Web

In case you don't know, I have this website hosted on a 1&1 shared hosting account.  It's not the best, but it's cheap and it works.

Anyway, one of the main problems people run into with Drupal on most shared hosting accounts is Clean URLs not working.  Why does this matter?  Without Clean URLs, there will be a ?q= in the URL for each page, which looks weird and is not quite as friendly with search engines.

Thankfully, there is usually a simple fix.  On 1&1 just two things need to change.

1 - Drupal needs to use PHP5, not PHP4.  You can rename all the PHP files, if you want, or you can just add this to you .htaccess file.

#Use PHP5. AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

You can add this on any new line in the file.

2 - Drupal needs to know how to handle URLs correctly, which means this:

# RewriteBase /

needs to be this:

RewriteBase /

Yes, so just delete the # character in front of RewriteBase /, that's all.  It is probably located towards the bottom of the file.

Like I said, a simple fix, but it stumps a lot of people.

I ran across this video the other day.  It's pretty funny.

I like the ending. "Ubuntu?"

Smashing Magazine has posted some great underwater photos.  Some of them are of underwater creatures, some are of people, and they are all amazing.

NASA commisioned a guy to make a rap video about astrobiology.  That has to be one of the strangest things I have ever heard of.  Check it out.

Also, if you haven't already, watch the LHC Rap.

Check out The PCR Song that Katy posted.  One of only a handful of music videos for science geeks.

In my search for some information about a thick-headed fly, I ran across this site.  Diptera.info has tons of great information, pictures, links, and a great forum.  The forum is great if you are trying to determine exactly what species of fly (or midge) you have found.  And you'll especially love the site if you're a bug geek.  There are a bunch of other bug geeks lurking in the forums all the time too, so you should feel right at home.  And be sure to check out the photos; many of them are absolutely amazing.

The Encyclopedia Of Life is a new website with the goal of documenting all species of life on Earth (eventually).  Currently, there are 25 "exemplar species pages" full of information and links to additional resources about a specific species.  There are many other partially completed pages, but most of them just have some basic information on the species.  One reason for the limited amount of content is that all the information on the site must be verified by a scientist or researcher focusing on that species, so you can rest assured that the information you find on EOL.org is correct.  There are many neat features, such as a detail slider and graphical species navigator.  See for yourself here.  It will be very interesting to see how the site progresses over the next few years.

Pandora.com is an ingenious free, internet radio system.  Essentially, you can create your own internet radio stations based on a song, band, genre, or several other aspects.  Just enter in a song or band you enjoy, and a station is automatically created with songs and bands that have similar characteristics.  One nice feature is that you can create a free account and give a thumbs up or thumbs down to songs.  When you give a song a thumbs up or down, the future songs on that station are changed to reflect your decision.  If you give a song a thumbs down, it will not be placed into your station queue.  If you give a song a thumbs up, then it will show up in your queue more often and similar songs will be played more often too.

So does it work well?  Absolutely.  I have had an account for more than a year and I hardly ever skip a song or run across songs I don't like (and I have pretty weird tastes in music).  About song skipping, you can skip a certain number of songs within a set amount of time on each station.  Once you reach your limit, you must either listen to all the songs in the queue for that station or switch stations.  The interface is simple and easy to use.  Check it out at pandora.com.