Alden Bates' Weblog

Red Star Robot pointed out that Newsweek's website displays four international edition covers down the left hand side (you can see them at right - it's rearranged them to make them easier to post, but the image is linked to an unedited screen shot). While the three non-US editions all show a fellow holding a rocket launcher with the headline "LOSING AFGHANISTAN", the US version shows a women and her three children with the headline "My life in pictures". Interesting difference in focus there...

I've had a few occasions where people have used the MT search.cgi form to search for URLs. Since they've been the only hit I've gotten from that URL (no graphics or style sheets) I suspect it's the work of a spammer. Why though? Are there sites which are publishing the searches made through their search form (other than AOL that is...)? If so, the URLs are unlikely to be published linked.

Domain #1: COMLIVE.BIZ, which is registered to "Mesalina Poling", however the email address attached to that is an admin address for a domain registered to Maximilian Berkovich.

Domain #2: WANTISPYWARE.INFO, registered to "Alexey Andreychenko", Moskva, Tverskaya str., Russia. A search on the email address (rskin@mail.ru) gave me a forum where he's been spamming and the alias "Rukhmanov Sergey".

Also there was a case where someone searched for a <script> tag, presumably trying to inject javascript into my pages. The <script> tag called a javascript file on another domain which redirected the user to google, but could easily have redirected the user to any number of nasties.

When there's no parking spaces, be creative - use a traffic island!

So yesterday was Talk Like a Pirate day and Livejournal celebrated by changing things on their site to be piratey themed, like a user info head with an eyepatch. Because entering into the spirit of things is nice. But then there's always one who thinks this means "WE SUPPORT TERRORISTS". WTF?

I liked the suggestion that there should be a Talk Like a Ninja day (what do ninjas talk like?)

From the infamous Pendragon "Not the Tom Cruise Version" of War of the Worlds comes a Martian:

Which looks sadly like some sort of sprouting root vegetable. Despite the spindly appearance of its tentacles, it can actually walk on them, although it prefers to stay within its war machine. Sadly, this is by no means the worst visual effect in this LSD-soaked three-hour torture (viewings have been banned under the Geneva convention), which I may some day demonstrate by posting screen shots of the "good" bits..

Last week I took part in the shifting of A Teaspoon and an Open Mind from one web host to HostForWeb. I struck only two major problems.

1/ The backup format for MySQL databases which HostForWeb and the old web host used were completely different. The old host generated a gzipped tar of FRM, MYD, and MYI files, while HostForWeb expects a file in some format I didn't recognise. Fortunately I've struck a similar problem before, so I generated a file full of SQL queries and away I went.

2/ I discovered that if you tar and gz a directory structure in Windows XP, then decompress it again on Linux, all the directories are created without the executable attribute (On UNIX systems, directories must be set executable so you can use them, while Windows doesn't even have an executable attribute). I wrote a perl script to run through all the directories and set the executable bit.

Hopefully we won't need to do that again soon.

I thought it was about time I tried out the new Skycity cinemas in Queensgate (they're very big and they don't play 15 minutes of adverts before the movies like Hoyts does!) so I went to see DOA: Dead or Alive.

I haven't played the games the movie's based on, but I've seen enough of them to go in to it expecting lots of Mortal Kombat style fighting, with added T&A and a token plot, and that was pretty much exactly what I got. Robin Shou from the MK films even has a couple of cameos.

The token plot involves a dozen or so fighters being invited to an island to take part in a tournament. About halfway through, I realised that the mastermind controlling the competition was Eric "The Master" Roberts. This, plus the "plot twist", is all the plot you'll get. The movie is filled out with fight sequences and gratuitous T&A shots.

An entertaining if silly movie.

The Paged Archives Plugin is done! This superceeds the Paged Categories plugin - upgrading from one to the other is a simple matter of taking the old .pl file out, putting pagedarchives.pl in, and doing a search and replace on the tags in your category template. I'm using Paged Archives on my weblog now - only the categories and main index support though. My monthly archives don't tend to get all that large.

I've addressed pretty much everything raised in the previous discussion...

It took me a bit, but I've done some work on the Paged Categories plugin, and now it supports date archive types, and the main index as well. So I changed the name to Paged Archives. I think I've addressed everything in the comments section of the previous post! I even tried running it with Smart Rebuild, and I didn't run into any problems. I'll make up a page for it and make it available tomorrow.

One strange but related matter - I've noticed a number of people following the link from the SixApart plugin page seem to be converting the link URL to all-caps. I had to put in a redirect so they wouldn't get a 404 error. I can't see why this is happening, since the link on SixApart's site is all in lower case.