K-Squared Ramblings

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?