K-Squared Ramblings

Ah, Hollywood Accounting!

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that Dreamworks and Aardman are going their separate ways after the disappointing performance of Flushed Away and Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Wait… Wallace and Gromit? Wasn’t it #1 on opening weekend? Didn’t it stay in the top 5 for at least a month?

Aardman’s dry British wit went over well with critics on such films as “Chicken Run” in 2000 and 2005’s “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” which won an Oscar for best animated feature.

But both “Wallace & Gromit” and “Flushed Away” were costly misfires, failing to resonate with American audiences. DreamWorks reported a $25-million loss on “Wallace & Gromit.”

Hmm, according to IMDB, W&G had an estimated budget of $30 million. It grossed $16 million its opening weekend and went on to gross $56 million by January, 2006. Domestically. That’s not even counting foreign distribution or DVD sales.

If they spent $30 million and made more than $56 million, how exactly did they “lose” $25 million? Where did that missing $50 million go?

LJ Apology

To all three of you reading this via LiveJournal syndication, sorry for filling up your friends list with repeats. I changed the footer on the feed, and didn’t realize that LiveJournal will repost articles as new if there’s any change.

I guess this means I’ll have to be careful about things like fixing typos on the latest 15 posts.

Unlikely Partnership

Here’s a surprise: web standardista extraordinaire Molly Holzschlag is now working with Microsoft to promote web standards within the organization.

Improving interoperability, especially at high-profile services like many of Microsoft’s, is critical to the future of the web. I can only hope that the emphasis on standards will feed into the design goals for Internet Explorer 8—and that IE8 will be released before Windows XP drops from mainstream to extended support in 2009.

Pilates of the Caribbean!

Found these next to each other at Costco the other day:

Sushi…Coffee?

I was catching up on my brother’s Flickr posts and found this photo:

©Brion Vibber, used per the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Not a combination I’m used to seeing…

He’s got a handful of other photos tagged wtf.

LJ Feed

Interesting. Apparently someone has set up a syndication feed for this blog on LiveJournal: ksquaredramblin. I’ve been thinking about setting one up more or less since I joined LJ, but I resisted since I worried people might start commenting in two different places. I guess it’s a moot point now!

Clikipedia

I’ve been meaning to post on this subject for quite a while now, and it turns out someone has gone and said it more succinctly than I ever could have: The Problem With Wikipedia. Read the rest of this entry »

Smallville Traffic Spike 2.0

After last week’s Smallville episode, “Justice,” featured Cyborg, Aquaman, Green Arrow and the Flash Impulse, there was another spike in traffic to my Flash site and the profile of Bart Allen, Smallville Edition.

It jumped up to 1½ times the usual number of visits on the day “Justice” aired, then quickly started trailing off to normal levels. It’s nowhere near as big a jump as last time the Flash appeared on the show, when I saw a threefold spike in traffic for the first two days.

Why the difference? I’ve got several theories:

• Interest in Smallville has waned over time, so fewer people dropped in. Pure speculation.
• Viewers remembered Bart from “Run” (which was rerun a few weeks ago) and many didn’t feel the need to look him up again. Again, speculation.
• Bart was sharing the limelight with other guest stars this time. But I’d expect people to look for all of them, which is borne out by the number of people who have searched the site for Green Arrow in the past week.
• Overall site traffic is higher, causing the jump to be less noticeable. Wishful thinking, but the last spike hit ~7,600 hits/day, while this one hit ~8,200, so the numbers hold up. (Hits & bandwidth are down for the Flash section, but I’ve done several rounds of optimization in the last few years.)
• Fewer sources linked to the site. Last time, there were lots of links from forums and blogs. I even got linked from Television Without Pity. (They decided to go with Wikipedia instead.) This time around, it was mostly search engine hits.

Updated to WordPress 2.1

I just upgraded the site to WordPress 2.1. Please bear with the site as I make sure all the customizations work. (Yeah, I know, living dangerously by not waiting a few days.)

Right now the category tabs are showing all categories instead of just the top three… but only on single posts.

OK. That’s fixed. Apparently WP 2.1 removed the ability to list only the top-level categories, and caching was half-enabled. I also had to apply the fix for PHP 5.2 again. (I really figured they would have fixed that by now!)

Everything else seems to still work, except for the word stats plugin and wp-amazon plugin. Both are composing plugins, and I wasn’t really using either of them anymore.

Update Jan. 25: I also updated WP-Cache to version 2.0.22, and it doesn’t work quite right. In particular, it won’t clear the cached copy of a page after someone posts a comment. I’ve reverted the cache to 2.0.17+tweaks for now, which seems to work.

Enhance your… mortgage?

I suppose it was only a matter of time before these two genres of spam collided. Today I received a spam advertising body-part enlargement products, with a link to a site called bmsMUNGEDcommercialmortgage.info (without the MUNGED).

Apparently, getting a new mortgage is supposed to increase my ability to handle huge tracts of land.

Crescent moon and Venus

I walked out the front door last night around 5:50 to pick up the mail, and immediately walked back in to get the camera, because this is what I saw:

My parents gave me a flexible mini-tripod for Christmas, and it proved very helpful here, as there was nowhere flat where I could set the camera and still get a good view. I ended up coiling it around a stair railing, which held the camera in place long enough to get a decent exposure.

I seriously thought about pulling my SLR camera out of the closet and seeing whether I had any film for it, but ultimately decided against it.

Smallville Flash

With Bart Allen returning to Smallville tonight—alongside Cyborg, Green Arrow, and Aquaman—I find myself wondering about the best way to hang onto just a few episodes. Last night I went looking for my tape of “Run,” the first episode in which he appeared, and I couldn’t find it.

I have no interest in buying full seasons of Smallville, but I’d like to have copies of the two episodes with Bart (partly for character research, partly for completism). Warner Bros. has no reason to release individual episode DVDs, but downloadable episodes (as in iTunes) might be an option.

Another possibility: themed collections. There have been enough episodes guest-starring other DC heroes that WB could do something similar to Buffy’s Slayer Collection, or The Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” set. A single disc featuring, let’s say, the Flash, Cyborg, and Aquaman episodes (Green Arrow might need his own disc), followed by tonight’s big team-up, “Justice.”

Hey, I’d buy it.

Firefox and Opera: Allies?

Opera Watch posted an interview with Firefox co-founder Blake Ross yesterday, in which he talks about Firefox, Opera, and the relationship between the two. When asked about the rivalry between fans of the browsers, he says, “I think it’s ridiculous. Millions of people out there rely on us to make the Web better, not have pissing contests.” I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I launched The Alternative Browser Alliance primarily in response to that rivalry.

I found it interesting that when asked to describe Opera in three words, Ross’ response was: “Our best ally.”

Daytime… Comet?

Well, I tried again at lunch to see if I could spot Comet McNaughton during the day, just in case it was still bright enough. No luck, but I set my camera on max zoom and took a set of pictures in roughly the right area, just to see if I could spot something.

And, well, I did. I’m just not sure what. This was 1:28 pm (33.66 N, 117.75 W), looking roughly southwest, with the sun placed behind a wall to the right. The sun is to the right and above the frame. I don’t have a good sense of distance in the sky, but this is in the right direction to be either Venus or the comet.

Or it could be a passing high-altitude airplane that I didn’t notice.

If it is the comet, the tail is completely invisible, as it should be stretching down to the lower left (away from the sun) and I can’t make anything like that appear with any of the image enhancement tools I’ve tried.

This is unprocessed. All I did was load it from the camera and crop it. And here’s a copy of the whole photo (this was at full ~3x zoom on a Canon PowerShot SD600) with the position of the object and the rough position of the sun pointed out.

WordPress 2.0.7 security & feed fix

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.7. It fixes a security issue with certain versions of PHP, and it also includes the fix for the feed problem in 2.0.6 and a couple other minor fixes.

According to the announcement, WP 2.1 should be out by the end of the month. Looks like it’s almost time to see how many of my customizations will work with the new version.

Web Design is Like Pizza

When web designers switch from focusing on a single browser (usually Internet Explorer) to developing cross-browser sites (usually adding Firefox, sometimes Opera or Safari, ideally all three), they often find that things don’t work as expected in the “new” browser. This can be for a number of reasons, including:

• Bugs or “missing” features in the new browser (whether incomplete support in the new browser, or proprietary features in the familiar browser).
• Broken code on the website being handled differently.
• Different defaults where behavior isn’t well-defined in the specifications.

A big problem is that when you get into the code, a lot of pages aren’t as specific as the authors think they are. When you write code and test it on one browser, you’re not testing that the code is correct, you’re testing that that browser makes the same assumptions you do.

It’s like ordering pizza.

No, really. Let’s say Internet Explorer specializes in Chicago-style pizza, with a thick, chewy crust. And let’s say Firefox specializes in New York-style pizza, with a thin crust. But each can make the other style of pizza on request.

So you call up Internet Explorer and ask for pizza. They deliver you Chicago pizza, and if that’s what you wanted, you figure your order is fine. If you actually wanted New York style, you make sure that next time, you tell them you want that style of pizza.

But let’s say you like Chicago pizza. You get used to calling up IE and just asking for “pizza,” until one day you’re busy, and ask your roommate to order it. He likes to get his pizza from Firefox, so he calls them up, asks for “pizza,” and you get New York style. That’s not what you wanted. Obviously, Firefox pizza is inferior, because they got the order wrong! Well, no, it’s not, and no, they didn’t. They delivered what they were asked for. If you’d told your roommate to ask for Chicago style, Firefox would have been perfectly happy to deliver that style of pizza.

The moral of the story: always be specific with your code. Make sure it’s asking for what you think it’s asking for (validation helps here). And if something doesn’t do what you expect, make sure you didn’t leave that expectation out of your order.

See also: No, Internet Explorer did not handle it properly

(Expanded from a comment I posted at Mozillazine.)

Fantastic Films?

2007 looks to be a good year for fantasy adaptations, at least of books I’ve read. What I’ve seen of Stardust (Neil Gaiman & Charles Vess) looks great. I’m psyched up for His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass (Phillip Pullman)—and I’ve got to say I’m glad they’re doing each book as its own movie, instead of trying to condense the whole trilogy. And Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J.K. Rowling, as if you didn’t know) looks promising as well, though most of the Harry Potter films have suffered from condensing too much.

I’m a little more apprehensive about The Dark is Rising (Susan Cooper), mainly because the IMDB page says they plan to start early this year, but the Los Angeles Times has it down for a September release. For the record, I do think this is the one to start with, not Over Sea, Under Stone, because as I recall it has a much greater sense of tension, which will translate better to screen. Plus it provides more of an introduction to the world and the conflict, since Will is dropped right in the middle of it, while I remember the other book being set more solidly in the “real” world. The Drews don’t get involved as deeply until later.

On a related note, I don’t think I’m in the target audience for The Number 23. We saw the trailer for it on Friday when we saw Pan’s Labyrinth (which is quite good, BTW), and I could not stop laughing. Not because of Jim Carrey, but because of the premise. Perhaps it comes from reading the Illuminatus! trilogy. There’s a great sequence in the book where one of the characters is starting to look for certain numbers, including 23, in everything. Of course, since he’s human, he finds them, using ever more convoluted arithmetic to prove that they’re significant. While reading Illuminatus!, I looked up stuff on synchronicity and found the tech term for this tendency to see connections where none exist: apophenia. And here I’m watching this preview, and there’s a sequence in which the lead character starts finding the number 23 in everything, using ever more convoluted arithmetic…. I don’t think I could take the premise seriously enough to get into the movie.

Comet!

The skies were surprisingly clear today. Four of us at work walked outside after sunset to a bridge near the office, and saw Comet McNaught. It was visible from ~5:10/5:15 to 5:28, at which point it slipped below the line of hills to the west.

We saw it against the red sky, slowly dropping through the (fortunately sparse) clouds. It was easily visible to the naked eye as a fuzzy white spot, with a hint of a tail pointing straight up that was a lot clearer in binoculars. The tail looked like a U or a V, fanning out at what looked like (but probably wasn’t) a 45° angle.

Well, my fingers are finally warming up. (I made the mistake of not grabbing my jacket, and went out just in my sweater.) Time to wrap stuff up.

Update January 13: I managed to catch another glimpse of it tonight. Unfortunately I was just arriving at the shop to pick up my car, and it was just closing, so I didn’t have a chance to watch it set (or see much more than a fuzzy white dot.) My watch said 5:02. By the time I got out, it had set beneath the building across the street, and there just wasn’t anywhere nearby enough with a clearer view of the western horizon.

On the plus side, I did manage to spot Venus while the sky was still light, and get a picture. It’s not quite as exciting as spotting it at one in the afternoon, but by adding more blue, you get an idea of what that looked like:

Update January 14:

I was looking over the photos I took last night (Saturday) and discovered I could actually find it by messing around with levels. On the left is the original photo, with a little bit of color correction to match what the sky looked like. The background’s still too bright to see the comet, though it was visible to the eye. On the right, I’ve adjusted the heck out of the image, and there’s a very slight bright spot right where it should be (I framed the shot so that the comet would be near the light pole, making it easier to find). Actually, now that I look at it again, it’s just barely visible in the less-processed photo on the left.

Also, this is cool: the comet has gotten bright enough to be spotted in daylight. (via Slashdot) I didn’t have any luck looking for it this afternoon, but I chalk that up to lower altitude and city haze.

Update January 15: I spotted something today, but I’m not sure what…

The Longest Flash

A post on the Comic Bloc Forums the other day made me think about the question: Which Flash had the longest solo career?

It depends on how you measure it. The original Flash, Jay Garrick, has of course been around the longest: 1940–today. He’s got more than 65 years on his successors. But a more useful question is: How long was each Flash around before DC replaced him as “the” Flash?

The easiest measurement: years in publication.

Barry is the clear winner by this measure, at three times Jay’s career, and 1½ times Wally’s.

But what about sheer number of comics**? Read the rest of this entry »

No comet for you!

I’ve been hoping for the last few nights to get out around sunset and look for Comet McNaught. Unfortunately, it’s been cloudy all week by the time sunset rolls around. And in a couple of days, it’ll slip past the sun and appear in the morning sky instead. At that point, I won’t have a chance of seeing it. Even if I could get myself out of bed before dawn, the eastern horizon is blocked by mountains.

The Market Ace!

Actually the Lake Forest Market Place, spotted a few weeks ago.

Feeds in Google results?

Does anyone know how to convince Google to prefer an HTML page over an RSS feed when serving standard search results?

With the demise of the Jamie Jack and Stench show, Another One Bites the Dust has shot back up to the top 5 pages on the site. It turns out it’s the #7 hit on Google for “jamie jack and stench.” Oddly, the comments feed for Alternative to Music? is #8. Not the post itself, which includes all the same comments, but the feed.

I don’t want to keep the feeds out of Google’s index — if someone’s looking for feeds, and mine happen to be relevant, I want them to show up. But if someone’s looking for web pages, shouldn’t Google bring up the web page with substantially similar content in favor of the feed?

Fixing Feed Problems with WordPress 2.0.6 and PHP 5.2

Upgraded to WordPress 2.0.6 and now feeds are broken. At least, they’re broken in Firefox, IE7, and KDE (Konqueror & Akregator). Something seems to be interrupting the transfer, causing them to get a blank file. Oddly, they work fine in Opera, the LWP “GET” command-line utility, and Dillo (not that Dillo can do anything but display the source, but it gets the whole file.) Even more oddly, SeaMonkey seems to have no problems. You’d think Firefox and SeaMonkey would have the same issues. Also, I seem to be able to sometimes get it to work on reload.

Anyway, I’m working on it. If you read this site via RSS or Atom, and it is working, let me know (and let me know which feed reader you’re using). I suppose it could be cookie-related, though I’ve already tried clearing cookies. I’ve also tried disabling just about every plugin I use that does something to feeds or headers, to no avail.

Update: I think I’ve got it. By using the Tamper Data extension, I was able to determine that the 304 Not Modified status was not being set properly. Instead of actually issuing the 304 status, it would issue a 200 OK, then send a Status: 304 header later in the response. It never showed any problems on command-line GET or HEAD because they weren’t conditional. That’s also why forcing reload would work.

I looked into wp-includes/functions.php and found the status_header function. Then I looked at the following line:

@header("Status: $header $text");

In theory this should work. Traditionally, setting a “Status” header will replace the actual HTTP status. But that’s not how the PHP manual says to do it. They suggest issuing the actual header that the server would send: HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified. I noticed that the header function in PHP has some optional parameters, including one to force the HTTP status. That felt a little cleaner than hard-coding the protocol (since an older browser might make an HTTP/1.0 request, and it should get an HTTP/1.0 response), so I changed the line to this:

@header("Status: $header $text", TRUE, $header);

It seems to have fixed the problem.

For the record, this is PHP 5.2.0 on Apache 1.3.37 using the mod_php interface.

Update 2: Simpler fix just removes the if.. statement and else… section so that it’s just the following:

@header("HTTP/1.1 $header $text");

Bug reported as Ticket 3528.

Read the rest of this entry »

Joined ComicSpace

Figured what the heck. I’m now on ComicSpace.

Because I need yet another site to suck up all my time.

It’s being described as MySpace for comics people—creators, fans, reviewers, etc.—though the feature set is pretty sparse right now. I’ve resisted MySpace itself partly because of a somewhat adversarial relationship with the site*, partly because I can’t stand looking at most MySpace pages, and partly because my friends are all on LiveJournal, so there’s really no compelling reason for me to go there.

And yet I’ve got profiles at LiveJournal, Slashdot, Opera, WordPress, Spread Firefox… Even eBay is adding blogging capabilities. Maybe I should bite the bullet and sign up for a Blogger account too. At least then I’ll be able to comment on Crimson Lightning.

*The culture at MySpace seems to encourage hotlinking images without asking. I’m still a writer at heart, so I consider the commentary to be as important as the images or more… and it really annoys me when people en masse just embed the images on their own site. Though I suppose it’s not as bad as the occasional “geniuses” on other forums who will hotlink an 800×600 or bigger photograph as their avatar, even though it only displays at 80×80. Damn kids, get off my lawn!

Flash Fraud

Got an interesting phish today.

Subject: Error in your billing information
From: Keystone Savings Bank.

Hmm, Keystone, eh?

Radio Connection

They say that the Southern California car culture is isolating. It’s hard to argue with that, when everyone’s shut up in their own little boxes. But today, on my way to work (delayed a bit on account of dentist), I was listening to KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic and stopped at a traffic signal. They were playing a live version of Elvis Costello’s “Allison.” I looked in my rear view mirror, and realized that the driver behind me was singing along to the same song. Even though it only went one way—she had no way of knowing I was listening to the same music—it was still a moment of connection through shared experience.