kaioa.com

Spaaaaaam

Usually spam comments are easy to detect. It's either some canned text (which is used everywhere) or a pile of quickly assembled semi-nonsense sentences generated by a little script (or even a cheap chat AI). That stuff is very easy to identify since it's either blatantly obvious, pure garbage, or completely off-topic.

Just a few minutes ago something different slipped through the recently installed filter. At first glance it looked pretty innocent:

Stealthy spam (in light not-published-yet-pink)

9 kinds of vision

This is an extension for Inkscape which simulates 9 different types of vision. Again it's a color effect and therefore it can be found over at Effects->Color->Color Blindness after installation.

Supported modes:

• normal trichromatic color vision
• protanopia red-green blindness (no red cones)
• deutanopia red-green blindness (no green cones)
• tritanopia blue-yellow blindness (no blue cones)
• typical achromatopsia (no cones; rod monochromat)
• protanomaly (anomalous red cones)
• deutanomaly (anomalous green cones)
• tritanomaly (anomalous blue cones)

Case in Point

Caching is a very hot topic these days. Aggregation of scripts and style sheets, compression, setting Expires and Last-Modified headers. All of that is about improving loading times and reducing the amount of traffic. It's pretty smart stuff and it works pretty well.

There are always two cases to consider: a user with a non-primed cache and a user with a primed cache. If the cache is primed, the user will need to download far less files, because most of it is already cached. Scripts are the same, style sheets are the same, lots (or even all) images are the same, and maybe even the document itself is the same. Well, that's the deal basically.

Yesterday I noticed something odd, however. I visited some page I visited just the day before and all those images were reloaded. I also observed this on a lot of other websites I visit regularly. Of course I checked the headers and everything looked fine. Pretty odd. Especially if you consider that I already ramped up the cache size to 150mb ages ago.

Speed - we need more of it

Back in the Days

Do you remember those days you started programming? Back then all I had was a Commodore 16, one and a half bad books, and BASIC of all things. The really awkward kind with numbers in front. Incrementing by 10 every line in case you need to insert something later on. Drawing a Sinus curve took bloody ages. You could literally see how it was plotted pixel by pixel.

Later at school I had some C lessons. I liked C a lot. It was fast enough to do draw some odd effects in real time and the code looked so much better than C16 BASIC. Well, big deal. But back then it was truly the holy grail for me. I also got introduced to that odd algorithm stuff. Bubble sort. Gasp.

Quake2 running in Firefox 2.x

No Java

There aren't much details out there about Quake Live (formerly known as Quake Zero) yet. One of the few things that were made public a few months ago was that it won't be written in Java (nor ActionScript... haha... very funny). Some people were really happy about that. Java is slow after all, right? Even Carmack himself said so.

While it's true that Carmack said "Java is really slow"^[1], he didn't mean Java in general but J2ME. And he's of course right - J2ME is slow and it really is a platform of pure horror. There are simply too many differences between all those handsets. Different resolutions, color depths, key layouts, features, extensions, glitches, processing speed, memory, and whatever else might get in your way - it gets in your way with J2ME. I salute to the bravery of everyone who's doing that stuff for a living.

I got a lot of comment spam recently. Since comments are moderated here for legal reasons, no one ever noticed. But boy it was annoying. By the looks of it it was some botnet. Random IPs spread across the world, posting the same kind of rank pushing junk over and over again.

It was some new kind of spam using Google Notebook as shell site. That is they spam links to a specific notebook page which in turn links to their page(s). The reason for doing so is twofold: a) Google has a high rank (no matter which search engine you use) and b) the ranking goes up if it's referenced from a high ranked site. So, it's basically the same old deal just with a booster on top.

In order to get rid of this nuisance I wrote a small module, which hopefully shouldn't get in your way. While there are several 3rd party anti spam modules, I decided to write a custom solution because they usually last longer. A single website simply isn't worth the hassle.

Crispy glyphs

Some of you might have seen FontStruct over at Slashdot. It was at the front page yesterday or the day before. The usual thing happened of course - it got slashdotted to death. Fortunately it's back online. It's time to give it a shot.

In a nutshell: FontStruct is a web-based font creation tool. Apart from a few minor issues the Flash-based interface is perfect. It's surprisingly awesome in fact. Well, it's not intended to be used for professional font creation; it doesn't handle kerning or hinting for example. There aren't even any vector tools (all you get is a set of building bricks). But all those things aren't really necessary for less-serious/pixel fonts.

There shall be structure

Benefits

Hierarchical structures are always rather hard to explain with words alone. You've to identify the key items and then lay out their relation to each other - two at a time. This can take a couple of sentences and you'll also have to carefully check if everything is at the right place.

But it doesn't stop there. The worst part is probably that every user will have to parse your explanation very carefully. Of course that only adds a few seconds to the whole process, but those seconds accumulate. Your thousands (or even millions) of users might have done something more important during that time. They could have picked their nose for example, which is an activity many people enjoy more than reading documentation.

Yes, it's true. Reading documentation is really that exciting. So, we really should try everything possible to make it as quick and pain free as possible.

This should be easy, right? Well, for reasons unknown to me it isn't. Win2k/98/95 got two sliders: one for sensitivity and one for acceleration. This was great. This was easy. WinXP, however, assumes you always want to use some degree of acceleration - unless you're using the lowest sensitivity setting, which is quite frankly unusable. This is really irritating - especially if you consider that people who disable acceleration typically use a rather high sensitivity. There is only one slider which controls both settings and there is a check box, which can be used to "improve" the sensitivity... whatever that means.

Why am I writing about this anyways? There should be zillions of pages about that topic, shouldn't it? Well, while that's true all I saw so far only contain some nonsense. And they all copy&pasted from each other. Gee. That really helps.

Mmm... crispy sectors

It's toast

The weekend started with a premonition. Well, maybe "bad omen" is more accurate. Some rather bad SQL errors showed up, but they were sorted out quickly. The next day the site disappeared. "403 - forbidden", it said. That's just great. Did I already mention that I'm amazingly unlucky these days?

Page 403s, FTP says the password is wrong, but email works. So, I waited for the phone support hours to start. Gee. Fast forward about an hour and I got some techy to talk to. Apparently some HDD failed, it got replaced, some files were wiped (well, all of them - except for some now empty directories), and some access rights were nuked as well.