K-Squared Ramblings

Googolplex: a virtual reality movie theater

Here’s an interesting idea: Googolplex Theaters creates a virtual reality movie theater so that, effectively, everyone gets their own screen.

Of course, once you simulate a screen in VR, why stop there? You’ve already got 3-D in the display, and between the backlog of 3D movies and a decade or so of computer animation, there are a lot of possibilities.

Mind-Machine Interface

• BBC: Brain chip reads man’s thoughts
• Business Week: The New Science of Mind over Matter

(via CNET Extra)

Gaming search engines with Wordpress

It’s always something. Apparently WordPress.org has been dabbling in black-hat SEO, hosting thousands of keyword-based articles on their high–page-ranked site and placing hidden links to them on their home page. Way to go, guys. This makes the paranoia over remote images almost look reasonable. What’s next, putting ads in the next default template?

The free/open source software world is based primarily on trust. Based on comments I’ve read over the last couple of days, WordPress has lost a lot of it. They’ve even been (mostly) dropped from Google. A sensible precaution while things are sorted out, but it unfortunately means the first top-level listing on a Google search for “wordpress” is wordpress.com, which looks like a cybersquatter. Not exactly an improvement.

In a support thread Matt answered last week, he referred to it as an “experiment.” He’s on vacation right now, but someone has taken it upon themselves to remove the bogus articles from the site.

My thoughts: Read the rest of this entry »

Girl Genius moves to the web

Here’s some surprising news: Phil and Kaja Foglio’s excellent comic book Girl Genius is moving from print to the web: Girl Genius Online. They plan to have new pages up three times a week, and release graphic novels once a year.

I’m of mixed feelings here. On one hand, I like being able to hold the comics in my hand, and this was a series I’ve been collecting as individual issues. Hardcovers and TPBs are often harder to find. On the other hand, the series was only nominally quarterly, often managing only three issues a year (or fewer). If they actually manage 3 a week, that’s the equivalent of six 30-page issues over the course of the next year. And it will be easier to introduce new people to the series. I can just point them to the website instead of lending an issue or telling them to hunt through their local comic stores.

(via the Studio Foglio newsletter)

Fully Random Spam

The blog spammers must be getting desperate. The only other explanation I can think of is courtesy (keeping offensive language out of the posts), and I just can’t ascribe that motive to them.

The latest attack on this site consists of randomly-generated alphanumeric strings. Name? ah87fdfbqpo3q9483fhc. Email? ahsdhufs@q98hf4i4whfcia487f.com. URL? augfagfwi7832hr732rh8732fcfiuh.example.com. (I assume they have a wildcard DNS set up for random subdomains.) Content? Try something like “ads78shafi7 uigiutgw87n srgn743fnufc42.” (I’m typing my own gibberish, just in case the plan is to search for particular strings and see which sites have actually posted.)

The “advantage” of this approach is that there is no content to filter. No references to pills, poker or porn, no common phrases, not even empty generic statements like “I really like you’re site” and “Your an idiot” with links tossed in. It’s just a bunch of meaningless letters and numbers and a link. After all, the link is all the spammer needs, to get that coveted PageRank.

Oh, about that link? Easily identifiable. SURBL-style lists eat them for breakfast, and Spam Karma has been snacking on these all morning. *chomp*

Czech yore gramma!

A nice example of why spelling and grammar checkers (at least as they stand today) are not enough: In trust we Word. The article has more.

(Appropriately, it seems that WordPerfect’s grammar checker is considerably more effective than Word’s.)

Sweet Irony

This is a good one. Apprently in setting up their own anti-Groklaw site, SCO has grabbed PDFs of legal documents from Groklaw and Tuxrocks.com.

In a campaign focused on intellectual property rights, where SCO is the accuser…

Groklaw’s PJ has a good take on it: “I’m sure [Tuxrocks'] Frank would want to join me in thanking SCO for this wonderful endorsement of our websites.”

Unusual Flash Sighting

I noticed this SUV as I got on the freeway after work. We apparently kept pace with each other, because it was there on the off-ramp as well. It was then that I noticed something red on the back:

Yes, a plush Flash doll was jammed into the trailer hitch!

Fiendish Alarm Clock

The MIT Media Lab has come up with Clocky, an alarm clock that rolls away and hides when you hit the snooze button.

(via CNET Extra)

The Dreaded Double Digits

What is it about two-digit version numbers?

Mac OS went up to 9, and now it’s Mac OS X. Everything since then has been numbered “under the hood.” You can find 10.3 in the fine print, but everywhere else it’s Mac OS X Panther.

Windows alternates between vintages and letters (Me, XP, etc.). Even then, they’re only up to 5.2 internally (Longhorn will technically be Windows NT 6.0).

Red Hat Linux got up to 9, then spun off into Fedora Core, starting over at 1.

Mandrake got as far as 10.1, and Conectiva to 10, and the merged system is moving to yearly vintages.

SuSE is about to hit 9.3, but Novell has been busy absorbing all the Linux companies they bought. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see them release Novell Linux 1 instead of SuSE Linux 10.

Hazard Construction?

Here’s a photoblog flashback. This picture was taken in 1999, so I assume the project has long since been completed:

Something about the combination of “Hazard” and “Cannon Road” seemed…apropos. And somewhat ironic when considered in light of construction.

(I did find one Hazard Construction Company on Google. I assume this is them, since they’re based in the right county.)

Farce Cape

A caption I always wanted to write. From “Crackers Don’t Matter,” one of Farscape’s more comedic episodes.

The Microsoft Prize

One of those “international lottery” scams (very closely related to the Nigerian scam):

CONGRATULATIONS !!! YOUR E-MAIL HAS WON A MICROSOFT PRIZE

My e-mail has won a prize? Not me? Hmm, I can think of lots of Microsoft “prizes” my email has received: Mydoom, Netsky, Bagle…. Of course, it’s declined all of them!

Senior Xing

I’ve only seen these signs in Irvine. I suspect that says something about them:

Perhaps an important warning to drivers, but it’s not a well-designed road sign. There’s too much detail, for starters—detail you’re not going to see clearly zooming by at 35 M.P.H. Compare to the stick figures of the standard school crossing sign, or even to the bunny crossing sign.

More importantly, the cues chosen to identify senior citizens are temporary, in the sense that they’ll look dated not too long from now. Why a hat, for instance? Read the rest of this entry »

Time Travel Spam Returns

Back in 2002, people all over the net started getting email from a “time traveller” looking for a dimensional warp generator. Most people assumed it was a joke, and some decided to play along by setting up fake stores or even arranging a drop-off. The “time travel spammer” was eventually identified as spammer Robert Todino, who, unfortunately, was quite serious in his belief that time travelers were interfering with his life. The fake store, the mock DWG made from old computer parts, the offers to supply his equipment, all unwittingly fueled his belief.

This all came out in mid-2003, and aside from immediate fallout and a brief spate of (probably copycat) AIM appearances late last year, the field seems to have been quiet.

Well, guess what showed up in the spam traps over the weekend!

Hello <address removed>,

I’m looking for a good trans_universal transportation unit. Do you have the Mccoy g series self generating watch or similar newer models available? I also need other items you may or may not have available. Please send a (separate) email to me at: <address removed> if available and let me know your terms on doing business.

Thank you
Paul

They’re baaack!

Other sightings: here [archive.org], here [archive.org], and here. Edit: Somehow it seems appropriate that these sightings are now only accessible via the Wayback Machine. (July 28, 2006)

A most ingenious paradox

A sign spotted in a parking garage the other day:

Next step: prove black is white—but be very careful at the next zebra crossing.

Everything you know is wrong!
Black is white, up is down
And short is long…

Limited Resources

A while back I remarked that the Babylon 5 spinoff Crusade died in part because the Sci-Fi channel had already committed to Farscape.

I was thinking about VR.5 recently. Had it survived into a second or third season, Anthony Stewart Head might not have been available for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Can you imagine anyone else as Giles? Of course, given the nature of the show (they killed off a regular about five episodes in, and pulled an “everything you know is wrong” moment near the end of the season), it’s entirely possible that Oliver wouldn’t have made it through season 2 anyway, and he still would have gotten the role as Giles.

Mail-order Tumbleweeds!

Just what I always needed! Proving that “you can sell anything on the Internet,” it’s Prairie Tumbleweed Farm, purveyor of “organically grown,” “100% Y2K-compliant” tumbleweeds.

It wouldn’t be much use here in Orange County, where all you have to do is pull over to the side of the road at the right time of the year. Maybe in the off-season.

(Via the Daily Sucker. You have been warned.)

More spammer threats

Here’s another good one:

This-message-is-not-spam. If you file a spam complaint you will be deemed liable for all costs related to the spam complaint.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the words “This is not spam” in a message that wasn’t spam, or at least talking about spam. It’s kind of like “Please do not discard” on an envelope. It’s a sure sign of junk mail. I mean, if it was mail you wanted, you wouldn’t be discarding it anyway, would you?

The robots are coming!

I picked up a couple of domain names for joke websites and spamtrapping on Tuesday. I set up a placeholder page for each, and I’ve started writing and designing one of them. Aside from running one of the test pages through the W3C Validator and hooking one page into Project Honeypot, no one outside of myself, Katie, and the domain registrar even knows the sites exist.

Of course, the domain registrar has to share that info with the DNS system at large, and this morning, both sites were hit by SurveyBot/2.3 (Whois Source). As near as I can tell, they just check the home page of every registered domain once a week to grab the title and see whether the site is active.

And just eight hours later, Ask Jeeves/Teoma showed up. I assume they got the info from Whois Source, or maybe they’re plugged directly into the DNS registrar system.

It’s just amazing that the robots have arrived first—even before the content!

The Pain of Winstallation

Windows gets installed
Now reboot–again!–again!
Why so many times?

The Joy of USB

New server setup
Network driver CD gone
Ten-meg download file

13 things that don’t make sense

New Scientist: 13 things that do not make sense. Everything from homeopathy and cold fusion to dark matter and variable constants. Another good title would be “13 things science hasn’t explained or disproved (yet).”

Promise SX6000, FreeBSD, and Linux

If you want to build a Linux or FreeBSD system around a RAID array, don’t use the Promise SuperTrak SX6000 controller. At least not for now.

The card used to work under Linux using the standard I2O drivers (i2o_block, etc.), but sometime last year Promise changed the firmware so that it no longer uses I2O. Now you’re stuck with Promise’s own driver, so if you want to use an old enough distribution* (say, Red Hat 7.3) that you can find a driver disk, or make your own driver disk, go ahead…but don’t expect to be able to upgrade it unless you can create a driver disk for the newer distro. This assumes the source code for the driver will work with recent 2.4 kernels—it won’t compile with 2.6. There has been talk of merging the pti_st driver into the kernel (fortunately it’s GPLed), but I can’t find anything more recent than August. Someday it might work again, but not today.

Now, FreeBSD is another matter. It has built-in drivers (pst), the installer will detect it automatically, and even let you install your entire system to it—without warning you that FreeBSD can’t boot from the SX6000. You can boot from another drive and interact with it once the system’s running, but you can’t put your entire system on the RAID array. (This information is not in the installer, not in the hardware notes, not in the driver man page. I only found the one 1½-year-old mailing list post by the driver’s author, and a bunch of “I don’t think it works” comments in other lists and forums.)

I hope this post will save someone a lot of frustration.

*Of the distributions for which Promise has provided driver disks, only one—SuSE 9.0—hasn’t already been retired.

Alpha PNG in IE7?

According to Microsoft Watch, Internet Explorer 7 will handle PNG Transparency. Not sure what their source is—it isn’t IEBlog—but if true, it’ll be very nice. Now we only have to wait another 5 years for everyone to upgrade or switch, and web designers will be able to make use of a very simple, but very useful effect in our normal layouts instead of only in the enhanced versions.

(via CNET Extra)

Getting to “know” spam

There’s just something twisted about porn spam that uses Biblical quotes to distract filters.

Cross-browser Java Spyware

Talk about convoluted. Someone has developed a Java applet that will use one browser to install spyware on another. The applet runs in any browser using the Sun Java Runtime Environment—Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, etc.—and if it can convince you to run the installer, it will install spyware on Internet Explorer. And since you can’t remove Internet Explorer from Windows (you can hide it, but it’s always there…waiting), just using an alternative browser isn’t enough to protect you.

Of course, the obvious solution here is don’t let it install anything. That’s what the Java sandbox is for, after all: applets run in their own little world and can’t touch the rest of your system unless you let them (or they find a hole in the sandbox, which is why you need to keep Java up to date—just like everything else).

Time to emphasize the fact that while Firefox is still safer than IE, it’s not a magic bullet. There is no magic bullet. You can minimize risk, but never eliminate it.

(via SANS Internet Storm Center)

Diversifying Fedora Core

Fedora Core is following the path blazed by the Linux kernel: having started out as primarily an x86-based project (the 32-bit Intel-based processors from the 386 through the Pentium 4 and Athlon), it’s branching out. Versions 2 and 3 added support for the AMD-64 chips (basis of the Opteron and Athlon 64), and now, with the first test release of Fedora Core 4, official support for both 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC.

There was a side project already, and most of the pieces that go into a Linux distribution have reached the point where they’re (mostly) platform-independent—all you need to do is recompile them. It takes fine-tuning, of course, and the actual hardware support takes effort. Yellow Dog Linux started out porting Red Hat to the PowerPC so it would run on Macs, and now builds a solid distribution off of Fedora Core, including a high-end server OS targeted for IBM’s PowerPC servers.

It’ll be interesting to compare upcoming versions of Yellow Dog and Fedora Core now that the latter is working on an actual PPC release.

Neverwhere 3.0

Also in comics news, the nine-part adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere begins in June.

The basic premise is this: In urban areas, we tend to tune out the homeless to the point where we don’t even see them. What if we really don’t see them? What if there’s another world, just slightly out of sync with this one, where the rules are all different. (JMS used a similar springboard for Midnight Nation, but took it in a completely different direction.) There’s poverty, and scavenging… but there’s also magic, and honor, and a society with its own strange codes. The story follows everyman Richard Mayhew as, through a simple act of kindness, he slips through the cracks from London Above to London Below. In order to get back, he has to help a mysterious girl named Door on her quest to find her family’s killers and honor their legacy…and escape the assassins tracking them both!

It’s hard to guess how well this will work. Neil Gaiman’s comics and prose are both fantastic (in every sense of the word). Comic book adaptations of his prose, though, haven’t been nearly as good. The writers have a tendency to preserve too much of the text, and it gets bogged down in narration. It happened with “Murder Mysteries,” with “Only the End of the World Again”, and with “The Price.”

Neverwhere has two advantages, though. It started life as a TV script (he only wrote the novel because he realized that budget limitations and producer interference would prevent them from doing the story “right”), and TV, like comics, is a visual medium. And with nine issues, there should be plenty of room to show, not tell, the story.

You knew she was coming back

On the list of DC comics for June: The Return of Donna Troy #1. Along for the ride: New Teen Titans: Who is Donna Troy?, collecting the classic stories that explored the original Wonder Girl’s past. (And, I suspect, some of the newer stories that screwed it up. It doesn’t mention the Dark Angel storyline, but it does say “and much more,” and includes a bit from the Titans/Outsiders Secret Files that I know I read, but can barely remember.)

Let’s face it: like killing Superman, Troia’s death was never intended to stick. It was an admitted gimmick: what would shake up the Titans and Young Justice so badly that you could break up both teams and create new takes on the Teen Titans and Outsiders? Throw in the backstory with multiple lifetimes and the sequences in Graduation Day itself that showed her in another life, and you’ve got more than a back door to bring her back: she just lingered a bit longer than usual near the revolving door.

I’m of mixed feelings on this. On one hand, I think comics should take death a bit more seriously. If you can bring back Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, and a dozen other heroes, why should any of the Titans have expected Donna’s death to be permanent? Why should anyone have expected Sue Dibny’s death in Identity Crisis to be permanent? Then add in the fact that I’d generally rather see comics follow through on changes (Wally replacing Barry as Flash, Kyle replacing Hal as GL, etc.) than reversing them.

On the other hand, Graduation Day was a lousy story. It was basically “How can we dismantle two teams in three issues?” And Donna’s death was clearly intended to be temporary. And unless you count Cassie, the new Wonder Girl, no one really replaced her, so bringing her back doesn’t push anyone else out of the spotlight.

Heck, it’s got George Perez and Phil Jimenez working together. How can I not read it?

Desperate in Decency

It looks like the FCC isn’t completely insane. After four months, they concluded that the now-infamous Desperate Housewives locker room promo isn’t indecent after all. “Although the scene apparently is intended to be titillating, it simply is not graphic or explicit enough to be indecent under our standard.”

I saw the spot—or at least something that matched the description exactly—and it was no more explicit than typical prime-time fare. I thought it was cheesy, but I honestly didn’t think any more about it, so when the controversy hit, I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was.

But it took them four months to figure this out?

Ah, well, I suppose it’s fast for the FCC. I mean, it took them more than a year to clear a complaint against Angel, by which time the series had been off the air for nine months.

(Incidentally, I’ve never seen a single episode of Desperate Housewives. It just doesn’t look like my kind of show.)