One idiot's blog

Link to Comment on Plural

Last week I posted a comment in Joho's blog about the East Asian concept of plural (or lack thereof). Don't feel like repeating it here, but didn't want to lose the link either.

Hope this entry doesn't make my popular Yahoo[u.p.o] Launches Korean Blog Service entry scroll off the front page.

Office Space

I love the movie "Office Space". My roommate pirated it and I've watched it a bunch of times. You really have to if you want to hear everything that Milton says. In fact, just now, I figured out what he is saying while he sits waiting for the bus.

My Post to NewsForge

Posted a response to a particularly offensive comment from someone I'm actually familiar with in the Open Source world, Steve Parker (have his site bookmarked; just might un-bookmark it). Right now it's the only response to that comment, but in case things change, mine's the one that starts out, "I'm really not sure what article you just read."

Decoding Challenge

In the spirit of Chris Ruzin's Tengwar challenges, I present this challenge. I will tell you that it's English, and you can find some more about its nature and even its contents by investigating me a little bit and by taking a good look at the history of Chris's Tengwar challenges. One or the other might be sufficient to work out what it says.

CSS Not the Problem?

Well, guess I was wrong about Google hating my CSS. I've been able to find a select few pages of my blog, with the new stylesheet, on Google. But it hasn't been all of them. Seems to correspond to whether there are trackbacks to the particular entries more than anything else. That's why a page from my blog is the top result for this not too unreasonable search, but a search for ... oh, crud. Seems like things have changed almost as I was typing these words. Lo, the word Laserboobs has been re-introduced into the English lexicon! Or something like that.

Dangerous Drivers

Despite the way people complain about driving in DC, I haven't particularly had many problems. But today was an exception. A tractor-trailor was tailgating me in the right lane on the Beltway, even as I brought my speed up close to 65. It finally switched to the next lane to the left, then turned on its turn signal to switch back. Then it started switching back into my lane -- when the tractor part was barely past my car! Fucking trailer forced me to go on the shoulder until he was past. My horn doesn't work, so I couldn't blast him, which would have been far less than he deserved. After he changed lanes again, I somewhat agressively followed him, and took a look at the license plate, and tried to make it obvious that I was checking his license plate. Unfortunately, it was the license plate to his trailer (a flat bed), and it was white with red lettering and border, which I realized too late is not a local color scheme, so who knows what state he's from. So, all I can do is leave this note to this maniac: they're gonna git you one day.

Drop Everything

...and get yourself a Rivoli Chain Rivet Extractor. Adam bought one five years ago, and he hasn't regretted it since. Or, maybe, he stopped regretting it once he finally had a chance to use it the other day. But all's well that ends well...

Parade of Morons

OK, imagine this. You open up a burger joint. You put a sign in the window, saying, "World's Best Burger, featuring Fike's American Cheese". A guy walks in, and says, "I've been looking for cheese. Do you have Camembert?" Thinking this guy's here to do the Cheese Shop routine, you respond with absurd enthusiasm, "why, yes, we've got some of that, but I'm afraid it's a bit moldy". The guy shrugs his shoulders and walks out, and you are crestfallen. Guess he wasn't a Monty Python fan after all. A few minutes later, a woman walks in. "Could I buy some Nacho Cheese?" she asks. "Er, no, sorry, this is a burger shop," you answer. "We just have the cheddar cheese for the hamburgers. We get our cheese from Fikes; perhaps you can try them." The woman trudges off, and as you watch her, you wonder whether you accidentally wrote "World's Best Cheese" on the sign, instead of "Burger".

Another person walks in; same thing. You tell them, a little more shortly, where they might be able to get the cheese they're looking for. Then you make up a sign, saying "THIS IS NOT A CHEESE SHOP! PLEASE TRY FIKE'S DOWN THE STREET." You toy with adding a cartoon of a mousetrap with a mouse trapped in it, screaming in agony, but you decide to hold off; for one thing, you're not sure what a screaming mouse looks like.

But people keep coming in, one after the other, oblivious to the sign that says "THIS IS NOT A CHEESE SHOP!", oblivious to the original sign that still says "World's Best Burger" (by now you've gone and checked). "I was looking for some Gruyere". "Do you have any of those cheese sticks?" "Gimme some decaffeinated Cheez-Whiz." All you can do is smile and shake your head, and keep on shaking your head long after they've walked out.

Well, this is sort of what happened to Chris Ruzin when he thought it was neat to find out how to write his name in Chinese, and decided to post it to his blog. Now everybody on the Internet seems to think he's the world's foremost authority on how to write your name in Chinese. One idiot after another posts a comment asking him to write their name in Chinese. My little allegory was made up; his comments page is real. Except for the one from "Cris". I added that one; couldn't resist :)

Slashdot Covers Yahoo[ungrammatical punctuation omitted] Korean Blog

Well, it took a whole weekend, but the thing I've been talking about all weekend, both here and on Jeremy's Blog, has finally been covered on Slashdot. One commenter, who seemed to be a foreigner living in Korea, said you do need a Korean National ID number. I didn't see a request for it on the main page, so I assumed not, but maybe, like Daum, you have to give it at some point before you actually use the blog. Can't read Korean at work, so I can't check this out; might try at home, but not sure if I want to go through the trouble of seeing how far I can get before I get that bear carcass thrown in the path of my Jeep.

If I Bought Coffee Beans

I'd buy me some Mozilla Coffee. Seen on Slashdot.

Must Be Seen To Be Blogged

I'm not sure what I like most about 60X1.COM: Freedom Is Not Free When Freedom Fries Are Not Free! Is it the way the the mouse pointer becomes an animated icon of (I assume) Silvio Berlusconi? Or is it the fact that the domain name is a whole bunch of 1's (60, I guess, by the page title)? Takes a while to load, requires JavaScript and sight.

Google Hates My New CSS

For some reason, Google searches which should turn up entries made since I updated my stylesheet don't. The only possible relevant line from Google's FAQ on the subject is:

We will not comment on the individual reasons a page was removed and we do not offer an exhaustive list of practices that can cause removal. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text that can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index.

My Favorite Pastime: Hunting for a Selection in an Unsorted List

This one's for all you Korean readers out there. I took a look at the country selection box on the Yahoo[ungrammatical punctuation omitted] Korea Blog registration page. Other than the fact that the three obvious candidates, Korea, the U.S. and Japan, are listed first, second and third, respectively, I can see no order whatsoever to the way the countries are listed; not by English alphabetical order, not by Korean alphabetical order, not in order of ethnic Korean population, geographical region, or anything else.

Non-Korean readers may also participate by looking at the two-letter country codes in the source code, but will have to take me at my word that the countries in this select box are not sorted by alphabetical order according to their hangul spelling. Here's the box:

Yahoo[ungrammatical punctuation omitted] Korea Launches Blog Service

Found this: Jeremy Zawodny's blog: Yahoo! Korea Blog Service Launched.

I've tried several times to register for various Korean Internet services (e-mail accounts and other things), but I am always rebuffed -- and somewhat disturbed -- when they ask for the National Identification Number. I wonder what the hell they want with that. It would seem to me to be the equivalent of Yahoo asking for my SSN, to which I would answer, "to hell with you!" Which is easy to say, but if every major US internet service asked for the SSN and most people didn't balk at giving it, maybe I'd have a more blasé attitude towards it.

Of course, what the National ID Number requirement really means for me is, "NO foreigners! (Besides, this site is all written in our language, and if you don't have a Korean ID number, how could you possibly be someone who can read Korean and participate in the Korean Internet community?)".

The current leader, daum.net (no link, no point), requires this. Also, I've tried to visit a blog hosted there, but failed; the HTML that this powerhouse site produces only works in the national web browser. Which does not, and never will, have a Linux version.

Anyway, I took a look at the registration page for the Yahoo[ungrammatical punctuation omitted] Korea thing, and I didn't notice any demand for a national ID number. So this is a new thing. Of course, Yahoo[ungrammatical punctuation omitted] is an American company, so if I were to get an account there, I don't think it would have quite the same cachet that, say, a hanmail.com address would.

Clever, but Evil

Though finding buffer overflows and security oversights are the tools of the cracking trade that get the most attention in the press and in the general "security community", for lack of a better term, one of the best ways of breaking into a system is to get someone to just give you the password (something that probably falls into the category of what crackers (well, hackers in general, I suppose) call "social engineering"). Someone is trying just this right now to Yahoo users.

I got an email claiming to be from a nice-looking young woman, inviting me to Yahoo chat with her. The email was HTML, and it displayed the URL for an actual Yahoo profile. But the href that the link pointed to was different from what the text of the URL said in the email, and brought me to this warning, which further brought me to this fake login page. I'm sure these pages will be gone in a few days, of course; perhaps I'll make a local copy of it and put it on this website. Note it appears to be an exact replica of actual Yahoo pages, so someone not paying attention to the URL they are visiting could easily be fooled. If you fall for the bait, you will enter your login name and password, and presumably these will get sent on to whoever is collecting them.

It's probably best to hold innocent the person whose profile is eventually revealed when you type a username and password into this page.

Here's what I IM'ed to the presumed victim (I was sort of figuring things out as I typed). She was evidently not logged on or asleep.

(02:13:15) rschmertz: Hi


(02:14:59) rschmertz: I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you may be an innocent party....


(02:18:01) rschmertz: I got an email claiming to be from you, inviting me to chat.


(02:21:35) rschmertz: The email had a link, that looked like it was to your Yahoo profile page, but the link really went to a site that asked me for my Yahoo password, so that some low-life could get my password and use my account for who knows what.


(02:23:14) rschmertz: So, you may be getting a lot of IMs and emails from complete strangers, who either thought you wanted to chat with them, or who knew someone was trying to scam them.


(02:24:46) rschmertz: BTW, I'm single :-)


(02:27:44) rschmertz: And I hope you yourself are not the scum-sucker who is perpetrating this, or in cahoots with said scum-sucker. But it's a pretty clever scheme, and I doubt whoever cooked it up would be stupid enough to associate it with themselves by using their own Yahoo ID. So you're pretty much clear in my book.


(02:28:25) rschmertz: Later!

Yahoo [ungrammatical punctuation omitted] hosed? Going LUGging!

WTF is up with Yahoo Maps? I swear it used to do this, but I can't seem to either zoom in to or recenter the result of my driving directions. I kept clicking on the map, clicking the different numbers for the different degrees of zoomage, and clicking "Zoom In" and "Zoom Out", but it kept giving the same, whole-picture map. Gave up and went to Mapquest, which worked beautifully.

Hopefully I've finally figured out how to drive to the M Street location. I think I keep missing Thomas Circle because I end up going under it. Funny, seems every time I do that, I tell myself, "if I get lost, that's a good point to start over", but by the time I figure out I'm lost, I'm close enough that I'd rather just follow the scent, so to speak. And then, next time around, I forget what my plan was regarding that underpass.

또 한 한글 테스트

Adam이, 한국어를 한마디도 몰라도, 나 Ami를 사용 해서 한글을 직접 Mozilla로 적을수있게 해 줬다. Hey, if anyone can read that, feel free to leave a comment and tell me how horrible the grammar and expression is. Anyway, I was hoping this would put EUC-KR encodings or something like that into my entries, but no, it is still using HTML entities. It must be MT doing that, however; when I type into Henry's bulletin board, what comes out appears to be Unicode. So I guess Mozilla is meeting me at least partway. And... I've spent too many hours on this today.

The Devil's Workshop

Man, was there something in the air today? People seemed to just want to shoot the shit today. Everywhere I went, someone was trying to engage me in some type of conversation or other. I must have spent four hours in off-topic conversations today. I was actually pretty good about doing my work when I actually had time alone on my computer, but I got very little done, all told. But I did learn that the Chinese names for the letters in the Latin alphabet are not based on our words for them, but each based on a Chinese word representative of each sound. For example, B is pronounced 'bo' or something like that, complete with a tone. And I learned that if you use synthetic motor oil instead of petroleum-based, you can go 2-3 times as long without an oil change. Both useful facts. I didn't know which account to charge for the time spent acquiring that knowledge, though.

Astounding

As of today, this Google search yields no results. Could I be the first person to think of this? Should apply for a patent or trademark or something....

Update 9/1: There are some results now :-)

Welcome to our Overlords

I seem to keep missing all the memes. I somehow picked up on the "in SOVIET RUSSIA, <some role-reversal scenario with YOU as object>" meme, and maybe I really picked up on this overlord one before it really got big. Or maybe not; these guys seem to have had the meme down pat since April. Now, it's from an old Simpsons episode ("Homer in Space", which I've never actually seen), so the meme could be years old and the world at large never noticed. Similarly, I guess in limited circles, gamers were spicing their chats up with "All Your Base" for a few years before it exploded; that's the way these things are. They start out slowly, quietly, building up a base. Your Base. All Your Base. Er, ahem.

I guess I shouldn't worry. After all, in SOVIET RUSSIA, insect overlords welcome YOU!

Upgrade

Oh, and how could I forget: I upgraded Movable Type yesterday to the latest version, 2.64. Marvel at the wonderful changes! I haven't noticed them yet...

Not sure there were any publicly released versions between the last version I had (2.51) and this one.

What You Find on a Web Search

I was searching for my name on Overture (don't ask why), and I found James Landrith - March 10, 2003 Joint Letter to The President. My father's name is in there; no surprise, since he was a big opponent of the war. Landrith is also using Movable Type, and using the same skin that I was using until today. It's weird how familiar the Style Sheet made it look; I knew instantly that it was Movable Type.

Happy...

Today is not only:

Indian Independence Day
Korean Liberation Day
and
Feast of the Assumption

...it's also Malcolm's, Monika's and Myriam's birthday. Hey, all those people's names begin with M! So about 50% of the world is celebrating something today; if you're one of those people, have a happy whatever-it-is. It's also the anniversary of the last day I worked at Rax, which was the same day that one of our cats went into convulsions and died, and there was also a huge storm that day, IIRC.

Note on Layout

I thought I'd check out my new site layout on IE, since I'm at work, and I was wondering whether it would come out totally hosed, since I don't know what I'm doing. Well, it looks fine, and it doesn't seem to have the problem I complained about in the previous post, with the container not taking up the full height of the page. So if you're only looking at this with IE, you may be wondering what I was talking about. Just ignore it.

New Stylesheet

Everyone,

If I ever get to talking about how I think I want to start playing with my stylesheets on my blog, please tell me not to. It's a hideous amount of work for such meager results. I don't even think the current version really looks better than the "trendy" stylesheet I was using before, though it is sort of nice. But I already knew how much tedium is involved in making a Web page look right. The problem is, there was no one to stop me from doing it anyway. Thanks a lot, fans.

I borrowed heavily from the Friendly Beaches theme from The CSS Zen Garden, stopping short of grabbing photos from it (didn't get around to it, frankly). I don't know why the "content/blog" part of it is extending outside the container, when the Friendly Beaches page also has a container and floating elements, but doesn't have that problem. That's the major one of a few things I'd still like to fix when I get the time.

Trackbacks On

Good news for all my thousands of readers/fellow bloggers who've been dying to put trackbacks to their sites on my site: I've turned on trackbacks by default. This means all future entries will have Trackback enabled, unless I decided to disable them on a case-by-case basis. The action I have taken, however, does not enable Trackback for past entries. I would have to do that manually, post-by-post, AFAICT, so I won't. If anyone's dying to trackback a particular post, send me a comment -- or an e-mail, if you know where to find me -- let me know which one you want to ping, and I'll be happy to tell you where you can put your trackbacks.

Shadyside

It's always nice to run across some random person who is from the same area as you. I hopped over to Starjewel's blog, and I found a reference to Shadyside, in particular, the Shadyside Arts Festival. I grew up in Shadyside, and used to be able to walk about two blocks to Walnut Street, where it was held. I also remember the Festival being one of the coolest things about Pittsburgh (at least from my then-Shadyside-centric perspective), especially after they added the jazz component. Good times.

A Bookmarklet Only a Programmer Could Love

I spent about half a day working on my CookieWiper JavaScript bookmarklet, which would have a mere six lines if I didn't have to put it all on the same line, but, God, those are six beautiful lines of code. It's purpose[1] is to clear all cookies from the website you're looking at at the time. If you think it will be useful (for example, as an alternate way of logging out of your MT editing session :-)), then drag the link called "Cookie Wiper" to your toolbar and try it out. Only tested in Mozilla, so far.

I'm very poor at JavaScript, so I had to do a lot of digging around. And quite a bit of my effort was devoted to stripping it down to the size it is now. Unfortunately, I messed up just enough that at one point, after I pretty much knew what I was doing, I had to close the browser, so I'm not sure how easily I can find all the pages that helped. Oh wait, forgot about Mozilla's detailed history, so maybe I can pull some up. Here we go.

Probably most helpful was Setting and Reading Cookies at www.the-cool-place.co.uk, whose code I copied, used for inspiration, massaged, massaged some more, and eventually kneaded beyond all recognition.

Also, Thau's JavaScript tutorial is always helpful for giving a quick explanation of the most useful stuff. And, most JS tutorial sites tend to shy away from teaching about the for (var in object) syntax, which I knew I had seen before but couldn't remember where, but I found a description in an online extract of this 1995 book.

P3PWriter's page on cookies, Server-Browser Cookie Interaction, was useful for explaining how cookies really work, in terms of when they get sent, who can read them, how this is determined, etc.

[1] Since I'm wearing my programmer-instructor's hat right now, it seems more appropriate to put the apostrophe in "it's", as seems to be the norm in that crowd.

It Checks Out

I checked it in the dictionary; I spelled it wrong, but got the meaning right. It's 어쨌든.

New Korean Expression

Listening to Henry talk on the phone; seems that 어째뜬 means "anyway".

Oatmeal Bad

I think I've gotta stop eating oatmeal. I felt pretty bad today during ultimate, and I still feel bad after my shower and everything. Maybe I oughtta go back to the instant stuff and see if that's not as bad. although the reason I went to the canister stuff was because the instant was bothering me. Hmmm....

The Koreans and the Cake

When I first discovered the Lunch basket was being taken over by new people, I urged them to keep selling the marble cake that the Greek mama made. It was so good, I introduced it to two of my cow-orkers, who agreed it was very good. Kind of dry, not too sweet or heavy, goes great with coffee. Minjung said she'd get the recipe from Mama.

So a few days later, I come in and I see cake ... with chocolate frosting. Mama never used to put any sort of frosting on the cake. Remember how I just raved about how it was not too sweet or heavy? I don't buy the cake.

Today I walk in and I don't see any cake. I've already eaten a small lunch, so I'm not really looking for anything other than cake and maybe something else small that I don't yet know about. I ask if there's any cake. Minjung is sitting at a table talking to other people, but greets me, and the other lady who doesn't speak English that well (well enough, really, though) is behind the counter, and I'm indecisive about who to talk to, whether to speak Korean, and whether to ask about cake, look at the menu, and what to say if there's frosting on the cake. Someone brings out a piece of cake, and it's frosted, like last time. I want to complain, asking why they had to go and start putting frosting on it. Or find some nice way to say I'd prefer it without frosting, or even say, nicely, or at least casually, that I wouldn't buy it because of the frosting. I somehow can't do any of these things, so I just sort of sulk and become incommunicative. At this point I'm feeling a bit like Milton from Office Space. I get a menu, see potato salad, and manage to work up enough Korean to aks [typo, but I think I'll leave it there] if it's not too big, and I order some. Finally, I find a way that seems polite enough to address the issue. I ask if all the cake has the frosting. She says yes. Then she offers to set aside a piece without frosting for me. Now that just makes me feel bad, like I'm a super-demanding, picky customer, and they're going to go to a lot of special effort just for me. And maybe if I were cool, I would just say no, you don't have to do that, but at the moment I'm a little keyed in on the cake, so I start mumbling about the ratio of people to cake, getting my Swingline stapler back and setting the building on fire.

I don't remember whether it's resolved whether she will set aside some frosting-free cake for me. But anyway, I'm never too happy with the way I handle myself when I'm there. I don't know what it is.

Professional Time-Wasting

Instead of working this morning, I spent a while being awed/fascinated by ASL's LEGO Page. Great if you're an Escher fan or a mathematician.

No translation

I'm going to have to say that my big achievement for the day has been not, so far, going back and trying to re-translate the Tengwar, now that I know it's Quenya. I did check out the Quenya page of the site I found, just to see if I could find the symbols I couldn't figure out previously. They weren't there, however.

OTOH, I am still writing in my blog, as well as checking out the Trackbacks. Instead of coding.

Wonder whether I'll just blow off the translation and try to convince myself that I have more important things to do (well, I really do....) or whether I'll get back to it and give it another shot.

Speaking of Tengwar

This guy must have read the same article on Slashdot about Tengwar, because yesterday or so, he posted a little transliteration (or, that's what he seems to think, anyway) to some Elvish language or mode of Tengwar. I attempted to translate the text, and had some comments I'm rather proud of. Plus, I really wanted to use the Trackback feature, and see if it registered on his site.

Farewell to Windbag

Tracy is one of my good friends, but she is a windbag. Anyway, she just got married, and I hadn't seen her in months because I never go to the building where I used to work anymore. So, after the weekly EPOCH meeting -- the first one I had been to in months -- I went by to say hi. And she didn't let me go. So I wasted about two and a half hours talking to her. This time around, she had absolutely no restraints; she's leaving in two weeks, and they haven't given her any work to do, so she really has no job. As usual, she was fun, but eventually got a little exhausting. I'm sure I'll miss her, though, even though I never go to see her. I guess the difference is, until next Thursday, I always know I can go see her.

So Nerdy it's Cool?

I think I'm too far behind in my knowledge of the Tolkien worlds to start taking an interest in his languages, but it would be kind of cool to learn Writing With Elvish Fonts. At this point, I haven't even bothered to try to install Shavian fonts on my Linux PPC system, and that's something I actually know how to write and read. So I'm not too likely to see if I can get Tengwar working at home.

Full Circle

Remember how I said Koreans make me call them hyung or nuna? Yet I can't remember anyone ever calling me hyung or oppa in the four years I spent in Korea, except perhaps children of friends. I always felt like they thought I should respect their age, while they didn't feel they should respect mine.

Well, yesterday I went back to the Lunch Basket. While there, I observed 민정 (the friendly one) telling a male Hispanic employee he should call her nuna. It was all in fun, of course. She turned to me, sitting in the dining room, and said, "Isn't that right? He's younger than me, he has to call me 누나!" I responded, "well, then, you have to call me 오빠." She asked how old I was, which I guess was good that she doubted I might be older than her. And she said, "all right, 밥 오빠." Guess I finally scored one.

It has occasionally occurred to me that maybe many Koreans won't call someone by that proper mode of address unless the older person asks/tells them to. I don't really think this is the case, though.

Poverty

A friend-couple in another city has been unemployed for nearly a year. The husband seems to be unwilling to ask any sort of help from anybody. The wife is not afraid to do so, and has asked some rather difficult things. The last couple of days have been rather emotionally exhausting, as I debate whether I can do these things, what my responsibilities are to these people, etc.

It makes me wonder if I'll be able to handle having children. If they have major crises, and they will, will I be able to function in life? I had a hard time getting work done the day after she called, when I still felt like I had "actions pending" on her issue. I mean, I wouldn't hesitate to make sacrifices for my children, but maybe it was the matter of emotional support that I felt unable to provide. Argh. Must get back to work.