Tuesday, June 10
Blog of the Day is Rob's Still in Japan:
As we got into the elevator to go to our hotel room, a Japanese family got in with us. The kindergarten-aged girl took one look at us, marched up to me and insistently held out her nametag. We weren't quite sure how to react.Make sure you check out his photo album too.I looked at her nametag, and blurted out the first thing that came to mind: Aa, Minako-chan, hajimemashite! The young girl's face broke out into a huge grin, and she danced back to her equally happy parents.
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08:53 AM
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I have to admit, these are good photos. (The snake is number 7 and the kitten number 11.) You can vote for your favourite, too.
(via The International Squirrel Conspiracy)
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08:29 AM
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Monday, June 09
Hey, it got my categories! Neat. Now let's see if it works...
It does indeed. Cool, very cool. w.bloggar: recommended by Pixy Misa. On the basis of three whole minutes of experience.
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09:55 PM
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Ow! Ow ow!
Last night my back was a bit stiff, which I put down to a long day at the computer fiddling with stylesheets. This morning when I woke up, it was OW.
Whoever designed the human spine needs a darn good kicking, that's what I say. I also say, OW.
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09:00 PM
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Susie of Practical Penumbra asks the question that's been on all our minds:
Ever tried to manage a movie theater on a Saturday night with only one concession register open and one of your employees stuck on the roof?Nooo... No, I must say that I haven't.
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08:20 AM
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Ambient Irony should look rather like this:
(Click for larger image.)
If it doesn't look like that, please leave a comment to let me know. Make sure you say what browser and operating system you are using.
Thanks!
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07:26 AM
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Over at Gweilo Diaries, Conrad
Something needs to be done and, in the end, the only solution may be an e-mail "postage fee".This suggestion has been floated before, and has been largely ignored because, for a variety of reasons, it is completely impractical.
First off, the Internet is global. Unless every country in the world charges an email postage fee, any country that doesn't charge such a fee will become an instant spam-haven. So the spammers will relocate their servers at minimal cost, and spam will continue unabated.
Second, no-one runs the email system. Anyone can run an email server; I run three myself. Indeed, I've written an email server myself. How are you going to enforce this postage fee, when the way email actually works is one (privately owned) server passing the message to another, with no "post office" of any sort involved?
Third, even if you passed legislation that all SMTP (the Internet mail protocol) transactions on the public internet incur a fee, and enabled law-inforcement agencies to go after the free-email offenders, the immediate result would be that people stop using SMTP and start using something else. It's quite easy to send email over an SSL-encrypted HTTP connection so that it looks just like a web page. Tax that.
Fourth, there are many, many useful public mailing lists that send out thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of messages a day. An email tax would kill them instantly to no good end.
Finally, the technological solutions do work. I have 600 spam emails in my Junk folder, trapped there by Mozilla's Bayesian filtering. Christopher Caldwell's article shows a basic lack of understanding of how Bayesian filters work:
The primary tool that exists today is the "Bayesian" filter, which seeks out words like "Viagra" and phrases like "online gambling." Spammers have long been able to evade such filters with subtle misspellings (TURN HER ON WITH HERBAL VIARGA!).In fact, this is precisely the problem that existed before Bayesian filtering, and which Bayesian filtering is designed to solve.
The key here is that spam looks like spam. With Mozilla, there's a training period where you need to tell the program this is spam and this is not spam. It quickly learns to recognise the characteristics of spam; not just individual words, but all the patterns found in both the headers and the body of the message, the same things that let you tell at a glance that a message is spam.
Which is not to say that I don't favour anti-spam legislation. Even when it's filtered out automatically, I'm still paying to download the spam in the first place. The right legislation would let spammer's internet connections be blocked promptly, preventing the flood of messages going out in the first place... And leading us back to my first point. But at least we won't have some ghostly beaureacracy monitoring our emails and extracting a penny a piece.
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03:24 AM
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It's up! I just made a tarball of my MT test site, scp'd it up to my server, unpacked it, fiddled with permissions and Apache options a bit, and viola!
If you're reading this in IE, though, it's not my fault!
Update: Then I ran into errors in MT, ended up deleting the whole thing, installing 2.64, reimporting all my entries, re-adding my plugins, fiddling with my templates and stylesheets to get them working again... It could have gone smoother.
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02:09 AM
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Sunday, June 08
Joy. A three hour outage doesn't even earn a mention on Status.Blogger.Com, it seems.
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11:42 AM
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Steven den Beste points to an "opinion piece" by Tom Utley in The Telegraph (the English one, not Sydney's Daily Terror):
"You know, Tom," this sage said to me, glancing up from his well thumbed copy of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, "we really ought to make Prince William Governor-General of Australia."There are a number of problems with this ill-conceived attempt at humour, not least of which is that it's not funny. The one I choose to point out, though, is that the Brits can't make anyone our Governor-General. We send the Queen a list, and she approves one of our choices. I believe that the last list we sent only had one name on it - not a particularly good choice, in my opinion; in any case, it's rather strongly hinted which of the names is to be approved.
Oh, and as for Tom's lady friend who failed to find love in the Land Down Under: There certainly are heterosexual males even in Sydney, but most of them are already hooked up with beautiful Australian women. If you can't find a man in England, dear, you're not going to do any better down here.
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10:41 AM
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