Monthly Archives: June 2010

Protecting Firefox from Farmville

Posted on June 28, 2010 by Kelson

Firefox has been testing a new release that detects and closes crashed plugins (instead of letting them crash Firefox entirely) for several months, carefully making sure everything was working before they released Firefox 3.6.4 last week.

Within days, they released an update. I couldn’t imagine what they might have missed in all the beta testing. Katie wondered if the beta testers hadn’t been testing the limits.

You want to know what convinced Mozilla to issue an update so quickly?

Farmville.

Apparently Firefox was detecting Farmville as frozen and closing it. It turns out that on many computers, Farmville regularly freezes up the browser for longer than 10 seconds, and its players just deal with it and wait for it to come back. Mozilla decided that the simplest thing to do would be to increase the time limit.

What this tells me is that the type of person willing to beta-test a web browser these days is not likely to be playing Farmville — or if they are, it’s likely to be on a bleeding-edge computer that can handle it without 10-second freezes.

In more practical terms: Mozilla needs to convince a wider variety of users to help test their software!

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Hello, New Friend!

Posted on June 28, 2010 by Kelson

Whenever I see spam that starts out with a subject or greeting like “Hey, friend,” I think of Fluffmodeus from the webcomic Something Positive:

TV Tropes describes the grotesque cute character as being “like an ’80s cartoon character who Care-Bear-Stared a little too long into the abyss…” Rippy declared him to be “the most annoying thing that’s ever existed.” Hmm, maybe he’s a spammer when he’s not haunting Kharisma? :-D

Oh, and the archives…definitely not work-safe.

Posted in Comics, Spam | Tagged | Leave a comment

The $250 Magnifying Glass

Posted on June 27, 2010 by Kelson

You know you’re a geek when you take a photo with your camera and zoom in on the display instead of looking for a magnifying glass:

Broken Watch Pin
OK, perhaps a bit overkill, but now I have this cool close-up picture of a broken watch pin.

Incidentally, it’s harder than I expected to buy just a replacement pin. I can find watchbands easily, but just the pins? I’m going to need to do some more looking. Not that it necessarily matters, since I seem to have misplaced the unattached half of the watchband — I may need to replace the whole band anyway.

If I do, this time I’m making sure I keep the remaining pin as a spare.

Posted in Photos | Tagged | 1 Comment

Netbook, Phone or Tablet?

Posted on June 26, 2010 by Kelson

Comic-Con International is rapidly approaching, and you know what that means: it means I’m thinking about mobile computing again!

Right now, I’ve got a G1 Android-based phone, and Katie and I share a MacBook. The G1 is showing its age, and it would be nice to have a second computer to do things like manage photos with while traveling.

So. Options.

1. Upgrade the phone. I’d like to stick with T-Mobile, but unfortunately after being the first network to take a chance on Android, they kind of dropped the ball on high-end Android phones. It looks like they’ll be getting the Samsung Galaxy S as the Vibrant, which might solve that problem. (Downside: no camera flash, no physical keyboard, both of which are in the Galaxy S Pro — but I don’t know when or even whether it’ll show up on T-Mobile’s network!)

Also, this doesn’t solve the photo management problem…and if I get a touchscreen-only phone, it’ll really slow down typing until I get used to it.

That and the rumored launch date for the Vibrant is July 21: the day before Comic-Con! That’s not the best time to try to get used to a new device.

2. Get a tablet. As much as I love Apple’s laptops and think that tablet PCs are a great idea, I can’t get behind the iPad. I don’t like the walled-garden approach where Apple gets to choose what you’re allowed to install on your computer. As for other platforms, Windows and Android tablets don’t seem to be comparable just yet.

In short: not gonna happen this year.

3. Get a netbook. I keep coming back to this, don’t I? Last weekend I checked out the selection at Fry’s and Micro Center, and decided on several things:

  • Never, ever buy a netbook without trying out the keyboard first! I found one that was so bad that I’d rather type on my phone for an hour than this netbook.
  • Smaller is better (up to a point). There’s no point in getting a large netbook when I could get a more fully-functional small notebook.
  • A lot of netbooks have truly awful trackpads.
  • While I’d rather get one with Windows 7 than Windows XP, it’s not critical. (Vista, however, is right out. Not that I saw any Vista-based netbooks…)
  • I like the Splashtop instant-on mini-network OS. It’ll be sufficient for 90% of what I’d be doing with a netbook.
  • A big chunk of that other 10% would be photo management! Or at least pulling photos off the camera and uploading them. Managing stuff within Flickr should work.
  • Most netbooks are still above my personal “Oh, just buy it and get it over with” price point, which is $200. MicroCenter had two, one of which was the one with the horrible keyboard, and one of which had Windows XP, didn’t have SplashTop, and had a mediocre trackpad. I really had to think about whether it was worth it or not.

Even so, It’s going to be hard to justify a netbook and a newer phone, and if I have to pick one, it’s going to be the phone. At this rate, by the time I decide to go for it, a tablet may actually be more practical!

Posted in Computers/Internet | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Links: Doomed Data, Web Services, WTF Textbook Questions & More

Posted on June 25, 2010 by Kelson

An experiment: I’ve modified* Twitter Tools to create digest posts as drafts instead of publishing immediately. That gives me a chance to edit a week’s worth of random thoughts and links down to the interesting stuff, clean things up a bit, expand things that could use more detail, and remind myself of items that I wanted to write more about later.

If it works out, and if the plugin still offers digests after it’s rewritten to use OAuth, I’ll probably use this same setup to make sure I keep on top of linkblogging at Speed Force.

*It was pretty simple. I just looked for the function that creates digests, then changed the post_status from publish to draft.

The Links

  • Why information storage is hard: The Universe Hates Your Data.
  • Interesting analogy: Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone aren’t quite ecosystems. Maybe it’s better to think of web services as governments. (via ma.tt)
  • WTF of the week: A book I was looking at on Amazon didn’t have any active discussions related to it, so Amazon showed me some random forum threads. They included this question on used textbooks: “Is it Ok if I used it to bludgeon several people to death with it?” Be sure to read the responses.
  • I love how Twitter’s status blog describes Wednesday morning’s outage as “high whales.”
  • Dear CNN: A 4.0 earthquake in California, especially one that didn’t cause any damage, is not breaking news. It’s more like business as usual. (It’s worth noting that a full day later, they haven’t updated the story with anything substantive…probably because there isn’t anything to add!)
  • Very cool: the Sci-Fi Airshow is a gallery of photorealistic images of spaceships from various science-fiction TV shows and movies set at, well, an air show. (via Bad Astronomy and SciFi Wire)

Posted in Computers/Internet, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Strange World | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Link Archive 2010

Posted on June 25, 2010 by Kelson

Some interesting links I encountered over the last few months, between the time I stopped importing Twitter digests and the time I started using them for linkblogging.

Continue reading →

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Call Your Mark a Sucker

Posted on June 25, 2010 by Kelson

My jaw just dropped at this advance fee fraud scam that showed up in the spamtraps this week. The whole thing is about how the reason you haven’t gotten your funds is because you’ve been dealing with fraudsters who have been impersonating Nigerian diplomats, police, etc., and how could you possibly be so naive?…oh, and if you’ll send me your personal information and bank details, I’ll make sure the real police clear things up so you can get your payment.

Seriously. Does this technique actually work?

Actual text of the email below the cut:

Continue reading →

Posted in Spam | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

DC Comics Goes Digital

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Kelson

DC Comics has launched a digital comics program, starting with the iPad/iPhone and the Playstation network.

And by launched, I mean launched. As in, you can download the app and buy comics right now.

I’m really looking forward to the day when they expand this to more platforms (desktop PCs, Android and Windows–based tablets, etc) and start reaching into their back catalog. I’ve griped about the lack of Golden Age Flash reprints before, and the Bronze Age is also virtually invisible in reprints (though at least with comics from the 1970s and 1980s, you can usually find the back-issues at a reasonable price).

I haven’t had time to read all the interviews, but I’ll definitely be reading them tonight:

With Jim Lee so heavily involved in this project, I can’t help but think of a moment at WonderCon this year. Saturday was the day of the iPad launch, and the Apple Store in San Francisco is just a few blocks from the convention center. Jim Lee was conspicuously missing from the DC Editorial panel. He showed up partway through the panel and stood in the Q&A line, where he planted a few questions…and then pulled out the brand-new iPad that he had stood in line for that morning!

Sadly, judging by ComiXology’s new releases, DC hasn’t brought Flash to the iPad just yet. But I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

Update: Comics Alliance has another article I won’t have time to read just yet, on why this is a big deal.

Cross-posted at Speed Force

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Spam template

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Kelson

I love seeing it when spam software doesn’t quite work. Sometimes it’s just schadenfreude, and sometimes it’s interesting to see how the templates are structured.

Here’s one that showed up in a comment spam on Speed Force:

{Hi|Hello|Hey there|Thanks}, {very|really|truly|genuinely} {cool|nice|good|interesting} {post|article|stuff}. Such {insighful|entertaining} writing is rare these days. I’ll {surely|certainly} be looking in on {this|your} {blog|site} again {soon|in the nea

It’s cut off because they managed to plug it in as the commenter name instead of the comment itself (oops!)

I haven’t decided whether to call this “flattery spam,” or “kiss-ass spam,” but my general reaction when I see these (and I’ve seen a lot of them) is, “Nice try.”

If you like finding humor in spam, check out @lol_spam on Twitter.

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New Look for WordPress 3.0

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Kelson

WordPress has been making a big deal out of their new default theme, Twenty-Ten, released with WordPress 3.0. Meanwhile, I’ve been watching this site get more and more cluttered, and I keep having to tweak the existing theme to be able to deal with new WordPress features like nested comments, custom menus, etc.

Last week I had to replace the theme’s comment form (fortunately with something simpler) because it didn’t interact quite right with WordPress 3.0.

What the heck. I haven’t changed the look since 2007, so I might as well give it a shot.

I’ve switched over to Twenty-Ten, using one of my own photos for the banner. It’s a view from Modjeska Grade Road, taken last January.

Modjeska Grade View

I’m not quite happy with it yet, but I’m not sure what I want to do next.

My main goals for the new layout are:

  • Move the last of the customizations out of the theme and into plugins (so that I can easily switch to another theme if I want to).
  • Keep the new page uncluttered and relatively fast-loading (which is why I haven’t added everything back to the sidebar).

I have had to make a couple of adjustments to the theme itself. Twenty-Ten insists on showing excerpts instead of complete posts for archives, categories and searches, so I had to go in and modify that. I also added a couple of bits to the stylesheet: alternating comment backgrounds, tweaks to the old Twitter digests, etc. Still, I’m making a point of keeping those changes minimal and grouped together.

I’m also trying out WP-Minify, which should make scripts and styles load a lot faster, or at least the ones hosted locally. Unfortunately there are still a lot of remote scripts for things like Google Analytics, the Share This buttons, and the Link Within thumbnails. Some of them might work. I’ll have to experiment.

So, things are in a bit of flux. Please let me know if you find something that doesn’t work, or miss something that used to be here, by doing one of the following:

  • Leave a comment on this post.
  • Use the contact form.
  • Email me at kelson – at – pobox – dot – com.

Thanks!

Posted in Site Updates | Tagged , , | 1 Comment