In short, I’m having to develop a system which at this point doesn’t exactly exist. The problem is that I’m lazy, and can’t decide on the “proper” way of doing so.

Anyway, the project will be in Django, and I have a whole bunch of pseudo-code, a basic design (see below) and lots of hope.

I figured I have a lot of material I don’t really use in the form of tweets. 1,832 of them.

When I started writing this blog post I wanted to gather a bunch of tweets and just call it The Best of Dushkin or something. Then I started looking at what those tweets actually contained.

Common themes include:

1. Being generally PO’d with the state of public transport/commuting:
   

   The automatic announcer that’s supposed to make up for the shortcomings of the Israeli train schedules didn’t go off and I missed a train.

1. Boring work related things that nobody who isn’t in my particular position would ever in their right mind understand or want to understand:
   

   The guy who did the friday shift didn’t trace right.

2. Playing (boring) games:
   

   I played some plants vs zombies. It was cool actually.

I began to wonder if that’s the future of my communication with the outside world will be conducted in 140 characters or less and be about terribly simple things like playing Plants vs. Zombies (update: it’s a good game).

So perhaps it won’t replace it completely, but I wonder just how many of these tweets could have been expanded upon and become fully fledged blog posts. Not that a blog post is much of a step up from a tweet, let’s face it.

So I promise I’ll write more meaningful things, more often.

You might remember a similar post much like this from some time ago, except longer. Its fate remains uncertain and I’m somewhat infuriated.

Still adjusting…

Date display

Edit: It’s here!

I thought I’d share “gum”s progress with the world.

Here we’re seeing the date display which I’ve worked on. It only shows the date of the post for the first post of that day. For any post following that, only the time of day is displayed. The year is only displayed if it’s not this year.

It’s quite similar to what dushkin.org had in the older design, except redone. And this time, done right instead of being thrown in at the last second.

Gum's nested comments

As well as avatars, “gum” will also introduce nested replies. I have to say, it was actually a lot easier than I thought initially. Now you can reply to others’ comments and at the same time not appear as some idiotic smiley I put together at the last moment.

WordPress has so many features the old theme just couldn’t use.

I’m really looking forward to implementing this new design I’ve got in the works. It makes me as happy as… something that is usually quite happy (I’m such a wordsmith) to know that, yes, soon, I will replace this horrible poorly thought of design.

I hate the old design. But that’s not a bad sign, at all. It means there is change. It means I am becoming developing as an individual.

No joke! Good artists hate their work too. Kafka wanted to burn his works. Luckily, they were not burned though.

The other thing is that the web changed a lot since two years ago. Creative use of Javascript only really started coming into the picture around two years ago and the social media is taking invading the TV as well (youtube clips and tweets being scrolled in the ticker on CNN). I don’t regret the old design. I simply know how to make it better.

Developing a theme (and touching up on some plugins) for WordPress has been an interesting experience overall, and very rewarding. They’ve made it simple to customize all the elements involved in making the theme work (except for those damn comments) and I salute them.

So off to a fresh start soon. And damn you, IE for making me work so hard.

I’m going to bring my website’s design up to more up to date standards in terms of looks. Long, long, overdue. I think this is the 3rd (if not more) year I’ve not done a major overhaul.

I don’t feel that reflects what I’ve actually done. I was in fact very active, and did a lot. No, my gallery doesn’t reflect that sometimes, but I most certainly have.

But why not just fix the problems with the current one first? Because I always felt it just didn’t cut it. That it wasn’t appealing enough. But I used it anyway, and just got incredibly lazy.

So here’s the photoshop mockup of what I have in mind:

Mockup of the new design of Dushkin.org

It’s not final, no, but this is version 1. I also intend to have only my latest tweet (or two) up on the site somewhere in a “what am I doing?” kind of box. (Probably under the menu)

Dushkin.org was inaccessible to me: it was 404ing the whole time – probably my ISP’s cache to blame. None of my friends had a single problem, and the same was true for CGI proxies. I rang my ISP that day and they had clearly stated, “we have a problem.”

Fine. They have a problem. And fine, they cache my pages. And that cache is having problems, fine. It’s not the first problem I’ve had, and I’m honestly quite tired. Sick and tired.

The email though, read as follows:

Password Lost and Changed for user: dushkin

Password changed?

I had someone take a look at the site. Someone with… internet tubes that aren’t broken. At first I thought he was bullshitting me, “why is there a guy with a gun there?” But, no, he wasn’t lying, as I soon found out via a CGI-proxy.

In this picture: shitty javascript, real player and horrible English

Naturally, I freaked out. What else could I do? Of course I’d freak out, I assumed I protected myself against these things. But then again, wordpress is not flawless. It was to be expected.

I mentioned this one had something to do with Spice Girls? Well, I wasn’t lying, I’m serious. This stuff is a blast from the past. Some serious hardcore 90s trash. Take a look at some of the HTML: (Modified slightly for better lolz)

<META content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0" name=GENERATOR>

<BODY oncontextmenu="return false" onselectstart="return false">

Holy shit. “Disabling” right clicking? FrontPage? All this page needs now is real player. Wait a second…

<embed name="video" pluginspage="http://www.real.com/player/" src="http://some.url.rm" hidden="true" type="audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin" maintainaspect="false" controls="ControlPanel,StatusBar" nojava="true" autostart="true" loop="true" height="62" width="165">

The only thing this page was lacking was a Spice Girl photo. And LASERS.

I reverted the database, changed my password and made changes to .htaccess among other things to ensure nobody gets in.

I don’t know whether the guy who did it was being even remotely serious. Namely because of the logs showing pretty clearly an IP in Egypt originating in Cairo:

41.232.6.15 – - [03/Jul/2009:13:43:26 -0500] “GET /visuals/?action=image&image=December%208.png HTTP/1.1″ 200 14458 “http://www.dushkin.org/visuals/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”

The same IP is the one that changed my theme (which no longer has write access) in case you were wondering why I’m pasting this snippet.

Hey, at least he took the time to appreciate my gallery. I guess it’s something? I guess our Dr.MoZo at least appreciates art.

The second thing I have with regards to him is an email address on Yahoo, which was how he resetted the password by some unknown feat: mazika_aboezat@yahoo.com

Come on, that HTML is like sooo last decade.