K-Squared Ramblings

Professional…Building?

Don’t trust your office to some amateur building! Hire a professional!

Of course, what I’m really concerned about is what it does on its day off…

Irritable Liquid?

Found on the side of an AM-PM convenience store today:

That’s one cranky glass of water.

Or maybe Odo?

My best guess is that they were trying to say something like “inflammable,” decided it wouldn’t fit, and misused a thesaurus.

Variations on a Theme

I read Shadowpact #2 last night. So far the book does read better than Day of Vengeance, probably in large part because Bill Willingham can set his own schedule instead of the must-be-6-issues policy of the Infinite Crisis lead-ins.

One of the villains struck me as familiar, though: an albino swordsman with a magic sword, apparently allied to a sinister god-like being, who has picked up the nickname, “the White Rabbit.”

Maybe it’s just the timing—just a few days ago I read a comic about Elric, an albino swordsman with a magic sword, allied to a sinister god-like being, with the nickname, “the White Wolf.”

Actually, I was first reminded of Count Zodiac from Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse, largely because Zodiac is based in the 20th century, rather than an ancient sword-and-sorcery landscape. Count Zodiac is one of at least three versions of Count Ulric von Bek*—the others appear in The Dragon in the Sword and the trilogy that begins with The Dreamthief’s Daughter—and, like Elric, an incarnation of the Eternal Champion.

The Eternal Champion in all his forms fights for the balance between order and chaos, and often finds himself fighting for order while indebted to a lord of chaos. At least two versions** of von Bek are albinos who wield the Black Sword (Ravenbrand, rather than Stormbringer), and while I don’t recall Ulric himself being linked to a demon the way Elric is reluctantly linked to Arioch of Chaos, the von Bek family has ties to Lucifer going back to the Hundred Thirty Years War. Read the rest of this entry »

ABA Publicity

It’s been a good week for the Alternative Browser Alliance.

Last weekend, Opera Watch linked to it in the follow-up to the RSS icon controversy. (I use the site as my URL when posting on browser-related blogs and forums, and Daniel was kind enough to include the link when he highlighted the news I’d posted in the comments.)

On Tuesday, I linked to it myself in a comment on Slashdot. For once, a couple of hundred people clicked on the link. Not long afterward, it started popping up on StumbleUpon after a dry spell. (Coincidence? Well, maybe.)

On Thursday morning, the site got posted to Linkfilter, which led to a few dozen visits.

And finally, Thursday night, BBSpot posted it in their daily links, resulting in over 1500 visits over the past three days!

Thanks to everyone helping to spread the word!

Now I have to start replying to comments…

In related news, I’ve finally broken down and added Flock to the list. Mainly I stayed away from it because I’d already listed 7 Gecko-based browsers (8 if you count SeaMonkey separately from the Mozilla Suite), and it seemed overkill to add one more. I first tried out Flock back in October, and while it seemed interesting, it didn’t really grab me. Now that it’s in beta, it looks like progress is solid, and it’s different enough from Firefox or SeaMonkey to warrant inclusion.

When it has to be there in a Flash

A while back I was driving on the freeway and noticed a truck with this logo:

OK, so I’m maybe a bit focused on the Flash, but then I started looking at the design.

• Red as the main color
• Sans-serif capital italics (just like the longest-running versions of the Flash logo)
• A lightning bolt that runs from the upper right to the lower left.

Hmm…

It got me thinking about commercial applications of super-speed. Not something that turns up often in the super-hero genre, but it shows up occasionally. Kapitalist Kouriers is the first one that comes to mind. They were a trio of Soviet defectors who decided to sell their services as couriers and, from time to time, heroes for hire.

The Fall of Windows 95

Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Millennium Edition will stop getting security updates next month. Firefox 3, due out next year, will require Windows 2000 or later. A lot of controversy has erupted over the wisdom of these decisions.

But how many people are still using these older versions of Windows? And how quickly are they switching to newer versions?

Exact numbers are tricky to measure on the web, but trends… trends, you can measure. So, I present: the percentage* of Windows users visiting hyperborea.org using the Windows 9x series over the past three years.

As you can see, the Win9x/Me share has been dropping precipitously for at least three years, exhibiting a half-life of one year. Assuming this trend continues, it will drop to roughly 2.5% by this time next year. Admittedly still ahead of this month’s Linux stats, but then Linux doesn’t seem to be shrinking by 50% every year. This may be accelerated by Microsoft dropping security support, and by the release of Windows Vista, currently due sometime early next year.

I think it’s safe to say that the Windows 9x series is dying out.

*Calculated by summing the number of hits recorded by AWStats for Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME, then dividing by the total number of hits for all versions of Windows.

¿Cómo se dice, «duh»?

NPR’s “Morning Edition” ran a story today on the rise of the Spanish-language television market, and Univision in particular. They led into it with a remark that Spanish-language coverage of the World Cup has been getting higher ratings than the English-language coverage.

This should surprise no one, given that soccer (as we norteamericanos call what everyone else seems to refer to as football) isn’t terribly popular in the USA, with two notable exceptions: Parents of 6-year-olds who want to put their children into a sport, and the duration of the World Cup. El fútbol, however, is wildly popular in Europe and Latin America, and we have a lot of recent immigrants from Latin America.

So no, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that there are more Spanish-speaking hardcore soccer fans than English-speaking ones.

Opera 9 Released

It’s here, it’s free, it passes Acid2, it has widgets and BitTorrent, and it should take care of a lot of those nagging incompatibilities with rich text and AJAX. It’s Opera 9, currently the web’s #4 browser*.

I’ve been following the weeklies since beta 2, and I’m really impressed. Where Opera has been ahead of the competition, it’s stayed ahead, and where it’s been behind, it’s caught up. It’ll be interesting to see a serious showdown between Firefox 1.5 and Opera 9.

So far there are only two things I don’t like about it. I still have problems getting it to handle cookies the way I want it to, even with the new site-specific preferences. It looks like I should be able to tell it to delete all new cookies when closing except for particular sites, which I do in Firefox, but I still have to use the workaround from Opera 8 where I disable the setting, visit the site to get the “remember my login” cookie, close the browser, then re-enable it.

The second is that Opera has imitated Microsoft’s workaround for the Eolas patent, requiring you to click on plugin content (including Flash, Java, etc.) before you can interact with it. No word yet on whether Eolas has actually gone after Opera, but I can certainly see that, since even Microsoft’s deep pockets lost the case, Opera wouldn’t want to take any chances.

There’s a big launch party in Seattle later this morning.

Update: Arve Bersvendsen has posted a nice overview of what’s new for those who would rather not dig through the changelogs.

*Well, #5 if you separate Firefox from Netscape.

No Spring

I’ve been really enjoying the comic-book adaptation of Robert Jordan’s New Spring, the prequel to The Wheel of Time. Unfortunately, the last few issues have been very sporadic, and there’s been no way to get any kind of schedule. New issues would just pop up on the shipping list the week they arrived in stores. It didn’t help that the publisher, Red Eagle Entertainment [archive.org], is a complete unknown.

So every week, I’ve scoured Diamond’s shipping list, hoping to see “New Spring” on there. Today I figured I’d check the publisher’s site again, even though it’s been useless from the beginning. Still nothing, just a cover and March 2006 date for issue #6, which has yet to appear.

I thought of another source, though: WoT fan site Dragonmount is where I learned about Book 11. So I looked over there, and guess what? Just last week, Red Eagle issued a press release that they’re cancelling New Spring with only 5 out of 8 issues published.

On the plus side, a rep from Dabel Brothers (the studio that actually wrote and drew the comics) commented in the thread at Dragonmount, saying that “the New Spring series is being continued just not through Red Eagle. The remaining issues are all completed…”

Not surprisingly, the publisher and studio blame each other. The dispute is apparently in arbitration. But given the realities of the comics industry, the fact that the publisher appeared out of nowhere and has no other products, and the presence of artwork for issue #7 on the studio’s forums, I’m inclined to believe Dabel Brothers’ claims that Red Eagle stopped actually paying them for the work they were doing.

Double your Angel, double your fun!

It seems that there will be two Fallen Angel collections on the shelves this August. To coincide with IDW’s book collecting the first story arc of their series, It seems DC is reprinting their TPB of the first few issues of the original series.

Fallen Angel started as a creator-owned book at DC and ran for 20 issues. DC published a TPB collection of the first 6 issues, but stopped there. As much as the cancellation rankled, DC gave it a lot of opportunities… it just wasn’t a good fit for the DC brand (it probably would have thrived at Vertigo) or the DC sales targets.

After it was canceled, Peter David took the series to IDW, with J.K. Woodward taking over the art from David Lopez. The first arc set in place a new status quo, and finally answered two key questions: Was Lee really a fallen angel? And if so, how did she fall? Fallen Angel proved to be a better fit with IDW, who immediately extended it from a 5-issue mini to an ongoing series when sales figures started coming in.

I highly recommend reading DC’s trade, which Amazon still has in stock. If you like that, pick up the next issue of the monthly. (Keep in mind that the art style is vastly different, and twenty years have passed, story-wise, between the end of one series and beginning of the next.) I don’t know how easy it’ll be to pick up the back issues, but the IDW trade will be out soon.

And who knows? If capitalizing on IDW’s success works out for DC, maybe they’ll see the light and collect the remaining 14 issues!

Campaign Camp

Now that the election is done, here are some of the campaign signs we saw that elicited some unintended laughter.

I couldn’t decide between two captions: “But I did not hunt the deputy…” and “I didn’t think they were in season.”

This isn’t funny on its own, but coming right off the Lost season finale, all I could think was, “Vote for me, brother!”

Uh… I hate to break it to you, but that’s green…

Troll Bridge

Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney’s op-ed piece on net neutrality, No Tolls on The Internet, is making the rounds. But for some reason, every time I look at the title, I keep misreading it as “No Trolls on The Internet.”

I guess the internet/troll combination is just too ingrained in my brain…

(via Slashdot)

Six of one, half a dozen of another

Last night we went to see a screening of Twelve Monkeys, still one of my favorites. There was an odd moment in the middle, though. In the scene in which Bruce Willis and Madeline Stowe are attacked in the abandoned theater, just after Willis’ character kills the attacker, is this exchange:

“You killed him!”
“All I see are dead people.”

Nervous laughter cascaded around the theater as the audience flashed forward to The Sixth Sense and its signature catch-phrase.

Look, it’s Expo-Lad!

Spam subject:

this going to expolad

It’s a stock spam, and what they’re trying to say is “This is going to explode.” But doesn’t “Expo-Lad” sound like a character from the Legion of Super-Heroes?

Just imagine:

“No one wants to come to our convention! What can we do?”
“Never fear! Expo-Lad will save us!”

Update: I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier, but maybe ExpoLad is related to TypoLad!

Executive Power

The Orange County Register has an ad campaign going in which people stand around on street corners holding banners with controversial topics printed on them. The latest is, “Is Bush abusing executive power?”

Given that the Register is known to have a conservative bias (you can often guess a person’s political affiliation from whether they read the Register or the Los Angeles Times), chances are that their answer is “No.” However, it’s undisputed that Bush has been expanding executive power over the past six years.

The trick with expanded power is that people often don’t object when the person wielding it is someone with whom they agree. Even if you think it’s OK for President Bush to insist on greater powers, eventually, someone you don’t like will be in the Oval Office. Even if the Democratic party implodes, there are different factions in the Republican party, and chances are either the Republicans would split, or another party would rise to fill the gap. And if no one did… well, a one-party system isn’t much of a democracy, is it?

So whether it’s 2 years from now, 6 years, or 10 years, someone you disagree with will end up with all the powers Bush has pushed for. If there’s anything you don’t want that President to have…are you sure you want the current President to have it?

One-Man Team

Something I’ve noticed as I read through various Golden-Age Flash Comics is a repeated subgenre in which the Flash plays an entire team. “Nine Empty Uniforms” (Flash Comics #90, 1947) is the first one I read, since it was reprinted in an 80-page Giant. The bad guys cause problems for a baseball team, so the Flash takes the place of every single player in the upcoming game.

As I’ve picked up comics from the 1940s, and the new Archive book, I’ve found more. In an untitled story from All-Flash Quarterly #1 (1941, reprinted in The Golden Age Flash Archive Volume 2), racketeers hassle a hockey team.The owner needs the money from the “Manley Cup” for an operation for his daughter, so when the racketeers force the players to sit the game out, the Flash steps in.

“Play of the Year” (Flash Comics #39, 1943) breaks with tradition a bit and instead of a sports team, the Flash replaces a troupe of actors. A rival producer tries to financially ruin one of Jay’s friends by preventing his play from opening, in this case faking a measles outbreak among the cast and putting them in quarantine. Once again, the Flash steps in and plays every single role, changing costumes and switching places faster than the eye can see.

The weird thing about these stories is that nowhere does anyone suggest that having a super-powered player—who isn’t even on your roster—just might be cheating. It goes all the way back to his first appearance in Flash Comics #1: Back in college, Jay Garrick was a football scrub. After the accident gave him super-speed, he convinced the coach to put him on the field so he could show off in front of his girlfriend, Joan.

Interestingly, later retellings of the Flash’s origin make it a point that he quit the team immediately afterward because staying would have given him an unfair advantage.

Generic Novel-ty

Found this on Amazon a few months ago while looking for something by Neil Gaiman:

I just checked back and the listing is gone. I figure it was probably a placeholder or something.

Incremental Updates and the Problem of N+2

There are two main ways to handle software updates: provide an updated installer, or provide a smaller updater that only includes the changes. (Either method can be automated.) Incremental updates have advantages, especially if you’re dealing with something as massive as, say, World of Warcraft, or Microsoft Office. But they do make things more complicated for the publisher.

One problem is the upgrade path. It’s one thing to provide an updater that goes from version N to version N+1. But what if someone doesn’t run the updater until N+2 is available? Or worse, N+3? Read the rest of this entry »

Keep Out!

OK, so they’re just storing stuff on the side of the intersection for a while, but seriously… doesn’t it look like a barricade?

Google Toolbar AutoFill is Weird

I briefly enabled the Google Toolbar to check some PageRank stats, and noticed some fields on contact forms were highlighted in yellow. A little experimentation revealed that this was part of the toolbar’s AutoFill capability, which will try to identify standard form fields and fill in your name, address, etc. (There’s a config box where you fill it all in once.)

The weird thing was that this form had name and e-mail fields, but AutoFill only recognized e-mail. I figured, OK, people might be using this, let’s see if I can adjust the page and make it compatible.

This form was using “name” and “email” for the actual names of the fields. They were labeled “Your Name” and “E-mail,” in separate table cells before the fields, with explicit <label> elements. A bit of searching turned up the fact that AutoFill looks for field names defined in ECML (RFC 3106). That list applies to the actual field names, not the visible labels, and if I’m reading it correctly, both “name” and “email” should work. Read the rest of this entry »

WP203

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.3. The usual bug fixes & security updates.