Well, I made the jump with the rest of all trendy Mac users to get Twitter + Twitteriffic, after I found out I got some hits through it’s homepage. Why can’t you search tweets? It makes me sad not to be able to find something ‘relevant’ and I haven’t got one friend!

You can add me, my username is Cocoia. Anyone who tweeted something linking to my site, or feels like he’s got something to tell, please let me know and I’ll start watching ;).

I don’t know what moron calls himself ‘Fag stomper’ at all, but I already know you’re from Michigan, in the city of Lansing, Comcast for a provider and they got a complaint about someone spamming just now. Stop posting offensive comments, it’s useless as I have to moderate them anyway. I consider the matter closed. Here, take a look at this purdy map of your location:

For everyone but me and this strange individual; some strange person has been trying to post rather offensive and blatantly misspelled comments on my blog. I won’t repeat his words, because they will simply be ignored, and deleted. Get a life, dude.

The stripped version of the feed has been replaced with one containing images and line breaks. Don’t go off duplicating the site, please. Delete the feed in your reader to re-sync. Some RSS apps may pick up on the change, but Vienna doesn’t. Hope this fixes your problem, Jo.

Random House, I don’t know why you are visiting, but I want to shout this at you guys.

These books changed my life. First, I read House of Leaves when it came out (and I was a lot younger) and it shaked my world. It was the Dutch translation – which was disappointing to me, so I bought the American version for it’s incredible cover (shown above, right). Only Revolutions was the second instant buy. I got two versions of House of Leaves at home in the bookshelf and two copies of Only Revolutions. I was severely disdained when there was an artwork contest and it was limited to US citizens. Really, no, really, you guys hurt me with that.

Now, if you think about buying either one of these books, I’d go with House of Leaves first. If you aren’t interested after reading three chapters, drop the book, return it to the store. But I guarantee you, if this is your thing (I’d consider it a 60-40 chance in favor for the readers of my blog), you’ll be enveloped by it after a few pages. It’s a journey of a book, that I’ve researched and read with equal pleasure. It’s scared me out of my wits many times and sometimes made me become paranoid of the shadows in my house at night. Once you enjoy the book (I enjoyed it to a significant level after one read, but I have read it about six times now) I suggest buying Only Revolutions. It’s the first book I ever bought that made me cry.

No, I’m absolutely serious. I don’t consider myself emotional or anything like that – I don’t cry for movies, never did, and generally don’t feel a lot for books either. And no, I didn’t cry because the letters get so small near the middle and you have to flip it over every 8 pages (if you follow the editor’s notes, that is… hint, hint), but because I truly got emotionally dragged along a fantastic tale, caught in the most incredibly beautiful words and phrases I have ever read. I used this line for a font specimen a lot (and damn, I just found out that all samples and source files of this font got corrupt and I got no backup!);

Corduroy was my first real font. It’s a sort of ‘poetry serif’; an aesthetic font for large text. I have a PDF sample still, you can download it here (4.3 megabytes). Unfortunately, as I said, I seem to have lost it for good. I never finished the capitals and some letterforms aren’t perfected either. If anyone is witty about it, you could notice the name is a reference to a mysterious object in the novel House of Leaves; Johnny Truant’s corduroy coat, of which buttons go missing at a certain moment (don’t want to spoil too much here). I’ve done a lot of work that has a theme of these books or one of them. I also had a series of posters made inspired by Only Revolutions, but alas, they too, are corrupt. Here’s one of them, the resource fork being the only thing a proof it ever existed (oh, and a print, yay)

Now, that’s it for Random House love. I really appreciate you guys publishing Mark’s work.

You know, I actually made my first real own lolcat. It’s at the end of this post.

I study at an Art Academy, here in the Netherlands. I am sure that gives you a very glamorous idea of how things would look, stylish and thoughtful design and all – but I have to disappoint you. Take a look at this.

First of all, it’s not just Arial Black we are using here. This facade actually cut plates of metal with a laser, for a lot of money, and out of a major list of typefaces, went to great lengths to pick… Arial Black? And what’s up with the CAPITALS? It’s absolutely horrid and disgraceful for any Art Academy. Because I hate it so much, I made a list of reasons why I hate it;

And, the most important reason of all…

Also, notice the beautiful dislocated inner negative space of the ‘R’. I have found many to agree with my opinion that this should be torn off the building overnight. I happily quote the most influential figure amongst them;

Portmap, a UNIX daemon made to supposedly make it easier for everyone to find out what ports services are listening on, seems to be dead essential in ad-hoc Ethernet-to-Ethernet networking with a static IP. I always give my home boxes IP’s in the strictly forbidden IP range 10.x.x.x (I’d be better off taking 192.168.x.x) and connect them with a CAT5E cable (for gigabit speeds or at least half of it) whenever I feel like it. I was dumbfounded to find that two Macbooks, one my own and one out of the box, will simply completely drown in an ocean of confusion when the daemon isn’t running on the serving system.

The context-sensitive autoconfigurator for network settings in OS X didn’t like it at all. I also have strict rules against named (the DNS server), bonjour (zeroconf) and I let in AFP with a temporary rule. No catch. The connecting party couldn’t find services, and the link refused to establish in most cases (i.e. jumping from self-assigned 144. addresses to my own 10.x range). I could disable the firewall. OK, still nothing. Obviously, this isn’t related to my nazi ipfw configuration. Could it be that I have stopped some services from running in the first place? Yup. I had portmap disabled. Bonjour was fired up and restricted with ipfw because Aperture throws a fit without it running (Read: it gives an error message with the rather descriptive text: “Error. 2.“.), which is a bit insane as I haven’t found it to be a nice enough app to go share my photo collection over the network with bonjour, which iPhoto does for free.

Nearing the end of this rant, it’s obvious what I am telling. Hardening always gives you trouble to get into your own computer. You know, that really the way I like it. But I don’t consider acquiring a link a real security issue, so I’ll have to fix this. Strangely, whatever security measure I took in the how-to’s I served, did not affect these problems. Rather, it was the portmap daemon that ships with OS X that seems to be much more essential to it’s networking than I thought. I’ll look into this, because portmap has it’s history, especially with RHEL. I don’t know what those guys in Cupertino were thinking when they were soldering in portmap with liquid steel, but I’d rather just run without a whole lot of services.