K-Squared Ramblings

Plastic Revolution

Well, I finally found out the reason for the Grass Under Renovation signs. I passed a median where a road crew was setting out what I first thought was sod, but then realized was Astroturf.

Nice one. I suppose it’ll save money on water and maintenance, but then so would painting the concrete green.

Couldn’t they just put in some native plants and leave them alone?

This ain’t spam

Why do some spammers insist on prefacing their junk with statements like “THIS IS NOT SPAM?”

Some idiot just posted a bit long letter offering to let me put my “products” on their online store. No, they didn’t send me an email about, say, the comic book collection I’m selling. No, they didn’t offer to sell prints or digital copies of my photography. No, they didn’t offer to publish my writing or Katie’s writing. They certainly didn’t look for contact information on any of those pages, because if they had, they would have found it and used proper channels. (Well, probably. I occasionally get comments on my Flash site via eBay’s “Question to Seller” feature because people don’t see the email address at the bottom of the page, but they do see the link to my eBay profile.)

They posted a very generic form letter—so generic that I can’t tell what they’re offering to resell—as a comment on a two-year-old blog post in which I remarked on some new comic books I had started reading.

And you know what? That’s spam. You can yell all you want that it isn’t, but when you post a completely off-topic advertisement on someone’s site, when you send someone a (supposed) business offer without checking to see whether it’s relevant—particularly when you claim to have checked them out, but clearly haven’t bothered—that’s spam.

And denying that fact won’t make me accept the offer (or leave the comment visible) any more than the “Please do not discard” statements on credit card offers will get me to fill out an application.

Grievous Entrance

We went to see Howl’s Moving Castle (Miyazaki’s latest, excellent as always) tonight, and as we walked past the Oakley store, I suddenly realized: that’s why General Grievous looked familiar!

Though Katie pointed out, it also looks rather like the Omni-Droid.

Those sushi chefs are such cut-ups!

Well, technically, the fish is severed…

Wee Little Puppet Man

OK, I have officially changed my mind about the four covers for Angel: The Curse #1.

If they weren’t publishing alternate covers, there’s no way they would have used a fully-painted picture of the puppet Angel. Update: Scan added.

The guy at the comic store said, “of all the people who had it on their pull list, I figured you’d appreciate this one the most.” Good call!

Based on WHICH recent purchases?

I let Amazon.com send me notices every once in a while, just in case something interesting pops up. This qualifies, though not in the way I expected:

Based on your recent purchases, we thought you might like to know that you can save up to 65% on summer favorites in men’s, women’s, children’s, and shoes.

The thing is, I’ve never bought clothing from Amazon! Books, CDs, the occasional DVD, some computer software. But no clothing, though they’ve tried to convince me. T-shirts aside, I prefer to be able to try something on before I buy it.

Assuming they actually are using their recommendations system, I think they must have just checked the clothing category for the mailing, and left the “based on…” phrase in the template. Though sometimes cross-category recommendations can be strange. I’m often amazed at things I find in my rec list that have no relation to the things I bought or rated that supposedly triggered the recommendation, simply because those items are popular enough to cut across multiple interests. Of course, right now the only thing they recommend for me in “apparel” is a Darth Vader mask, which I find somewhat disturbing…

We’ll fight for you!

Actual spam subject lines:

let us fight with your creditors

afraid to fight your creditors? we’re not

I’m imagining two guys in a boxing ring with the viking warriors from those Capital One commercials. If only Spamusement had a submissions page!

The Puzzle Blimp

From time to time on our morning (and sometimes evening) commute, we’ve spotted a multicolored blimp. Sometimes it’s in the air, sometimes it’s parked on a field.

For obvious reasons, we’ve started calling it the “puzzle blimp.”

We kept wondering just whose blimp it was. There was no logo we could see, and blimps are mainly used for advertising. Well, that last photo we caught turns out to have the answer:
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Suggestive logo

Here’s another example of using a design that suggests a logo, rather than using it outright. This is a “Win Compatible” badge from the package of a KVM switch. (I think it was from IOGEAR.)

What I like about this is that it manages to get the idea across clearly even though it doesn’t use the actual Windows name or logo. “Win” is enough to get the name across, and the overlapping colored rectangles immediately call to mind the look of Windows 2000, Windows Me, and Office 2000. Sure, it’s one redesign back, but it’s still recognizable.

As for why they made their own logo? Well, it’s all hardware, with no drivers needed, so there really isn’t any point in putting it through the OS compatibility tests. You might as well label a monitor as being “Designed for Windows.” But not everyone knows what is and isn’t OS-dependent. Even those who do are more likely to buy it if they have that reassurance. I’ve looked at devices that I was 90% certain should work with any OS, but bought the one that specifically mentioned Mac or Linux compatibility because it filled in that last 10%.

An offer you can’t turn down

Some amusing “word salad” variations:

To update passive your e-mail address regulator from <remove> to cellist, please visit adoptive My Profile barge.

I got another one with the same structure, and they’re just dropping random words into the sentence. But I kind of like the idea of a “My Profile barge.”

If you would rather not receive E-mail outshine diffuse alerting you of special offers, product announcements, sensuous and other news, just let us know by rapier

Oh, the temptation!

Missed it by that much

I recently picked up a new domain name for a stand-alone website I’ve been working on. Since I got a good deal from Yahoo last March when I registered googolplextheaters.com for $5/year, I went with Yahoo again. I was slightly annoyed to see the price was now $9.95, but I remembered $4.98 had been a promo price, and $10/year is still not bad. Heck, I remember when then-monopoly Network Solutions dropped the price of a domain name from $100 to $70.

Anyway, it seems that Yahoo still offers $4.98 domains—depending on how you get there. Some of their ads offer the lower price, and if you come into the service through the ad, you get the discount.

It’s kind of like an automatic coupon.

It’s also a bit annoying that I could have spent half as much if I’d clicked on a different link.

Still, it’s only a $5 difference. I spend that much on lunch.

Reinventing the Upgrade Wheel

The internet is a hostile place. Viruses, worms, and worse are constantly trying to break or break into your computer. Software developers are constantly fixing the holes that can let them in. It’s become critical to keep your system up to date. Unfortunately this can be very frustrating, even for a power user, for one simple reason: you have to keep track of each program individually.

Sure, the operating systems have their own centralized places. Microsoft has Windows Update, and Apple has Software Update. But every application that exposes itself to the network directly or opens untrusted files has to be updated, and there are many that aren’t part of the operating system.

So Symantec has Live Update. Real Player has its own updater. iTunes and QuickTime for Windows can update themselves. Adobe Reader has an update function. Firefox is redesigning its update system. Games check for updates when they connect to the network.

But wouldn’t it be nice if Windows would grab the Acrobat updates overnight, instead of waiting until the next time you launched it? Wouldn’t you like to be able to patch everything on your system at once and just not worry about it? As a software developer, wouldn’t you like to be able to let someone else deal with the update problem instead of re-inventing the wheel yet again?
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The power of color

I was looking for a list of requirements for Opera, and found this browser comparison table [archive.org]. Opera is compared to “Browser 1″ and “Browser 2″ on various features, speed, security, etc. Browser 2 doesn’t look too favorable, but Browser 1 looks terrible.

Of course, even if you don’t recognize the specs, you can identify them easily by the column headers:

• Opera is red
• Browser 1 is blue
• Browser 2 is orange

Hmmm….

Interestingly, I’ve got a project I’ve been working on off-and-on for a couple of weeks, and I’ve already put together a design using just color to represent different browsers.

It looks like I may have been on to something.

Update August 8, 2005: Apparently there are countries in which it is illegal to mention a competitor by name in ads, which might explain the tactic. Also, Opera has taken down the page, replacing it with a note that “This page is under development.”

Devoured by the Mandriva

The Mandrake/Conectiva merger has had a chance to sink in. I’m almost getting used to the name Mandriva. But I’m still trying to figure out last week’s announcement that Mandriva has bought Lycoris—or rather, has “purchase[d] several assets from Lycoris.” The big news is that they’re combining Mandriva Discovery (their entry-level desktop OS) with Lycoris Desktop/LX.

The main thing is, I can’t make out just what Mandriva has and has not bought. I can’t figure out whether there’s anything left of Lycoris, the company. Their CEO is moving to Mandriva to head up the new product. Their software collection and user forums are moving to Mandrake Club. Their flagship product is being merged with one of Mandriva’s. But the wording of the press release implies that they haven’t bought everything. If I were to guess, Lycoris might start focusing on their Tablet PC line.

What does seem to be happening is that Mandrake has begun collecting a number of the smaller commercial players in the Linux arena. Who knows? They may be in a position to challenge Red Hat and Novell soon.

Resolving SELinux audit errors on boot in Fedora Core 4

I’ve upgraded two systems at work from Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Core 4: a desktop using the normal installer, and a test server upgrading with yum. The yum upgrade worked well except for two snags. The first was a conflict with the old kernel-utils package. I followed the recommendation by installing the new kernel first, rebooting, then removing the old kernel.

The second was that SELinux denied access to about a dozen services on start-up. It was in auditing mode, not enforcing mode, so the services still worked, but I wanted to be able to start enforcing the policy once I resolved some other issues.
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