Eric Herboso's Bloghttp://www.ericherboso.com/blog/en-US2010-03-12T04:08:14ZSquarespace Site Server v5.9.2 (http://www.squarespace.com/)The Sun is Greenhttp://www.ericherboso.com/blog/2010/3/3/the-sun-is-green.htmlEric Herboso2010-03-04T02:42:08ZOkay, so the sun doesn't look green. But appearances can be deceiving. After all, everyone knows it's not yellow, even though that's the color that schoolchildren always use in drawings. Common wisdom says it's white—but what is white?

Click to enlarge.

White light is the combination of all colors of light. The sun is white because it emits all colors of light in our visible spectrum. Yet this brings up a question we rarely think about: is white a color?

If white is the combination of other colors, and black is the absence of other colors, can they really be considered colors at all? It's hard to answer this, because it depends on your definition of color. Color is defined so loosely that speaking clearly about it is almost impossible. It is better to speak of hues, such as red, green, purple, and orange. White is not a hue; rather, each hue can have a lighter tint or a darker shade to it. Orange, for example, is my favorite hue, but only when it has a particularly light tint to it. Dark orange shades seem like an entirely different color.

Of course, "white" is a term which corresponds to some sensation in the brain which we usually call color. But when looking at the different tints and shades in the image above, it becomes easy to see that white light is in fact some hue or combination of hues that has very low saturation and a very, very light tint. And if this is true, then the only question becomes whether sunlight contains one or more hues in greater concentration than the others.

In fact, sunlight does just that. The wavelength of sunlight varies throughout the visible spectrum (and more), but it is highly concentrated at the 500 nanometer wavelength: green.

Notice the peak at 500 nm.

So although sunlight appears white, the main hue it is consisted of is green. It just happens to be a very, very lightly tinted green of almost no saturation. Oh, and some other colors thrown in as well, but in far less of a concentration.

]]>Finally, Insurance Rescues Erichttp://www.ericherboso.com/blog/2010/2/20/finally-insurance-rescues-eric.htmlEric Herboso2010-02-20T22:56:06ZFire damage is limited to my roof.

A fire in the apartment above mine caused many of my possessions to get wet from excess sprinkler water. Thankfully, most of my stuff is okay, barring items left carelessly on the floor, such as a withings wifi scale and a first edition voltaire bio from the late 1800s.

Though everything is ultimately replaceable (even the first edition is not too terribly rare), the lost items that have affected me the most are surprising to me: power cords.

My iphone and my macbook are both fine, but the cords which power them are ruined. This has made it extremely difficult to go online, except in spurts when I get a spare charge from the iphone car charger, because snow has prevented me from being able to go to a store to replace the cords. As a result, I've had to go through a form of internet withdrawal, and trust me when I say it is not pretty.

Has both "with almond"
& "contains no nuts" text on back.

This entry, in fact, is being written by pen, and will only be transcribed later to my blog. Life without internet here is unexplainable. I cannot read, for my books are still in my room, while I'm stuck in a hotel for the next week. I cannot really write, for I only have scraps of paper that are quickly running out. So boring is my non-internet existence right now that I only find delight in reading all the complimentary soap packaging at the hotel.

I seem to remember, back when I was young and my experience of the internet was mostly confined to AOL 1.0 chat rooms, that tv was a good way of whiling away the time. But since the dawn of napster (and now btjunkie), I have become accustomed to the miracle of zero commercial interruptions, and this experience has made tv watching completely unbearable to me. Even if a story starts to interest me, the first appearance of commercials makes my body seize up w/ irritation. Just thinking about it is making my spine shiver. Ugh.

Without Applecare, this costs $76!

Thankfully, Applecare has come to my rescue. Although I do not think that technically my power cord should be covered in this situation, the kind Apple rep I spoke to over the phone took pity on me and expedited a replacement cord free of charge. Now if only the snow would let up enough to allow the mail to come through unmolested.

]]>Professional Philosophers on Twitterhttp://www.ericherboso.com/blog/2010/2/20/professional-philosophers-on-twitter.htmlEric Herboso2010-02-20T20:09:57ZTwitter is a great place to find stuff you're specifically interested in. And since philosophy is one of my great loves, you can rest assured that my twitter feed is filled with philosophy-oriented tweets.

To aid in my search for great philosophic inspiration and discussion, I created a couple of twitter lists that make finding great content that much easier. The first is a list of people interested in philosophy — the list is large enough that it becomes a bit unwieldy to browse thoroughly, but you can definitely find a few gems in there from time to time.

The second list, however, is a bit more useful. My Academic Philosophers list has only those people actually working in the field, or those in grad school who are aiming at that profession. At first glance, such a list might be seen as elitist, but in actuality it is a good resource for reaching out to the academic philosophy community.

If you qualify for the list, but aren't yet on it, please feel free to @reply me with a request; I'm @EricHerboso.

]]>One Day in Mathlandhttp://www.ericherboso.com/blog/2009/12/9/one-day-in-mathland.htmlEric Herboso2009-12-09T15:03:00Zjoke mathematics"The differential operator is coming!"

One day, in Mathland, you and x are walking around, talking about the weather. After a while, x2 and ex join you. The conversation moves to more small talk when, all of a sudden, 1 comes running by, screaming: "The differential operator is coming! Run for your lives!"

x and x2 look around nervously and tell you they have to split. After they leave, you turn to ex and ask what the problem was. "Oh, that's the differential operator, d/dx. When he gets close, he has to act. For 1 it's especially nasty, since he will completely vanish. And also for x and x2 it's quite irritating. But for me, it's no problem; I'll just transform into my old self again." And with a 'poof', he suddenly vanishes. You hear a soft noise behind you and you turn around.

"Hi," says the differential operator. "I'm d/dy."

]]>Finding a Girlfriend, Drake Equation Stylehttp://www.ericherboso.com/blog/2009/3/25/finding-a-girlfriend-drake-equation-style.htmlEric Herboso2009-03-25T20:01:49ZUncategorized conspiracy love mathematics prejudice probability science sexSo let's say that I was in the market for finding a significant other. The total candidate pool (C) would then be:

C = Pdc * F * G * A10 * S * Dn * Ra * A

Where:
C = total number of candidates
Pdc = total population of DC metro area
F = ratio of females
G = ratio of college graduates
A10 = ratio of those within a ten-year age range of myself
S = ratio of single
Dn = ratio of nondating
Ra = ratio of atheists/agnostics/nonreligious
A = ratio of those I find attractive

Note that I am assuming (quite incorrectly, I might add), that each of these terms are completely unrelated; i.e., that F does not differ based on the metro area in question, or that G doesn't vary according to F. I have done this to make the research for this type of equation much easier on my end, and also so that readers can determine an analogue of this equation for their own hometown.

Of course, this equation doe not even take into account basic chemistry-type stuff, or whether or not I'd even get along with them at all. Every additional variable makes C drop even more, which is disconcerting when you take into account how small C starts out at.

(Of course, there is one variable that is actually additive, since it would be placed instead of another variable, rather than appended to the end of this product. As an adherent to polyamorous philosophy, I might replace S and Dn with P, the ratio of polys in the total group. This number, however, is significantly smaller than what I have listed in the equation above, so we will ignore it for the purposes of this journal entry.)

With the help of Google and the all-powerful internet, I have found the following data:
Pdc = 1 million
F = 50%
G = 27% (2003 report on 2000 census)
A10 = 10% (2000 census)
S = 31% [unmarried] * 52% [percent of unmarried that also do not cohabitate] = 16% (2008 report from uscensus)
Dn = ? (can't find this information)
Ra = 16% (2007 religious ladscape survey; interestingly, the US census does not gather religious data)
A = ? (I will need to think for a while before getting this number)

With these values, we can determine C:

C = 1 million * 50% * 27% * 10% * 16% * 16% * Dn * A
  = 345 * Dn * A

That's less than three hundred forty-five people. Significantly less, in fact. If I put Dn at 50% and A at anything remotely reasonable, like 25%, the number drops precipitously to just 43 people. Even if I stretched things out a bit and put A at 75% instead, it's still only 130 people. In all of the Washington Metropolitan area.

And this is just to determine the potential pool of people from whom I could even consider seriously dating. Can you imagine trying to find one of 43 people in a population of 1 million residents? That's .0043% of the population. Talk about a needle in a haystack. The odds of even finding one from that potential pool by chance is astronomically low.

I never realized I was quite this picky. /c:

With apologies to David Kestenbaum, who gave me the idea to do this on This American Life. To find better statistics for your own area, I recommend ask.census.gov.

]]>Pledge to End Hungerhttp://www.ericherboso.com/blog/2009/3/8/pledge-to-end-hunger.htmlEric Herboso2009-03-08T04:29:02ZShare Our Strength Uncategorized ethics
Too lazy to volunteer and too cheap to donate? Fine. Click here and sign your name and Tyson Foods will donate 35 lbs. of food on your behalf. You ingrate.
A few years back, I tried an experiment where I went without food of any kind for as long as I possibly could. I wanted to test myself, to see if I could stand with greats like Gandhi, who went for three weeks without food at age 70. (I wasn't even counting those IRA guys who went for twice as long—that's just insane.) In the end, I lasted for fifteen days, consuming only water and Dr Pepper the entire time. Ironically, I broke down shortly after volunteering in a soup kitchen, eating a small bag of McDonald's fries. Thankfully, starvation of this kind is rare in the developed countries of the world. In the United States of America, for example, very extremely few people actually suffer from malnutrition so extreme that it endangers their life. It does still happen, of course—just ask Dr. Mariana Chilton, one of the friends I made at Share Our Strength's Conference of Leaders last year. She works with extremely underdeveloped children every single day. But of far greater concern for a country like the United States is the fact that hunger is still so prevalent. No one is surprised when I say that few Americans die from starvation, but almost everyone I speak with is genuinely surprised to find out that 1 out of 6 children in the United States are at risk of hunger. 12.4 million children (just in the States) are at risk of going 24 hours or longer without food. And they're not doing it for kicks, like I did. The situation appears even more grave than this if you think about it for a while. In many families, the expense of food is enough to cause family members to go without food much more often than you think. The 12.4 million children statistic is only applicable when there is so little food that not only do adults go without, but children as well. Just think of how many more families are out there that aren't quite at the level where the children go without, but still have to cope with adults going without food on a regular basis. The fact that this situation exists in a developed country like this is just sickening. There really is no reason for our wealth inequity to be so extreme that this sort of thing has to ever happen. It boggles the mind how our civilization can somehow be okay with this. That's why I have pledged myself end hunger. I am going to do what it takes to bring real action and get this issue resolved. But I'm not just choosing to do this because the need is great. I'm also doing it because this goal is entirely achievable. We can end hunger. It is absolutely possible that, with properly applied techniques, we can completely end hunger in the United States within ten years. I don't say this because I am so patriotic that I care more about Americans than others. No, my real intention is to complete a goal that is actually achievable, yet sounds so impressive that it will cause others to look at the result and say to themselves: look, the USA has completely eradicated hunger within its borders in just ten years; why can't we do the same? I am hoping for a sort of domino effect, where the eradication of hunger in our country will mean ALL developed countries will then solve their hunger problems, and then the inequity with developing countries will cause all those efforts to do the same with the rest of world's population as well. I know it sounds backwards; helping those best off before those who are worst off seems almost criminal when you first consider it. But this is a question of tactics. Throwing $500 million at ending worldwide hunger will save many lives, but not much more than that. Spending that same $500 million in the USA will literally eradicate hunger in the US, or at least in a significant portion of it. That will then cause momentum that will carry on to save many others—just think of how many more people would give to end hunger if someone actually showed good results. It is imperative that we have a win in our column that is as big as eradicating hunger in America; the fact of doing so may very well allow us to raise another $500 million. This is why I'm asking all my readers to sign their name and pledge to end hunger, either by donating to a hunger organization like Share Our Strength, volunteering at a local food bank, or even just spreading the word. It doesn't take much to make a difference. So please, everyone go to the PledgeToEndHunger.com and sign your name. For every person that puts their name there, Tyson Foods will donate enough food to feed 140 children. Just by putting down your name. That's all. Everyone who reads this can do that much, can't they? Plus, if you can get enough members of your local community to sign the pledge as well, then Tyson Foods will send your state an additional truck filled with food. So go sign the pledge. By the way, the reason it was McDonald's fries that did me in was more due to the fact that one of my methods for ensuring I didn't eat was to travel without cash on me in any way. I ate those fries mainly because I found a dollar bill on the ground that day, and the presence of cash in my pocket was enough to make me miss out on the three week mark that Gandhi set for me. Oh, well.]]>Christmas '08 With My Familyhttp://www.ericherboso.com/blog/2009/3/1/christmas-08-with-my-family.htmlEric Herboso2009-03-01T19:40:39ZUncategorized family religion video Although I have posted a few youtube videos previously for work related reasons, this is the first time I'm posting a video that I shot, spliced, and edited all on my own. Unfortunately, this means the result is actually fairly corny, but it's the best I could do for my first time. Music used is:
  • What Planet is This? - The Seatbelts
  • Ask DNA - The Seatbelts
    Edit: Tank! - The Seatbelts (thx for pointing this out, Matt)
  • Misato Theme - Shiro Sagisu
Please feel free to laugh at my first try at video editing. I'm sure I'll improve in the future. ]]>The Best People to Follow on Twitterhttp://www.ericherboso.com/blog/2009/2/25/the-best-people-to-follow-on-twitter.htmlEric Herboso2009-02-25T03:47:08ZUncategorized twitter
Twitter doesn't quite rival email for me, but it's rather close.
Twitter is one of my favorite web apps, right up there with IM and e-mail.  I use Twitter for everything from work to news to trivia to play and beyond.  But if you're new to Twitter, you might need a little direction on which people are good to follow.  Hence this list. (Please keep in mind that Twitter is best consumed only when all the content you subscribe to is interesting to you.  Don't just follow everybody.  Limit who you follow to under 100 at maximum; I recommend under ten for those who are getting started.  A good number to follow is forty or so, once you're into it.) The following list is of people that I personally follow, simply due to their interestingness.  As I'm not a big fan of celebrities nor up-to-the-minute weather updates, neither of those are listed here.  Your tastes may differ quite drastically from mine, so take these suggestions with an appropriate grain of salt.  Also note that my very favorite twitterers are bolded as appropriate.

Skepticism

  • @jref - The James Randi Educational Foundation's official feed, run by president Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer). Skeptic news and the like. More organizational presidents should run their organization's twitter feed, in my opinion.
  • @donttrythis - Adam Savage from the Mythbusters. Excellent public voice in the skeptic community. One of my favorite feeds to follow.
  • @BadAstronomer - Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy Columnist at Discover Magazine, President of the James Randi Educational Foundation, and all-around cool skeptic, has one of my favorite feeds on twitter.
  • @pennjillette - Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller's Bullshit fame) uses twitter mainly to update his facebook status. In fact, I doubt he ever checks his @ replies at all. But even though it's less interaction and more voyeurism, I still can't keep from following his behind-the-scenes bullshit tweets.

Politics

  • @joebiden - Our VP's feed is empty now that he holds the second highest office in our nation's government, but I'm still subscribed to it just in case a policy change allows him to do a personal tweet every once in a while, as Governor @Schwarzenegger occasionally does.
  • @BarackObama - Our President last tweeted on January 19, the day before the inauguration. Or, rather, his unnamed assistant did so. But I'm still blindly following the account, just in case.
  • @KarlRove - Yes, it's _that_ Karl Rove. And yes, he actually does twitter on it himself about 50% of the time. Of course, the other 50% is done by someone he hired for PR, but you take what you can get. I find it interesting just to hear what he's up to half the time nowadays.
  • @algore - Al Gore uses his twitter account just as another press release outlet, but since he only does so once a month or so, I don't mind being privy to whatever he's shilling this time. Often, it's quite interesting stuff.

Celebrities

  • @jimmyfallon - I don't watch Late Night because I only watch tv through bittorrent these days, but his time at SNL was quite entertaining for me. Not my favorite feed to follow, but definitely good enough to make this list. (His show's feed is at @LateNightJimmy.)
  • @BrentSpiner - He's a bit too snarky for me to really be into what he says, and his lack of emoticons mean that I don't always get when he's being sarcastic until well after the fact, but it's entertaining to watch anyway. Plus, how could I not follow Data?
  • @levarburton - The longtime host of Reading Rainbow has exactly the kind of twitter feed that I can get into. Levar is really into technology, and loves to interact with the twitter community. This makes him a great personality on Twitter for any geek to follow.
  • @wilw - Wil Wheaton's antics are worth watching, if you're into the kinds of things he's into (i.e. ultimate nerdom).
  • @hodgman - This surprisingly unfunny comedian's attempts at humor make me laugh just because it's so not funny. It's hard to explain unless you know who I'm talking about.
  • @mileskahn - Miles Kahn is one of the editors over at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. His tweets about segments he works on are always an entertaining backseat look at the set.

News

  • @BreakingNewsOn - If you want news as it happens, this is the twitter feed to follow. These guys break stories BEFORE the tv news outlets do. The only way to get more current than this is to either watch the global twitter stream live as it's tweeted or turn on c-span. A minor drawback to this cutting edge news is that they have to issue retractions at a rate of about once a week. It's worth it, in my opinion.
  • @democracy_now - Democracy NOW! is my favorite news source, and their twitter feed is a good way for me to keep up with what's going on behind the scenes. Every time they visit DC, I always go out to see them.
  • @CDCEmergency - The Centers for Disease Control's emergency twitter feed generally posts pretty inane stuff. But when emergencies happen (and you know they will), this is one twitter feed you'll be glad you subscribed to.

Technology

  • @cwilso - Chris Wilson is an engineer over at Microsoft that works on the Internet Explorer browser. He has some fairly interesting things to say from time to time.
  • @LeoLaporte, @kevinrose, @sarahlane, @martinsargent, @patricknorton - I used to LOVE watching The Screen Savers on TechTV. Besides listening to This Week in Tech and Diggnation via podcast each week, I also subscribe to their twitter feeds as a guilt pleasure. We're all allowed to have one. (Or two.)
  • @mattcutts - Matt Cutts of Google is on Twitter. If you know who he is, then be sure to follow him. If you don't know who he is, then you're probably better off ignoring this particular tweeter.

Science

  • @MarsRovers - Spirit and Oppy aren't doing too well anymore, but their sporadic news feed still gives great information. Account run by @VeronicaMcG.
  • @MarsPhoenix - Mars news at the speed of twitter. Awesomeness entailed.
  • @MarsScienceLab - It's still being built, but I have high hopes for this guy. Follow if you're at all interested in science.
  • @nsf - The National Science Foundation doesn't yet 'get' how Twitter is useful, but I'm holding out hope that this feed will become extraordinarily awesome in the future. It has such potential, and one day an exceedingly awesome intern will take it over and make it kick ass.

Washington, DC Specific Twitter Feeds

  • @dcalerts - Local DC emergency news.  Useful for those of us inside the beltway of our nation's capital.
  • @wmata - The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority runs the local metro (our subway/public transportation).  Seeing as how the metro is my primary mode of transportation, this feed is always very useful to me.
  • @SmithsonianIMAX - Their feed keeps me up-to-date on what films are being shown at DC's local IMAX theater.  This week it's The Dark Knight.  You can't tell me that isn't crazy awesome.
  • @amhistorymuseum - These guys do a great job of letting the public know what's going on at the American History Smithsonian without being too press-releasey.
  • @nmnh - The National Museum of Natural History Smithsonian does just as great a job.  I wonder if the people behind these Smithsonian twitter accounts get together and compare notes or something?
  • @smithsonian - This is how twitter should be handled by any organization.  Whoever is behind this account is freaking awesome. Somehow this twitter feed stays on message even while posting exceedingly retweetable tweets.  I am suitably impressed.

Niche Tweets

  • @dailymtg - From the daily Magic column over at magicthegathering.com.  If you're into Magic, you'll enjoy their very topical content.
  • @librarythingtim - Runs LibraryThing, one of my favorite social media sites.
  • @galcon - My second favorite iphone game.  I subscribe just to keep up with updates.
  • @fieldrunners - My favortite iphone game.  I also subscribe just to keep up with updates.

Random

  • @dailyhistory - A daily dose of history.  Cool for trivia buffs.
  • @ComicTwit - Bad jokes (mostly puns) tweeted at random parts of the day.  Funnier than @hodgman.

Non-Profit

  • @ShareStrength - Share Our Strength is the national nonprofit I work for.  Our mission is to end child hunger, which is no small feat.  My colleague and fellow web guy, Jeff Wiedner, runs this account.  I tweet here around once a week or so, when I have something to add.

Personal (Friends & Family)

  • @EricHerboso - This is me.  I tweet about pretty much anything and everything that interests me.  If you're reading this blog entry, then you probably should follow me, as I talk about the same kinds of stuff there as I do here, but far more often (and in only 140 characters, to boot!)
  • @tigreroar - My dad, a realtor in the DC metro area.  Has first page google search result for "short sale option" (without quotes), which makes him quite prominent in his field, and makes me way too proud of my SEO skillz.
  • @Mr_Blithe - One of my good friends from college.  He's teaching English to high school students in Japan.  Crazy, yet awesome.
  • @joe_sos - He's the sysadmin over at @ShareStrength, where I work.  I guess that makes him a work buddy.  Weird that I have those.
  • @mendoek - Another good friend from college.  Med student with a brain that somehow is able to stand being friends with normal people.  I envy his openness.
  • @Gibeath - One of my oldest friends, and one of the smartest persons I know.  And that's saying quite a lot.

People I Don't Follow

  • congresstweets.org - A list of your local congressmen with twitter accounts.
  • cdc.gov/socialmedia - The Centers for Disease Control runs many social media accounts to help keep everyone informed and up to date in the event of an emergency.
  • celebritytweet.com - Be warned that not every twitter account is actually run by the person who claims to.  @THE_REAL_SHAQ updates his status directly, while @BritneySpears hired someone to take care of her twitter account fulltime.
  • porn stars who twitter - Yes, even porn stars are on Twitter.  But be warned: their lives are just as boring as everyone else's.
I hope you enjoy the good follows above.  If you have any suggestions on who you might think I'd like to follow, please don't hesitate to leave me a note.  If I like it, I might even add it to the list.  (c; As a final note, for those who are interested, I use TweetDeck on my mac at home and TwitterFon on my iphone to keep up with all these tweets.  I recommend both quite highly. Happy tweeting! (And don't forget to follow @EricHerboso!)]]>Should I feel bad about things?http://www.ericherboso.com/blog/2008/12/29/should-i-feel-bad-about-things.htmlEric Herboso2008-12-29T23:07:52ZUncategorized crime ethics family feminism friends philosophy religion sex vegetarianism
When something feels this good, w/o causing harm to others, why not just enjoy it?
Through talking to others over the years, I've learned that what I think of as my "conscience" is very different from the ordinary person's conscience. While it is true that I do feel badly about certain things from time to time, they are almost never the same things that others continue to maintain that I should feel badly about. Sometimes, when I am feeling particularly down, I look back on events from my past that I honestly regret: But other things, things that I intellectually realize are horrible in the extreme, are items that I feel almost nothing about at all. It is as though these events, while real, have no guilt component embedded in them, unlike the events listed in the earlier bulleted list. Still, though I feel no guilt, intellectually I understand that they are negative to some degree or another, and thus I take care to ensure that they never happen again. But no matter how many measures I take, one fact remains: I do not feel bad about having done them. Some of these items include:
  • losing control of my temper and destroying a dorm window w/ my bare hand, leaving others to pay the bill
  • making fun of a fellow classmate nehind her back (longtime readers will remember her as Total Recall) just because I felt she was not a particularly 'deep' individual
  • being physically violent with others in a most cruel and continual way during my first few formative relationships
But there is another class of items I do not feel bad about: things that, for one reason or another, I feel justified in not feeling badly about. Like looking at breasts, for instance. As I explained in detail in my feminist blog entry a few weeks back, I do not consider the looking at breasts to be a negative thing, despite the fact that I consider myself a fully fledged feminist. While some may believe that breast-gazing is equivalent to objectifying the generic female person, I disagree halfway: I think it objectifies only the female form, and so long as the gazer respects the person within that form, then no harm is done by looking. (Unless the recipient doesn't wish to be looked at, in which case surreptitious gazing is a borderline case.) But there are other items as well, including: The above list is just a sample of the many things I continue to do to this day, even while others I talk to continue to insist that it would feel wrong to them. Hearteningly, everyone seems to agree with me on one or two items, yet disagree on others--yet everyone seems to think different things are right. I should mention that I have what I think are rather good reasons for each of the above: many recently popular books have been written on how religion ruins society, for example, and the only real argument for me to pay special attention to those related to me by blood is because they share genetic material with me, and that's got to be the lamest excuse ever. But even with these well thought out explanations, very few people have agreed with me on all points. To tell the truth, this diversity of opinion makes me happy. Personally, I think engineering is exceedingly boring when compared to theoretical physics, but I fully understand that engineers are needed for physicists to work their magic. It's a good thing that different people have different things they like. Yet I still appreciate beyond measure the rare individual who shares my thoughts on these issues. For it is only with those such people that I can ever fully let my guard down and participate openly, as equals. And that is an experience that I will always treasure.]]>The Horrors of Installing Facebook Connecthttp://www.ericherboso.com/blog/2008/12/18/the-horrors-of-installing-facebook-connect.htmlEric Herboso2008-12-18T21:12:37ZUncategorized design facebookAlthough it's been a number of weeks since I integrated Google's Friend Connect on EricHerboso.com, I never bothered to write about it because it was by far the easiest install EVER.  Installing it literally consisted of going to Google's web site, hitting a few buttons, typing in a few characters, and then it was over.  Google made things super easy. Installing Facebook Connect, on the other hand, has been an immense pain.  Every step I took in getting it to work has been a step lined in tears of sweat.  Everything that could possibly go wrong has in fact gone wrong, and it was the most irritating install ever.  Horrifyingly, on my second attempt, I even followed an inane video entitled "Add Facebook Connect to your blog in 8 minutes!".  And while following their directions were not hard, it took more like 45 minutes, and at the end of it, it didn't work at all.  Which is severely fucked up, since the video was literally posted only three days earlier.  (The sticking point was their usage of uid='loggedinuser' -- it turns out that 'loggedinuser' cannot be called by uid through xfbml.  Which makes the entire video pointless.) I also tried a custom installation by modifying some code I found at a spanish-only site.  It was a terrible mess by the time I got through with it, and has since been removed completely.  (I don't speak spanish.) But today, during my lunch hour at work (okay, I used 1.75 hours), I finally got facebook connect to work on my WordPress install.  And it's all thanks to some helpful code supplied by Adam Hupp.  You can see a partial documentation of it on the facebook developer's wiki.  (I've already edited a few bits in the Q&A session and plan on fleshing out the article a bit more later on to clarify some of the more complicated parts used to customize how facebook connects to wordpress.) Anyway, thanks to Adam Hupp, it's now a pretty seamless installation procedure.  Just follow the directions at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php?title=WP-FBConnect if you want to add it to your own wordpress installation and you'll see what I mean. So please try out the new system.  If you're already logged in on my blog, log yourself out and come back to this page.  You should see a 'log in with facebook' button right above the comment section.  You can log in that way, or, alternatively, if you're already logged in to facebook, you should see a box in the top right of your screen that asks you if you want to log in with facebook.  Either login method should get you set up, and then all you have to do is enter in a comment and it should connect directly to your facebook account.

However, there a few caveats.

First, it breaks in IE.  After numerous investigations, I've come to find out that this is an issue on facebook's end, and not an issue with the code I currently have on my site.  Facebook connect does not currently work in IE no matter how you try to make it work.  I think this is an xfbml issue, though I may be wrong. Second, it's fussy in firefox.  It doesn't seem to like the way the code is being executed.  Sometimes it works right away, and sometimes it logs meout unexpectedly for no apparent reason.  I can't seem to find the error here, even though I've combed through everything.  If you're using firefox, and it won't let you login, try refreshing the page.  It should work then. These browser issues aside, it works perfectly in Chrome / Safari.  So if you really want to see it work seamlessly, I suggest opening this page in one of those browsers.  I know that's a terrible way of getting code to work, but it'll have to do for now.  I'll let someone else do the legwork on figuring out what's causing the firefox issue and get it fixed as soon as I see the corrected code posted online. Anyway, please leave a comment and help me test to see if this works.  Oh, and let me know what browser you used to post the comment with, too. Be well.]]>