K-Squared Ramblings

Retcon Restoration

Over the past few months, DC Comics has attempted to straighten out the origins of two female characters who were left with screwed-up origins after Crisis on Infinite Earths: Donna Troy and Power Girl. The two origins, however, took opposite approaches. Read the rest of this entry »

Triple-Dub

WWW, while convenient to type, is rather unwieldy when spoken (at least in English). “Double-U double-U double-U dot some site dot com” takes a while to say. It’s not like, say, AAA, which can be easily spoken as “Triple-A.” Fortunately, these days most major sites have their servers configured to return the same web with or without the www. prefix, so you sometimes hear a website described with just its domain name.

This morning I caught the end of an interview on NPR’s Marketplace Morning Report, and the announcer explained that the full version of the interview was available on their website, “dub dub dub dot marketplace dot org.”

Pumpkin arrrrrrrt

I love carving jack-o-lanterns. These days, though, I don’t have much motivation to do one unless there’s a prize involved. So when I saw that someone on Puzzle Pirates was holding a contest for piratey-themed pumpkin carving, I jumped on it. This is my rendition of the navigation puzzle from the game, and my first-ever attempt at a projector pumpkin. I think it looks okay.

The lit picture is pretty dark, but it had to be or the “Arrr!” on the wall wouldn’t show up.

Suggestions for next year, or even out-of-season carvings for this year, are being taken……

One Time-Turner to rule them all

I keep calendars displaying both the current month and the next month up in my cube at work. I figured I’d better post this configuration before it stopped being what I got to look at every day:

The Wine Cube

Saw this at Target today. I suppose I shouldn’t be much of a wine purist, since I don’t drink much myself (I think we have one bottle in the apartment, and we haven’t opened it in the year+ we’ve had it)—but somehow I can’t bring myself to buy wine-in-a-box.

I mean, think about it. “You, me and a box of wine.” How appealing does that sound?

Then of course there’s the fact that the boxes are roughly the size of the Macintosh G4 Cube. And of course, that brings up thoughts of the WINE project (which allows many Windows applications to run on Linux), but of course that won’t run on a PowerPC chip…

Christmas Gets Earlier Every Year

I dropped into Sav-on briefly today. Among other things I wanted to top off the supply of Halloween candy for Monday. Imagine my surprise to find that Halloween was crammed into half an aisle, and there were two aisles of Christmas already. (You may notice that the sign above this one doesn’t say “Seasonal” or even just “Christmas.” “Christmas” was the next aisle over. This was labeled “Christmas Lights,” presumably to avoid duplicate signs.)

Yes, the Christmas stuff is already up, and it’s still October. It’s annoying enough when malls put up decorations and start playing Christmas songs before Thanksgiving! Soon, buying holiday decorations is going to be like buying seasonal clothing. You’ll have to finish your Christmas shopping in July, or you’ll have to rely on the remaindered stuff that the stores couldn’t get rid of. And you’ll have to pre-order Independence Day fireworks in December, and hope they’re still legal to set off by the time summer rolls around.

Lost on the Internet

CNET has an article on various websites related to Lost. Among them are official sites for Oceanic Airlines and The Hanso Foundation and fan sites for Mega Lotto Jackpot and Charile’s band, Drive Shaft.

I’d seen the Drive Shaft site last year (or at least a Drive Shaft site), though it seems to have exceeded its bandwidth for this month.

The official sites don’t have much detail, but they do have easter eggs…

How Thunderbird’s Scam Detection Works

Since upgrading to Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5 beta 2, I’ve seen a number of messages slapped with a warning label that “Thunderbird thinks this message might be an email scam.” It appears at the top of the message, in the same style as the junk mail notice bar or the warning that remote images have been blocked, and there’s a button to mark the message as “Not a Scam.”

There’s only one problem. Since SpamAssassin and ClamAV do such a good job of catching the phishing scams before they reach my inbox, Thunderbird has yet to catch any actual phish. But there’ve been a lot of false positives. It’s hit LiveJournal reply notices, newsletters from IEEE and Golden Key, a Spam Karma notice from my own blog, and I’ve seen it on both outbid notices and updates to saved searches from eBay.

I found myself wondering just how Thunderbird’s phishing detection decides that a message is suspicious—and how to teach it that the next LJ notice isn’t a scam.

The Thunderbird support website doesn’t seem to have been updated yet. Most of the articles I’ve found only talk about TB adding the feature, not how it works. The best information I found was this Mozillazine forum thread, which included a link to the actual code that makes the decision, in phishingDetector.js. Thunderbird looks at the following:

• Links that only use an IP address, including dotted decimal, octal, hex, dword, or some mixed encoding.
• Links that claim to go to one site, but actually go to another. (Phishers do this to fool you into going to their site. Legit mailing lists sometimes do this with redirectors for tracking purposes.)
• Forms embedded in the email. (This explains the LiveJournal notices.)

It also appears to trap text URLs containing HTML-escaped characters, which explains the Spam Karma reports. In this case the report includes a spammer’s link with ​ in the hostname. The message is plain text, so Thunderbird leaves the entity as-is when displaying it…but decodes it when it creates the link. Result: a link where the text and URL don’t match.

The easiest way to prevent it from freaking out over the next message? Add the sender to your address book. I’m not sure that’s a great idea, since a phisher could guess which addresses you have saved and spoof them, but it’s at least simple. I guess I’ll find out whether it works the next time I get a reply notice from LJ. Update: Adding the sender to your address book doesn’t seem to have any effect.

Update 2 (July 12, 2006): The comment thread’s gotten long enough that I can see people might miss this, so here’s how to disable it:

1. Open Options or Preferences (this will be under the Tools menu on Windows, Thunderbird on Mac, or Edit on Linux).
2. Click on Privacy (there should be a big padlock icon).
3. Click on the E-mail Scams tab.
4. Disable the “Check mail messages for email scams” option and click on Close.

That’s it.

End Construction!

Greg Dean (of the webcomic Real Life) has a strange way of looking at the world. Sometimes I share it. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve seen one of these signs and deliberately misread it as a demand rather than a description. I can just imagine a group of people marching in front of some construction site, carrying orange protest signs lifted from the side of some road.

Of course, sometimes the signs don’t need to be misread to be funny.

Crisis Lead-ins: The Verdict

Well, all four miniseries leading into Infinite Crisis are out. I’ve also read The Return of Donna Troy and the JSA Classified arc settling Power Girl’s origin.

Verdict:

• Villains United: Fun adventure book with bad guys. Last-issue revelation was interesting. Cheshire is genuinely insane—I can believe this is the woman who nuked a small country just to prove she wasn’t bluffing.
• Day of Vengeance: 3-issue story stretched out to 6. Some nice character moments, but overall have to wonder what the point was.
• OMAC Project: Suspension of disbelief hung by neck until dead. And the worst part? The most important thing to happen in the series didn’t actually happen in the series.
• Rann/Thanagar War: Total mish-mash. Even knowing who most of the alien races were didn’t help me keep up with what side anyone was on. Someone remarked that this was like a 12-issue epic condensed (badly) into 6 issues, and that sounds about right.
• Donna Troy: I wanted to like this book. I really did. Donna Troy, George Perez/Phil Jimenez art, a direct sequel to a classic Titans story, and they all-but ignored John Byrne’s Dark Angel retcon-fest. But all the characterizations seemed off from the first page on. Even the art didn’t grab me. (The coloring didn’t help.) And while it’s interesting to take the idea that all her origins are true, the ending—particularly how Donna dealt with the Titans of Myth—really disturbed me. (While we’re at it, Donna doesn’t need her own moon for a headquarters.)
• Power Girl: Believe it or not, I didn’t read it for the cheesecake. Like Day of Vengeance there were some great character moments (PG and Jimmy Olsen sitting on top of the Daily Planet building while Jimmy ate lunch and tried not to stare, for instance). But I had a hard time believing this was the same Power Girl I’d read in Justice League Europe during the 1990s. (Yes, JLE was populated by caricatures of the leads—anyone who read that book and Flash should know that—but it became more serious near the end of the run.) And again, I thought that the story could have been told in half the space—even keeping the character moments. And even though I’d guessed PG’s true origin early on—or perhaps because of it—the finale felt like a let-down instead of a “Hell, yeah!” Maybe if they’d let her say “So that’s who I am!” instead of slinking back to her apartment as confused as ever, only to run into a “To be continued…” sign, it might have felt less like an Infinite Crisis setup piece and more like an origin story.

Verdict: One hit, two sorta OK, three turkeys.

On a related note, Warren Ellis’ arc on JLA Classified, which started strongly, is rapidly going downhill. The plot’s holding up, but the dialogue has gone from “Clever!” to “Okaaaay…” to “You have got to be kidding me.” J’onn’s rant last month about how we insist on calling his home planet “Mars” was one of those moments. (You know, I don’t normally refer to Japan as “Nihon,” or the capital of Russia as “Moskva,” but that doesn’t mean I’m calling them by the wrong name.) And I think Wally used the words “speed force” more times in 5 pages than he has in the last 5 years of his own book.

Running late

We drove past this two weeks ago (i.e. October 2005), and were struck by two things:

1. The last time we’d seen the corner, they hadn’t even broken ground on anything.
2. Opening April 2005?

Ta’veren of the DCU

I was idly wondering about the way super-heroes and villains are named—not the code names, but the actual names like Clark Kent, Matt Murdock, etc. Was Hunter Zolomon destined to become Zoom? Was Roy G. Bivolo doomed to become the Rainbow Raider the moment his parents named him? And why do so many people with the initials L.L. gravitate toward Superman?

“Obviously, he’s a ta’veren!” Katie said. I laughed for a second, but then remembered an interview I’d read about Infinite Crisis. It actually fits.

Ta’veren is a term from Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time that refers to a person who forms a focal point for history (or, from another perspective, destiny). Threads of probability bend around them, and the unlikely becomes likely. Babylon 5 referred to the concept as a nexus. “You turn one way, and the whole world has a tendency to go the same way.” Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrormask DVD could take a long time

Neil Gaiman writes that Amazon lists 2025 as the release date for the MirrorMask DVD.

Twenty years seems a long way away, but Sony are probably just scheduling it that far off because during the Great iPod Content Uprising Years of 2013-2024 people aren’t going to have much time for things like actually watching films, what with gathering together in places where the iPodPeople can’t get them and shooting them in the brain and all that stuff, and it’s only after the Man-Droid-iPod Peace Treaties of 2024 that anyone gets back to the serious business bringing out DVDs of long-forgotten movies.

“Alternately,” he adds, “I suppose it could be an Amazon.com typo and MirrorMask could be coming out on the last day of this year. That would be nice.”

Who invented the gay artist?

Over the weekend, Something Positive’s Monette met her girlfriend’s half-brother, who wants to write showtunes when he grows up. Friday’s Real Life featured Tony taking Greg to task over singing a song from Monty Python’s Spamalot. Where did the showtunes=gay (or at least effeminate) stereotype come from? While we’re at it, where did the art=gay stereotype come from?

I mean, most of the people who actually write musicals are probably straight. Not all of them, of course, and some of the exceptions (Cole Porter, for instance) are rather prominent. And I would guess that a majority of the actors and audience are probably straight, also.

I have no doubt that the percentage of gays in the arts is higher than in the general population. I studied drama in college—all I had to do was look around to see that. But that’s a far cry from “most.” I mean, to pull some numbers out of thin air, let’s say it’s 20%, or even 30%, instead of the commonly-cited 10%—that would be like saying an industry with 30% women is primarily female. Read the rest of this entry »

Troubleshooting by Blog

From time to time I’ve written up the results of a particularly interesting (or annoying) computer problem with the intent of helping out other people who run into the same issue. Daring Fireball calls this Writing for Google and provides suggestions on how to make sure the write-up gets found.

There are enough of them that I think they’re worth labeling. Although the category list is getting complicated enough it might be worth chopping everything down to 4 or 5 and using tags for everything else.

“Expected dict” Errors in FDF Acrobat Forms

Today I was trying to fix a problem in a section of a website that hadn’t been changed in roughly 5 years. The page in question retrieved data from a database and filled out an Acrobat form using FDF. Under some circumstances, Adobe Reader would generate an error message, “Expected a dict object.” Then it would freeze, and crash the web browser for good measure.

This site was built with ColdFusion, and used a then-freely-available library called PDFFormFiller.cfm (I can’t find any sign of it now) to generate the FDF code. After saving the offending FDF to a file (eliminating the browser as a factor), I started manually editing the code to see what happened.

The problem turned out to be parentheses appearing in the form data. FDF uses parentheses-delimited strings, and it was finding ) in the code and trying to parse what was left as FDF tokens. The solution was simple: just escape the parentheses as \( or \). Read the rest of this entry »

Lots of Wind

You know, somehow I wasn’t convinced we’d actually run out of hurricane names this year, even though it looked possible. But the National Hurricane Center has just named tropical storm depression Alpha, marking the first time more than 21 tropical storms have been recorded in the Atlantic in one year.

Singing Monkeys on Stage!

Just got an email from Disney on Broadway (I assume I must have given them my email address when I bought Lion King tickets several years ago) offering me advance tickets to their new Broadway show, Tarzan.

WTF?

Admittedly, I thought The Lion King was an odd choice for a stage musical, and it turned out to be quite good. But Tarzan? I mean, it’s a weird enough choice for a musical in the first place, but Disney’s cartoon wasn’t even really a musical—it was a movie with a Phil Collins soundtrack.

I wish I could remember exactly what Aimee Mann said last week when she introduced “Save Me.” It was something like “Yes, this is the song that lost the Oscar to Phil Collins and his cartoon monkeys monkey love song.” (Katie remembered it.) Apparently she says this regularly.

Bleah. I’d rather they put together a new tour of Beauty and the Beast. With any luck it’ll still be playing when we finally get around to visiting New York. (I honestly didn’t know it was still playing now until I went to look at the Tarzan info.)

Bon voyage, mon appetit!

One look at this, and you’ll say goodbye to your appetite! Wait, I’m sure that’s not what they’re going for…

(On another level, the reflected palm trees fit in with the travel theme.)

Which way do I go now?

This is a traffic signal on the Jeffrey off-ramp from the northbound 5 in Irvine. The ramp is 3 lanes wide, and the middle lane can go either way. It’s not often that you actually see a double arrow like this, though.

It’s times like this that make me wish I’d taken a picture of the “U-Turn Only” sign I saw a few years ago. The street it was on has since been extended, and the sign is long gone.

Scool Zone

Bad enough that they misspelled “school,” but “development” as well? You have to wonder who’s managing their signs. (The underscore used in place of a dash bugs me, but not as much.)

And yes, this is the same elementary school that was “cloced for repairs” one time we drove past it.

I’m seriously reminded of the photo (even if it’s probably staged) of workmen painting “SHCOOL” on a road.

100 Million Firefoxes

The Mozilla Corporation has counted 100 Million downloads of Firefox!

Even if the numbers don’t correspond exactly to users, they show that despite concerns of slowing interest is still high. 100,000,000 downloads in the first year is an incredible number!

Congratulations to Mozilla, to Spread Firefox, and to everyone who has contributed to building or promoting Firefox!

(Image courtesy of Spread Firefox. Link via SFX as well.)

Apache, mod_ssl, and syntax errors in krb5.h

Upgraded the Apache web server today. I’d forgotten about a problem compiling mod_ssl on some systems. Fortunately I had left myself a note about it.

If you get syntax errors in krb5.h while trying to build Apache with mod_ssl, it’s probably because your Linux distribution puts the Kerberos include files in their own subdirectory (Red Hat/Fedora and derivatives do this), and the configure script has somehow missed them.

Solution: Configure mod_ssl and Apache as normal. Then edit the file path_to_apache_source/src/modules/ssl/Makefile. Look for the CFLAGS1 line and add -I/usr/kerberos/include to it.

Then continue with the build as normal.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

Wet Floor: This Means You

I have to wonder, were people ignoring the Caution sign until they scrawled “for you” on it?

Edit: I also can’t help but think of S*P’s emo catgirl drawing (disturbing image warning).

Lightning Storms and Aimee Mann

We drove up to UCLA last night for an Aimee Mann concert, and somehow, despite all the rain on the way up and back, we managed to not need our umbrellas at all.

The concert was great, and very different from the last concert we saw at Royce Hall just by virtue of having a full band behind her (Tori Amos performed solo last time we were there). It was also very different from the last time we saw Aimee Mann, at the House of Blues last summer. For one thing, she was focusing on songs from her new album, The Forgotten Arm.

It was also much more interactive than either of the other two concerts. What stuck in my mind was the request section. She had everything set up so that people would write the request on a piece of paper and leave it on the stage, but when she got to the break, people were shouting out titles. One guy came prepared with what looked like a balsa glider and wrote his request on that, adding that it was his birthday. I don’t remember his request, but she improvised “Happy birthday to the paper airplane man.” I’ve seen singers who get talkative, and singers who improv silly songs, but it really felt like the house was much smaller than 1800 people. (Of course, you could still make a drinking game out of the number of times she says “Thank you so much” after a song.) Read the rest of this entry »

The Money Pit

Ah, the truth about home improvement!

Gate Smasher!

I don’t know why, but there’s something comedic about the design of this sign.

Found last week while walking to the parking lot after Evita.

Dawn and the Key

The synopsis for JLA #124 (due in January) includes the phrase, “he loses focus on stopping The Key and saving Dawn, and turns his energies on an even deadlier foe.”

Now, I know these are separate DC characters, but my first thought was “But Dawn is the Key!”

Once you start down the Buffy path…

Evita

Last night we went out to see Evita at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. It was a good production, but it was a slightly odd experience for me because it was based on the original staging by Hal Prince. Back in college, I was in a production of the show at school…and our director also based it on the original staging. Visually, the show was almost exactly what we would have done if we’d had the budget. (And a full orchestra, and more experienced actors, and so on.) They did make different choices in characterization at points—Eva was harder, Che was more comedic, etc.—but there was a definite deja vu element. (Katie will get her turn at deja vu next week when we see Carmina Burana.)

It also got me thinking about the structure of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s shows . His early works, like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita and Cats and tend to be much more presentational. There’s lots of breaking the fourth wall, large chunks of Evita are symbolic (and the second half of act 2 is very disjointed), and many of them actually have narrators (Judas, Che, or just “The Narrator” in Joseph). But by the time you get to The Phantom of the Opera, the structure is entirely narrative. I’m not sure how much of that is Lloyd Webber changing his style and how much of it is moving to a new lyricist (Tim Rice worked on Joseph, Superstar and Evita). I don’t know Starlight Express very well, but what I’ve heard seems to fit more with Phantom, Sunset Boulevard, and Whistle Down the Wind.

Looking over at that site, I’ve discovered three more ALW shows I didn’t even know about. It’s not surprising when I think about it, though. I have been out of the musical theater loop for a few years. I mean, the big exciting musical event for me this year? The film adaptation of Rent that opens next month. I’m really looking forward to that, and the show is almost 10 years old!

Flashy sites

I’ve been struggling to promote my new site, the Alternative Browser Alliance, since I launched it in August. It’s a tough sell. I get the most traffic when I post something visible on Slashdot and people follow the link in my signature. You can barely even find it in Google—search for “Alternative Browser Alliance” and blog posts about it show up ahead of the site itself! (On the other hand, it seems to be #1 for “alternative browser” on MSN. Not that it seems to be helping much.)

By contrast, Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning pulls in tons of visitors. Last week I put up an article on the Three Dimwits, the Flash’s comedic sidekicks from the 1940s. Within 24 hours it had received more than 150 hits. Within 3 days it was the top result for “three dimwits” on Google.

Why the difference? Well, my Flash site is long-established and authoritative. More importantly, it fills a specific niche. You can find a zillion pages about web browsers. But there are only a handful of large sites dedicated to the Flash, and mine is the longest-lived of them, aside from DC Comics’ own site. And until I wrote one, I could not find a page anywhere that actually focused on the Three Dimwits, just a set of stubs and the occasional comment in articles about the Flash.

Last Thursday I posted a suggestion box on the front page of the site. The results have been interesting. The freakiest part was probably that the first suggestion came in just five minutes after I uploaded the form! There’ve been 22 suggestions in the first week, which I’ve divided into three categories. Read the rest of this entry »

Unconventional Naming

I was recently reminded that Kevin Smith’s daughter is named Harley Quinn Smith. At the time I thought it was crazy (though really, who am I to talk about people naming their kids after fictional characters?), but compared to Nicholas Cage naming his son Kal-El, it seems positively ordinary.