Comics Code Authority

The Comics Code Authority (CCA) is part of the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA), and was created to regulate the content of comic books in the United States…

…The CCA was created in 1954 as part of the CMAA in response to public concern about what was deemed inappropriate material in many comic books. This included graphic depictions of violence and gore in crime and horror comics, as well as the sexual innuendo of what aficionados refer to as good girl art…

…the CCA prohibited the presentation of “policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions … in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority.” But it added the requirements that “in every instance good shall triumph over evil” and discouraged “instances of law enforcement officers dying as a result of a criminal’s activities.”…

…Depictions of “excessive violence” were forbidden, as were “lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations.” Vampires, werewolves, ghouls and zombies could not be portrayed. In addition, comics could not use the words “horror” or “terror” in their titles. The use of the word “crime” was subject to numerous restrictions….

And then of course I did research about the further back-in-time censorship of the film industry.

United States Motion Picture Production Code of 1930

The Production Code (also known as the Hays Code) was the set of industry censorship guidelines governing the production of United States motion pictures. The Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), which later became the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), adopted the code in 1930, began effectively enforcing it in 1934…

The Production Code enumerated three “General Principles” As Follows:

1. No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.
2. Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.
3. Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.

And then of course the more previous unanimous ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States that the First Amendment of the United States Constitution did not extend to motion pictures:

Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio

The Court described movies in some technical detail and noted their popularity, but wrote “they may be used for evil,” and for this reason, “We cannot regard [the censorship of movies] as beyond the power of government.”

	def monthname(monthnumber)
		if monthnumber
			Date::MONTHNAMES[monthnumber]
		end
	end

Use it in your view like this:

< %=h monthname(item.month) %>

• http://www.pollsb.com/
• http://wis.dm/
• http://airow.com/

airow was closest to my idea… actually almost exactly. Too bad they beat me to the punch three years ago. It’s interesting that wis.dm got so much venture money. I think they’re going about their site the entirely wrong way trying to section out their users and questions into different segments. Their terminology and other things are their site are huge usability breaks too.

Also recently had ideas about reputation-management. Found three sites which all basically do what I wanted to do (I think):

• http://www.rapleaf.com/
• http://www.trustplus.com/
• http://claimid.com/

Trustplus looks the coolest and most promising of the three. Claimid is cool, but I don’t think it’ll go anywhere unless some more automation is added to it. It’s cool to have something based around openid, but it shouldn’t require you to do everything. Rapleaf is neat, but it’s been hard to find information about their roadmap. It looks like they’re mainly looking into social networks and e-commerce for users. Good place to start and I think Trustplus is starting there too, but Trustplus already has stuff built that you can use as a broswer addon; really good way to get it off the ground and working no matter how small your community is.

So these pretty much blew me out of the water. It’s likely you’ll see at least one of these rep-management companies get huge in the next few years here.

My goal now is to look years more into the future and come up with the next big thing THEN instead of the next big thing from last year that five people have already started on.

Right now I’m mainly working design, research, business/marketing strategy and internal documentation.

OpenID is really just about as insecure as email is for authenticating. Anyone can create an OpenID server (just like a mail server) and as many users as they want (just like a mail server). OpenID is not a spam-blocker and as far as I can tell never will be.

So how to verify? Well we could send a verification link to the email address associated with the OpenID account, but that would be just as insecure as OpenID is. I’m thinking now the best way to do it is require the user to fill out a CAPTCHA with their OpenID the first time they login to a site. This would prevent automated spamming of user account creation.

Other ideas

On a sidenote there should be another level to this with white/black-listing. There should be list lookups for OpenID providers just as there are for email servers. With this you could allow first-time authentication without a CAPTCHA and still be safe.

• Lightweight and my favorite for now, pretty easy to customize: BareTail
• Very lightweight: Tail for Win32
• Somewhat more heavyweight and customizable. Easy to change highlight colors: MakeLogic Tail

All of these have tabbed/multi-buffer interfaces.
Just download one and tell it where your rails app’s log/development.log file is.

It’s pretty straightforward. Just read the README and all the comments on agilewebdevelopment and you should be good to go!

Only gotcha that I ran into was making the ReCAPTCHA match the design on my submit page. Took me awhile to find this, but basically I had to just copy/paste the HTML and manually insert my public key INSTEAD of using recaptcha_tags.

• Custom theming your ReCAPTCHA: http://recaptcha.net/fastcgi/demo/customtheme
• Other security and CAPTCHA info for Rails: http://www.quarkruby.com/2007/9/20/ruby-on-rails-security-guide

The network profiler thing on this is an amazing piece of work. If you’re ever looking to do a performance assessment of a website based on page size/load times this is what you’ll want to use. You can see how long it takes for the page to respond, how long each element takes to load and how big all of the page elements are individually or in groups. I did one for my small budget photo page. Check out the screenshot.

I’m male. In the past few months however I’ve been sitting on the toilet when I go to the bathroom to help exercise my legs and also to prevent splashing. It’s much easier cleaning up.

Recently I’ve been thinking more about it and thought that sitting really isn’t the way we’re meant to go to the bathroom though. Whether it’s pee or poop there is no instance you can imagine in nature where one would sit down as though he was on a chair to do it. I would say it’s likely that even men in older times would not stand all of the times they do it. If you’ve ever peed standing in the wild you’ll find that you get a great deal of splash on yourself.

So I was watching a video on qigong the other day and the instructor on the tape mentioned it. I thought what the hell I might as well try it. So I did this morning. No problems. In fact it felt pretty good. It’s a very comfortable position. I could balance quite well on the platform of the toilet seat alone.

So after doing it I thought “well I wonder how many other people do this”, so of course I googled. I didn’t really find numbers.. I found that most of Asia and Africa does it and most of the US and Europe does not pretty much. But what was more striking to me than any numbers was facts I’ve found about health benefits:

• http://naturesplatform.com/health_benefits.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squat_toilet#Arguments_in_favour_of_squat_toilets
• http://hubpages.com/hub/squattoilet

And the benefits:

• Makes elimination faster, easier and more complete.
• Protects the nerves that control the prostate, bladder and uterus from becoming stretched and damaged.
• Securely seals the ileocecal valve, between the colon and the small intestine. In the conventional sitting position, this valve is unsupported and often leaks during evacuation, contaminating the small intestine.
• Relaxes the puborectalis muscle which normally chokes the rectum in order to maintain continence.
• Uses the thighs to support the colon and prevent straining. Chronic straining on the toilet can cause hernias, diverticulosis, and pelvic organ prolapse.
• A highly effective, non-invasive treatment for hemorrhoids, as shown by published clinical research.
• For pregnant women, squatting avoids pressure on the uterus when using the toilet. Daily squatting helps prepare one for a more natural delivery.

So I’m sold. Probably won’t be buying a squat-style toilet ever since western ones work fine for me, but I’ll be squatting from now on =)

Munin rules.. especially if you’re on Ubuntu/Debian. It’s good for monitoring multiple servers or just one. Here’s a demo.

Install is pretty much:
sudo apt-get install munin munin-node

Pretty much zero config if you’re starting a server from scratch.

Here are two of the sites I used to help me get up and running:

• http://waste.mandragor.org/munin_tutorial/munin.html - short guide
• http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-monitoring-a-server-with-munin - big guide