Suddenly, and I mean less than two minutes after I had used it successfully, the offline blogging tool I’ve been using forever started throwing XMLRPC errors. Support for it was abandoned years ago, so I haven’t looked for a replacement until now.

MarsEdit let me submit an edit to the previous post, so let’s see if it makes a new one successfully, and to double-check the encoding, I’ll insert some kanji: 漢字.

Now for a picture below the fold:

more...

My family’s coming to town for Christmas, so I went looking for things to do and places to eat. The most amusing thing to show up was this Freedom Festival, which turned out to be an ad for Diaz Brothers Bail Bonds.

This is not a hand mixer.

Amusing QA error on a maid-cafe web site; the title and keywords section of the page header are error messages of the form: “Warning: mysql_fetch_array() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /var/www/html/www_maid/S/wp-content/themes/maid2013/functions.php”.

This is the sort of thing that announces to the world, “Hi, we’re clueless PHP users; please try to crack our site”.

Also, I have to say that while I understand what they were trying for with the maidreamin.com domain, my initial parse of the URL was a bit… anal.

Please don’t tell me why the results of a search for the Bluray edition of The Seven Samurai included the Japanese edition of Kick-ass 2.

Even more baffling is the import of the Samurai Champloo box set that showed up in the results, for more than ten times the price of the US release. The product description suggests that this isn’t a case where the Japanese set had significant extras:

Draw a rare journey of Foo daughter　of cafe Liquidambar genius swordsman Jin era drama action animation! Wild boy infinite Shinichiro Watanabe "Cowboy Bebop" and "Animatrix" time as director! 3-Disc Blu which recorded all 26 episodes -ray BOX.

Your automatic metadata matching system is complete crap. Just thought I’d mention that.

So, the music video named Shy Boy by the girl-group Secret got matched to a 1931 movie named Local Boy Makes Good. Similarly, Hyuna’s Bubble Pop became the action/comedy film Knight And Day. Hoot, by Girls Generation, became the 2006 children’s film Hoot, and their song Gee became a Jane Fonda movie called Georgia Rule. Worst of all, perhaps, Leonard Nimoy singing Bilbo Baggins became the animated version of The Hobbit. In all of these cases, a four-minute video is being mistaken for a full-length ripped movie, based on some fairly vague keywords, and there’s no easy way to undo it; you basically have to start over to get rid of the downloaded image and phony metadata.

What I want to know is, has some poor soul been maintaining epgparser all this time, or did they finally break free from Andrew’s giant hairy Perl script?

(and when I say “hairy”, I mean “had to run as root so it could newfs file systems, and no one could ever figure out why it needed 4GB of RAM and ran for 26 hours a day”)

Looks like they’re selling performance-enhancement pills for men. I was hoping it was something different, like the “gyaku enjo” ads that have started popping up again in my Japanese spam.

From:  [비ㅡ아ㅡ클ㅡ리ㅡ닉]
Subject: 정품. 저렴하고 빠르게판_매합니다...[비ㅡ아ㅡ클ㅡ리ㅡ닉]
 
♣　사이트접속후 관리자에게 실시간 문의도가능합니다.
♣　당일배송을 원칙으로 합니다
♣　FDA허가된 상품이되 처방전없이 구매가능합니다
♣　건강한 性생활을 드립니다.
 
♣　묶음상품은 더욱 저렴하게 드립니다..^^