Alden Bates' Weblog

And I thought a box set containing all 10 Star Trek movies was excessive, Amazon currently have listed The Ultimate Star Trek Collection, featuring: all ten movies, the original series, the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. A steal at only $2,499.99 (yes, that's American dollars).

I actually wondered how much the postage would be on that little lot to New Zealand. You'd think the postage on 212 DVDs would be astronomical, but Amazon calculated it for me as... *drumroll* $6.48. They might need to revise that figure..!

Of course, I'm not actually going to buy this - it's incomplete! They didn't include the animated series. ;)

I suddenly drew a connection the other day... In the new Doctor Who series, the Doctor's sonic screwdriver glows blue when in use. That isn't, however, the first time a sonic screwdriver which glows has been used - in 1996 Tom Baker came to New Zealand and recorded some adverts here (The results of which can be downloaded from my Doctor Who page). The longer of the five adverts featured the use of the sonic screwdriver, which as you can see below (just) emitted a beam of green light...

I win a prize for Ultimate Geekery!

When it's a usenet post.

I have a search feed set up on BlogLines because I like to keep track of what people are saying about a certain celebrity I like. Mostly this works, except for a while last month when a Smallville news site added her name to an item in their news feed, which was updated daily with the content of the entire news page (therefore giving me the same info over and over for a couple of weeks). Some people really need to read up on how rss is supposed to work, but I digress.

On Usenet, which is also accessable via Google Groups, there's a certain newsgroup which shall go unnamed (though no doubt some of the people reading this will know which one) which I unsubscribed from a while back for two reasons: 1) it was largely full of trolls, and 2) a moderated, more-friendly alternative newsgroup was set up to cover the same basic subject.

This is where BlogLines comes in. Apparently BlogLines also carries feeds of Usenet groups, including the one I mentioned above. This means I also get subjected to the aforementioned trolls whenever one of them mentions the search terms for my search feed. Unfortunately there isn't any way around this, as BlogLines have no way to exclude certain feeds from being included in the search results (I suggested this could be handy a while back, when I was having the problem with the Smallville site).

This is more my problem than anything, but this is my weblog, so I thought I'd whine about it here a bit. :)

Normally I don't like promoting breaking the law, but if you want to hear a CD controlled by Sony's copy protection it's safer to download it from the Internet.

Via Antiwesley:

Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far

Using a Sony copy protected audio CD may install hidden software without your knowledge. Attempting to remove the software (which is extremely difficult) may result in the non-functioning of devices on your system. The installed software could easy be used by viruses and other attackers to hide files from antivirus software, allowing them to go undetected.

This is additionally surprising to me, as in October last year, Sony announced they were abandoning copy protection on their releases. I guess they changed their minds, huh?

On Amazon, the reviews for Van Zant's album are currently expressing their disgust. Sony have already released a patch to "unhide" the installed malware. But this doesn't change the fact that it's installed without the user's knowledge, and obviously if the user doesn't know it's there, they don't know they need a software pach. And I see nothing about them providing software to actually remove it.

See also: BBC News: Sony slated over anti-piracy CD, TechWeb: Security-spooked Users Slap Sony CD On Amazon.

The end is nigh! Mass hysteria! Cats and dogs living together!

*goes to start on the cannibalism*

Seriously, WTF?

eFiction was inherited from the previous management of Teaspoon when it was taken over and I volunteered to act as co-techie. Unfortunately there are many places where eFiction is lacking, and one of those is error recovery.

For instance, if the SQL server is down, rather than fail gracefully, you get errors all over the site saying things like:
Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/whoficco/public_html/index.php on line 35

Which doesn't look very nice, and doesn't tell the user what the problem actually is. This is because there's no test to see if a database query succeeded before going ahead and using the result set.

Equally not very nice is the fact that if, when someone edits a story, eFiction can't open the file to write the changed text to, it fails silently. Yes, it discards the changes and cheerfully gives the user a "Story successfully changed!" message, despite the fact that it hasn't! As this will cause data loss, I've fixed our version to display an error message instead, so the user can at least press the back button and save their changes externally before contacting us so we can fix the problem on the server.

On a more festive note, Brad has an LJ entry going with cool pictures of Halloween pumpkins.

From the very outer reaches of the Outer Limits comes a new fear! To be precise, I was watching an episode of The Outer Limits titled "Don't Open 'Til Doomsday". In the episode, people are sucked into a small box (it's bigger on the inside) by the alien within who seeks to destroy the world!

The alien looks like this:

I've got to hand it to the designer on that show for designing an actual literal crap monster. I'm not entirely sure why they chose to gave it that huge lopsided grin though - makes it look more like it's looking for a hug than seeking to annihilate the universe.

[Previously on Dodgy Alien Theatre: Thing]

My catch-all email box for tetrap.com seems to have exploded with spam. Usually it has a couple of dozen emails for people at tetraps.com, where the sender missed the S off, plus some hopeful spam sent to the webmaster address. But when I checked today, there were 170 messages, mostly spam, directed at one Fidel Yzaguirre. Google and Yahoo have two results for that name, but neither is of much help. The email address in question doesn't come up in a search on either engine...

Who is this mysterious Fidel Yzageirre, and why do dozens of spammers think he has a valid email address on my domain? Strange!

I only noticed a while ago what it said along the bottom of the Hellbender's licence plate...

Yeah, so I'm slow. Wonder what the significance of the 675 is...

Level: ONS-Maelstrom
Type: Onslaught
Download Size: 6 MB
Rating: 9/10
Downloaded from: Unreal Tournament Files (File Front)

Description: A series of gentle plataeus littered with nodes.

Continue reading "UT Review: Maelstrom"