K-Squared Ramblings

ABC=Doofs

Went to a lot of effort to get the TV on for the Lost season premiere at 8pm…only to discover that it’s actually a &*^@$# clip show.

If we’d known we had until 9, this would’ve been a much less stressful evening.

Edit: The rest of the evening went much better, and the actual episode was good. Most interesting bit: switching from flashbacks to flash-forwards really does change the dynamic of the show. (But I was seriously annoyed with the network for promoting the heck out of the “2-hour Lost Event!” and have it turn out that there was really only 1 hour of show.)

Getting Propositioned

Oddly, the usual deluge of election propaganda hasn’t materialized yet, and the election is less than a week away. While looking through the scanty haul, most of which is focused on a quartet of propositions on Indian gaming, Katie found an intriguing statement:

Wait… pubic services? Whoa! And here I thought gambling on tribal lands was hot. This could blow it away… or alternatively, screw everyone over.

Babylon 5 Scripts: The Bonus Volume

Hard to believe, but J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5 Script Books are almost done. Volume 13 of 14 just shipped (my copy arrived today by UPS), and it’s time to talk about the bonus volume 15, only available to people who’ve bought a complete set.

This is the book that has alternate versions of several episodes, the series writer’s bible…and a complete outline of the original arc with Sinclair all the way through. The site has a description of the contents, but how to get it is a bit out of date. Vol.13 shipped with a notice that they’ve changed the procedure.

Instead of waiting until you receive all 14 volumes, then filling out a proof of purchase form, you need to fill out a form before ordering #14, and they’ll ship #14 and #15 together. The form is at babylon5scripts.com/proof and collects your name, address, and the order numbers for the other 14 books. If you ordered them all through the same CafePress account, it’s easy: Log onto CafePress, look at your order history, and then copy and paste the numbers into the form.

Admittedly, “easy” depends entirely on how much other stuff you’ve made through CafePress. Unfortunately they only list order numbers on the history page, so you have to click through each number to see what was actually ordered. This makes it a perfect job for middle-clicking the links on Firefox (open in background tab): I just went down the list, clicking away, and then I had each order in a tab. Click, copy, click, paste. Repeat.

Net Links

ISC on Targeted Attacks

Hixie’s Natural Log: Come up with the best test for Acid3 Edit: Strike that, Acid3 has been completed.

Spies in the Phishing Underground (via Slashdot)

Corona

Spotted this on Thursday, between rain showers. It’s a slightly distorted corona, formed by diffraction of sunlight around cloud droplets, splitting the spectrum and producing rainbow-like colors. According to the Atmospheric Optics site, the distortion indicates that the droplet size varies across different parts of the cloud.

This was shot through a window, and I’m 99% certain that the straight line running down the middle of the darker foreground cloud is a reflection from inside the room.

This is why you vote

The code name for Fedora 9 Linux has been chosen, and it’s going to be Sulphur. Because a foul-smelling rock associated with rotten eggs and depictions of Hell is just what we want to identify an operating system. (Actually, it might not be too far off for Windows Vista.)

Bathysphere was only 8 votes behind. Weird, but considerably cooler.

Oh, well. At least it’s not Mayonnaise or Chupacabra. And some of the other names on that list are considerably worse.

San Gabriel Snow Panorama

We went to The District on Saturday afternoon to catch Cloverfield and check out the Auld Dubliner. I took the Warner exit to go in the back way, and noticed someone standing out on the shoulder of the ramp, taking photos. I looked out past the wide expanse of empty fields and was astonished to see the entire San Gabriel mountain range covered with snow!

Not just the tops of the mountains on the eastern half of the range, but everything, even the lower parts you can just barely see by the Cajon pass, and this huge expanse north of Los Angeles that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen covered.

I pulled over as soon as I found a spot I considered safe, then walked back up to the top of the ramp. I talked briefly with the man I’d seen taking photos, and he said he’d lived in the area for 50 years and had never seen the mountains like this. He also mentioned he had a friend who had served at the base*, and he was going to send him the pictures.

I ended up taking a 12-photo panorama (zoomed) spanning at least 120° from the blimp hangar on the left, across the San Gabriels, past the hills above Orange and Tustin, the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, on to Saddleback, which had a few bits of snow clinging to the mountainside.

Click to view panorama (424 KB 6648×500 JPEG)

*This is the location of the former MCAS Tustin. The Marine base was closed in the mid-1990s, and the land is only just starting to be developed—notably The District in one corner, which is what brought us to the area yesterday.

Musical Thoughts of the Day

1. Fountains of Wayne’s song, “No Better Place,” popped up on the iPod today. There’s a great line that made us both laugh when we heard them at a concert several years ago, opening for some band that one or the other of us wanted to see:

It may be the whiskey talking
But the whiskey says “I miss you” everyday.

2. The “dream control” sequence from Queensryche’s “Silent Lucidity” sounds really weird in headphones.

3. Heard a cover of Aerosmith’s “Dream On” in Red Robin a few nights ago. Sounded like sort of like Amy Lee (Evanescence) if she were a soprano. Googling suggests that it might be Kelly Sweet. (Edit: After grabbing her version of the song—99¢ is a great price for impulse buying—I’m almost certain this was the one we heard.) She was accompanied by our waitress—but not when she was at out table.

Green and Brown

While driving to work this morning, I looked off to the left and saw this beautiful view of fluffy white clouds hugging the mountains, and bright sunlight on the patchy green hills.* When I got into work, I went straight for the corner conference room that has a view in that direction… but the clouds had rolled in and turned everything gray. I kept checking back every so often, but the closest I got was this:

It’s been great to have a more normal amount of rain this year. The coastal hills all turned green after the second rainstorm, early in December. The hills up by the mountains took longer, since most of the area had burned off in the Santiago fire. Faint patches of green started to appear around Christmas, and now, the lower hills at least are more green than brown.

The scenery still looks odd, though. There’s a third peak (Flores?) near Saddleback, about 1,000 feet lower, that normally blends in with the mountain behind it. Well, the entire north face of the hillside burned. Then high winds blew the ashes away. People coated it with a green-gray material that I suspect was intended to prevent mudslides (it looked like the stuff they spray on dirt embankments in construction projects before the landscaping kicks in). It rained, repeatedly. Then we had high winds again, clearing all the gunk out of the air…and now it’s got the light brown color normally seen on the lower, closer hills during the dry season, instead of the darker brown of the mountains. It doesn’t blend at all, even from as far away as Tustin.

This was taken from in front of the Ralphs on Jamboree on January 13. You can see the line of hills in front is still a green/brown mix, and then there’s this light brown lump rising up behind them. On the left side you can see some remnants of the anti-erosion substance.

The following day, on my way to lunch at the Irvine Spectrum (7 miles away, and perhaps a 30-degree difference in angle), I went over a bridge and saw Saddleback next to the Ferris wheel. I knew I had to get that shot.

I parked in the west parking structure, then went running around the top floor looking for a spot where I could frame the wheel and the mountains together, and avoid too many light poles, and get above the few cars, and not have to worry that losing my balance would cause me to fall 3 stories to my death. I finally climbed onto one of the support pillars for the light poles in the middle of the deck, where if I fell I’d only fall a few feet.

Here, you can really see the difference between the areas that burned and those that didn’t. Compare this to the third picture in Saddleback Snow, or the second in Ashen Mountains.

Sadly, the best places to take photos from seem to be the middles of freeway bridges and tops of private buildings — in other words, inaccessible.

P.S., I Love… what?

A movie theater tried to cram a few too many titles into this space.

Whoever that is in the last line must really like basketball. Alternatively, feel free to insert your favorite Catherine the Great joke here.

And “Atonement Water”—is that anything like holy water? Or perhaps like Aquamantra’s “I am Lucky”/”I am Loved”/etc. water?

Essential Graphic Novels

DC Comics has posted a list of 30 Essential Graphic Novels (that are published by DC or one of their imprints).

I’ve read:

• Watchmen
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vol. 1 & 2
• V for Vendetta
• Sandman vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes
• Sandman: Endless Nights
• Fables vol.1: Legends in Exile
• Batman: Arkham Asylum
• Batman: The Long Halloween
• Batman: Dark Victory
• Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
• Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again
• Kingdom Come
• Identity Crisis
• JLA vol.1: New World Order
• Crisis on Infinite Earths
• Transmetropolitan vol.1: Back on the Street

I haven’t read:

• Superman for All Seasons
• Superman: Birthright (but it’s on my to-read list)
• Superman/Batman: Public Enemies
• Batman: Year One
• Batman: Hush vol.1 & vol.2
• Green Lantern: Rebirth
• The Quitter
• Hellblazer: Original Sins
• Y: The Last Man vol.1: Unmanned
• Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne
• Sword of the Dark Ones
• Ex Machina vol.1: The First Hundred Days

The list is a bit heavy on Batman at a full 25% of the titles. And since it’s roughly 50/50 super-hero stuff and, well, other stuff, that means half their “essential” super-hero books are Batman. Come on, DC, show people a few more facets of your line!

On the plus side, they’ve chosen just one volume each for series like Transmetropolitan, Fables, etc.—so they can recommend as many different series as possible—and it’s the first volume. Unlike the well-known super-hero books, where the average potential reader probably knows enough to hit the ground running, it helps to start at the beginning, with a book that’s specifically designed to introduce each concept. And many of them are big, long stories. You wouldn’t recommend starting Lord of the Rings with The Two Towers, you’d tell someone to start with Fellowship of the Ring or get a combined edition.

Personally, I’d drop The Dark Knight Strikes Again (does anyone really consider it a “must read?”) and possibly the second volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Maybe even Endless Nights, though I suppose it represents the overall tone of Sandman better than the first book does. Maybe Dark Victory, since it’s essentially a continuation of The Long Halloween. With the Justice League, I might replace New World Order with Rock of Ages.

I’d add the first Astro City book, no questions asked. For the other space(s), I’d plug in something less well-known, but highly regarded. Maybe some more WildStorm, like Planetary or The Authority. Or how about a another DC hero, like Wonder Woman, Starman, or the Flash?

Rumbling toward IE8

My feed reader is filling up with commentary on Microsoft’s proposal to lock web pages to specific rendering engines (funny how it doesn’t sound quite so forward thinking when you put it like that). Rather than link to a lot of them, I’ll just link to Opera Watch’s post which collects quotes from various standards & browser people.

The IE7/IE6 ratio on this site is still holding above 1 for the month (yay!) at 33.6% to 28.3%.

Also interesting: last week we got our first visit from Internet Explorer 8. Just one visit to Katie’s analysis of Wolfram & Hart’s work comp liability, but it loaded the relevant images, styles, etc., so it looks like an actual browser visit (and not some bot using a fake UA, like the spambot that keeps trying to post comments as Firefox 9). More importantly, it actually came from an IP address that’s assigned to Microsoft and resolves to a microsoft.com hostname, so I think it’s the real deal.

The Right Tool…

I’ve been reading High Performance Web Sites and started thinking about how to apply the guidelines to my own sites (not to mention stuff for work). A lot of them are things I already do: minimize external resources, use compression & cache control, etc. Others are a bit out of reach for a personal site, like using a content delivery network. It got me looking at the way I use scripts, and reminded me of a change I made about a year and a half ago.

Way back when, I put a simple app on my Flash site: a team-name generator for teams of speedsters. It randomly generated a name from two lists, and provided a button to generate another one. I originally wrote it in PHP.

The funny thing was that it was the most-hit page on the site, because people would sit there and hit the button to generate a new name half a dozen times before moving on. And because it was a sever-side script, that meant not just another HTTP hit, but re-downloading the entire web page with only 2 words being different.

Eventually I realized it was much better suited to a client-side app. I rewrote the whole thing in JavaScript, using DOM functions to replace the name on the current page instead of reloading. I left the hooks to the PHP in place, so that it would still work for clients with JavaScript disabled.

• It was much faster — practically instantaneous, in fact.
• It used a lot less bandwidth — 40 KB (5 KB × 8 ) vs. 6 KB (5 KB + 1 KB) for a typical 8-name* scenario.
• Traffic stats more accurately reflected the page’s popularity, as it dropped from #1 to around #30–50.

* Based on a drop from 32,000 hits/month in July 2006 to 4,000 hits/month in September, with the rest of the site staying about the same, it seems people were hitting reload 7 times.

Web Browsers of the Future

I’ve been using the Opera 9.5 previews across the board since September, and the Firefox 3 beta 2 on my secondary work computer for the past month, and I just can’t bring myself to go back. The full-history search available in both browsers has got to be the most useful new feature I’ve seen in a browser since inline spell-check.

Really, the only things holding me back from jumping up to Firefox 3 on my main computers at home and at work were Firebug and some of the HTML validator extensions. Firebug is complicated enough that I didn’t want to rely on the Nightly Tester Tools to disable the compatibility checks. Then I found out that there’s a Firebug beta that does work with Firefox 3. That was enough. Last night I took the plunge.

Meanwhile, things look good on the ditch-IE6 front. After last month’s false alarm due to a local maximum, it looks like IE7 has solidly overtaken IE6 on this site! For the first 13½ days of January, Internet Explorer accounted for 62.5% of total hits. IE7 was 33.5%, and IE6 was only 28.4%. Even better, that’s barely over 1 percentage point from Firefox’s 27.2%!

Most likely, a lot of people got new computers for Christmas. New Windows boxes would mostly be Vista, and would ship with IE7. Another factor might be techies visiting their relatives and helping clean up/update their computers. They might have taken the opportunity to install IE7 or Firefox.

Wash Out

Is that like “Bridge Out?” As in the wash has broken down, so isn’t safe for the water to cross? How is the water supposed to read the sign?

Stylish Links

2008: Year of the Layout Engine - CSS3.info takes a look at the four major categories of web browsers, and where they’re likely to go this year.

Also, Progressive Enhancement with CSS3. This is an approach I’ve been taking for quite a while, particularly with my personal sites, but it’s starting to creep into sites I’m building for work as well. Essentially: Build it to look decent in everything, but throw in enhancements to browsers that you know can handle them.

An example of progressive enhancement: the rounded corners on the tabs on my Flash site. They’re not critical to the design, but it does make it look better in Safari and Firefox. And in theory, Opera and IE will eventually pick up the capability. (Though in this case, since border-radius is still experimental, I’ll have to change the CSS when they do—so maybe it’s not the best example.)

Authors I Need to Catch Up On

Julie E. Czerneda — read the Species Imperative trilogy in October and was very impressed. To read: 2 trilogies, 1 stand-alone, start of a new series. I think I’ll pick up the first book in the Trade Pact Universe next.

Robert J. Sawyer — read the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy a year or two ago, and more recently Calculating God. Currently reading Mindscan. His work tends to be social science-fiction: if X technological advance occurs, or Y scientific principle is discovered, what impact will that have on society? To read: 9 more stand-alone novels and a trilogy. Could take a while.

Robert Charles Wilson — read Chronoliths, Darwinia and Bios within the space of a few months of each other, maybe around 5 years ago. To read: 10 novels.

Strangely enough, looking them up I’ve discovered that all 3 of them are Canadian.

Also: Two authors I’d really like to see more from:

Greg Keyes — I was introduced to his work through his Babylon 5 novels (back when he was writing as J. Gregory Keyes), then went on to track down his own work. The Age of Unreason cycle is also quite good, and I’ve previously reviewed The Waterborn and Blackgod. At this point, I’ve read every novel he’s published. The Born Queen comes out in March, finishing the 4-book Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone cycle, which means I need to start re-reading the first three books next month.

Neil Gaiman — dark fantasy, mythic fantasy, whatever you want to call it. Discovered through Sandman (yeah, big surprise). My favorite of his novels is probably either American Gods or Neverwhere. Need to track down more of his short stories, though.

I’ve previously mentioned that Gaiman and Keyes are the only authors whose work I’ll immediately pick up in hardcover, no questions asked.

Comics I’m Reading - 2008

6 ongoing monthly series, 3 monthly miniseries, 1 weekly, and 5 that are sporadic. Read the rest of this entry »

Primary Reactions & Binary Thinking

Had dinner at my parents’ last night, and at one point talk turned to yesterday’s primary election. It’s quite interesting that, within a matter of days, the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary chose different candidates for both major parties.

It points out something that should be obvious: State-wide primaries don’t tell you how well a candidate would do in a national election. Iowa Democrats preferred Obama; New Hampshire Democrats preferred Clinton. Iowa Republicans preferred Huckabee; New Hampshire Republicans preferred McCain. It shouldn’t be a surprise that people in different regions have different concerns.

Putting too much stock in the results of one state-wide race makes as much sense as having Oregon voters select the next governor of Louisiana.

On a related note, what is it that causes so many fields to settle into the equivalent of a two-party system, with two major players (sometimes balanced, sometimes one dominant and one major alternative) and a bunch of also-rans? Republicans & Democrats, Windows & Macintosh, Internet Explorer & Firefox (and previously Netscape and Internet Explorer), Pepsi & Coca-Cola, etc.

Sure, humans like oppositions. It’s what makes the false dilemma fallacy work so well rhetorically. But why is either-or thinking so prevalent in some fields? And what’s different about fields in which many alternatives hold each other in balance? Car manufacturers, for instance, or movie studios, or cell phone manufacturers.

Cookie Fortune

Spotted on the front window of a Pei Wei Asian Diner in Lake Forest.

Now there’s an opening line!

I just spotted an advance fee fraud pitch in the spamtraps that started out with the greeting: Dear Trusting Friend.

I suppose the scammer could have meant “trusted friend,” which is still odd for an introduction, but makes a little more sense. Of course, if you take “trusting” to the extreme—i.e. gullible—you’ve just described the type of mark they’re looking for.

As a bonus: only two* of the ~270 Google hits for the phrase is not a references to 419-style letters using the same opening. People just don’t write things like that normally, which makes it a pretty good indicator.

*I didn’t look at all 270, but there were only 30 hits by the time Google filtered out duplicates. And most of those were clearly recognizable just from the excerpt on the search results pages. For the record, both of the two non-scam hits used it as a description, not a greeting.

Not so Random

I wanted to take a look at Firefox’s error page a few minutes ago, so I selected the address bar and hit some random keys. Due to a lack of sleep last night and a day of caffeine, I’d forgotten that if it can’t find a site with a given hostname (and still can’t find one through auto-complete), it automatically does a search for whatever you typed in.

I was rather surprised to see that a search for “klasjdf” turned up 508 hits.

As I think about it, it makes sense. Those letters are 7 of the 8 home keys on the QWERTY keyboard layout, and the eighth is not only a semi-colon, but home to a pinky. A touch typist hitting random keys might be inclined to just hit the ones that are already under his or her fingers. One per finger, leaving out the single non-letter, gets you exactly the 7 that I typed.

As for the letter order, I spot-checked a few permutations, the lowest of which was just 251 for klasdfj. Those with patterns scored higher: 18,400 for alskdjf (alternating left & right, working in from the edges to the center); 99,600 for asdfjkl (left-to-right).

I guess there must just be a lot of people typing random text. Infinite monkeying around, so to speak.

Chatspeak IRL

Went to the comic store on a late lunch today. As I got in the car, I saw the clerk locking the door. At 2:00, it seemed a bit early for closing, but then I noticed he had just hung up a sign that said:

AFK BRB

A bit cryptic to the uninitiated*, but probably completely understood by the target audience.

*And for the uninitiated, that’s “Away From Keyboard” and “Be Right Back,” common online abbreviations that have made the transition from IRC chat to modern IM. Though I suppose in this case it could be “Away From Kounter.” Oh, and IRL=”In Real Life.”

Flash: Changing of the Guard

Last week, Comic Book Resources broke the news that Mark Waid is leaving The Flash after his first story arc ends in #236, and Tom Peyer is taking over with #238. There’ve been a slew of interviews on the subject, and I wanted to get the links all in one place:

• Tom Peyer on taking over The Flash (CBR)
• Tom Peyer on taking over The Flash (Newsarama)
• Keith Champagne on his fill-in issue (Newsarama)
• Mark Waid on leaving the Flash (Newsarama)