Web
Yeah, what he said
Not the bits about Sony, although I agree on that as well. I haven’t much liked them since they discontinued my favorite portable CD player (the one that had every function clearly separated onto different buttons).
No, skip down about halfway. Look for the word “Metafilter”. I grovel in praise of his ability to sum up what it is that I hate about that site. I visit often to find amusing links, but the moment I spot one of their typically rabid Leftie front-pagers, MEGO. There’s no point in replying, because it’s crystal clear that they simply wouldn’t comprehend that a reasonable person could legitimately disagree. You must be a troll, a freeper, or some other convenient label; you can’t actually be serious.
Notes:
- MEGO - My Eyes Glaze Over
- Freeper - as far as I can tell, this means "anyone to the Right of Michael Moore"
Who thought this was a good idea?
I like Dean Martin. I picked up one of his albums on the iTunes Music
Store recently, and I’m glad to see that Capitol Records is
actively promoting
him once again. But what eagle-eyed halfwit thought that “light
gray on white” was an appropriate color scheme for body text,
especially at a size as small as 9px?
I apologize in advance to anyone who follows that link. Especially anyone old enough to remember Dino.
Munitions go boom
Well, actually it’s just the DNS server, which I have no control over. It looks like the caches started timing out around midnight. IP address for munitions.com is 209.81.13.66.
HTML forms suck
It didn’t shock me to discover this, but it was one of those things about the web that I hadn’t really played with seriously. Then I started trying to expose all of the parameters for my random web colors page, so people could tinker with the color-generation rules.
Not only did the form add 24K to the page size, it increased the rendering time by about an order of magnitude.
Color combinations for web sites
I’ve stumbled across two interesting tools recently. The first is the Mac application ColorDesigner, which generates random color combinations with lots of tweakable knobs. The second is Cal Henderson’s online color-blindness simulator, designed to show you how your choice of text and background colors will appear to someone with color-deficient vision.
I decided to try to merge the two together into a single web page, using Mason and Cal’s Graphics::ColorDeficiency Perl module. It’s not done yet, but it’s already fun to play with: random web colors.
Right now, the randomizer is hardcoded, but as soon as I get a chance, I’ll be adding a form to expose all of the parameters.
Sanitizing Apache with PF
About 45 minutes elapsed between the moment that I first turned this server on and the arrival of the first virus/worm/hacker probes. It was obvious that most of them were looking for Windows-based web servers, so they were harmless to me.
Still, I like to review the logs occasionally, and the sheer volume of this crap was getting annoying. Later, when I raised munitions.com from the dead, I discovered that it was getting more than 30,000 hits a day for a file containing the word “ok”. Worst of all, as I prepare to restore my photo archives, I know that I can’t afford to pay for the bandwidth while they’re slurped up by every search engine, cache site, obsessive collector, Usenet reposter, and eBay scammer on the planet.
Enter PF, the OpenBSD packet filter.
By their threats shall ye know them
Hey, what’s a web site without fraudulent threats of legal action? There’s a guy out there who has bullied and blustered his way into a business running pay web sites for Playboy models under various names, primarily “Alpha Interactive” (no links provided; after all, my goal here is to convince you to spend your money elsewhere).
This is old news, but I couldn’t resist the urge to yank his chain by reposting his threats and explaining his motive in making them.
trollbridge
Teresa Nielsen Hayden of Making Light has a charming way of dealing with obnoxious commenters: she disemvowels them. This seems to be far more effective than simply trying to delete their comments or ban their IP addresses. She apparently does it by hand, in BBEdit. Bryant liked the idea enough to make a plugin that automatically strips the vowels out of comments coming from a specific set of IP addresses.
I don’t have any comments to deal with at the moment, but the concept amused me, and I wanted to start tinkering with the guts of MT, so I quickly knocked together a plugin that allows you to mark individual entries for disemvoweling. While I was at it, I included another way to molest obnoxious comments.
