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.