Minh’s Notes

Not to be arrogant or anything, but this is how a St. X graduate treats a Wikipedia article about Moeller High School:

• He rewrites its “History” section, removing text that plagiarizes Moeller’s website.
• He improves the wording of its “Academics” section, citing sources where appropriate.

This is how Moeller fans treat a Wikipedia article about St. X:

• They delete its content, filling the page with profanity and non-encyclopedic cheers for Moeller.
• Just two minutes after an anonymous St. X fan replaces the profanity with non-encyclopedic, non-inflammatory cheers for St. X, an anonymous Moeller fan strikes back with more profanity.
• Another anonymous Moeller fan, clearly a big fan of old jokes, sees fit to mock the school’s motto.

All this since Friday. What the fans are banned from shouting in the stands, they shout online. No surprise there. I should note that it’s not just Moeller fans: on Wednesday, a Regis Jesuit (Colorado) fan rambled on about how much better their team was, right in the middle of the St. X article. And I always see petty vandalism on high school articles, including when people from my graduating class libeled some of our classmates. But Moeller fans should know better than to deface an article on their athletic rival. This isn’t a Facebook wall; it’s an educational resource. And Moeller, with its “reputation for … academic and athletic excellence,” surely understands the implications of that.

Entry №1067, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 1:49 AM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: Frustration, High School, Wikipedia | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I can’t believe it! St. X shut down Planet Xavier!

This morning, I got a letter in the mail from St. X, asking me in no uncertain terms to “cease and desist”. Who’da thunk that you would get a C&D letter without having violated copyright?

Here’s the cruxt of the letter:

The St. Xavier High School administration has determined that “Planet Xavier” (“the Web site”) has contributed to the continued misuse of school resources by encouraging students to use services such as Xanga, MySpace, Facebook, YTMND, the Encyclopædia Britannica, and Google.

Despite the IT Department’s valiant efforts to curtail the use of these Web sites, your Web site has served as a loophole, through which students have exchanged non-Jesuit-appropriate comments and, worse, non-curricular thoughts. Thus, we feel it is our duty as educators to ban the use of this Web site and thereby help students regain the immaculate grades they once received before they were introduced to the Internet.

We trust you agree with our belief that the constant abuse of computer time for “blogging” and related activities directly leads to rapidly declining grades. Persuant to this, we ask that you cease and desist, and furthermore ask that you not attempt to revive this Web site and instead devote his time and resources discouraging the practice of “blogging.” We are confident that you will respect our decision to close your Web site and obey our directions, considering the virtues of “Men, Women and Children with, about, above, across, amid, among, around, at, behind, below, beneath, beside, by, for, from, in, into, of, off, outside, over, to, toward, under, until, within and without Others,” AMDG and magis to which you swore under your breath as you were handed your diploma.

To which I say: you handed me my diploma in the mail.

Imagine my intense frustration once I realized what they had done next! Before bed, I happened to open up pX, only to find that exact same excerpt on my own website, with only a few minor changes in wording and a lot more boldfaced text.

I can’t believe they would go through such lengths to persue these “non-curricular activities”, and I especially can’t believe that they would trespass on the property of someone who’d already graduated!

Needless to say, I’m miffed.

Entry №1011, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 11:56 PM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: High School, Humor, Planet Xavier | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

Last November, when I was still a senior at St. X, Firefox 1.0 came out. It was a big deal, because at the time hardly anyone used it, although people were only starting to hear about it from their friends. Since the Tuesday it came out was an X Day, I was down in the Math Tutoring Center for 8^th period. I was bored as usual, since no one except Ryan Finan ever needed help with their math during 8^th.

So I drew a rather large ad for Firefox on the whiteboard there – I covered the entire thing, actually, with an enormongous logo of Firefox coming out of the box.

Last Tuesday, the Mozilla Corporation – the Mozilla Foundation subsidiary that’s responsible for releasing and marketing Firefox – released version 1.5. You can download it for free. Don’t let the fractional version number increase fool you: this release is every bit as important as the one just over a year ago. I won’t bore you with all the changes under the hood that’ve made my night-job as a web developer so much easier, but here are some features that I know you’ll appreciate:

• Going back and forward is literally a snap. You no longer have to wait for a page to load when you hit the Back button; it just goes right back. And it’s the same for going forward. The nice thing about Firefox’s back and forward functionality is that you don’t lose your e-mail, say, if you accidentally hit the Home button while composing your mail and frantically hit the back button.
• Firefox is known for its ability to keep webpages in tabs, which let you organize your webpages better. 1.5’s twist is that you can now drag your tabs around, to keep related tabs next to each other – a real boon for multitaskers. Previously you had to download a fairly crash-prone extension called miniT(drag+indicator) for the same feature.
• The popup blocker is now more reliable: I’ve been using the Firefox 1.5 alphas, betas, and release candidates for months, and in that time I haven’t seen a single rogue popup, yet I can still click on a link that is supposed to popup a new window, and Firefox won’t get in the way.
• If you’re using the family computer – or if you’ve installed Firefox on a school computer, against that school’s wishes – you’ll appreciate the Clear Private Data option that lets you quickly erase any type of personally-identifying information before you exit, without having to dig through the Options window.
• If you try going to a webpage that doesn’t exist, Firefox will now show elegant error pages (à la Internet Explorer), instead of popping up annoying little error messages.
• The Options dialog has been completely reorganized. While I don’t think the new design overall is that much more useable than the previous one, they have made the Cookies dialog so much easier to use.
• And in case Bill Dirkes is still reading this blog, Firefox now lets web designers use CSS to specify custom cursors (beyond the standard arrow, hand, hourglass, and I-bar cursors) on webpages. It won’t be long before every Xanga mod will abuse this feature, though.

But most importantly, this release features a dead-simple update system: when a new version of Firefox is available (perhaps one that fixes some security-related issues), Firefox will automatically download the patch and give you the option to install it. Note that it’s a patch that the browser downloads: from now on, you won’t have to download a bulky installer every time Mozilla fixes another security bug; just a little patch on the order of kilobytes.

The whole process of downloading, installing, and restarting involves just one click from the user (where Firefox asks you to confirm that you actually want to update) and takes less than a minute. If you have the SessionSaver extension, you can then just pick up where you left off, without losing all your windows and tabs.

That’s why, when I went to cover one of the many whiteboards along my dorm’s first-floor hallway with a tastelessly large ad for Firefox 1.5, I dubbed the new release “the mother of all upgrades.”

Entry №942, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 9:10 PM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: College, High School, Mozilla Firefox | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)