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.

Browser Zealotry

I found a three-year-old blog post by Arve Bersvendsen on web browser zealots that, sadly, is just as true today. Only the names have changed (Phoenix to Firefox).

Seriously, I think these people are hurting the fight for standards….In having to choose whether to believe the Operanians or The Mozillians, I believe J. Random User will believe both. He’ll believe the Opera fans when they say “Phoenix [Firefox] sucks”, and he (or she) will also believe Phoenixers who say “Opera stinks”. And so, J. Random sticks with MSIE.

Arve mentioned his earlier post when he weighed in on the Opera splash page download kerfuffle, which is a great example of why I created the Alternative Browser Alliance. Both Mozilla and Opera have stated goals of promoting choice on the web. Both want to unseat the current dominant browser (i.e. IE). Those goals are better accomplished, if not by outright cooperation, at least by civility. As Arve puts it:

Please, instead of wasting all that time on endless flamewars against the “other browser”, spend your time evangelizing the product you actually use!

Also, a big thanks to Rijk for the shout-out on his blog!

Bathroom Humor

One of the two soap dispensers in the bathroom at work has been broken for months. I think the building doesn’t fix it because it looks full. Over the past week or two, someone has started writing things like “Broken” or “Still Broken” (or, one day, “Kaput”) on paper towels and leaving them underneath or draped over the dispenser. Someone decided that this makeshift “Out of Order” sign needed an addition:

Commies From Mars!

The Grand Comics Database* is a project to index the titles, dates, credits, covers, and character appearances in every comic book ever published. A sidebar on the home page shows the latest cover scan contributed. A couple of days ago, that cover scan was this:

The image links to the GCD entry, which is still a stub right now, but apaprently it was printed in 1973 by Kitchen Sink Press. Here’s the kid’s thought balloon:

I’ll play along with these filthy commie invaders from Mars until I can get to my shotgun! I’m little, but I’m all American!

On a related note, I’ve just made reservations to see Scott Shaw!’s show, Oddball Comics, running in LA through February (hat tip: News From ME).

*I’ve found it very useful for finding info for my Flash site. Unfortunately it isn’t big on supporting characters, so I’m still tracking down issues myself to fill in the details. On the other hand, this way I can acutually read the stories.

Email advice: Pick a domain and stick with it!

Here’s a piece of friendly advice from a mail server admin to companies that interact with subscribers and customers via email:

Pick one domain name for your business. Just one. Don’t use any other domains in your emails, even if you want to keep order confirmations separate from promotions. If you contract out for some other company to send out a newsletter or survey to your customers, insist that they send it out using your own domain name. If you’re using DomainKeys or SPF, make sure they’re authorized or send it yourself. And don’t even think of making the links through redirection scripts, even if you really want to track which subscribers are clicking.

Why?

Two words: Spam and fraud. Read the rest of this entry »

Fire Entries

I saw this sign at a shopping mall food court a few weeks ago. It managed not only to contradict itself (is it an exit or an entrance?), but also to contradict available evidence, as the door was ajar at the time—with no alarm. About thirty seconds later I saw a janitor carry some cleaning supplies “out” through the door as if he were returning them to a supply closet.

And on a related note:

This probably won’t be funny across the pond, but here in the US the “first floor” is the same as the ground floor. If you leave the first floor using the stairs, you’re not getting out of the building!

Flash DVD Out!

I picked up the complete Flash TV series on DVD today. It’s been a long wait since it was announced last October, but an even longer wait since the show aired in 1990. I haven’t had time to watch any of it yet, but it turns out that Best Buy is selling an exclusive package with a bundled comic book.

That “exclusive” comic book isn’t anything totally new—it’s an abridged version of 2002’s DC First: Superman/The Flash featuring the first race between Superman and the original Flash, Jay Garrick. The original book is 38 pages, and it’s been cut down to 24 by removing a subplot involving the Pied Piper (which was essentially really early setup for “Rogue War”) and trimming a few pages from the main story in which two Flashes and Superman combat Abra Kadabra.

The funny thing is that the TV show features Barry Allen (more or less), but the comic they chose features the other two Flashes!* If it had been up to me, I would have chosen the Flash TV Special, which used the TV version of the characters, but I guess they wanted something closer to the current version of the character. The whole thing is printed small enough to fit inside the box.

Now if only they’d included the Smallville episode, “Run”, which guest-starred another version of the Flash, the set would really be complete. One of the Smallville DVD sets did include an episode of The Flash as an extra, for no apparent reason.

*There’ve been three Flashes: Jay Garrick from 1940-1951, Barry Allen from 1956-1986, and Wally West from 1986-2006. Rumor has it that Wally will be replaced after Infinite Crisis, with Barry’s grandson Bart Allen—who got to be the Flash in Smallville—the current front runner.

MySQL Upgrade and Caching

Finally upgraded this server to the latest MySQL 5.0 from the ancient, ancient MySQL 3.23 that RHEL3 still uses. Also turned on WP-Cache 2 since Bad Behavior is supposed to work with it now. (Though I’m a bit concerned about the Encrypted Payload feature in Spam Karma.)

If anything seems broken, comment about it here. If you can’t comment, email me at webmaster at this domain name.

Coffee rings caused by capillary action?

I was preparing my latest favorite work-suitable drink a few minutes ago, and a drop of tea spilled over the side of the mug and ran down to the base. Naturally it immediately spread around the entire base, forming a ring on the desk. It was easily wiped up, but then I thought—why does it always spread around the entire base to form that unmistakable coffee ring?

It occurred to me that it might just be capillary action with the liquid flowing along the V-shaped channel formed by the table and the edge of the mug. Some googling did turn up the fact that ring-shaped coffee stains from single drops are caused by capillary flow: as the drop evaporates, it draws water from the inside.

But the instant ring from the mug? Either it’s something else, or it’s so obvious no one has throught it worth writing about.

Edit: *sigh* Read first, then post. I was just reminded that capillary action specifically refers to fluid moving against gravity. Any other thoughts?

Leeches on the Web?

Wow… Jakob Nielsen certainly woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. His latest Alertbox, Search Engines as Leeches on the Web, starts out:

Search engines extract too much of the Web’s value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.

Nice. Because, God knows, you wouldn’t want people to find your site, would you? He rambles on with a whole bunch of garbage about search engine advertising—wait, this is all about advertising? I thought this was supposed to be about searching!—and how, over time, it can take up more and more of your budget until it cancels out the gain you made on that new customer who got there through the ad.

There’s actually a useful bit at the end, though, in which he describes other ways to get people coming to your site—or rather, coming back to your site.

The real goal is to make users come back, and to have them come directly to your site instead of clicking on expensive ads. The ideas above are just a few ways to encourage repeat business. Further in-depth studies of user behaviors and customer needs should reveal many new ways of keeping users loyal.

Of course, no one has ever done that sort of study on how to keep people coming back to a store, or a brand name. Shyeah, right!

Smallville Cyborg

I’ve seen a grand total of one episode of Smallville. It just never interested me. The one I watched was last season’s “Run,” which featured the Flash as a guest star.

Apparently Aquaman showed up earlier this year, and there’ve been rumors about the Teen Titans’ Cyborg. The Pulse reports that Lee Thompson Young will play Vic Stone in the February 19th episode.

Looks like I’m gonna be watching another episode of Smallville.

Ahead of their time

Remember when the web was young, and email was just gaining popularity in the mainstream, and there was a slew of virus hoaxes like the Good Times Virus, or It Takes Guts to Say Jesus, or Elf Bowling?

Remember painstakingly explaining to people that no, your computer couldn’t get a virus just by reading an email, you had to click on an attachment? That images were safe to open? Remember when the worst people had to worry about from web pages was unwanted cookies? Getting a virus just from looking at a web page? Preposterous! And a virus that ran up your credit card? Ridiculous!

It’s sad to think that all those “ridiculous” things are now possible—in fact, they’re commonplace. Look back at that link up there. It’s Snopes’ page on computer virus warnings. Way back when, they were all bogus. These days, most of them are real.

So what’s next? Well, they keep talking about Internet-aware appliances, so a future virus probably could “recalibrate your refrigerator’s coolness setting so all your ice cream goes melty.”

Ask your doctor…

Are you troubled by ridiculous drug advertisements? Concerned that the pharaceuticals industry might be trying to unduly influence your medical care? Ask your doctor about Panexa today!

Aside from a great parody of those ads that list all the side effects, it really points up something that’s always bothered me about ads for prescription drugs: The person watching the commercial is generally not the person who chooses the medication.

(via News From ME)

Darth Burgers

You may recall that Burger King had a marketing tie-in with Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. You may also recall that the movie came out last May. It seems that the Dark Side continues to dominate the destiny of at least one Burger King franchise. This picture was taken today (January 1, 2006):

OK, it may have deflated a bit, but 7-8 months is a bit long to keep an inflatable Darth Vader on your roof.

(10 points to the first person who identifies the reference in the title.)