked question:

How do I center stuff on my website without using tables?

The answer is amazingly simple. It also validates as correct CSS, and best part of all… it doesn’t use tables!
Here is the CSS:

body {
  /* We'll make sure IE centers the stuff properly. */
  text-align : center;
}

#wrapper {
  /* We'll center the content for all other GOOD browsers.
      IE doesn't center properly with this. */
  margin : 0 auto;
  width : 50%;
}

Here is the HTML:

<body>
  <div id="wrapper">
    <!-- Put all your centered content here! -->
  </div>
</body>

It’s was live just right now. The midi was fun to hear.

Ok, so I found a bug in Digg v3. Try clicking on hidden comment. When the comment is shown, everything looks fine. If you try to hide the comment again, the body of the comment and EVERYTHING below it disappears. Kinda fun. I BROKE DIGG!

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Do you think it is possible to create an AIM client using Perl and AJAX? On the x10hosting forums someone started a thread about creating an online AOL Instant Messenger client. He cited WebAIM.net and AIMonPSP.com.

I then realized that Perl has functionality for connecting to AOL’s servers. I once made an AIM bot using perl (I really wish I still had that code :/ ). Then I thought… well, it the server is doing all the work, how do we get the information to the client? AJAX? Might work. Could be kinda slow. Would definitely have to work out the kinks. WebAIM is based on Java. While that is all well and good, it still requires a client download. AIMonPSP uses a server based approach, but it has to use META refreshes to get its information. Not so fast. I was thinkin’ well, why not AJAX. From what I know of AJAX, this isn’t the best use of it, but it could be a nice proof of concept.

Oh well, as of right now, I’m up to my eyeballs in Night Light, my soon-to-be-released distribution of Linux. I’m having a lot of fun and I’m learning a whole lot about how Linux works. Now, if I could only learn this much about cars….
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Here is a follow up to the post I created about Vincent Ferarri; the guy who tried to cancel his AOL account. Wow. This has hit the big time. Matt Lauer interviewed him about his ordeal with AOL. After watching the video, I think Vincent presented himself very well. It definitely seemed like he felt comfortable talking to Matt Lauer as well as being on camera. I was, as probably many other people were, to learn that it took Vincent 21 minutes to acutally cancel his account. I think that was about 20 minutes too long.

I hope AOL and other large corporations learn from this… you can’t push your customers around. They are your customers. They pay you for a service. And in today’s compu-world, anyone with a connection to the internet can voice their opinion(except people in China — Sorry guys…) and let everyone else in on the dirt.

Now, if we could only get the government to stop spying on us….

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