So, it turns out that Francois Tremblay is a shameless transphobe.

[trigger warning for transphobia]

The recent rants against trans-women made me raise an eyebrow about the sheer level irrationality displayed here, but then I folloeda link to a discussion and found out this quote

I don’t want your fucking sympathy, trans-lover.

What the actual fuck Francois? When did  you become a bigoted scumfuck?

Sorry, but this sentence, along with recent peppering of “bitch”, “retard” and “faggot” as slurs in your posts makes me think you’re a very confused individual. Let me make that very very clear to you: You can’t go using misogynistic, ableist or homophobic slurs and  then claim that you “do not impose harm”.

Your laughably misguided “antinatalist” tirades are one thing, but outright bigotry it quite another. Sorry to say but the left-libertarian forum was right to treat you like shit.

Work on your shit dude.

PS: If anyone wants to see the extent of Francois’ transbashing, start reading from this comment (after which he calls the poster a “gender traitor”). Big trigger warning though.

Invite yourselves then

Ok, nobody took my on my Dreamhost invitations offer so I might as well throw them out there for anyone who might be interested.

  • 575458093644
  • 509716414959
  • 131138983931
  • 595831052380
  • 551763039374

So feel free to take them and register for Dreamhost. You’ll get 2 Tb of Space and 20 Tb of bandwidth per month. You will also get a nice price cut on 5 and 10 year plans.

You can only use them for the next 4 days unfortunately but If you do use on of them, just write it in the comments so that others are aware.

Holy mama! I've got Dreamhost invites!

I don’t know if anyone from Dreamhost noticed my recent promotion for Self-hosting WordPress, but I’ve just been handed special 5 promotional codes to give around and boy are they a doozy.

  • You will get four (4) times the normal disk and bandwidth!
  • If you choose our five-year plan, you’ll get $150 off.
  • If you choose our ten-year plan, you’ll get $200 off.

Now, 4 times 500 is 2Tb of space. 2. T-e-r-r-a-b-y-t-e-s (I don’t get to say this word often enough) and quite a lot of bandwidth as well.

The only problem is that this is valid for 2 weeks only so I need to give these out quickly. If you were thinking of taking me up on my self-hosting proposal, then there’s no better time than now. Once this is gone, you can’t get this offer any other way, short of stumbling on someone who got this invite as well.

So step up. I don’t have anything else to do with these so I might as well give them out. If you’re interested just email me or leave a comment and I’ll give you the 12-digit code of your dreams (pun intended 😉 )

UPDATE: I just noticed that If you go and sign with Dreamhost now, you get unlimited bandwidth and space for life, just because it’s their birthday. You don’t even need my invites, unless you want to save the money that is. Hurry up. Only 30 places left

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Slap in the face

This mountain bicycle features oversized tires...

I’ve been trying to control and introspect my feelings lately, after the recent event where the Barefoot Bum abruptly terminated his self-hosted blog. This sudden turn of events left me stunned and hurt, very much like a slap in the face.

Thus, I’ve been waiting for the last few days to get an explanation, a reason or something anyway to understand what led to this. But after my emails were ignored and my IM attempts were shot down, I’m starting to believe this is for him, somehow personal.

But why is this a slap in the face for me? Let me give you an analogy.

Lets say that you have an old fashioned bicycle which does not have any speed control but always moves at the same old speed. This bicycle does not have anything fancy but it takes you where you want it eventually but like all bikes missing speed control, when the road gets upward, it makes you struggle and when it goes downwards, your pedaling becomes useless.

I see this and I explain to you that there are new types of custom bicycles with speed control. They takes a bit of time to setup and get used to but give you much more power in your rides. You’re sceptical at first but once I explain the rest of the features and widgets that a custom bicycle can have and that I’ll be glad to set it up or you as a gift (once you buy for the material) you’re sold.

I also explain that I’m trying to convince more people to try these out as I think it’s worth it.

So I spend some time to setup this bicycle and you start using it. The first week goes just fine and while you don’t yet have the perfect understanding of speed control, you can ride it. Sometimes it gets a bit harder as you’re not used to switching the speeds but nothing serious. As far as I know, everything seems to be going fine until…

One sunday, I wake up to find you shouting how much these bicycles suck. You start calling them an absolute piece of crap that only bike mechanics could ever setup and ride, regardless of the fact that many non-mechanics are doing exactly that. Not understanding what changed, I try to explain that this criticism is a bit harsh.

And the next time I wake up and find that you’ve smashed your new bike into millions of pieces. This bike which as a gift I helped you setup, without any expectation of reward and with the best of intentions, is now scrap metal.

How do you think that makes me feel?

All along you knew that as my first attempt to setup a custom bike for, you are the first sample people are going to look at as an example. And yet, you now start saying that custom bikes are not working and that you can’t remove those dynamos I suggested for your old bike either.

You don’t consider that custom bikes may not fit your style. You don’t give me a chance to fix any problems. No, you smash it and then say that they are crap. As if you’re trying to deliberately turn people off and sabotage all I’m trying to achieve.

How do you think that makes me feel now?

If you thought hurt and surprised, you’d be spot on.

Like a slap in the face.

And here I am now. A few days after the “slap”, and I still do not know the fuck happened. I’ve been patiently waiting to see if anything will be explained but in vain. I’ve also been trying to suppress my outburst but I’ve had enough.

All I know is that from one day to the other a succesful migration was trashed and I’m reading impressions that I didn’t expect. At least not from someone I respected. And make no mistake. The migration was succesful. All the posts from the old blog were moved. All the comments, from both blogger and IDC were moved ((Save one post with ID Comments)). Everything was working. The only missing was the moving of the old blogroll and widgets to the new blog, and the only reason I did not do this as well, is because I was not given access.

There was absolutely nothing more complex left to do, than going to your dashboard and clicking on “Write new post”. Others agree.

As for the setup difficulty; do not be confused by my step-by-step process. In that, I went into excruciating detail in order to make it as easy and fool-proof to follow as possible. I could have easily shortened it to half the size.

That’s it then. This post was mostly a rant to take this stuff out of my chest before it easts me up and burst out like an alien of bitterness and anger. I cannot claim to know why BB acted the way he did but for me, it was certainly the wrong way.

For me, it is especially troublesome when we’re talking about atheist activism, solidarity and cooperation to have my first attempt to help others, pissed on like that from the get go.

UPDATE @ 02/11/2009: This post was never posted publicly until now. As a result of recent developments with the Barefoot Bum, I’m making it public as I see no hope of salvage. Make of it what you will.

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Barefoot Bum's New Slum

So, Barefoot bum’s new shiny, wordpress-powered self-hosted blog is now ready. I’ve finally finished with all the imports and the thing is ready to use. Of course the layout might change if Larry wishes but the thing is ready to be used.

Here’s a step-by-step summary of the setup process, just to get an overview of what was required. Keep in mind that for a new blog, you don’t need more than 10 or so of these.

Day 1

  1. Setup the domain to use php5 and not to use the needless www. prefix.
  2. Use One-click install to setup wordpress and wait 5 minutes.
  3. Setup WordPress password.
  4. Install One Click Plugin Updater through FTP.
  5. Deactivate Wp-Cache.
  6. Acticate the plugin Wp-Super Cache (Installed with wordpress).
  7. Delete all other plugins except Akismet and Hello Dolly (Just in case he likes it).
  8. Go to Settings > General and copy the blog desc from the original blog.
  9. In Settings, Go to Writing and add http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ to the ping so that the Atheist Blogroll is pinged.
  10. In Settings, Went to Discussion and deactivated the option to require one approved comment before posting it. Increased the number of links before moderation to 3.
  11. Updated the admin password to a temp password from the default of WP.
  12. Added a new admin user for me and Larry and deleted the default admin to avoid 0-day attacks.
  13. Went Manage > Import > Blogger. Sent email to Larry to authorize wordpress for his blogger account.
  14. Downloading some themes closer to the original blog style.
  15. Larry started the import procedure. It finished in about 10 minutes for 1200+ posts and 3000+ comments.
  16. Installed a cartload of plugins. Activated them.
  17. Set Permalinks to /blog/
  18. Setting up feedburner.
  19. Setup Yadis for blogger
  20. Setup Photodropper
  21. Enabled wp-supercache and .htaccess settings.
  22. Added Similar & Recent posts to sidebar and feed.
  23. Added Socrates Image to right sidebar.
  24. Extended sidebar size.
  25. Added We-Op-Ed image and rss for larry.
  26. Added Atheist Out Scarlet A.
  27. Added more wigets.
  28. Got stuck on how to import the IDC comments from blogger

Total time to setup all these, from start to finish, while also doing other stuff (like chatting on ICQ and reading blogs): 5 hours.

Day 2

  1. Finally received some help from Intense Debate on how to import IDC comments from blogspot to WordPress. I got a plugin which automates this in the mail.
  2. Plugin did not work as my host does not support a php function for security reasons.
  3. Contacted the Josh Fraser, the author of the plugin for help. He was amazingly responsive and helpful and provided me with an updated version of the plugin that could work around the php restriction. Josh you rock!
  4. Import went perfectly and all comments were back into wordpress. Unfortunately one post did not get them as the title has italics which wordpress stripped and they names did not match. Nevertheless, the rest worked. (I will do a follow-up post on this later)

Total time for this part: 1 hour.

Thoughts

Of course this process was a learning experience for me as not only did Larry have a pretty customized blog with widgets, images, etc) but he is also subscibed to a lot of services I do not have access (Feeburner, Scoutle, etc). Finally this was the first time I was trying to migrate ID comments from blogger to wordpress sso this took some extra research as well.

For someone who has a very simple and uncustomized blog, the migration time can be cut to 1/3 easily.

Nevertheless, this first experience will now allow me to know what I need and streamline the process. Specifically, there is the issue that I cannot setup a lot of stuff without access to one’s accounts, while other times I may need feedback.

This is the stuff I need to know in order to bug people less:

  • Feedburner password: In order to setup your blogspot feed to redirected to your new blog
  • WordPress.com password or API: So that I can setup your stats
  • Blogger password and username: So that I can start the import process and see the codes for any widgets you have on your sidebar (Mybloglog, scoutle etc)
  • If the codes are not visible through the blogger gadgets, I need to have them so that I can put them in the sidebar.
  • How do you want your tags and categories? As blogger only supports the generic “labels” which gets translated to wordpress categories, I need to know which ones (if any) to turn into tags
  • How do you want your permalink structure to be? By date (as in blogger, like a newspaper), with categories? with a custom text (like here under /blog/ ?)

All of these are information that I will need to set it up with the minimum of input from you. If any of these is missing, unfortunately I will have to ask you or you do it yourself (for the last two options I can just make a choice myself which you can change later on).

All in all, it went quite well and nothing horribly broke. So I’m quite glad. This will go much faster for someone with a more simple blog (as in, one hosted in wordpress.com, or not very customized blogspot)

I’m only a bit saddened that Larry chose not to start using it yet. If he keeps using his old blog, new comments and posts will be more difficult to transfer over as it cannot be done as part of a mass import.

Anyway, so what do you think?

And it begins

The Barefoot Bum has accepted my offer. I now have my first…guinea pig 🙂

That was quick 😀

So I’ve now started setting up the Larry’s new home. I will attempt to log and blog my progress to that hopefully others who might want to follow, but doing this themselves might be able to do so.

Stay tuned 😉

As for the others, I still haven’t heard from Alonzo and unfortunately Vjack is preoccupied with Hurricanes and the like so it’s not really feasible for him at this point (and best of luck to him). In any case, I have some time until I’m finished with the Barefoot Bum.

PS: Fuck, I now need a new category to post these types of blogposts under.

A Quickie

OK, on rapid succession before I hit the bed:

  • I finished version 0.9.5 of Complexlife. It now includes support for stumbleupon and reddit, an option to simplify the settings menu by hading the extra options and some code improvements.
    This is 5 minor versions since the fork. Go me!
  • I finally added a favicon on the Division by Zer0. I wanted to do this for a while but I never got around to it and I also didn’t have anything in particular I wanted to use. Finally a guest post from Pharyngula gave me the idea to use the atheism symbol which looks cool enough.
    It took me a while to figure out what the correct code is but a little Google prayer and I got my divine answer.
  • We now have 22 Atheists in Scoutle which is pretty impressive if you consider it was only 4 days ago that I mentioned it. However the more impressive news is that found a fellow Epicurean blogger through the new network I setup. Coolness!
    So, for the rest of you who haven’t joined yet. What are you waiting for?! Git!
  • I now have an actual Comment Policy so I’d appreciate any opinions on it 😀

G’night!

PMOG Mission: The War on Science

A Mission on the Nethernet about how Science is assaulted when it conflicts with Dogma

This is a post, for completeness and awareness sake, in regards to the new mission I’ve just created in PMOG

Initially the plan was just to type a short post with a link to the mission for anyone who wants to take it, but since I write pretty long descriptions, I think it would be a shame to just lose them. To this end, I’ve decided to post the whole descriptions, along with the links to the mission articles themselves, which will also serve as a notification to the blog authors that they’ve been linked to.

So, my newest mission is The War on Science.

If you have a PMOG account, you should already be taking it and if not, well…get one already 😉

Description

Science is the accumulated knowledge of humanity that we have achieved through the scientific method and it has managed in a short 150 years to provide us with tremendous leaps in all aspects of human life.

However, this pure and neutral attempt of humanity to understand the world around it has been coming more and more under attack in recent years because it casts light into the shadows that people use to hold onto power

Follow me into a dangerous mission to understand why this is happening and how.

The Mission

Reining In the Fallacious Human Belief Machine

Our first stop is a more relaxed presentation of the Scientific Method (than a wikipedia article that is) and the classic problems you run into if you avoid it.

It is an unfortunate fact that human reasoning alone is not sufficient to understand the world. We are simply to error prone and this is why 2000 years of philosophy have not accomplished even a bit of what science did.

Why Things Suck: Science

But if science has managed to provide us with so much in its short time of use, why is it creating so many negative feelings?

Short answer: It makes us look bad,

Skepticism and Informed Consensus

But of course, science is not at war with everyone. Indeed, it is an invaluable boon to sceptics everywhere as it provides a rock-solid base for their beliefs.

The ability to question theories which go against real knowledge without having to “re-invent the wheel” every time is a great resource that helps to debunk and refute unrealistic or dangerous beliefs

The “Radio Wave” Argument

It is a common tactic of science-opponents to claim knowledge of something undiscovered or to hide in the gaps of our knowledge

But what people do not understand is that this is useless. Claiming to be able to see, feel or hear something no one else can, is of use to no one but yourself. And even that is disputable

Science vs. religion: no contest.

It is common for Science to be misrepresented as an “Atheist’s religion”, especially by religious proponents.

In truth, science has no direct relation with atheism other than the fact that it is, often enough, a fortunate result.

Science is not here to assault religion but it also does not care to appease it by conforming to it.

The Value of Science in Education

Science is oft misunderstood for it’s lack of absolute answers. While it can occasionally give you very high probabilities, it will never give you a 100% answer.

But is this a weakness? Far from it. It is, in fact, its greatest strength.

Lysenkoisml

But is religion and superstition the only enemy? No.

Every belief that is unfounded in evidence has the habit of turning against science when truth does not conform to its wishes.

Witness how the Soviet Union in its anti-capitalistic fervor ignored the scientific findings, with catastrophic results for its food production.

Inhofe’s 400 Global Warming Deniers Debunked

The most high profile wars on science at this moment happen on the fronts of Evolution – from religious opponents – and Global Warming.

You see, where religion attempts to discredit the scientific method, the vested interests behind Global Warming denial are waging a war of misinformation, attempting to slow down governments acting on what Science has discovered in order to retain profits.

It has happened before with the Tobacco industries, and it is happening yet again.

Incredible Machine Full Version “AKA Pipe dream”

But science does not have to always be boring and difficult. As previous articles have said, there is beauty in science.

I will leave you thus with an amazing video of a purely mechanical construct that by using the laws of physics can produce a wonderful result.

Να ΄χουμε να γράφουμε

Καιρό είχαμε να γράψουμε εδώ λοιπόν, ας όψεται η μικρή διάρκεια προσοχής μου.

Τι έγινε απο τις 3 Ιαν λοιπόν; Κυρίως τίποτα. Απέραντα πεδία βαρεμάρας με μικρές αναλαμπές ενδιαφέροντος, όπως όταν άρχισα να φτιάχνω δικό μου campaign στο παιχνίδι στρατηγικής Wesnoth (δες το. Λέγεται Forgotten Legacy)

Πήρα και την άδεια μου επιτέλους. Μετά απο ~6 μήνες είχα φρικάρει πια, ειδικά μετά απο τα απίστευτα 10-12ωρα που τράβηξα τον Οκτώβριο.
Δεν έκανα τίποτα εκτώς απο το να κοιμάμαι και να λιώνω στο PC μιας και όλοι είτε είχαν φύγει διακοπές είτε είχαν εξεταστική. Το κέρατο μου δηλαδή για ευκαιρίες ξενυχτίου.

Τουλάχιστον ξαναείδα τον [tag]Elt[/tag] που είχα πολύ καιρό. Πήγαμε για μια μπύρα στο Ark και θυμηθήκαμε τους παλιούς καλούς καιρούς.

Αυτά για την ώρα, τα υπόλοιπα σε ξεχωριστά posts έτσι για να γεμίζουμε

Back to the routine

Aaah, four days of rest passed. Now back to work.

Situation with family seems to be on an uneasy rest, things haven’t changed. Friends liked the scar though 🙂

[tag]WoW[/tag] interest is waning again, and I don’t know if it will resurge once more. I feel bad for letting the guild down. However I like getting out once more and my grief seems all but gone (still have occasional relapses now and then).

I haven’t seen my gaming buddies for a while but I just don’t feel like playing games now, taking a break so to speak. Maybe in due time…

Downloading songs like crazy as well, exploring new bands I’ve never really taken an interest before.