Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in GreenReaper's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, February 6th, 2010
7:14 pm	Google's creepy version of "friends and family" Google is now returning results from your social circle (link may only work if you are logged in, have a profile, and are cool - more info). Got a friend on LiveJournal? A contact on Google Chat? A blog (or Flayrah ;-) in Google Reader? You might find what they say appears at the bottom of your results. Obviously, this works best if they know who you are - I have a relatively complete profile. But if I'm your friend, they now know a little bit more about you, too. Current Mood: surprised (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
10:25 am	Anthrocon booking open For those who didn't see my comparison post on flayrah - Anthrocon hotel booking is now open. Don't book on a card that can't take at least one day plus taxes right now! I have reserved a double room in the Westin from Thursday night to Monday morning. I have three slots open, if anyone is interested. Current Mood: calm (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
5:49 pm	Truth in advertising Now we know why "the car in front is a Toyota" - the accelerator is stuck! Current Mood: amused (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
6:55 pm	A plea for more extensive con records One thing I forgot to mention last time - Flayrah has an RSS feed, which you can subscribe to via flayrah. I just set up a Twitter account for it as well, so even you young whipper-snappers with your new-fangled "smart-phones" have no excuses for not keeping up with the news. This weekend I posted a story I've been collecting data on for several years - a decade-long summary of furry charity donations. There are twenty events on there; I had to go hunting for figures for pretty much all of them. There's still a few gaps where I'm sure a charity event occurred but there's no figure for it. (This is also true for our timeline of convention attendance.) On the plus side, some conventions have started posting charity and attendance figures directly to WikiFur. But this has its downsides, too, the main one being that our source is now a random editor who may or may not be associated with the con. Sometimes we can grab figures from a LiveJournal - or Archive.org, once they get around to indexing it - but often they're not there for long enough, if at all. So, to conventions: please consider putting the information considered important enough to announce at opening and closing ceremonies permanently online at a website you maintain over the years, linked from your main "about" page - like Anthrocon's history section. It doesn't have to be fancy, but WikiFur shouldn't be the only place it's kept. If this sounds like a waste of time, consider it in the context of promoting your event. After all, when concerned parents/reporters/co-workers are looking for information, where do you think they'll look first? and what do you want them to learn? Feeding hungry kitties and hosting name-brand guests makes for good copy, don't you think? That's not to say that charity donations (or attendance, or fursuit parade numbers, or whatever) are the important thing about a convention. But if they're good, you might as well flaunt them! Current Mood: restless Current Music: Dragon Age: Origins - In Uthenera (Leliana's Song) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
10:54 pm	Look! It's moving - it's alive! As earlier alluded-to, I've been working on a little project over the holidays - a complete revamp of furry news portal Flayrah.com. I'm pleased to say that the site is now fully operational. Old accounts have been preserved, as have all news stories and comments. Since posting on Flayrah kinda died out over the last three years, I imported about a hundred WikiFur News posts, which was a fun experiment in itself. Many thanks to aureth and frysco for giving me the chance to do this, and to the Drupal community for their work in creating the software that now runs it. I'll be putting the word out further in the coming days, but if you're reading this you get a sneak peek. And if any of you wanted to help out by submitting a story/comment or two, or by tagging and rating, be my guest. :-) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 18th, 2009
5:18 am	GreenReaper exmly hot. GreenReaper push herb. It's late. I can only see the glow of the screen, and my hands. I'm a tad feverish. I'm on holiday. I'd be upset if I wasn't in a warm bed with water, ibuprofen and a chocolate cookie. Also making great progress over the last week on what I hope will be a kickass new community website. Well, sort of new. You'll see. Also, this is shiny. Maybe self rest now . . . *z-Z-Z* Current Mood: *br-brBR* Current Music: *ding-dada-ding-dada-ding-dada-ding, DING-daDING-daDING-daDING-daDING* (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
3:24 am	Sometimes even release versions are too close to the bleeding edge I was trying to install a local test version of Drupal but couldn't get past the database selection dialog. Oddly, it seemed to be failing when testing mysql_connect . . . It turned out that I'd stumbled on a bug. When using PHP 5.3 to connect to "localhost", the script will time out when attempting to make a test connection to the database as documented at PHP's mysql_connect page. This is because the mysql native driver that PHP now uses cannot properly handle two addresses being returned for localhost, and Vista will return ::1 (the IPv6 localhost) in preference to 127.0.0.1. To avoid this problem, either change to using 127.0.0.1, or comment out or remove the IPv6 entry for "::1 localhost" (leave the other "localhost" setting). Or, of course, don't use PHP 5.3. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 30th, 2009
2:10 pm	Furry topics in Wikipedia offline release; others soon to be deleted Just over a year ago I mentioned on wikifur that WikiProject Furry had managed to sneak both furry fandom and furry convention into Version 0.7 of Wikipedia - the latest offline release of the wiki-based encyclopedia. This has finally been cleaned up and is being prepared for release (it's a little over 2GB). I derive far more enjoyment than is proper from the thought that children in developing countries are going to look up hobbies and get furry convention as the first hit. Kudos to the Lego and philately [stamp collecting] groups as well! For the curious, here's the ranking of topics by importance, and the criteria for ranking. This data is over a year old; its publication triggered reassessments and the removal of several articles that didn't really belong in the project (such as Rocko's Modern Life and CatDog). Coincidentally, we still have 110 articles due to the addition of other topics - though sadly a few, like Furrlough and Shanda_The_Panda, are likely to be deleted today or tomorrow for lack of third-party references. They will follow several other furry topics purged recently. The information within them is preserved on WikiFur, of course - it's greatly improved our articles on The Suburban Jungle and Newshounds - but it's still a shame. Current Mood: amused (Comment on this)
Friday, November 13th, 2009
4:17 pm	BBC News magazine investigates that "furry" thing Those within the fandom may already have heard about this, but for those who haven't . . . drop by BBC News and you should see a little something about furries there. It's not perfect, but the tone is appropriate, and the large proportion of quotes from those who know what they're talking about gives it a lot of value. Further reading: Marshall Woods - Ian Wolf - Kathy Gerbasi - Fred Patten (Wikipedia) - Mark Merlino - TaniDaReal Current Mood: pleased (Comment on this)
Friday, November 6th, 2009
7:12 pm	Being "a good person" A recent post made me think about something a friend once asked: whether I thought they were "a good person". To be honest, I didn't know them well enough to have a good answer; even now, I'm not sure it's my place to render an opinion. Hopefully they can judge for themselves how this would apply: ( What it means to be "a good person" ) Current Mood: thoughtful (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 30th, 2009
2:30 pm	Ride share to MFF? Anyone heading up to Midwest FurFest on Thursday evening, and - ideally - back on Monday (Sunday might work too)? Got free space and can swing by the Northville/Plymouth, Michigan area? I don't take up too much room, and I can pay for gas. :-) Edit: Found a ride - see you all there! Current Mood: hopeful (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
10:09 am	Anthrocon 2009 photographs My Anthrocon 2009 photos are now up. You can see them in a slideshow - though if you're not a fan of parade pictures or flags, you might want to skip to the end of it once you get to that point, as there are a lot of them. Honestly, there are no shots that jumped out at me as super-awesome this year. The event itself was a lot of fun, though! Current Mood: cheerful (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 11th, 2009
9:09 pm	GitHub discriminates against non-humans At a suggestion from giza, I was looking into Git tonight, and thanks to a coincidental comment from Kakurady I happened across GitHub, an online repository-hosting service. Unfortunately, they appear to discriminate against non-humans in their terms of service. I guess devout furs, therianthropes and otherkin just have to host their own repositories . . . *grin* Current Mood: amused (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 9th, 2009
12:32 pm	SSL certificates just got cheaper I was interested to learn that StartSSL has been added to the Windows root certificate list. StartSSL offers free email and domain name SSL/TLS certificates, and low prices ($30 and $100 respectively) for corporate identity/code signing and Extended Validation (EV, "green bar") SSL/TLS certificates (Verisign wants $1500 for the latter). Some addresses cannot be used to sign up (notably Hotmail and Yahoo, but not Gmail), but you can issue certificates for them once you've passed initial authentication. This offers a new perspective on why Thawte is shutting down their Web of Trust initiative, which I've used in the past. The StartSSL root certificate is only distributed with Windows 7, but this may not be that much of a problem, as it's been provided in an optional update, and both Windows Vista and (I believe) Windows XP SP2 will automatically check back with Microsoft if presented with an unknown root certificate. Users can also get an update manually. Current Mood: curious (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 5th, 2009
2:47 am	I'll say this . . . Every time I visit ArtSpots, I wish I were more of an artist so I could get to see my stuff there. (I also think it'd be a neat way to grow the site if they let me upload art by other people into galleries reserved for them, and have those people approve it before it would appear publicly, but that's just me. :-) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 27th, 2009
8:16 pm	Public Service Announcement: You run a con? We know who you are. If you run a charity or other tax-exempt organization in the USA - say, a large furry convention - don't be surprised when ( we know your real name . . . or where you live ) This does not apply to those normally termed "volunteers" by conventions, or even most "staff", only those with a direct hand in running the event's organizational body. (cross-posted to furoperations) Current Mood: determined (Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
11:20 am	Reinventing search I'm not a huge fan of Yahoo (though they did send me a corkscrew set once), but I have to admit they're doing some pretty cool stuff with search. You can actually make your own plugins for results. Here's a shot from one I spent several hours cursing at whipped up last night: Yep, those are links to section headers, and a thumbnail, both using data extracted from furry art with XSLT and massaged with some PHP. The title and description are customizable, and you can add tags to display structured data. It's not perfect, but it's possible to do interesting stuff with it. Current Mood: curious (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
12:39 pm	I got (most of) my photos from RainFurrest 2009 (slideshow) up last night. Still have a backlog from other conventions this year, but at least that's one off my list. For the record, I had a good time. There are certainly worse ways to spend your birthday than being chased by zombies with tails. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 17th, 2009
10:31 am	You are what your friends eat The New York Times has an interesting report on how your friends - and their friends - control your lifestyle to a surprising degree. Possible applications to fandom? Maybe we need to encourage the popufurs to lose weight, so we can too. :-) (Comment on this)
Saturday, September 5th, 2009
10:45 pm	You know you're a geek when you're poring over decade-old research on cache replacement policies and their implications for handling flash crowds for fun. :-) Of course, there are plenty of reasons to do it for profit, too. And a person who sounds like they could be talking about furries, but isn't: America has always been the land of self-invention, but lately that concept has been applied to the body in unprecedented ways. (Comment on this)