My ear is clogged. It has been since last Saturday. I’m not sure why. All I can think of is that I was listening to music extra loud on the commute home to help blast away the stress of a traffic jam. It’s a weird sensation, slightly disorienting at times. I can’t hear people or things well on that side. I can hear internal things very well, like chewing, breathing, myself talking, the clicking of my jaw, movement of my face, and ever-present tinnitus. I’ve tried several things so far, and the best I can say is that it might have gotten a little better, but not unblocked. I’ve tried q-tips, vinegar, alcohol, oil, carbamide peroxide, hydrogen peroxide, and blasting it with water from a bulb thing. I will have to try once more with these. I also saw some little ear brushes that I will buy if the chemical methods fail. And if that fails, I guess I’ll have to go to the doctors. I hope my hearing isn’t damaged, but the clarity with which I hear internal things would suggest otherwise.
problem posts page 21
Struggling with PhoneGap:
- had trouble with geolocation on iOS
- wasn’t able to get cordova-icon or cordova-splash to work, or ‘config.xml’ icon configuration, so I had to manually put icons in place for now
- struggled getting a coworker’s build working
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.
GiveCamp 2016 day 2
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.
WordPress.com redirects don’t support HTTPS
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.
Testing the Monty Hall problem
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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"CSS3: Text Rotation Rendering Problems
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.