K-Squared Ramblings

Teppan Timing

Went out for teppan at 7. Figured we’d be home in plenty of time for Pushing Daisies. No, it’s teppan – we got home w/ 10 minutes to spare! #

Flash 500

Over at Speed Force: 500th post and a Flash drink #

Cupcake, Fedora & Benadryl

• Cupcake has arrived! (Android 1.5 update for my phone) Now I just need time to try out the new stuff. #
• Oh, fun: Fedora 11 #linux is now coming out on June’s Microsoft Patch Day. #
• Real Life Comics on allergy medication. Oh, yes, I’ve been there. #

Ridiculous!

• 8 Ridiculous Things Bigger Than NASA’s Budget. #
• Miniature cows? Didn’t I see this in a Jack in the Box ad? #
• *sigh* Wednesday was more of a Monday than Tuesday was. #

Browser Sniffing Strikes Again!

As the first major web browser to reach a double-digit version, Opera has been testing out alpha releases of version 10 for months now. One of the early problems they encountered was bad browser detection scripts that only looked at the first digit of a version number and decided that Opera 10 was actually Opera 1, and therefore too old to handle modern web pages.

After extensive testing, they’ve concluded that the best way to work around this is to pretend to be Version 9.80. From now on, all versions of Opera will identify themselves as “Opera/9.80″ with the real version appearing later in the user-agent string.

For example:

Opera/9.80 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.00

This is similar to the way all Gecko-based browsers identify themselves as Mozilla/5.0, then list the real browser name and version number later on, which makes me wonder why they didn’t just stick with that increasingly irrelevant prefix — though I suppose any scripts looking specifically for Opera versions might have still picked up Opera/10 later on in the ID.

It’ll be some time before Firefox or Safari runs into this issue, but with Internet Explorer 8 in wide release, you have to wonder…what will Microsoft do when they get to IE 10?

Your Daily Dose of Iron

Those must be some big pies!

Three Fads in One!

It’s not quite at the level of ranch-flavored clear toothpaste with oat bran, but I’ve seen spam for all of them

Okay, maybe not for granola.

Netbooks and Robots And Flash (Forward), Oh, My!

• Argh! Tiger has a $200 netbook. That’s right on the edge of “I’ll regret not buying this” but I keep reminding myself I don’t REALLY need it #
• Terminator made $13.37 million on Thursday. Seems appropriate for a movie about robots and AI. #
• Aw, crud. ABC has scheduled Flash Forward for Thursdays at 8, opposite Bones. I foresee a DVR in our future. Or maybe just Hulu. #

2000

Hard to believe it, but this is the 2,000^th post on this blog. Yeah, I know — crazy.

In celebration of this milestone, here’s looking back at…

The Year 2000

I was a recent college graduate, while Katie was finishing up her last year at UCI. We’d been dating for a little over a year. I’d started working as a web designer just before Y2K, only to be thrust into the role of sysadmin when our previous sysadmin pulled up stakes and moved to the other side of the country.

Travel

In March, Katie and I took a trip to the San Francisco Bay Area to check out UC Berkeley as a potential grad school and visit San Francisco and Monterey. (I’ve got one photo from that trip online.) In August we went north again to attend a friend’s wedding near Santa Rosa, and a few weeks later, Katie was a bridesmaid in our friends Stacy and Jim’s wedding.

We went camping with UCI’s Campuswide Honors Program that April in the Angeles National Forest (in the mountains north of Los Angeles) — you can check out funny quotes from that trip. We may have hit the Renaissance Faire that spring (we definitely went in 1999 and 2001). In July we went with Katie’s family to the San Diego Zoo, and met up with a bunch of friends at Disneyland in November.

Sometime that summer I went on a company trip to do whitewater rafting on the south fork of the American River. It was a lot of fun…even though I fell out of the raft on a Class III rapid with the cheerful name of Satan’s Cesspool. It happened to be the spot where the rafting company set up their camera, so somewhere I have a series of pictures of our raft heading through the rapid while I lean farther and farther out until all you can see is a hand. (I was fine — I just swallowed some river water and rode the rapid like it was a water slide, and they picked me up when the water calmed down.)

I definitely went to Comic-Con International that summer, and we both went to LosCon in November. That was the year Katie dressed up as a Centauri (Babylon 5), and we have quotes from LosCon as well!

Cyberspace (Yeah, people still called it that)

I bought the hyperborea.org domain name in January and had my entire website moved off of the UCI Artslab servers by February. That included Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning, nearly four years old at the time, and Les Misérables: The Complete Multilingual Libretto…which, after nearly five years online, netted my my first (and so far only) takedown notice just one month after I moved it from .edu to .org. I still think there has to have been a connection.

Meanwhile, Katie moved her website from GeoCities to Xoom…which shortly thereafter became NBCi, then disappeared entirely, and she set up shop on hyperborea.org.

Living Situation

In June, after about a year living with my parents post-graduation, I took my saved-up money and moved into an apartment in Lake Forest, where I never quite finished unpacking. (I never picked up a couch, either, just folding borrowed chairs.) When Katie graduated, she moved out of student housing and back in with her parents, and I racked up a lot of miles on my car driving back and forth to Downey.

In December, Katie moved into my apartment for a few weeks while she looked for a job, and we looked for a larger apartment. We officially moved in together during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. During a December heat wave, naturally.

Update (August 2009): I’ve been cleaning up the “Line Items” Twitter digests, and ended up just deleting some that were redundant. So technically, this is no longer the 2,000^th item in the archive, though it was at the time it was posted.

Standing on the Freeway at Midnight

Here’s something funny that happened last weekend.

We were driving back from Los Angeles Saturday night around 11:30pm. You might think at that hour traffic would be relatively light. Not so: it was Saturday night, after all, and the route we were taking (101 south to 5 and onward) went straight through Downtown LA. By the time we merged onto the 5 we’d already been delayed by several slowdowns from accidents. It was a bit past midnight when traffic just…stopped.

We waited, figuring it was another round of stop-and-go traffic. And waited. A fire truck quietly worked its way along the right shoulder. After a few minutes, I put the parking brake on.

But the funny part was the driver of the car next to us.

He looked like he was probably around 20, and was driving an SUV with a sunroof. After a few minutes of dead stop, he opened the sun roof — this was midnight, remember — and climbed up on top of his car to see what was going on.

Then he got back down, opened the door, and walked around to the back of his truck so he could get his camera…and his guitar.

Next step: He handed the camera to his friend in the passenger seat, then walked out in the middle of the lane to pose by the car in front of him, giving a double thumbs-up sign and a goofy grin. As far as we could see, he didn’t actually end up playing the guitar.

I expect the photo is probably on Facebook or Myspace by now…somewhere.

All I’ve got are some blurry photos of the dashboard and the cars ahead.

Oh, and the traffic break? Not surprisingly, it turned out to be an accident. Once we started moving again, we passed an area where several lanes were blocked off…and a car was propped up on its side.

Retroactive Robots Exclusion

In going through to-do items in my mailbox, I stumbled on this post which I thought I had posted here, but realized I hadn’t. It may be out of date, but it may prove interesting, at least to someone.

I recently [edit: August 2006] discovered exactly how the Wayback Machine deals with changes to robots.txt.

First, some background. I have a weblog I’ve been running since 2002, switching from B2 to WordPress and changing the permalink structure twice (with appropriate HTTP redirects each time) as nicer structures became available. Unfortunately, some spiders kept hitting the old URLs over and over again, despite the fact that they forwarded with a 301 permanent redirect to the new locations. So, foolishly, I added the old links to robots.txt to get the spiders to stop.

Flash forward to earlier this week. I’ve made a post on Slashdot, which reminds me of a review I did of Might and Magic IX nearly four years ago. I head to my blog, pull up the post… and to my horror, discover that it’s missing half a sentence at the beginning of a paragraph and I don’t remember the sense of what I originally wrote!

My backups are too recent (ironic, that), so I hit the Wayback Machine. They only have the post going back to 2004, which is still missing the chunk of text. Then I remember that the link structure was different, so I try hitting the oldest archived copies of the main page, and I’m able to pull up the summary with a link to the original location. I click on it… and I see:

Excluded by robots.txt (or words to that effect).

Now this is a page that was not blocked at the time that ia_archiver spidered it, but that was later blocked. The Wayback machine retroactively blocked access to the page based on the robots.txt content. I searched through the documentation and couldn’t determine whether the data had actually been removed or just blocked, so I decided to alter my site’s robots.txt file, fire off a request for clarification, and see what happened.

As it turns out, several days later, they unblocked the file, and I was able to restore the missing text.

In summary, the Wayback Machine will block end-users from accessing anything that is in your current robots.txt file. If you remove the restriction from your robots.txt, it will re-enable access, but only if it had archived the page in the first place.

(Originally posted as a Slashdot comment.)

On Ebay: Angel DVDs, Tori Amos CDs, and a Star Trek T-Shirt

I hope you won’t mind me using this blog for a little self-promotion. We’re selling off some duplicate CDs and DVDs, plus a Star Trek T-shirt from the Paramount panel at Comic-Con International 2007.

• DVDs: Angel Seasons 1-5 (individual season boxed sets)
• CDs: Tori Amos “A Piano” boxed set (massive 5-disc archive of hits, rarities, alternate mixes, etc.)
• T-Shirt: Star Trek (XL) from the new J.J. Abrams movie. Handed out at San Diego Comic-Con in 2007, still has the original 12-25-08 release date on the back. It’s never been worn.

Here’s the link to all the auctions. Most of them run through Sunday, May 24.

Buy a Sports Bar!

Somehow I don’t think that’s the kind of bar they’re talking about…

Line Items for 2009-05-20

• 83 copies of the same fake-Facebook spam sent to the same spamtrap address via botnet in one day seems a wee bit excessive. #
• “rm spam” – if only it were that easy. #
• Mozilla Launches Jetpack #

Crossover Names

Have you ever run into a name that you can’t help associating with a completely different context? Like when people realize that one guy in Office Space is named Michael Bolton? Or when you look at “AD&D,” and instead of “Accidental Death and Dismemberment” your first thought is “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons?”

Yeah. Especially in IKEA.

For example, here we have Harry Potter’s favorite instructor in Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts, magically transformed into a set of venetian blinds.

And here’s the thief who ends up as one of Blake’s 7 on the Liberator…as a set of sheets. (Nine of them, no doubt, to the wind.)

And it’s not just IKEA. Robin of the Teen Titans has his criminal counterpart in this bottle of wine:

Or the older daughter of Eddard Stark, playing music instead of the Game of Thrones.

So, what good crossover names have you seen?