Solipsism Gradient

From Doc Searls’ weblog, a link to the Illegal Art Exhibit Contract.

NOTICE TO USER: BY METABOLIZING YOU ACCEPT ALL THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THIS AGREEMENT INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, USE OF YOUR HOME AND CAR BY THE AUTHORS OF THIS AGREEMENT.

If you like warning labels, don’t miss the Rinkworks Warning Labels Page.

“Warning: has been found to cause cancer in laboratory mice.” — On a box of rat poison.

Rinkworks, which can’t be praised enough IMHO, also contains the Absolutely Funniest Thing I’ve Ever Seen On The Internet. You have been warned. Do not click on this link while eating or drinking.

Let’s see… there’s Happy Fun Ball…

Happy Fun Ball Contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at.

And, of course, they continue to disclaim everything.

…An explanation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle may be found at the bottom of this page. Then again, it may not.

They also pointed out to me Dave Barry’s Original sci.electronics FAQ, a classic in this genre.

PLUGGING IN THE DEVICE: The plug on this device represents the latest thinking of the electrical industry’s Plug Mutation Group, which, in a continuing effort to prevent consumers from causing hazardous electrical current to flow through their appliances, developed the Three-Pronged Plug, then the Plug Where One Prong is Bigger Than the Other. Your device is equiped with the revolutionary new Plug Whose Prongs Consist of Six Small Religious Figurines Made of Chocolate. DO NOT TRY TO PLUG IT IN! Lay it gently on the floor near an outlet, but out of direct sunlight, and clean it weekly with a damp handkerchief.

DISCLAIMER: This post, as well as the rest of this website, is covered by The World’s Most Powerful Meta-Disclaimer.

I’ve updated phpBB to version 2.0.3, which just came out. It fixed some security vulnerabilities.

I’ve also done incremental fixes to page formatting inconsistencies, changed to grey smilies (the default yellow ones were rather obtrusive), added a link to the site map to the 404 page, and did some minor things I can’t remember right now .

One problem with IE; posting and editing posts has some problems. I think the JavaScripts that handle cursor position and tag insertions aren’t IE-friendly. Sometimes, when I submit a message, the first dozen or so characters are mangled.

I’ve seen this before on other phpBB boards, so I suppose it’s an IE issue. I’ll look around on the phpBB support forums to see if there’s a fix out…

Meanwhile, be sure to preview, double-check (and edit, if necessary) your posts.

I decided to let guests post here, while I figure out a way to hide comments. I can always delete stuff if this gets out of hand … now I’m off to learn more PHP…

Also, guests can now post in the 4 product support forums.

I added a new topic about this site’s design, for whoever’s interested.

OK, the new design is finished.

It took me two weeks of nearly full-time work, going through at least ten iterations. I started out with nothing more than insatisfaction with my previous site, some notes from Adam Engst‘s critique of it at his MacHack 2002 session “Hacking the Press”, and the idea to implement both a weblog and support forums.

At first I tried simply implementing some of Adam’s suggestions under my old design, and using Blogger. However I found it difficult to integrate, and I didn’t like depending on someone else’s site being up to be able to post stuff to my own.

Anyway, after looking briefly at some available options, I decided to download and try out phpBB. My provider turned out to have the necessary infrastructure installed (mySQL and PHP) and very soon I had a test forum running.

I looked at the several visual themes available for phpBB and the default one (subBlue) looked nearly like what I wanted for my site.

After several iterations of convergence between the forum theme and the rest of the site, here it is. It’s now hard to tell which pages are served by phpBB and which aren’t, unless you look at the URL; if it has the .php extension, it’s a phpBB page.

Before anyone asks, I actually like Mac OS X’s “metal” look. The site graphics (actually, there are only 3 graphics altogether for that) have a different blur level and are very slightly blue-tinted. So it will be easy to change in the future. Suggestions are welcome…

Please excuse any remaining inconsistencies (and tell me if you find any). I had no previous PHP experience, and stylesheets also were new to me. Hopefully it came out OK.

I checked the site with all Mac OS X browsers I could find. Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla and Chimera all seem to work OK and render things the same. OmniWeb still doesn’t support borders in stylesheets, but seems otherwise OK. Opera does some strange things to column widths on some page; no time to figure out why. And iCab, so far, seems to have the most formatting problems.