Alden Bates' Weblog

Most of the traffic to the main part of my site, the www part, seems to be coming at the moment from people looking for LiveJournal icons. I can't think why that would be. :P Also, people really dig the Dalek mood icons. I still prefer the K9 icons, myself. But, like, the average hits to my site keeps going up by the week.

When I started on Host For Web in January '04, my site was using around 1.5GB per month. It's currently eating through 4GB per month... Fortunately my account allows for up to 50GB per month.

• Popular Weblog posts: cmblineext02.dll, My Crappy PC, TabMix, A wee wireless networking question, and The Hotel rant.

My favourite spammers, the Bulgarians switched from comment spam attempts to trackback spam attempts. They didn't notice when I renamed the trackback script and blocked all access attempts to the old one. Apparently they've given up as of the 29th, and I've had very few spam attempts since.

• Popular NZDWFC archive items: Image: Daleks playing computer games, Review: Build the TARDIS, eBook: Who Killed Kennedy, I Exterminated JNT, Notes from a Who Island

Sadly I think most of the people who googled in to the second item were wanting to build a real one, and #1 is probably people searchign for info on the new series. :P June also saw record traffic to the NZDWFC pages due mostly to the build-up to the Prime screenings, and the exposure this got the site in places like This Week in Doctor Who, which is posted to the newsgroup and several high-profile Who sites. Also the Prime Press Pack went up fairly late in the month, but still managed to get into the top 25 pages with some 143 hits. Himpressive.

• Popular music items: Era, The Mass, Daft Punk, Interstella 5555, Daft Punk, D.A.F.T., The Celtic Circle 2, The Celtic Circle.
• Popular Artists: Enigma, Mike Oldfield, Daft Punk, Enya, Moby.

Moby and Daft Punk both released new albums recently, and Mike and Enya are both working on new ones. Enigma is... well, who knows? Hopefully his next album won't have the same copy protection that stops me being able to play Voyageur (See also Hotel). Likewise, what Era are up to is not obvious from their Flashturbated site, which is still merrily promoting their 2003 album.

There's now information from the Prime TV press pack up on the NZDWFC site, including an interesting description of the Slitheen, and an mpeg of one of the promotional trailers (which is, in fact, one of the BBC trailers!)

Jeff Stone and I went to see the Spielburg War of the Worlds at the Embassy last night, and Jeff found a photocopied picture of a Dalek in the toilets, with "Bad Wolf" scrawled along the top. So far it's a mystery as to whether this is a Prime promotional stunt, or some fans. So far no one has owned up on the NZDWFC message boards...

Along the lines of This is Broken: For as long as I've been using Yahoo! Briefcase, I've had the Briefcase status box on my My Yahoo! page. And for as long as I've had that box there, it has always displayed the same message: "Problem retrieving your personal information. Please try again later."

Clicking on "try again" doesn't do anything, so far as I can see...

Hell, that's not the only thing that's broken on Yahoo! I have the login expiry on Yahoo! mail set to 24 hours. This used to mean after 24 hours, I would have to re-enter my password to get back in. Apparently they have changed this. Now the routine is:

1. I'm prompted to enter my password, which I do.
2. I'm prompted to re-enter my user name, password, type in the text from a graphic, tick the "Remember my ID on this computer" (again).

However, at screen 1, I can hit the "sign in as a different user" link, and I'm taken to a screen where I'm prompted to re-enter my user name, password, and tick the "Remember my ID on this computer" - I.E. the second screen above except with no graphic. This doesn't make much sense to me at all - why have a device to stop robots from logging in if it's so easily circumvented? It just makes it harder for me, as a human, to use my Yahoo! mail...

Edit: Right as I was posting this, I went to add a file to my briefcase. There were two buttons at the bottom of the page:

So which one do I press?! (It's the one on the left, but you have to look at the source to find that out...)

I don't write about politics much, but here's the situation:
The NZ cricket team is going to tour Zimbabwe in August. Prevailing feeling is that they shouldn't be going because of the ongoing human rights abuses there and the possibilty they might be in danger.

This makes me wonder: (a) why book a tour in a country you know is having human rights issues anyway, (b) why call off the cricket tour while the Prime Minister is trying to negotiate a trade agreement with notorious human rights abuser China?

The latest TV Guide has a Dalek on the cover, and a two-page article on the new series (mostly reproduced interviews which can be found online, a guide to the monsters in the new series, and a "Fact file" with some basic facts about the series).

Holmes (Prime, 6pm) tonight played one of the BBC trailers. Excellent!

Above: The starship Voyager (from the episode Timeless) takes a short-cut through the space/time continuum.
Below: The TARDIS (from the Doctor Who title sequence) activates its Quantum Slipstream drive.

Tee hee hee! (Couple more pictures under the cut, the one from Doctor Who may be mildly spoilerly...)

Continue reading "Then and Now"

Level: Coret Classic
Type: Capture the Flag
File Size: 12.4 MB
Rating: 9/10

Description: Hi-tech base.

Continue reading "UT Review: Coret Classic"

I bought the region 4 DVD of the Justice League episodes Starcrossed. Unfortunately episode 3 has the English soundtrack for episode 2 - the French and Hungarian soundtracks for that episode are correct. That doesn't help me much, as I don't speak French or Hungarian.

I attempted some web searches to see if anyone else had reported the problem yet, but can't find anything.

I'll try to find out who the Warner distributor is in NZ/Australia and see if I can get any information on whether this is a problem with all of the copies, and if so whether they're going to fix it. If not, I'll have to attempt to return it to Whitcoulls tomorrow (they're shut now...)

Ain't that just a bummer?

Edit: Warner's contact page is unhelpful. No email address - what is this? The 80s?

Edit2: I returned it to Whitcoulls. Unfortunately they didn't have another copy in stock, so I got my money back instead. Whitcoulls = Cool. I may try the Lower Hutt branch and see if they have a copy without the sound problem...

Edit3: Yup, looks like the whole printing is bad (see comments)

I uploaded TSV issue 30 tonight. Published in 1992, it included reviews of the Cat's Cradle trilogy of New Adventures, and more Tomb of the Cybermen reviews.

Perhaps interesting given the fact that the TV series is back and going strong is an opinion piece by Aden Shillito, titled In Memory of the Late Doctor Who, which argues that the show should stay off the air.

There's also the transcript of a series of comedy sketches titled Fibremen of Spong (which featured a Maori Doctor and screened in a comedy show here), Missing Scenes Resurrection detailing material cut from Resurrection of the Daleks, no less than six Discovering Who, an analysis of Time Travel in the Doctor Who Universe, cartoons, artwork, and loads more stuff.

You think "Hmmm, WordPress... TypePad... WordPad! That'd make a great name for a blogging servi- oh, wait."