Meta on Evan Hoffman

LITERALLY

Tue, 06 May 2014 15:58:22 +0000

When I was in fifth grade, we had a student teacher in English. I’ll call her Mrs. N. I guess we were doing a lesson on literal versus figurative speech at some point that year and Mrs. N taught it. On the test at the end of the unit, there was a question to the effect of “What does the sentence ‘It’s raining cats and dogs?’ mean literally?” Now, I could tell that she really wanted to know what it meant figuratively, but that’s not what she asked, so I answered the question with “Cats and dogs are falling from the sky.” After she’d graded them she returned them and I saw that she marked my answer wrong, with a comment that “the question was confusing.” I went up to her and pled my case - everybody else in the class answered the question she’d meant to ask, but I answered the question she actually asked. Figuratively, that sentence means “it’s raining very hard.” Therefore, the literal meaning is just what I wrote, and my answer shouldn’t have been marked wrong. I appealed to the real teacher and she told Mrs. N that I was correct. I bring this up because the meaning word “literally” appears to have been eroded in recent years to the point where “literally” is no longer the literal definition of literal. I was reminded of this today when I read this story about Lara Logan:

Digital Ocean - First Impressions

Wed, 24 Jul 2013 08:59:06 +0000

For the past few years I’ve been hosting this site on an old desktop in my basement on my FiOS connection. This was one of the things I really liked when I switched from Cablevision to Verizon - they don’t block port 80 inbound, so I didn’t have to pay for separate hosting. My “server” was an old AMD desktop with 1 gig ram and a sata drive. It was ok; my site was slow but I was ok with that. I configured Nginx to cache the static assets which sped most things up to “ok” levels but it was never fast.

And... I'm back.

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 00:37:06 +0000

HOLY SHIT THAT SUCKED.

Where’s my site been for the past month and a half, you ask? Gone, thanks to Sandy. Back for now anyway… finally.

Blog rename again

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 16:00:25 +0000

I hate calling this site “Evan Hoffman’s Blog,” but it seems that when I Googled my own name most of the results were about this guy. So let me just clarify… that’s not me. I enjoyed having the title be obscure lyrics from songs I love but drastic times call for drastic measures. And let me tell you… renaming a blog is serious business.

When the admin of your online community dies

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:57:05 +0000

In 2000 or 2001 I started playing EverQuest. I was relatively late to the game, joining after the 3rd expansion (Luclin) was already out. I played it for a few years, at one point obsessively. In truth, I was never really that good, but I was in a guild that I loved and for the most part we all had fun. Like in other MMOs, when you start playing EverQuest you need to choose which server to play on. Basically I picked a random one to create my character on: Tarew Marr (most servers in EQ were named after the deities in the game). For anyone unfamiliar with MMO games (as I was at the time), your server choice affects almost every aspect of your gameplay experience. Each game server is essentially a parallel universe with the same buildings, NPCs (characters), quests, and items, but completely different sets of actual human beings inhabiting them. Servers develop their own personalities as a result of the players inhabiting them. Like any community, there are nice people, morons, trolls, elite players, people who totally sucked at the game, grownups, children, racists and any other variety of person you can imagine. This, of course, is exactly the appeal of any MMO. You can play a single-player game in complete safety, but when you add 2000 random strangers in to the mix things get pretty interesting. There was plenty of drama, and Tarew Marr was actually one of the crazier servers.

Using Nginx as a caching proxy in front of Wordpress

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 16:43:28 +0000

Why you may want to use Nginx as a caching reverse-proxy in front of Apache for Wordpress, and config examples for doing so.

Upcoming downtime

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:33:57 +0000

I’ll be moving this site to a new hosting provider over the next few days, so there will likely be some downtime. Not that this site gets that many repeat visitors, but figured I’d give a heads-up so Google can cache this ahead of time.

Graphing SSH dictionary attacks with HighCharts

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 14:06:03 +0000

After my 10-year-old basement Linux server died this week from a power outage, I took the sad step of giving up on it. It’s died before and I’ve patched it back together with a new power supply here or an addon PCI SATA card there, but I finally decided to throw in the towel since I had a newer old computer that had been idle for several years. The one that died was an Athlon K7 750 MHz with 512 MB ram. The new one is an Athlon 2 GHz (3200+) with 1 gig. For my uses, specs don’t really matter that much, but it’s nice to have more power for free.

Displaying currently-playing iTunes track in the Mac menu bar

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:48:42 +0000

In an attempt to teach myself Objective C, and because I couldn’t find anything that did what I wanted, I wrote a little utility to display the currently-playing iTunes track in the Mac taskbar. Originally I had it display the full track name right in the taskbar but it was too much text for such a small space (especially on a 1440x900 screen), so now you click a little musical note and it shows you the info in a menu.

Installed Relevanssi so search won't be so useless.

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 17:07:53 +0000

I installed the Relevanssi plugin because the native Wordpress search seemed almost useless. So far it seems to be vastly superior. Native search frequently returned zero results when there were relevant posts. So, enjoy.

Traffic spike

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 09:08:53 +0000

Somehow this site became the top Google result for two different searches, “Shogun2.dll appcrash” and “fedora 14 gnome3”. My theory is that Google’s indexing the referring keywords listed in the widget on the right, causing a snowball effect. But the rise in traffic this year has been dramatic, especially for a site really about nothing.

Why is my title in smallcaps now?

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:48:56 +0000

~~Wordpress is doing something weird now. Yesterday the head of the site was not in all caps, and today it is.~~

Hmm.

Ok, I figured it out. I guess I must have installed some new font on this computer - “Trajan Pro” - and the header was showing in that font. I deleted it from the stylesheet and now it defaults to Lucida Sans Unicode, which is what I wanted.

Time for Wordpress

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:15:30 +0000

Everybody else is doing it…

I guess I’ll try converting my old posts to this thing and ditch the old page.