To generate buzz about it, they are allowing customers to purchase a download of the album at whatever price they want. I just ordered my copy for £0.00.

In addition to the download, there is also a “discbox” available. The discbox includes the album on CD and heavyweight vinyl, a second CD of more new songs, digital photographs and artwork, all enclosed in a pretty case which is apparently also a book.

The discbox is £40.00 (about $80 US) and they are being made to order. I do intend to buy a copy of the discbox if I enjoy the album, which is virtually a given.

Now some people might want to be naysayers and point out that I could have registered it as a .co.uk or even .org.uk domain and it would have been even longer, but those are TLDs and they miss the point.

The longest domain name that can be registered is officially 63 characters. The overall limit for a domain, it’s subdomains and TLDs is 255, which reminds me of the old Final Fantasy games where none of your stats could break 255.

<side tracked>
Growing up playing The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy and other games that carried the 255 limit on various things, I always wondered what it was that they had in common that would give them all the same limit. Now I know that it’s because 255 is the maximum value that can possibly be represented as an eight digit binary and therefore stored as one byte (which is eight bits). I’m not sure which I like better; the mysterious, magical barrier that 255 was to me as a kid or the actual scientific explanation of it. Both are cool in their own way.
</side tracked>

But that is a post for a different day. The real reason for this post is that at some point today, between 1:03 and 1:06 PM (GMT -6) according to my website tracking system, anyone that shows up with an empty referer doesn’t actually show an empty referer anymore. Instead they show this:

http://esc04.midphase.com:2086/scripts2/getthemes?modules=1

At 1:03:17 I saw a blank referer, which is pretty normal since many people now use Firefox and it’s just a couple of clicks to turn off the referer and give yourself a false sense of privacy. That and anyone that types or pastes an address into their browser rather than clicking a link won’t show a referer. Then at 1:06:22 I saw the first occurrence of the mystery referer.

That URL goes to a Web Host Manager page that allows you to choose which plugins will be installed for cPanel users on your server. My first reaction was that someone at my hosting company was looking at one of my websites and somehow sent that URL as their referer. Then I noticed that there were hundreds of these referers to many of my websites.

I’m fairly certain that the problem lies with my server configuration. It’s unlikely that something has gone wrong with my tracking script since it’s been working just fine for a few months now. It has also been installed on over 200 domain names and I would have had to change it across all of them at once in order to see the problem across my entire portfolio.

I’ve submitted a support ticket with the facts I have and I am patiently awaiting a response from the Ukrainians that Midphase has outsourced their support department to.

EDIT: Just got a response from support.

Sorry, I cannot say what could be wrong.
Is there some way for me to replicate this issue?

So I whipped up two example pages that linked to each other and displayed the issue in a visual way that even a moron could understand.

EDIT II: Tech support just restarted Apache and that seems to have cleared up the issue.

If you’re not already familiar with GrandCentral, here’s how they describe themselves:

With GrandCentral, you can be reached with a single number, answer a call at any phone you want, seamlessly switch phones in the middle of a call, and even know whether a call is important before you take it.

• Check your messages by phone, email, or online
• Keep all your messages online for eternity
• Record and store your phone calls (just like voicemail)
• Quickly (and secretly) block an annoying caller
• Click-to-dial from your address book
• Surprise your callers with a custom voicemail greeting
• Forward, download, and add notes to your messages

It also includes spam filtering, custom ringbacks, custom call screening, grouping of contacts and custom call settings per caller group or individual caller.

You get to pick the phone number you want to use from a list of available numbers. You pick your state, pick your city, then choose your number from the available list in that area code. I believe that only the continental United States are currently supported.

I have nine invitations left. If you want one, just ask.

The synopsis sounds interesting enough:

Michael Landon Jr. directs this period drama set in 1850s Appalachia and concerning a young girl who carries a crushing burden. Ten-year-old Cadi Forbes’ (Liana Liberato) sister has died as the result of a tragic accident, and now the surviving sibling can’t help feeling somewhat responsible for her sister’s untimely death. Desperate to shake the guilt she feels and absolve her dearly departed kin from her Earthly sins, Cadi seeks out the assistance of the one person rumored to have the power of achieving both goals — the mysterious Sin Eater

I love a well made period movie. And come on, it’s about “the mysterious Sin Eater”. Who wouldn’t be interested? I’ll tell you who. Anyone who knew what the movie was actually about.

The movie started off well enough. It wasn’t a hit by any means, but we weren’t eager to turn it off or take smoke breaks every 20 minutes. And I say we watched it, but when we got to the plot “twist” we both looked at each other and I immediately hit stop on the DVD player. So we never actually finished it. We were both officially too creeped out to watch another minute of this movie.

The Last Sin Eater isn’t the usual Poltergeist or The Hills Have Eyes kind of creepy, or even a Sixth Sense creepy. If you never plan to watch this movie, and trust me you don’t want to watch it, then keep reading. Otherwise, there are spoilers ahead.

As I said before, the movie started off fairly well. Cadi’s grandmother passes away and we see the rare and ancient spectacle of the Sin Eater’s ritual. The family of the deceased ring the “passing bell” and the entire community turns out for the occasion. The body of the deceased is carried to the local graveyard and an offering is placed on the chest, then every turns their back while the Sin Eater materializes from the forest and removes all sin from it.

Cadi had been warned not to gaze upon the Sin Eater, as he has sold himself to the devil in return for everyone else’s sins (which he is now filled with) and he will kill anyone who looks at him. Of course, she can’t help but turn and look.

Realizing that the Sin Eater would not actually kill her, Cadi seeks out the Sin Eater to remove her own sins. In doing so, she crosses path with a “stranger” who has mysteriously appeared in her remote mountain community. She hides in the bushes near his campsite and we find that he has come to the mountains in lieu of a terrible evil that he has apparently sensed there. We see him pacing back and forth along the riverside, an old, thick, leather bound bible in hand, exclaiming to his lord that he means to cleanse the area of the evil.

At one point, Cadi is spotted talking to the stranger by one of the community men and told that it is her fault that the unwelcome guest is here in the first place and if she meets with him again she will be severely punished.

With a little help from an elderly lady of the community, Cadi finally tracks down the Sin Eater and convinces him to perform the sin eating ritual on her, even though she is not dead. The ritual is performed, yet Cadi doesn’t feel any different. She is still plagued by her sins. Distraught, she runs off.

Disobedient as ever, Cadi of course meets with the stranger again and tells him of her woes. She describes the accident that led to her sister’s death and how this is the sin she is trying to rid herself of.

This is where the film reveals it’s true hidden design to us. The last part of the synopsis:

Only after discovering the truth about Jesus Christ and the human condition does Cadi realize that there is only one man capable of providing absolution of sin, and the word of that man can only be found in the Holy Bible.

That’s right. The stranger explains to Cadi that there is only one true sin eater and that he died for all of our sins a long time ago. Cadi asks how she can request forgiveness from the true sin eater and the stranger exclaims that she just has! All of her earthly sins are now washed away and she can live her life in peace!

Cadi runs off to tell everyone that “it’s gone!” and “it feels better now!” She is finally free from her sins. She runs to the elderly lady who helped her find the other Sin Eater and tells her the whole story about Jesus.

The elderly lady (who must be in her 70’s) immediately casts aside the ancient beliefs of her people without blinking and demands that Cadi introduce her to the stranger since she won’t be alive much longer and she has her fair share of sins to be eaten as well.

STOP

Yep. I can’t describe the rest of the movie because we refused to watch another minute of it at this point. To assume that these Welsh immigrants living in the 1850’s had never heard of Christianity is absurd. Then to assume that they would cast aside their own ancient rituals just like that and embrace Jesus as their new Sin Eater is absolutely ridiculous. What a crock.

I must say though that there were warning signs. It was adapted for the screen by Michael Landon Jr. (son of Little House on the Prairie’s Michael Landon) from a novel by Francine Rivers (a born-again Christian author).

There’s also that last sentence of the synopsis that could have saved us (no pun intended) had either of us read it. Then there was the DVD menu screen which featured a glowing, pastel painted image of Cadi running through a field of flowers to meet her mother’s embrace. The same image is also the DVD cover, but we got this movie through our Blockbuster online account so we didn’t have that advantage on our side.

The most obvious sign of all is the movie’s tagline:

A little girl’s quest for redemption uncovers a dark secret… and the truth shall set her free.

Right. The Last Sin Eater is a cleverly veiled Christian crusade. Unless you are already a Christian or you are open to being converted, I recommend that you avoid watching this movie at all costs.

/archives/2007/09/01/redirecting_old_blog_urls.php

Now my permalinks are much more simple, like this:

/redirecting-old-blog-urls/

Also, my category archives are now in a directory called /category. Well, they’re not actually in that directory physically the way they were with Movable Type, but WordPress works it’s magic to make it seem that way.

Those changes would not have been very friendly to anyone that ended up on my blog via an old link, whether it be from someone else’s blog or from a search engine. That visitor would have seen a generic 404 page and probably would have clicked their back button and went about their browsing. I like having visitors to my blog and I want them all to enjoy their stay here and eventually come back so I had to deal with my new URLs somehow.

To do this, I have created a system of 301 redirects using a combination of .htaccess and PHP. The first part, the .htaccess is pretty simple. It only deals with fixing the /archive to /category change. It goes like this:

Redirect 301 /archives/ http://sixtimeseight.com/category/

Pretty straight forward.

A bit more tricky is the completely new URL style of my permalinks. For that I decided to turn to PHP. If I’m not mistaken, virtually every page of a WordPress powered website is served via good ol’ /index.php. Given that, I figured I could write a quick little addition to that file and everything would be just fine. Here’s what I came up with:


if(strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],'category/2005') || strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],'category/2006') || strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],'category/2007')){
$thisPage = $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
$parts = explode('/', $thisPage);
$fileName = $parts[count($parts) - 1];
$fileName = str_replace('_','-',$fileName);
$fileName = str_replace('.php','/',$fileName);
header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header('Location: http://sixtimeseight.com/'.$fileName);
exit;
}


My blog only goes back to 2005, so I just look in the URL for any of the past three years (including 2007) and if one of them is in there, my little script does it’s thing and sends the browser to the new URL. I included the ‘category’ in front of the years just in case I ever decide to include any of those three numbers in a post title. If I did that my script would get confused and try to redirect itself to itself over and over and your browser wouldn’t be happy with that at all.

To figure out the new URL, we create an array of the URL parts using the / as the separator. From that array, we find the last part of the URL which would be the old file name from the Movable Type system. That’s all I need since I have removed the dates from my URLs. With that file name, we replace all the underscores with dashes, then replace the .php at the end with a slash. Then we tell the browser that this newly created string is where the post has been moved to and mark it as a 301 (permanent redirect) which will (hopefully) alert the search engines to update their indexes.

I’m certain that there is a more efficient way of achieving the same effect, but I didn’t really feel like digging into it that deeply. This works quite well and doesn’t really add a noticeable amount of overhead to the script execution time, so it’s ok with me.

There are still some small details to work out. Some of my old archives had underscores in the URLs so I may end up moving the archive redirect from .htaccess and including that in the PHP as well.

I recently setup a new blog for Michele using WordPress, then switched her over to the latest version of Movable Type and I was simply not pleased with the experience. Some things weren’t working. Other things were a bit tricky to figure out. All in all it was just unpleasant.

Now I’ll be moving her back to WordPress. Luckily, WordPress’ import feature seems to work nearly flawlessly. Before I switched this blog over I ran an export of my old Movable Type posts and WordPress gobbled up the resulting file and had all my posts setup in seconds, including categories.

I have changed the permalink structure though, removing the dates from the URLs, so there will be a hefty .htaccess file to build so that any links floating around out there won’t be rendered useless.

I found this nice simple theme you’re seeing in the official theme repository. It needs a little sprucing up, but it’s a good solid base to work from.

I wish Michele would pick something more simple like this. She wants me to wrap this theme around her blog. Easier said than done considering that template uses tables for the layout and I need to convert it to CSS.

We have four full games so far in addition to the slew of demos available on the Playstation Store:

• Resistance: Fall of Man
• Motor Storm
• Virtua Fighter 5
• Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom

I found Resistance hard to play with the PS3’s controller, but I’ve read online that it’s playable with a USB keyboard and mouse. I’ll make an edit here once I’ve tried it. I haven’t given much time to Virtua Fighter 5 yet, since that’s more of a multiplayer thing and nobody’s been around to challenge. I did run through the practice mode for a few minutes and I found some of the moves to be impossible to pull off. Dark Kingdom was Michele’s pick. It’s a hack and slash Gauntlet type of game from SOE, the makers of EverQuest, so she’s enjoying that one.

Motor Storm is by far the best game out for the PS3 right now. The graphics are nothing short of amazing and the game is just plain fun, although the soundtrack could use a little help. One cool trick I noticed is that as you race around the tracks, lap after lap, the ruts left in the sand and mud by each racer don’t disappear. It’s a nice touch.

Last night Michele and I played the demo of Full Auto 2: Battlelines. That game is fun. Cars and trucks with your choice of weapons attached. You can play through a career mode and actually race other cars, or do what we did and play the arena mode and just blow up your opponent’s cars up with no goal other than having the most kills. It’s good stuff.

Michele has also been enjoying the Sudoku game that is available for download from the Playstation Store. It reminds me of the situation with Geometry Wars on the Xbox 360: Here you have this complicated machine that cost several hundred dollars and what do you do with it? You play the hell out of the simplest game ever devised.

On a side note, with my new T-Mobile MDA phone and the Playstation 3, our wireless router is finally getting some actual use. Getting the PS3 connected to the wireless network was super easy too, in case anyone has been wondering about that. Our network here is locked down with WPA. The PS3 found the network and synced right up in a matter of seconds.

Immediately upon arriving at Men’s Warehouse, I realized why she respected the opinions of the coworkers that sent us there: those guys must be well dressed. The clothes there are very sharp, and by “very sharp” I actually mean “ridiculously expensive”. I had no time to ponder this though because as soon as you walk in the door at Men’s Warehouse you’re greeted by a “personal wardrobe consultant”. This person will spend the rest of your shopping experience guiding you through what you need to buy. Not what you want to buy, but what you will be buying. Because you look like a slob.

My wardrobe consultant for this, my first time at Mens’ Warehouse, was Amye. That’s Amy with an E at the end. And let me tell you, Amye is good at this job. She kept picking stuff off the racks that I wouldn’t have touched if it were just me. The first few times I doubted her, but after trying on each item that she selected, I slowly became impressed with her ability. Eventually I stopped even trying. She’d hand me something and I’d just put it on and it would look great.

In the end I picked up four new sport coats, seven pairs of slacks, eight shirts, six pairs of socks, a pair of shoes and a new belt. Amye marked each pair of slacks for my height as I tried them on and I have to wait for them to be tailored and delivered.

Men’s Warehouse also offers one of those customer loyalty programs that everyone is into these days. You get your own member’s card and they swipe it each time you shop there. For every $500 you spend, you get a $50 gift card. I got three gift cards, so do the math. When the gift cards arrive in the mail I’m going to go back and pick up a long coat, probably this one.

After Men’s Warehouse, Michele and I drove all the way to Foley, Alabama to visit the Tanger Outlet Center, which is supposed to kick ass. Let me save you the drive: It doesn’t kick ass at all. We didn’t even buy anything there. There were only two stores there that they don’t have at the Silver Sands Outlets which is ten minutes from our house.

So, long story short: Tax return came. Men’s Warehouse 0wned me. Tax return went. Part of Michele’s too (Thank you honey).