Divide by Null - undefined

Infinitesimals

Voicemail has its uses, for example, when one won't be able to pick up the phone for awhile, but needs to relay a message immediately, or when other forms of communication are not possible, i.e. e-mail or texting is inconvenient or irrelevant.

However, I still usually end up ignoring it, thus rendering most of the pros as moot.

(1) Oct 10, 08 - 10:18 AM

On the subject of high school friends, just because you're different, doesn't mean you can't be friends.

(0) Jun 17, 07 - 10:41 PM

Pi is wrong.

Well, actually, maybe it would just be better to use what is currently known as 2*pi. I've always thought it would be easier if sine and cosine had periods that were just pi, not 2pi.

So should pi be 6.283185...? Should pi be the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius, instead of diameter? If so, it would take about 50 years for this to gain any momentum in the mathematical community.

(0) Apr 20, 07 - 12:07 AM

MySpace is not YourSpace

Thursday, May 11, 2006 | 2:07:35 AM
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MySpace. Chances are, you have an account there.

I'm sure most of you know about how there are stalkers all over the site and such, but that's not what I'm talking about. That can be remedied on the user scale.

I'm talking about the back-end. They're always under maintenance. They always have problems. They're constantly making changes on the main site. Why not test it first? For a site of that calibur, I think it's unacceptable. It's fine for me, because few visit me at the moment. If I get popular, I would invest in a dedicated server and upgrade the efficiency of my scripts, etc. I don't really have the money or the expertise to do that right now. I'm sure they could make some investments.

Next, customization. It's nigh-impossible to customize your myspace without advanced css knowledge. Sure you could add all those little things to make your text bright yellow on a bright cyan background with falling images of animated rainbow stars. But to truly make an appealing site, one nearly has to scrap everything and start anew.

Next is their lack of security. Jeff and I managed to find a harmless (potentially harmful) exploit regarding our names. We replaced the display name with an image. I really don't see how they could have such an exploit work... it seems reverse of what I would expect to happen. Maybe that's just how ColdFusion works? Yay PHP.

Have you heard about the MySpace "virus"? It ran awhile ago, adding the creator as a friend and adding a small notice in one's about me. It was a simple javascript script. Then again, I think IE should take a bit of the blame. Nevertheless...

Next... it looks really bad. It's so cluttered. It doesn't have the excuse of sacrificing looks for accessibility... because it's not. This probably is why it translated to the problems with user customization.

And yet there are many MySpace alternatives that improve on this. More secure, more customizable, more features... but they never caught on. MySpace was lucky. It succeeded where Friendster failed, but stayed at the top.

Just the luck of the draw, I guess.

For such a popular site, MySpace is lack-luster. It's a (insert analogy here).

Yeah, I couldn't think of a good analogy... what? It's near midnight. Time for me to sleep.

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2 Comments

  1. Ryan Tuesday, May 16, 2006 | 12:13:53 AM

    Well, it seems between this post and this comment, the exploit has been fixed.

    Because of a request to remove the image, I tried to move into a different font color. It appears that the entities no longer turn into the angle brackets and the brackets no longer disappear. Thus... I'm stuck back to regular text =P. Ahh well, the image was icky anyway. Jeff and Travis appear to be the lucky few remaining.

    I still don't know how something like that could have occurred. html_special_chars should have easily taken care of it. It now seems to only be a string replacement for the brackets, though.

  2. Sean Tuesday, May 16, 2006 | 12:15:17 PM

    MySpace is ugly and cluttered, thats why I walked away from it when someone first showed it to me. Since I walked away once I never went back.

    They really should make their site look better =/

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