Alden Bates' Weblog

While waiting for the next episode to screen (two weeks has never been such a long time), I've been musing. Spoilers ensue for The Doctor's Daughter below!

Continue reading "Doctor Who and Shipping"

I updated my copy of AVG to version 8 recently, and discovered that they've added a while bunch of new features. One of these is LinkScanner. When you do a google/yahoo/msn search, LinkScanner inserts little icons into the search results to let you know if the site the link goes to is likely to be hazardous to your computer. This is pretty cool. Unfortunately it tests the pages by actually downloading them (and any javascript files they reference) so I suspect it's going to be unusable on a dialup connection. You can't turn it off, or AVG complains that you've turned off component.

There's a thread about it on Webmaster World, wherein it's shown that LinkScanner is actually quite easy to spot, so it would be quite easy to fool. Not only that, but it only scans search results, so once you go to a site, you're on your own.

The new GUI looks very slick though.

Surprise! Coca Cola has a new energy drink out on the market (apparently e² didn't last?) called Relentless. It comes in a 440ml dark-brown can with the name written up the side in a fancy Germanic font. Some of the letters have three-pronged grappling hooks hanging off them, and there's a faint image of a head made of muscle on one side. I suspect that from the can size and colour scheme, it's aimed at competing with Demon Energy.

Relentless has a sort of sweet but tangy taste which is close to resembling most of the other energy drinks out there. Hey, CC, why don't you make an energy drink which tastes like Coke? You could call it "Coke Plus" or something.

Random thought: why is it petrol stations (or gas stations for the yanks) sell matches and cigarettes? Fire + petrol is bad.

Continued from last time, but obviously covering episodes 4 through 6. Spoiler warnings are, of course, in effect.

Continue reading "Doctor Who Series 4 (Part 2)"

Iron Man! The best Marvel comics movie in, ooo, a while at least. It's fun, has great characters, a plot relatively uncluttered by clichés, and should be relatively kid-safe. Spoilers follow.

Continue reading "Friday Night Movie: Iron Man"

I'm finding that the new error 403 graphic (it appears when people try to leech my bandwidth by remote-linking to my graphics) for this site is proving to be quite effective at discouraging bandwidth leeching. I think it's the middle bit.

If only there were some way to apply this technique to email spam...

Previously: Even better hotlink protection, More on "Even better hotlink protection"

Online today - TSV 57!

After the news of the recovery of missing episode The Lion in TSV 56, the next issue contained the full story of its recovery, as well as the more off-beat experiences of Neil Lambess in his new regular column The Life and Times of Neil Lambess.

The other major item was the printing of Pilots of the Deep. Parts 1 and 2 had been printed in TSV 12 and 14 back in 1989 before the original artist, Mark Roach, had lost interest. Ten years later, David Ronayne and Peter Adamson collaborated on a conclusion and it was printed (along with the first two parts) in TSV 57. There was even a behind the strip article about the creation of Pilots of the Deep. I wonder if Mark Roach has seen it. :)

Also in this issue, Pex anticipates The Juggernauts, and he and the Karkus team up to fight a giant headless chicken. Yes!

Next time, Beyond the Sofa!

Previously: Resurrection of the Daleks
See also: the write-ups by Jamas and Paul

Via indefatigable42:

It occurred to me that I'm not seeing much comment spam here recently. In fact, they don't even appear to be trying any more. The last spam which SpamLookup caught was on the 25th of March. Maybe they got discouraged by my security measures. Maybe I'm not writing about stuff which spammers typically look for. Maybe I'm not posting enough.

Or maybe spammers are moving on to hacking sites and inserting links that way. Most of the bad hits I've been getting lately are from people trying to hack my site using PHP exploits. Of course, I don't use any PHP applications here, so they get a nice error in response. Judging by the URLs they hit, they found this site by searching for sites which mention PHP. On the bright side, so long as they're making futile attempts to hack my site, they have less bandwidth to use on trying to hack less secure sites.

So is comment spam on the decrease, or am I just lucky? It'll be interesting to see if blogging about it causes an increase in attempts...

Back in Y2K or so, Jim Mortimore wrote a Doctor Who novel called Campaign. At the time, BBC books were publishing Doctor Who books from a wider range of people, so he submitted it to them. It was rejected. Campaign, you see, didn't so much push the limits of the genre as kick the limits over and then run away giggling. It's a veritable mind-bender of a story.

At the time, the author chose to self-publish the novel, and the other day, it went up on the NZDWFC site as an eBook. It's available primarily as a PDF file (although there's also the option to email the author regarding a hard copy) and not in HTML format like the other eBooks, mainly because it would be really difficult to do.

The crux is, the book is now available to an audience I suspect is wider than that which it would have had had it actually have been published back in 2000. :)

Read Campaign here.