K-Squared Ramblings

WP 201

Requisite upgrade post. WordPress 2.0.1 came out with a bunch of nice bugfixes. Upgrade only took a couple of minutes.

SK3 Donation Drive

Dr. Dave, author of the excellent Spam Karma plugin for WordPress, has posted The State of Spam [Karma] in response to a new breed of spambots. (These sneaky %#@!ers hit this site on Friday, so I installed the 2.2 beta. They seem to have stopped trying over the weekend.) Anyway, Dr. Dave is holding a donation drive to help cover future versions of Spam Karma. I think it’s worth at least a few bucks.

FWIW, I use Spam Karma and Bad Behavior to block comment spam on this site.

(via Akismet)

Sunrise, Sunset

The first photo is from Wednesday morning around 8:00. Katie took it on our drive to work. There’s actually another shot that shows more of the sky, but this one is more striking. The second shows tonight’s sunset as seen from the Metro Pointe parking lot. Yes, it’s a freeway in the foreground, but the sunset itself was incredible. Both thumbnails are linked to larger copies of the photos.

Finally, here are some vaguely lenticularish clouds I saw looking north at sunset on Friday. This one’s full-size already:

Rummy Caption Contest

The BBC has posted an interesting article on the US Military’s plans for Internet operations. But that’s not what I want to write about here. What I want to write about is this accompanying photo of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

The article mentions that messages put out for psychological operations in foreign markets are making their way back to American audiences. I’m not sure this photo qualifies as PsyOps, but I think it does qualify for a caption contest.*

Please post your suggestions in the comments.

(via Slashdot)

*OK, you won’t win anything, but with luck the other entries will make you laugh.

Twins in the Flash Family

It’s really annoying that the writers and editors on The Flash didn’t see fit to actually tell us the names of Wally and Linda’s children during the final 6 issues of the series. All we know is that one is a boy and the other is a girl.

Even more annoying is the fan speculation that the twins will turn out to be one of two existing pairs of characters:

1. The Tornado Twins, who first appeared in Legion of Super-Heroes, or
2. Más y Menos, a pair of speedster twins from the Teen Titans cartoon.

Read the rest of this entry »

Disney/Pixar: More than CGI

It looks like the media is still viewing Disney’s acquisition of Pixar in terms of 3-D computer animation vs. 2-D hand animation. I still think they’re missing the point.

Disney’s new golden age started with The Little Mermaid in 1989 and ran through The Lion King in 1994. Pixar’s unbroken string of hits started with Toy Story in 1995. Disney has continued to release at least one animated movie each year, but hasn’t had a hit on the same level. It’s tempting to say “Well, Disney’s doing 2-D animation and Pixar is doing 3-D animation, so that must be the reason.” But Disney’s own Chicken Little did only passably well at the box office.

I’ve maintained all along that the issue isn’t the animation style but the quality of the movie as a whole. Yes, Pixar is very good at 3-D animation, but they’re also very good at story. Let’s look at Disney’s recent films for a moment—just the films, not the competition, and not the box office take. Has anything from Pocahontas onward been as good as Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin? Or has the quality dropped off? I don’t mean just the animation—the animation is still top-quality in the ones I’ve seen. I mean, is the story compelling? The characters? The premise? Would the average moviegoer look at Home on the Range and say, “I have to see this!”

I think there’s plenty of life in both 2-D and 3-D animation. Disney’s in-house animated features didn’t “lose” to Pixar because they were 2-D. They lost because Disney got boring. Switching from hand animation to computer animation isn’t going to change that.

Surprisingly Popular

I installed the Popularity Contest plug-in on Monday. It uses a bunch of factors including number of page views, number of comments, number of viewings on home/category/archive pages, number of pingbacks, etc. to determine the most popular posts on the site. At first it tracked the “Most Commented” list fairly closely, because comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks are the most highly-weighted factors. Then all the posts in the Buffy/Angel category started taking over.

It turns out that a lot of people do image searches for things like “dark angels” or “fallen angel”—and right now, the #1 hit on Google for “dark angels” is the thumbnail I posted of the Fallen Angel #1 cover, presumably because I posted about both Angel and Fallen Angel in a post called “Dark Angels”. And because the Buffy/Angel category is full of more comments about Angel and Dark Horse, Google chose that as the page to use instead of the individual post. The default settings give a lot of weight to category views, so everything on that page has shot up to the top.

Speaking of Fallen Angel, I noticed in this week’s shipping list that the latest issue is listed as #2 of 5. This was the first I remembered it being a miniseries, but not to worry—it’s slated to continue.

Confidential? Perhaps not…

I found a 419 scam in the spamtraps that started, in typical fashion, with an all-caps name and address, then the line:

HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL REQUESTING

What made this funny (aside from the bad grammar) was the fact that the To: line contained over 1,200 addresses!

Ah, this is obviously some strange use of the word confidential that I wasn’t previously aware of!

Harry and Ginny

The webcomic “Punks and Nerds” comments on one aspect of the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Read that first… Read the rest of this entry »

“Abuse Contact” is not an invitation

I handle the abuse contact for an ISP’s domain name. Normally this doesn’t take up much of my inbox. Even the “Your users are spamming” messages (in response to forged senders) have dropped off.

Since last night, though, the abuse and tech support contacts that filter into my inbox have collected 42 44 spams advertising the “Body Bouncer,” which claims to “take the gravity out of sex.”* Distributed IPs, random content, 6 different subjects (so far). What they have in common are a sales pitch in an image, and a link to their website.

Ordinarily, that would be enough to tag it. Read the rest of this entry »

IE Weirdness

I had a really strange experience with Internet Explorer earlier this week. I had a reason to check Windows Update (checking for driver updates), but no matter what I did, Microsoft Update opened itself in Firefox! Even if I typed the URL into IE, or chose it from the Tools menu. It became clear that the same was true of typing in any other URL, or trying to open a link in a new window.

As far as I can tell, IE had decided that it wasn’t capable of handling new HTTP connections and was sending the URL to the default browser. Read the rest of this entry »

Delicious Ghosts

I have the Firefox extension for del.icio.us installed on several computers. Today I noticed that the Tag button, when hovered over with the mouse cursor and seen indirectly, looks like a ghost from Pac-Man.

Not only that, but it’s dark blue, like a ghost after you’ve eaten a power pellet and can reverse the food chain.

Now that sounds delicious!

Firefox DnD/Save As Hang on Linux Fixed!

The most annoying thing I’ve had to deal with in Firefox 1.5 is a Linux-only bug in which the first time you do something in a certain class of actions—drag-and-drop, Save As…, and a couple of other things—it will lock up for a period of time (1 second to 30+ seconds, depending on how many tabs & windows you have open), scroll all pages back to the top, and in some cases, bring up an unclickable extra copy of the pop-up menu.

The bug was fixed before Firefox 1.5 was released, but it was too late for the fix to make it in. I actually suspect this bug is one of the reasons that so few Linux distributions have upgraded their built-in Firefox releases to 1.5, though they could always have just added the patch to their build process. Fortunately, Mozilla has decided that it’s worth including in the first bugfix release in the 1.5 series, which is now available for testing. Firefox 1.5.0.1 should be out sometime in the next few weeks.

Nightwing must be ticked off

DC Comics’ April releases have been announced, among them Crisis Aftermath: The Battle For Blüdhaven. (That’s the city Nightwing decided to protect when he went solo, downriver from Gotham and even more corrupt.) But the cover doesn’t make me think of Nightwing, or of Batman:

Let’s see, there’s American Maid/Captain Liberty, not sure about the guy in the middle, but the three ninjas on the right sure look like they’re forming a hedge.

Could it be true? Is The Tick coming to Blüdhaven?

OK, they’re actually the Force of July (thanks to the Comic Bloc forums for the ID), but wouldn’t the Tick have been funnier?

PHP Upgrade

I’ve upgraded the server to PHP 5. As with last week’s MySQL upgrade, if anything seems broken, please comment about it here. If you can’t comment, email me at webmaster at this domain name.

Update: It looks like something in my setup disagrees with the combination of PHP 5 and WP-Cache 2. Pages were turning up blank the first time they were loaded, then perfectly OK the second time. Oddly, it was working fine under PHP 4.4, MySQL 5, and WordPress 2.