Alden Bates' Weblog

I'm having an odd problem with Movable Type - when I first save a new post, it has a superfluous link to the "Next Post", which actually links to the first post I made. This looks odd, since someone will spot the post on Technorati and click on the next post link, only to end up on my first post (which is now slightly inaccurate, as LJ have implemented categories, as per my previous post, but I digress, often and at length, in fact).

As I say, this happens when I save a new post. If I go edit the post and save without changing anything, the useless "next post" link vanishes. Typically, no one else on the Interweb appears have have had the same trouble.

Must be something odd in the coding of MTEntryNext which causes this...

So LiveJournal (and soon, presumably, all LJ based sites) finally has categories. Sort of. They elected to call them Tags and have users enter them as free text when creating/editing entries. What you end up, therefore, is a flat hierarchy of catagories... Now all they need is a way to apply tags to multiple posts at once, so I can go back and tag the first four seasons of Voyager reviews...

I'm unsure whether LiveJournal posts will start turning up on Technorati, mainly because LiveJournal doesn't currently have a way to ping any site other than weblogs.com. Technorati does have a page to manually ping them, but whether it'll recognise LJ-style tags is open to experimentation...

I attempted a ping using my LJ, but nothing turned up on the Star Trek: Voyager tag. That may simply be because I have my LJ set NOINDEX.

Now they need trackback too... :)

Edit: Yes, LiveJournal posts are now turning up on Technorati!

Today's Doctor Who episode? Bloody good. From last week's preview, my expectations had been pretty low, but the episode itself far surpassed them. The only possible complaint I can think of is... (and I'm venturing into spoiler territory here, so the rest of the post will be under a cut...)

Continue reading "Bad Wolf"

I had two questions answered yesterday:

Q: Why don't some of the bots turn up randomly in Instant Action games and some do?

This turned out to be easy to fix: the .upl files in the system directory hold the definitions for bot characters. Getting them to turn up in instant action games turned out to be matter of finding the appropriate .upl file, and editing the part of the bot's definition from (for example) menu="MALCOLM" to menu="".

Edit: also, setting BotUse=1 is essential!

Q: How come, after installing the last patch, I had a bunch of Onslaught levels marked "(Bonus vehicles)" but they were no different when I played them?

That turned out to be because I had to install the UT 2004 ECE Content Pack, which comes with three new vehicles (including the Cicada, shown right), six characters (finally the Necris turn up again...) and four new Onslaught maps (Dear Epic, please put out some more Assault maps, kthxbai). I also installed the lasted game patch.

They should also fix some of the bot behaviour. Things like... ooo, bots forgetting that it's alt-fire on the link gun to heal vehicles and nodes... bots getting stuck places and/or running their vehicles into walls and staying there for the whole match... Or hanging around one node brcause there aren't any vehicles there instead of jumping to another node...

Also, I can't be the only one which finds it annoying that the male "nightmare" characters (Mr. Crow and so on) have half their taunts delievered in the default merc male voice.

Occasionally you come across TV series which are of highly variable quality. Take the classic 1970s British series The Tomorrow People, about a group of youngsters who have developed such psychic powers as telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation (Though sadly not precognition, otherwise they could regularly save themselves a lot of hassle).

I thought I was safe, you see. I'd already seen A Man For Emily, which has to be the most insanely bad episode of any science fiction series ever, and the first two stories of season 6 were actually quite good, but then...

Continue reading "The Tomorrow People and Dodgy Special Effects"

Level: Firestorm
Type: Onslaught
File Size: 2.0 MB
Rating: 7/10

Description: A volcanic island in a sea of lava.

Continue reading "UT Review: Firestorm"

Last week Another Time and Space was added to the NZDWFC site. This is an eBook written by Paul Scoones which details the screening of Doctor Who in New Zealand from 1964 to today.

It includes details of the background of the screenings, listings of the dates and times each episode was played, the episode blurbs from TV listings magazine The Listener, and also clippings from that magazine. It's an updating of The Doctor Who Listener, which was published in paper form in the late 80s/early 90s.

Another Time and Space is a continuing work in progress - there are more clippings and blurbs to go up, and doubtless there will be more information to put up once Prime starts playing the new series...

The problem we were having with the wireless network previously turned out to have a simple solution - changing the channel which the network was running from eliminated the interferance from the microwave oven. Excellent!

First trackback spam in a while got through today... It managed to get past MT-Blacklist, but was moderated by MT-Moderate before it could appear on the entry.

At least (as far as I can tell from my logs anyway) the Bulgarians have given up trying to comment spam me constantly - the last hit from that was around the 16th of last month. The .htaccess filters I got from Spamhuntress' site were pretty much blocking their hits...

It looks like they're concentrating on trying to trackback spam me - I'm still getting plenty of spam trackback pings, though I don't think the one that got through was from them... Many of the pings are coming through alestra.net.mx, which I have blocked in .htaccess, of course. Those pings which have gotten through have been stopped by MT-Blacklist.

I have a regex set up in MT-Blacklist which stops all of their trackbacks. The software they're using generates random sentences all in the same format using a small collection of phrases:
(check|visit|check out) (the|some) (sites|pages|relevant pages|helpful info|information) (in the field of|dedicated to|about)

808 hits blocked so far (though that's not accurate because I refined the regex a couple of times). I'd like to just block pings with links in the body, but (a) I'm not sure if that would block valid pings, and (b) MT-Blacklist doesn't have any way to specify comment versus trackback or specific fields thereof.

I'm also tempted to try hacking MT-Blacklist to return a 403 when it blocks a ping, on the off-chance it might discourage the spammers further...

Eh, not as good as I thought it'd be. Better than diet with lime, but not as good as vanilla or regular Coke... (and I'm usually biased against diet drinks because the artifical sweetener they use tastes odd to me, and is a bit cloying).

It tastes vaguely like you're drinking a raspberry tart. My rating: 7/10

Incidentally, while I'm on the subject of Coke, they cheat horribly on the "Nutrition information" on the bottle. At a glance, it has a table which shows energy, protein, sodium, etc "per serving" and "per 100mL". At first glance, I'd expect the "per serving" figures to be the total for the bottle, but at the top it says "Servings per Package: 3" and "Serving Size: 200 mL", so to get the total for the bottle you have to multiply by 3. How many people buy a 600 mL bottle of Coke and drink a 3rd of it at a time?

I presume also they're required by law to state the protein and fat content, otherwise they're just wasting three lines, since the content for both is 0g.