01 Nov 2006
“thanks for the review of liferea, very interesting” from fanof don lapre arrived in my moderation queue today. I approved it. I think automated services (Akismet) probably would have, too. Fanof looked like a possible first name at a glance (obviously, it’s not — it means “Fan of” and Don Lapre is a name) but the commenter URL linked to an innocuous website with pay-for-copy content and occasional spam links.
So where’d the authentic-looking comment come from? (It was on my Liferea review post.) I’m pretty sure someone must link here using that text. For example, I might say “check out this (link start) review of Liferea (link end)” in an article, and spam robots would see that pointed to a blog (perhaps using Technorati or similar) and pursue the link to leave a comment. Using human text. I don’t know what the linguistic success rate of this would be — though I would hazard with the amount of blog content out there, one could have fairly stringent filters to improve success — but it worked well in this instance.
31 Oct 2006
Uni is looking particularly beautiful at the minute. Cause for concern. If you attend UNSW (and, uh, actually have exams) this is probably an unfamiliar concept ;-) Basically jacarandas signify imminent exams and time necessarily spent indoors. Such is life.
31 Oct 2006
It’s based in Sydney and transmits to my house (it’s got coverage equal to all commercial licenses in Sydney) and I still listen to it online.
Mostly because I haven’t got a radio here. Also because it doesn’t count towards quota (Bigpond Unmetered, baby. It’s the thing I’m going to miss most about this when the contract expires in January.) And also because the music is actually a lot of fun. Great quality programming which is really surprising (and I remember listening to it just after it first got its permanent license… things have improved lots!)
Kick on with a Windows Media stream at mms://wmt.streaming.telstra.com/UCS-wh_telstr16livefbi or if you’re not into that whole bandwidth-draining thing and wanna be old school, flick your radio’s dial around to FM 94.5. Not guaranteed to please, but generally quite closer to the listenable side than commercial radio ever was.
30 Oct 2006
I am about to start crying because of a web application for the second time in (I think) as many days. No, it’s not MySpace (it was sufficiently vanquished after some tumbling about with pointed sticks).
I suppose I should have known better. Just because there’s no warning, doesn’t mean it’s not about to do something stupid. Particularly given the University of Sydney’s web team’s fetish for session timeouts like they’re running some high-grade-cipher-required (they use 256bit SSL certs for everything) nuclear launch system. Only not, because Kim isn’t a student. But, then again, even if he were the usability issues would probably be manifestly more successful than the UN/non-proliferation treaties.
Whatever. So I spent too long agonising (and I do mean agonising) over subject selection for pre-enrolment (I know, I don’t need to worry, I can change it later — whatever. I’m having a stressful day and for whatever reason am choosing to get this out of the way now so that I don’t experience this later. That’s the theory.) and then the monster ate it all. What really [expletive] me is that when I finally made my last choice, I went and entered it then its bloody popup-confirmation system (which, incidentally, is quite usable but I despise it on principle) still worked. Submit it? Sorry, you’re not logged in. Log in? Their [another expletive] auth proxy doesn’t even pass the right GET vars (strips ? and possibly ampersands, too, it seems, so I got a lovely 404 page), let alone everything I just POST’d. Talk about stabbing users in the back.
Words cannot express how irate I am right now.
To top it off, I’m increasingly convinced I somehow managed to screw up my whole degree programme whilst still in first year Arts. No, I didn’t think that were possible, either. I am adequately pissed off with the world to leave this post here.
30 Oct 2006
Snazzy. And enormous. 1700 × 700 × some height but who really cares so long as there’s legroom enough?
It gives me a sense of consumeristic pleasure ($175 and it’s not cheap & nasty flatpack… it’s slightly better-than-IKEA-quality flatpack ;-)) and makes the room seems loads bigger and… will not help me pass my exams in the least. Nor will it sort out my subject selection for next year.
Take victories where you can find them, I suppose.