I realized this morning what struck me as odd about the original crew of Moya: they’re not a crew, they’re a D&D party. Two warriors, a priest, a thief, and Ordinary Guy (who’d probably be classed as a bard). We started trying to categorize everyone else who shows up and realized that we’d need to know all the kits and extra subclasses to do it right. Then I thought of trying to determine alignments and couldn’t decide whether to use the D&D system or the TMNT system (which I barely know but seems to work better for actual people). It was at that point that Kelson said, “You know, it’d be easier to sort them into Hogwarts houses.” So we did. Continue reading
What’s in a User-Agent String?
Some people browse collections. I collect browsers. Mostly I just want to see what they’ll do to my web site, but I have a positively ridiculous number of web browsers installed on my Linux and Windows computers at work and at home, and I’ve installed a half-dozen extra browsers on our PowerBook.
One project I’ve worked on since my days at UCI was a script to identify a web browser. In theory this should be simple, since every browser sends its name along when it requests a page. In practice, it’s not, because there’s no standard way to describe that identity.
Actually, that’s not quite true. There is a standard (described in the specs for HTTP 1.0 and 1.1: RFC 1945 and RFC 2068), but for reasons I’ll get into later, it’s not adequate for more than the basics, and even those have been subverted. That standard says a browser (or, in the broader sense, a “user agent,” since search robots, downloaders, news readers, proxies, and other programs might access a site) should identify itself in the following format:
- Name/version more-details
Additional details often include the operating system or platform the browser is running on, and sometimes the language.
Now here are some examples of what browsers call themselves: Continue reading
Cancellations
When it comes to serial entertainment, everything will end at some point. I’m sure even Superman and Spider-Man comics will cease someday. A show can end before or after it’s run out of things to say, but it’s worst when it hasn’t finished speaking.
We’ve all seen shows that kept going long after, by any rights, they should have been cancelled. Is there any doubt that Voyager only lasted 7 years because it was Star Trek, on a studio-owned network, and the previous two Treks had also run that long? “The Far Side” and “Calvin and Hobbes” ended while the artists were at the top of their form. Compare that to “Peanuts,” whose last 20 years were hardly worth reading, or the new “Opus” from Berkeley Breathed (although it does have its moments). Continue reading
With near bowling ball!
It came from the spam box! (cue scream)
Offscreen voice: AAAAAAAAA!
This one (which scored well above the threshold, thanks to SURBL) was an image-only spam, which means I have no idea what it was actually advertising. (You have to go deep into the preferences and answer several “Yes, I know what I’m doing” questions before KMail will do something as risky as fetching images over the web when displaying your mail.)
Anyway, the title of this piece was “avocado pit 8 tenors.” Along with its single image, it contained a paragraph of distracting words, and it looks like they might actually have been trying to form sentences:
When recliner defined by corporation is dirt-encrusted, of particle accelerator write a love letter to light bulb for.turkey about guardian angel is mitochondrial.Indeed, near apartment building seek fetishist defined by skyscraper.And plan an escape from the dark side of her ocean.about blood clot laugh and drink all night with near bowling ball, but industrial complex beyond pee on coward inside.He called her Kirk (or was it Kirk?).
perseverant grumble quintillion culver flowchart brandywine
OK, it doesn’t have the literary greatness of “The Eye of Argon”, or even Zero Wing, but I suppose not everyone can.
Undead Spam!
OK, it’s time someone collected these comments from the SpamAssassin-Talk mailing list.
A week ago, Matthew Cline posted “Vowel Duplication Humor”
Subject: Regaain Your Yoooouth
Text: Hi Reyna, Reeeeeeegaiiin your yooooouth with Humaaaaaaan Grooooowth Hoormooooooone!
It’s like being spammed by ghosts. “Your dooOoooOOommmmed!! DoooOOoOOOoommed!!”
Today, in a thread describing the pattern as “stuck key” spam, Justin Mason said:
ha! I’ve been calling that “zombie spam” — you know, like “Braaaaaaaaaaiiiinssss….”
From the department of Huh?
Groklaw has posted an affidavit in the SCO vs. Daimler Chrysler case.
Essentially, SCO sent DC a letter saying “as per your license terms, send us a list of all the computers you’re using UNIX on.”
DC wrote back saying, “We haven’t used UNIX in seven years, so there is no list.”
And SCO sued them for not providing the list.
I’m not making this up, folks – this comes out of SCO’s own deposition!
Avert your eyes
I’ll be the first to admit that I go near-ballistic where cigarettes are concerned, from sprinting by smokers on a sidewalk to springing up to turn our window fan to exhaust mode. But, rude though I may be, I’m not as bad as the AMA. An R rating for smoking? Even when the smoker is an evil character, or when a would-be teen smoker lights up and doubles over coughing? What about random guy in the background on a busy street scene? How the hell are filmmakers going to deal with that?
Unfortunately, I have a guess, and it doesn’t involve parental permission cards. If this rating-system change does happen, the industry will know that any film involving smoking has no chance of hitting the PG-13 sweet spot for audience draw. Rather than making something like Forrest Gump inauthentic by leaving out the ubiquitious Vietnam cigarettes, they will instead add footage and sound that they may have held back on before, simply because they have that freedom under the measure. We will see films that are more violent and more full of sex and cursing where there is no cause for it, because there is nothing to lose. Imagine biographical movies about well-known smokers–Churchill, FDR, Einstein–done by John Woo, and you’ll have an idea what we’d be in for.
Now think of all the foreign films we import. Continue reading