Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

At least seven people have recently searched on Google and arrived at this site for the phrase “soulja boy = moral decay.” I couldn’t agree more.

For anyone with a Dreamhost account set up to take advantage of mail forwarding, check out this post on their support site. Mail forwards are being delayed 18-24 hours in my experience.

In the meantime, to check all email routed through Dreamhost, I’ve been using webmail access (http://webmail.yourdomain.com) and also have a second forward going to my Yahoo address. Yahoo accounts, by the way, take advantage of BlackBerry push-style forwarding.

Hopefully the DreamHost staff get this fixed soon!

I’ve recently switched my Gmail account to a new alias (jake.billo). It looks much more professional than my Evergreen98 screenname, especially considering Outlook 2003/2007’s habit of attaching “sent by X on behalf of Y” to any outgoing message using a different From address. I don’t mind having the on behalf of text in the subject line, as long as it’s reasonably professional and not a slightly-outdated alias. However, I have 363MB of searchable, indexed content from my existing account that I’d prefer not to lose, and would like to transfer to my new account.

While I don’t have a “Gmail for your domain” account setup configured, since I like the IMAP support that Dreamhost provides, these instructions from Silvermac are fairly useful. Here’s the adapted process I used for moving evergreen98 to jake.billo:

1. Sign into your old account, then click Settings / Forwarding and POP. Set up forwarding to your new email account, and also select the Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded) option. Save your changes:
2. Sign into your new account, then click Settings / Accounts. Under the “Get mail from other accounts” section, add a new (or additional) POP account with the name of your old Gmail account. Provide your username and password for your old account, as well. You should use pop.gmail.com for the incoming mail server. (The server address on Silvermac is undocumented - use the official one.)
3. The synchronization process will begin and Gmail will begin fetching the contents of your old account. For me, this process is taking several hours, but will run in the background fetching 200 messages at a time:

There you have it - get rid of your embarrassing EmoKid10471XxXHaRdCoRE alias, and move over to something that won’t get your resume filed into the circular filing cabinet on the floor.

Edit: Fixed some horrible post formatting. WordPress’ editor really needs to shape up.

In an effort to be regular with my content - considering this week has not been kind to my posting schedule - I’ll continue with “Random Links of Interest Friday”. Here’s what I’ve stumbled across this week:

• A List Apart: Sliding Doors CSS. This article provides examples of how to implement rounded tabs by styling an unordered list element.
• CBC News: Digg dumps Google for Microsoft as ad partner. Facebook already has had the Microsoft contract for a while now, and I’m fairly certain Microsoft’s ad business is operated outside of the MSN/Windows Live norms.
• ColorSchemer Online. I’ve been doing a few web designs this week and sites like this one have been immensely helpful in selecting complimentary colours for links, active elements, etc…
• O2Networks Blog: A friend of mine, Dave Aldwinckle, has joined the weasel community of people who write things nobody else wants to hear online. He’s already got some great content online, such as this uTorrent technical manual for new users to the world of BitTorrent. (Disclaimer: EdgeLink Consulting indirectly hosts and helps with the IT dirty work for Dave’s site.
• Wall Street Journal: Hide the Button: Steve Jobs Has His Finger on It. A discussion of everyone’s favourite CEO and his hatred for buttons in user interfaces.
• McAfee Site Advisor Phishing Quiz. See if you can spot the scam sites from the real ones. Most of the problems, though, stem from incredibly poor English. If any of these scammers paid a technical writer to proofread their content, it would start getting really challenging to separate the real from the imitation sites.
• ScoreHero gets new Guitar Hero III information. While I’m probably not picking up this game (waiting for Rock Band personally), it’s neat to hear about the improvements coming in the next version of the game. The forum thread is full of fanboys, though - as would be expected if your favourite game developer paid for a trip to you to see their next product.
• The Math Moron. A Slate columnist, frustrated with her own mathematical ineptitude, decides to enroll in Kumon to be better able to help her daughter with homework. Also check out her latest piece about being a standardized patient and the following chat transcript.
• RewriteRule examples for Apache. While the actual rules themselves are regular expressions (regex), the formatting of them can be slightly different. This site has a few good examples for your webserver configuration.
• TOBlog: Your Rights as a Photographer in Toronto. A former coworker of mine wrote this post about what you’re legally allowed to do when taking pictures. Good advice for anyone who’s gotten a digital camera and is starting out into photography.

From the UWaterloo LiveJournal community:

Google Maps and Google Earth apparently now both have high-res (the closest zoom level) images of Waterloo Region. The comments thread seems to indicate that the images were taken last year, sometime in the spring.