K-Squared Ramblings

Only in LA

It seems fitting that I’d eventually write a post with this title, seeing as how the regular LA Times column is where I got the name for the Only in San Diego series.

We were up in Los Angeles for a wedding on Wednesday and Thursday. Since we were both involved, we stayed in a hotel instead of driving up and back two days in a row. (I’ve made that drive in 40 minutes. It took us nearly two hours on Wednesday.)

First up: the hotel. You may recall we found an interesting combination in the nightstand drawer the last time we stayed in Las Vegas. Here we found another combination, somehow appropriate for LA:

The Bible, of course, had been provided by the Gideons. The name plate on The Teaching of Buddha indicated it had been placed there by the Society for Buddhist Understanding.

Then, of course, there’s this place. We’ve been told that “Happy cows come from California,” but they never tell you where they go…

I had a few hours free the morning of the wedding (the bridesmaids had an earlier call time), so I walked around downtown Los Angeles a bit. The Disney Concert Hall is weird, of course, but it’s well-known weird.

Now, to a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, the name “Angelus” has a somewhat sinister connotation:

Finally, you may think you’ve seen truckloads of FUD coming from places like Microsoft, but we actually saw a literal truckful of FUD.

It turns out to be a Mexican company that sells meats, playing on the pronunciation (“fud” in Spanish would sound like “food” in English). They’ve recently licensed the brand in the US, focusing on “areas of heavy Mexican immigration where the brand name is already well known”—in other words, areas like Southern California.

That’s it for now. Maybe I’ll post some of my sightseeing photos next year (i.e. tomorrow).

Stranger than Borat?

Though of all the things I’ve heard Borat called, “queen” isn’t one of them.

This isn’t going to last long

Did a Google search just for the heck of it. I wonder how quickly those numbers will climb…

Snow More!

Oh the crowds outside are frightful,
But the music’s so delightful…
’Cept for ev’ry darn place we go,
It’s “Let it Snow!” “Let it Snow!” “Let it Snow!”

Seriously. It seems like this song has somehow become the most popular Christmas song this year. I normally don’t mind it, but come on!

It doesn’t help that it’s about as likely to snow here as it is for a meteor to strike Times Square at exactly midnight on New Year’s Eve. But that’s worth its own post.

(Incidentally, the parody’s original. We made it up together in the grocery store on Sunday. Katie has more, but I can’t remember it.)

Star of Damocles

For various reasons, braved the crowds at South Coast Plaza yesterday. Oddly, it’s the easiest mall I’ve parked at all weekend. Getting to the Marketplace was a disaster, but that’s just because the streets are wholly inadequate to get cars in and out of the parking lot, and the Village (formerly the Mall of Orange) was just plain full.

At South Coast, as part of their Christmas decorations, they had these giant, shiny, 14-pointed stars hanging from the ceiling in several places.

Classic Christmas, but when you go down to the first floor and look up, there are all these giant, gleaming spikes hanging over your head.

It’s a little disconcerting. “Death from above!” is not something I want my holiday decorations to invoke.

DC’s Missed Opportunity

As of two weeks ago, DC was still talking about its upcoming Infinite Christmas special. Yesterday, the book came out, complete with a logo based on the Infinite Crisis logo.

Only it had been renamed the Infinite Holiday special, ruining the joke.

No word on why they changed it, but someone suggested “Christmas on Infinite Earths” would have been even funnier.

Note to those who are likely to cite this as more evidence for the non-existent “War on Christmas:” Most of the stories in the book are Christmas stories. Many of them with the word in the title. And in a country where atheists are the most distrusted minority, the idea that Christians are being persecuted is laughable. (Why do I think this footnote is going to get more comments than the actual post?)

Mozilla + Linux

This is good news: Mozilla will be working more closely with various Linux distributors including Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, and yes, even Debian, to coordinate Firefox updates, configuration, etc.

There are two main issues: making Mozilla’s Firefox installer work everywhere (it mostly does, but on some systems you need to install some compatibility libraries first), and keeping the distributions’ versions in sync with the official one.

After the Debian IceWeasel debacle, and Fedora deciding to skip Firefox 2 and wait for Firefox 3, it’s good to know that Mozilla has recognized the problem and is working on it. One key piece of information: Red Hat and Novell will both be providing extended support for Firefox 1.5 past its official EOL next April.

(via Fedora Weekly News)

Stubbornness, or Just Staying the Course?

President Bush is complaining about “stubborn obstructionism” in trying to get John Bolton appointed permanent ambassador to the United Nations. I find this odd because for the last 6 years, Bush has made his own stubbornness a selling point in his political career. I’d expect someone who thinks it’s better to stick to your guns than reevaluate your position in the face of new, contrary evidence to appreciate stubbornness.

What comes after X?

A few years ago, it seemed like everyone was using X in their software versions. Mac OS X. Windows XP with DirectX and ActiveX*. Flash MX, ColdFusion MX, and anything else by Macromedia MX. Macromedia managed to confuse things by releasing two rounds of MX versions, such as Flash MX, Flash MX 2004 (essentially versions 6 and 7).

It’s fallen a bit out of favor. Among those still unwilling to use plain version numbers, vintages are still popular. Office 2007, Norton Security Suite 2006, etc. Even though Apple still uses the X to promote its operating system, the last two have put a lot of emphasis on the cat-themed code names: Panther, Tiger, Leopard. And then there’s Windows Vista.

What do you think the next naming fad will be?

*ActiveX was actually a cross between two naming fads. For a while, everything Microsoft did seemed to be Active—Active Desktop, Active Directory, etc.)

Nanowrimo Completed!

You may have noticed the National Novel Writing Month banner in the sidebar this month. I’ve been participating in it, starting from literally no idea what the heck I was going to write on November 2 and working towards 50,000 words by the end of the month.

It turned into a fantasy novel with elements of time travel, though over time I moved away from the initial experiments in non-linear storytelling.

This past Sunday afternoon, I finished the story at about 47,000 words. So I’ve been going back, looking at areas that needed more development (and there were some significant character changes that I had glossed over initially) to fill in the remaining 3K.

About 15 minutes before tonight’s Veronica Mars, I finished a scene and checked my word count. It was 50,145. On Sunday, I had compared the OpenOffice and NaNoWriMo word counters and calculated the difference at 50K would be 144 words. I figured, what the heck. I saved it to a text file, scrambled the letters as directed, and uploaded it.

50,000 exactly. I have officially completed National Novel Writing Month.

I have no illusions as to the quality of those 50,000 words. But it’s only a first draft. I’ve never written a first draft of a novel before, so that’s pretty cool!

The main things I’ve learned are:

1. I actually can sit down with no idea of what I’m going to write and come up with characters and a story.
2. Discussing writing issues with another writer, even in vague terms, can help solve problems and crystallize ideas.
3. When I really get going, I can write about 800 words an hour (at least on the computer).
4. I can actually sustain a story over ~110 pages.
5. I need to do a lot more research on medieval Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and snow.
6. Writing follows a bell curve: it’s hard to come up with ideas when you’re starting out, gets easier in the middle as you start running with things, and when you get near the end, it’s hard to pull everything together and wrap it up. (added)

Next step: sleep. After that, start revising, and figure out how soon I’m willing to let beta readers see it.

I’ve been making regular posts on the Nano writing process over in my LiveJournal, if anyone’s interested. (And if no-one’s interested, they’re still there.)

Insert code name here

Been watching Heroes and loving it. Recently we read a list of names for the characters’ alter-egos. Inspired by this, I bring you my inventions:

Charlie – Flashdrive
Claire – Rebound (or, if you want silly, Anti-Maim)
D.L. – Fade
Eden – Hpnotiq (because somebody’s got to have a cool alternate spelling)
Isaac – Visionary
Micah – Wiretap (because I think Spark would get me in copyright trouble)
Nathan – Rocketman (I’m not the man they think I am at home . . . )
Niki – Evil Twin
Peter – Tabula Rasa (because anything with Mirror sounds too much like Mirror Master)
Sanjog – Dreamtime

I can’t think of anything for Mysterious Haitian Dude, and I just can’t bring myself to use Thought Police for Matt or Mr. Fusion for Ted. And I agree with the OP that Hiro is just Hiro because he rules.

Blurry

I set up a slide-show screen saver on one of my computers at work. To start, I dropped in some of my wallpapers, including several from the Astronomy Picture of the Day, then snagged some photos from my website to add a little variety.

Of course, 800×600 (or smaller) images don’t look so great blown up to 1400×1050, so last weekend I grabbed some higher-res copies from home.

What surprised me was how blurry the older photos were. Most of the digital photos I have older than 2003 are scanned in from 3½×5 or 4×6 prints. And half of those were done with a point and shoot camera. Even the photos that I scanned at a higher resolution tended to be much blurrier than the 5-megapixel images I’ve been taking since we went digital.

It also pointed up a problem with the point-and-shoot camera and lighting. Compare the following photos from my American Southwest page:

The one on the left (of the moon above a rock ridge) was taken with an old SLR camera that my grandfather gave me when I was maybe 12 or so. It was entirely manual except for a built-in light meter. I loved the control and the photo quality I could get out of it, but it was big and bulky, and eventually I stopped carrying it.

The second photo (with the one tall building sticking up out of nowhere) was taken with the point-and-shoot camera I picked up during high school and used right up through that first Hawaii trip. Notice the difference in the sky? The sky does vary in color—you only need to walk outside on a clear day to see that—but something about that camera just collected less light from the corners of the image. The Laughlin picture is a good example because you can see the circle continue across the lower half of the frame as well.

The ones from the 2003 Hawaii trip are actually not too bad, even though they were done on the cheap camera, because they were scanned straight from the negatives by Kodak. I suspect they have a slightly better scanner than I do!

The Danger of Saving Passwords

ISC is reporting a new type of vulnerability in web browsers that the discoverer has termed as “Reverse Cross-Site Request,” or RCSR.

Basically, on a site with user-generated content—like a hosted blog—it’s possible to add a form that looks like the site’s login form. If the victim has an account on the same site, and has asked their browser to save their password, it will auto-fill the form. If the attacker can somehow trick the visitor into submitting the form—say, with an invisible image submit button (ever clicked randomly? Or to get back to the page after looking at another window?)—the attacker gets the visitor’s password.

What’s new about this is that all it requires is plain HTML, not scripting, which most blog hosts and similar sites already block.

Chapin Information Services discovered the bug in Firefox 2, and reported it to Mozilla. It turns out that Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are also vulnerable, but only if it’s on the same page as the real login form. Mozilla is currently trying to determine the best way of resolving the problem without breaking all the passwords people have already saved. The ISC article links to the bug report, so you can follow the discussion. Microsoft has only said that they’re “aware of the issue.”

At the moment, I’m glad I don’t let web browsers save my passwords.

Why your website should support Opera

In an interview at Opera Watch last week, Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner responded to the eternal question: with less than 1% of global marketshare, why should web developers make the effort to support Opera? His response demonstrates another perspective on the numbers:

I believe we have something like 10 – 15 million active desktop users. That is actually quite a lot of people.

If you try to think about it, the place that I’m come from is Iceland. I was born in Iceland, that’s three hundred thousand people – we have a lot more. The place I live is Norway – we have a lot more. Actually if you look at it, the US has about 300 million people that live here, 50 states, about 6 million in each state on average. So which states have people that you would like to ignore?

He goes on to add that Opera Mobile is installed on 40 million mobile phones, with an additional 7 million people actually using Opera Mini. And then there are devices like the Nintendo DS and Wii…

Going by 2005 numbers, only four states have 15 million people or more: California (36M), Texas (23M), New York (19M), and Florida (18M). So take the 10–15M desktop users, the 7M Opera Mini users, and even 10% of the 40M mobile install base, and you’re looking at 21–26 million—the equivalent of the population of Texas.

Put that way, it doesn’t seem so small.

If you’re already supporting Firefox, in most cases the changes to support Opera 9 are minimal. The recently-launched Opera Developer Community has has tools, articles, and other resources to help build cross-platform sites.

Unless, of course, you don’t mind writing off a potential audience the size of Texas.

Apparently, it *is* a challenge

Every once in a while, a comment spam manages to get past both Bad Behavior and Spam Karma. Oddly enough, it always seems to be on the same entry: “Abuse Contact” is not an invitation.

I guess spammers like a challenge as much as anyone else.