K-Squared Ramblings

From what?

Always proofread carfully

Believe it or not, this is on the front of an elementary school!

It kind of reminds me of the “They’re just putting the S in principal” story.

Bad Boys

I am thoroughly sick of the phenomenon I call the Draco Malfoy Effect. This is the process by which young (and not-so-young) women become convinced that not only are evil bad-boy types desirable, but completely reformable. Liking the maverick is nothing new for the Hollywood-hypnotized masses, especially seeing as how he’s so often played by a desirable star. However, liking the villain–the kind who has not yet been definitively shown to possess a heart–to the point that you believe he can be saved through sex with either a) you, b) your Mary Sue, or c) the ingenue of the cast is, to my thinking, simply bizarre.

I’d love to have a discussion on this. Please comment. (Even if you think I’m the one with her head on crooked.)

Another update

Finally updated to WordPress 1.2, mainly to take advantage of plugins (first new feature: related posts) and hierarchical categories.

Overall less painful than the upgrade to 1.0, but there are character encoding problems (moved from Latin-1 to UTF-8 — which is ultimately a better choice) and some odd issues with comments. Every apostrophe and quotation mark in a comment has a backslash in front of it (presumably something went wrong in the conversion and it double-escaped them), messing up both words and links. Edit 11:30 pm: I think I’ve got them all fixed now.

Edit 1:30 am: It seems the backslashes were added to posts too, it’s just that the template removed them when it displayed the page. That wasn’t the case with the RSS and Atom feeds, so I’ve gone through the last 20 posts fixing that. (It’s relatively easy: just edit the post and save it without making any changes. It’s just tedious.) I’ll work through the backlog when I have time.

I’ve also fixed a problem with the next/previous page links (supposedly a fix is available in the development version, but at this point I’d prefer to stick with full releases.)

The new tie-in to Ping-o-Matic is very nice, but I can’t get WordPress to add the trailing slash to the RSS feeds, so every site pingomatic supports now has two almost-identical URLs for this weblog. Some of them (Blogstreet and Technorati) figured out it’s the same site, but some — including Blo.gs and Blogshares, now list multiple profiles that will take some manual adjusting.

There’s always something.

Well, if you spot any more problems, please comment here!

Creating CSS Buttons

Several months ago, I went on a minor site optimizing kick. One thing I decided to do was replace the validation labels with something smaller, less obtrusive, and directly on the page. I tried to duplicate the look of the classic antipixel-style buttons (like the ones you see on the sidebar here) by splitting a link into two <span> elements, but had so much trouble getting borders and height to match up correctly that I wrote it off completely.

After a while I came back to it, and started with very simple buttons like this:

Your browser shows this as:

Valid XHTML XFN Friendly

Here’s the CSS and HTML used for this version: Read the rest of this entry »

IM Wars and the Spam Strawman

To be honest, I haven’t used any instant messaging system much since college. But every once in a while I fire up Gaim just to see if anyone I know is on AIM or ICQ. I have a Yahoo account, but I’m not sure anyone I know actually uses Yahoo Messenger, and I’ve been avoiding MSN mainly on principle.

Sadly, it seems the IM wars have returned.

This time it’s Yahoo that’s blocked other clients from connecting to their networks. The most high-profile victim has been Trillian, another client which talks to multiple IM networks, but of course Gaim was hit as well. What’s interesting, this time, is that Yahoo claims it’s doing this to cut down on spam.

Now let’s think about this: In order to send and receive instant messages on Yahoo’s network, you need a Yahoo account, correct? So no matter what software a spammer uses to connect, he still needs to log in, which means Yahoo can control them inside the network. This is where current IM systems are fundamentally different from email: instead of many independently-controlled systems talking to each other, each IM service is one system with many accounts, more like a website with required registration. Place limits on what clients can do, and (barring bugs in your server) no matter what client someone uses, he can’t get around your spam/virus/hack controls.
Read the rest of this entry »

Ironic, now that I think about it

Long story short: while Eudora is still my favorite Windows-based email program, its HTML rendering is so bad that I had to read today’s Microsoft Technet newsletter on my Linux box. (And before anyone comments that I can set Eudora to use IE’s rendering engine, I don’t want the security mess of letting Internet Explorer handle my email.)

Nobody has dreams about…..

Fishfax was in a discussion today about dreams and related that she had one about eating pizza with piña coladas. If it were margaritas, I’d really question her sanity.

Interesting Combination

This morning I recieved both a bogus “Out of Office” reply from someone at Halliburton (presumably from a virus that spoofed my address as the sender) and a new 419 scam variant, this one claiming to be someone in Iraq. (I still think of them as Nigerian scams, but they’ve gone seriously international over the past year or so.) Subject line: “EVERY IMPORTANT” (really!)

Something to consider on those vacation messages: I was just sent some random Halliburton employee’s cell phone number. Not that I have any use for it, but would you hand out your cell number to any random person on the Internet? I know I wouldn’t!

Cross-platform?

This is from an ad for Comcast cable-modem service that arrived in today’s mail. I almost threw it out, but then I noticed something very odd about the middle picture on the front:

Now it may not be obvious at this resolution, so how about a closer look at the corners:

Wow - that’s the first time I’ve seen Windows XP running on an iMac!

I guess with Comcast you have to fire up VirtualPC just to run Internet Explorer.

Now that’s just sad.

I just came across an article on non-password authentication that refers back to an April 2004 survey of office workers which found that “71% were willing to part with their password for a chocolate bar.”

Wow. I know they say everyone has their price, but this is ridiculous.

It reminds me of the comic book Underworld Unleashed, in which a demon approached various DC villains offering to give them enhanced powers in exchange for their souls. The Joker sold his soul in exchange for… a box of cigars. “They’re cubans!” he explained.

Another good one: “I work in a financial call centre, our password changes daily, but I do not have a problem remembering it as it is written on the board so that every one can see it.”

Un. be. lievable.

Congratulations to SpaceShipOne!

Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne, piloted by Michael Melvill, became the first privately-built craft to fly in space this morning!

Scaled Composites looks to be the front-runner for the Ansari X-Prize. The goal of the X-Prize is to develop a reusable spacecraft, and for SpaceShipOne to win it, they’ll have to repeat today’s suborbital flight with a crew of three, then turn around and use the same ship again within two weeks.

Sorting the Leviathan

I realized this morning what struck me as odd about the original crew of Moya: they’re not a crew, they’re a D&D party. Two warriors, a priest, a thief, and Ordinary Guy (who’d probably be classed as a bard). We started trying to categorize everyone else who shows up and realized that we’d need to know all the kits and extra subclasses to do it right. Then I thought of trying to determine alignments and couldn’t decide whether to use the D&D system or the TMNT system (which I barely know but seems to work better for actual people). It was at that point that Kelson said, “You know, it’d be easier to sort them into Hogwarts houses.” So we did. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s in a User-Agent String?

Some people browse collections. I collect browsers. Mostly I just want to see what they’ll do to my web site, but I have a positively ridiculous number of web browsers installed on my Linux and Windows computers at work and at home, and I’ve installed a half-dozen extra browsers on our PowerBook.

One project I’ve worked on since my days at UCI was a script to identify a web browser. In theory this should be simple, since every browser sends its name along when it requests a page. In practice, it’s not, because there’s no standard way to describe that identity.

Actually, that’s not quite true. There is a standard (described in the specs for HTTP 1.0 and 1.1: RFC 1945 and RFC 2068), but for reasons I’ll get into later, it’s not adequate for more than the basics, and even those have been subverted. That standard says a browser (or, in the broader sense, a “user agent,” since search robots, downloaders, news readers, proxies, and other programs might access a site) should identify itself in the following format:

• Name/version more-details

Additional details often include the operating system or platform the browser is running on, and sometimes the language.

Now here are some examples of what browsers call themselves: Read the rest of this entry »

Cancellations

When it comes to serial entertainment, everything will end at some point. I’m sure even Superman and Spider-Man comics will cease someday. A show can end before or after it’s run out of things to say, but it’s worst when it hasn’t finished speaking.

We’ve all seen shows that kept going long after, by any rights, they should have been cancelled. Is there any doubt that Voyager only lasted 7 years because it was Star Trek, on a studio-owned network, and the previous two Treks had also run that long? “The Far Side” and “Calvin and Hobbes” ended while the artists were at the top of their form. Compare that to “Peanuts,” whose last 20 years were hardly worth reading, or the new “Opus” from Berkeley Breathed (although it does have its moments.) Read the rest of this entry »

With near bowling ball!

It came from the spam box! (cue scream)

Offscreen voice: AAAAAAAAA!

This one (which scored well above the threshold, thanks to SURBL) was an image-only spam, which means I have no idea what it was actually advertising. (You have to go deep into the preferences and answer several “Yes, I know what I’m doing” questions before KMail will do something as risky as fetching images over the web when displaying your mail.)

Anyway, the title of this piece was “avocado pit 8 tenors.” Along with its single image, it contained a paragraph of distracting words, and it looks like they might actually have been trying to form sentences:

When recliner defined by corporation is dirt-encrusted, of particle accelerator write a love letter to light bulb for.turkey about guardian angel is mitochondrial.Indeed, near apartment building seek fetishist defined by skyscraper.And plan an escape from the dark side of her ocean.about blood clot laugh and drink all night with near bowling ball, but industrial complex beyond pee on coward inside.He called her Kirk (or was it Kirk?).
perseverant grumble quintillion culver flowchart brandywine

OK, it doesn’t have the literary greatness of “The Eye of Argon”, or even Zero Wing, but I suppose not everyone can.

Undead Spam!

OK, it’s time someone collected these comments from the SpamAssassin-Talk mailing list.

A week ago, Matthew Cline posted “Vowel Duplication Humor”

Subject: Regaain Your Yoooouth

Text: Hi Reyna, Reeeeeeegaiiin your yooooouth with Humaaaaaaan Grooooowth Hoormooooooone!

It’s like being spammed by ghosts. “Your dooOoooOOommmmed!! DoooOOoOOOoommed!!”

Today, in a thread describing the pattern as “stuck key” spam, Justin Mason said:

ha! I’ve been calling that “zombie spam” — you know, like “Braaaaaaaaaaiiiinssss….”

From the department of Huh?

Groklaw has posted an affidavit in the SCO vs. Daimler Chrysler case.

Essentially, SCO sent DC a letter saying “as per your license terms, send us a list of all the computers you’re using UNIX on.”

DC wrote back saying, “We haven’t used UNIX in seven years, so there is no list.”

And SCO sued them for not providing the list.

I’m not making this up, folks - this comes out of SCO’s own deposition!

Avert your eyes

I’ll be the first to admit that I go near-ballistic where cigarettes are concerned, from sprinting by smokers on a sidewalk to springing up to turn our window fan to exhaust mode. But, rude though I may be, I’m not as bad as the AMA. An R rating for smoking? Even when the smoker is an evil character, or when a would-be teen smoker lights up and doubles over coughing? What about random guy in the background on a busy street scene? How the hell are filmmakers going to deal with that?

Unfortunately, I have a guess, and it doesn’t involve parental permission cards. If this rating-system change does happen, the industry will know that any film involving smoking has no chance of hitting the PG-13 sweet spot for audience draw. Rather than making something like Forrest Gump inauthentic by leaving out the ubiquitious Vietnam cigarettes, they will instead add footage and sound that they may have held back on before, simply because they have that freedom under the measure. We will see films that are more violent and more full of sex and cursing where there is no cause for it, because there is nothing to lose. Imagine biographical movies about well-known smokers–Churchill, FDR, Einstein–done by John Woo, and you’ll have an idea what we’d be in for.

Now think of all the foreign films we import. Read the rest of this entry »

Those Badass Stepford Wives

These marquees are all from the same movie theater:

Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

Evidently Helen grew up in Stepford. And it really does take a village.

So what does happen the day after Garfield?

The Uncanny Valley

I saw an interesting article on Slate the other day: The Undead Zone: Why realistic graphics make humans look creepy.

The basic thrust of the article is that when something looks slightly human - say a cartoon, or a C3PO-like robot - we fill in the gaps. But when something looks almost, but not quite human, we start to focus on the things that look wrong instead. This was observed by roboticist Masahiro Mori, who called it the uncanny valley. The term refers to the appearance of a graph plotting emotional response (y) against how closely something resembles normal humans (x). Up to a point - say 90% - the more humanlike something is, the better people respond to it, until it reaches that almost-but-not-quite-there point where instead of responding positively, people start responding with revulsion and active dislike. Eventually, as things get closer to “real,” the curve swings back up again until the reaction is the same as to a normal person.

So what does this mean for video games? At least for some people — including the article’s author — state-of-the-art graphics are in that valley. We can get a very good representation of a lifeless but moving human being. Getting those last few details, pushing up the far side of the valley, is going to be very hard.

Spam International

I hit a new milestone today: I received my first spam in Hebrew.

Most spam I get is in English (or some horrendously-misspelled imitation thereof). I’ve gotten spam in Portuguese since college. I frequently see spam in Japanese, Chinese and Russian (and possibly other Cyrillic languages, but I can’t tell them apart). I occasionally see spam in Korean, and once in a while even in Arabic. Lately I’ve started seeing spam in French, and of course over the past week lots of people have been getting racist political spam in German.

I think I’m now caught up on nearly every writing system that’s likely to see use in email. Thai may be all that’s left.

Netscape for IE

OK, does anyone else find the idea of a Netscape Toolbar for IE a bit twisted?

Simple drop shadows? IE/Win and NS4 don’t think so!

I found myself thinking of A List Apart’s CSS Drop Shadows, and decided I’d modify my writing portfolio to use actual drop shadows instead of the clunky border mess I’ve had for the last few years.

The first thing I realized was that the technique isn’t suitable for large, arbitrarily-sized regions, because you need to have a background image as large as or larger than the area being given the shadow. When you’re trying to apply it to most of the page, you need a multi-thousand pixel image. That’s not only hard to work with, but even if it compresses well it’s still going to take up a lot of unnecessary room in the browser’s memory.

I wanted to keep the markup simple, so I shopped around a bit more and came across a CSS drop shadow example at W3C which was very simple: all you do is put a shadow-colored div behind the area and mess with margins.

Well, that worked great in Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror and Safari. Then, the dreaded Internet Explorer test.
Read the rest of this entry »

Yogurt? What yogurt?

Today’s pathetic recipe:

*******
APPLE YOGURT

2 c fruit-flavored yogurt
4 apples, cored and sliced

Spoon yogurt into 4 serving bowls and top with apple slices. Serve chilled. Serves 4.
*******

Now let’s look at just how craptastic this is. First off, it’s labeled a dessert. Secondly, 4 apples?? Unless we’re talking miniature Galas off your tree, this is not only difficult to spoon up but also way too much fruit for the yogurt. Laying the slices on top would overflow the dish and completely obscure the yogurt. I suppose one could arrange the slices standing up in a flower pattern and use the yogurt as dip, but why serve that chilled? Thirdly, this is the second recipe in the calendar for basically the same thing; the first one was with orange yogurt and tangerines. However, put some orange blossom honey (and possibly a little finely chopped candied ginger) on that and you’ve got something slightly resembling dessert. For this one to fly, you’d need to use Yoplait Whips (or a similar product) and some caramel sauce. Oh, and half the apples.

What color is SCO’s sky?

OK, I haven’t written much on the SCO vs. Linux debacle in a while, mainly because others have done so much better and in much more detail than I possibly could, so here’s a summary of the situation as I see it.

SCO: Linux stole from us!
Linux: Uh, no. What did we steal?
SCO: Linux stole from us!
Linux: No, we didn’t. What are we supposed to have stolen!
SCO: Linux stole from us! They’re un-American commie terrorists!
Linux: Dude, what the heck? Tell us what we stole or stop accusing us!
SCO: Linux stole XYZ from us.
Linux: No, we got that legally from so-and-so.
SCO: Uh, never mind. We meant to say Linux stole ABC.
Linux: No, we got that legally from such-and-such.
SCO: No, we mean JFS and NUMA!
IBM: Hey, we invented those ourselves.
SCO: We have proof! We have millions of lines that Linux stole!
Linux: Such as?
* crickets *
SCO: We have millions of lines! Millions of them!
Linux: Shyeah, right.
SCO: But don’t worry, for a mere $699, you can assure yourself that we won’t sue you for this chunk of Linux that we haven’t actually proved we own yet!
Linux: $699? For a small piece of something you won’t even prove you own? What’s next, charging Windows users an extra $700 for Notepad because they can write code with it? [Looks up definition of "protection racket"]
SCO: Did I mention we own BSD, MacOS, and Windows too? They’re next! (Well, except Windows, ’cause Microsoft gave us money. For something else, I mean.)
BSD: You’re kidding, right? We went through this in court a decade ago.
SCO: Wait, we never said anything about BSD.
BSD: But in this interview right here –
SCO: Linux is evil! The GPL is unconstitutional! If you let people use software for free, then the terrorists have won!
Linux: What are you people smoking?

Then there are the lawsuits:
Read the rest of this entry »

Cookbook anarchist

I have a page-a-day calendar at work called “The Quick Cook.” It advertises itself as containing a variety of recipes with low prep time and uncomplicated ingredients. After five months of it, I think I know what their sourcebooks were:

• Desserts Kids Will Hate
• The Dijon Mustard Council Cookbook
• Imitation International Cooking
• Midwestern Weirdos’ Aid Society Cookbook, 1967 edition
• I Can’t Believe They’re Vegetables
• White Trash Family Favorites
• The Precooked Seafood Association Cookbook
• Quick Country French Cooking

There are a few gems of the actually good kind, like an actual workable recipe for avgolemono soup and one for panzanella, but otherwise it’s less hit than miss. Read the rest of this entry »

Practicing my Spamish

Sometime around 1997 I started getting a lot of spam from Brazil. I don’t mean relayed through Brazil, everyone gets that these days, I mean spam from businesses and groups in Brazil, in Portuguese, intended for a Brazilian audience. I don’t know how they came up with my address, although I suspect an unscrupulous ISP picked up on it when someone emailed me about translating my Flash site that summer.

Usually I just toss them, but every once in a while I try to puzzle them out (especially since I took some Spanish classes a few years ago - the languages are just similar enough I can usually catch the gist). This one was interesting:

Novidade na pesquisa dos discos voadores no Brasil

Visite o site da Revista UFO e conheça o movimento nacional que os ufólogos estão promovendo desde abril para pedir o reconhecimento oficial da Ufologia. Trata-se da campanha UFOs: LIBERDADE DE INFORMAÇÕES JÁ, que já conta com um abaixo-assinado popular com mais de 3 mil assinaturas. Todas as pessoas interessadas no assunto podem participar do movimento e assinar a petição, que será entregue às autoridades federais com um pedido de abertura de seus arquivos secretos contendo registros de observações de UFOs em nosso Território.

It’s about an online UFO magazine, and an effort to petition the Brazilian government to release classified information about UFO sightings and close encounters in Brazil. I got about this far before I decided to try Google’s translation service, and I’ll try to provide a tidied up version:

New in flying saucer research in Brazil [Google translated "discos voadores" as "flying records," which conjured up interesting images.]

Visit the site of UFO Magazine and learn about the national movement ufologists have been promoting since April to ask for official recognition of ufology. About the UFO campaign “Freedom of Information Now,” that already counts more than three thousand signatures. All people interested in the subject can participate in the movement and sign the petition that will be delivered to the federal authorities with a demand to open its classified records [Google suggested "private archives"] on UFOs in our territory.

It then goes on for another paragraph about the magazine’s history, and talks about “UFO sightings in our airspace and direct contact between humans and extraerrestrial civilizations that have visisted us” (I’m pretty sure that’s what it says, anyway).

Amazingly, the message footer contains the line “Essa mensagem não é spam.” — literally, “This message is not spam.” It seems that some aspects of spam are universal.

I mean, seriously, how do you take “Brazilian UFO enthusiasts” as your criteria and come up with an English-speaking California native whose website deals with comic books, creative writing, photography, and Linux? No, they just got my address off of the same list that’s been passed around Brazil for the past seven years.