Category: Tech stuff
Test post
WordPress is being particularly recalcitrant. Testing editing. Testing adding a totally random link. …ok, looks like it was a db issue after all. Yay backups.
Public service announcement
If you are a spammer who likes to use any of my domains as spoofed addresses for your nasty little missives, causing me to have to pick my real email out of thousands of your horrid little bounce messages, I had better not ever find out where you live, because if I do I will […]
Snort
(The alt text was “You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback”)
It is not a “social graph”
Lately some of the more pretentious online folks have started calling those pretty pictures of how your Facebook profile (del.icio.us profile, LinkedIn profile, etc.) relates to other profiles a “social graph” instead of the previously-used “social network”. No, no, no. Graphs have variables. Networks have connections. What we have here are connections, not variables. There’s […]
Games!
I’m not much of a gamer. I’ve played various versions of Civ since about 1994, but not much else… the gunfire sounds in first-person shooters make me tense, and when I’m playing it’s not my desire to end up more tense. Still, seems to me it’s as good a way of spending time as any […]
I has a LOLcode
HAI I HAS A VAR ITZ 1 IM IN YR LOOP VISIBLE VAR IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 39 O RLY? YA RLY GTFO NO WAI UP VAR!!1 KTHX KTHX KTHXBYE (From here. Lolcode specs here.) Hmm, the code tag is malfunctioning. If it’s all left-justified to you, please pretend it’s properly indented.
Your password will expire in 11 days. Change it now?
A nice passage from the middle of a long (and recommended) Boxes and Arrows post: A good password is one that cannot be guessed. And there within lies the problem. What is difficult to guess is most likely difficult to remember. This problem is multiplied when you have many applications that require authentication, each with […]
Where’s my jetpack?
Wide-eyed children of the eighties watched in astonishment as Michael J. Fox (a.k.a. Marty McFly) shredded pavement on a hovering skateboard in Back to the Future Part II. The hoverboard was just like a skateboard, but with one crucial difference: no wheels. His pink and teal board had “magnetic” pads on the bottom and with […]
Self-actualized pit viper
(A found poem, comprising titles from my spam) I. A certain tenseness could be sensed in the atmosphere of the household I have read your treatise–a very useful work, but stupid The man from the centre realised that he couldn’t draw blood there either, so he went back to the subject of the tung So […]
Code! and Resist!
I’m at DrupalCamp, surrounded by a sea of (other) MacBook-toting geeks. There’s a conference of Marxists using the same space. A while ago they came in and carried off a couple of our tables, which was a tricky moment for the DrupalCamp organizers: “Oh yeah. I’m going to go tell the guy who doesn’t believe […]
I has a pifanee!!1!
I love seeing academic stuff tossed at online phenomena — like this sort of sociological/linguistic analysis of lolcats via I Can Has Cheezburger? Check out this chart: Ha! Harbls in a chart! The great thing about all of this is how we can see new languages forming out of a new medium, and since the […]
Cisco vs. Apple
From The Joy of Tech:
xkcd nails it again
Fie on large, brainless corporations
From User Friendly: Reminds me of this: which is spoofing this ad: Why should we pay to watch ads in already-expensive products? Or be forced to sit through nasty warnings about piracy on DVDs that, since we’re seeing the warning, clearly aren’t pirated? Unskippable ads in children’s DVDs drive me crazy too. Why go to […]
Death to spammers
Lately I’ve noticed a bunch of spam has come in with delete-receipt requests attached. Since most people’s email programs auto-process such requests, it’s an efficient and invisible way of marking live addresses for further spamming and/or sale. Sneaky! An old friend’s “death by spoon” concept could be applied to spammers with great public support, I […]
Geotagged photosharing on Flickr
This is a really cool bit of technology. Flickr recently added — or perhaps it’s always been there and I haven’t noticed — the ability to geotag photos. Being Flickr, they’re friendy and non-jargony about it. When you’re looking at one of your own photos, “place this photo on a map” appears on the right, […]
I am large, I contain multitudes
(Update: Ivor Tossell responded to my rather ill-mannered rant with a very gracious note, thus disproving the hypothesis that the Internet exists solely so we can all call each other asshats, and adding strength to the hypothesis that at this point Google runs the world. The conversation will continue.) This article in the Globe: Who […]
The camera works
New computer smell!
Sitting next to me on the table, her power light breathing quietly in the way that Macs do, is my shiny new black MacBook — my present from D, who obviously knows very, very well how to make me happy. She is a thing of beauty, this MacBook, and a few light-years ahead of the […]