Want people to dance on your grave?

Want people to dance on your grave? Be a spammer. Apparently, a notorious Russian spammer was brutally murdered recently. Although there was apparently no particular evidence that it had anything to do with his spamming activities, people are not only celebrating his death, but declaring that he got a just comeuppance. You heard that right - people are so annoyed with spam that they think dying violently in pain and terror is proper punishment for cluttering their inbox. Spammers must make a lot of money to make becoming the scum of humanity, loathed by all, worthwhile.

Microsoft is crippling you

According to recent revelations about Microsoft's next operating system, it looks like Microsoft is conspiring with Hollywood to make your computer have less functionality for working with digital media in order to gain Hollywood sweetheart status for Windows Media format.

You still have the capability to create analog copies of media with your computer, bypassing DRM; current computers typically have this ability built-in. But Microsoft's next generation OS will cripple your computer's ability to do things like record analog signals off of a television, which will make doing things like remixing recorded content impossible. Your computer, under Longhorn, will be less capable of dealing with media than it does now. ("Your creativity, our passion," indeed.)

How NOT to deal with bloggers

Here's a good case study on how not to deal with bloggers. A moving company got a bad review by a blog commenter, and engaged in hollow threats of legal action. Instead of caving, the blogger blogged about the threats, and ended up doing more damage to the moving company than the original comment did, eclipsing their Google ranking in a matter of hours. They would have been far better off if they had just let the comment stand and not tried to silence their former customer.

Mountains out of Molehills

So an 85 year old grandma is suing RockStar games because she bought Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for her 14-year-old grandson, and didn't know that there was practically inaccessible simulated poly-sex locked up in the game code.

Apparently, she's not concerned with the drug dealing, carjacking, cop shooting, pedestrian crushing, and generally hyperviolent behavior that goes on in the game. She's okay buying that for her grandson. She's okay buying him games that are clearly marked as being for mature audiences only.

But she is upset at Rockstar Games because she bought a game that has risqué scenes that can only be accessed by a tortuous set of actions that would never happen in normal play - actions which you would basically have to know the end result of (namely, the poly-sex scenes) and go looking for in order to enact them. No one sees this content without going to great, specific pains to see it.

(And consider this: the sex in GTA is practically the only consensual act in the game, the only nonviolent act, the only loving act, and hell, the only legal act in the game! If children have impressionable minds, wouldn't you rather them play the Hot Coffee mod, where they do legal things to make another person feel good, rather than the normal course of the game, where they do highly illegal, dangerous, and homicidal things? Which example of the two would you rather have your child follow? One could reasonably view the Hot Coffee mod as a patch that adds a little nonviolent gameplay to the game.)

But here's the interesting thing: in all the stories I've seen on the topic, I can't discern whether or not the kid actually saw the Hot Coffee mod content. Indeed, it sounds like the game got taken away from the kid before he could see it. If the kid never saw it, what is her claim to any damages in this case? Is this a frivolous lawsuit?

It seems to me that Americans need to buck up and take responsibility for being parents. Games with mature content are clearly marked as mature. Right on the front of the package. If you're too dumb or too busy to check the rating of a game before you buy it, it's your own fault if your 14-year-old kid gets exposed to mature content. It's no different than renting him Debbie Does Dallas without looking at the movie's rating first. Just because it's a game instead of a movie does not absolve you of your parental responsibility.

Case sensitivity of redirects

Today's beauty of a problem was the issue of case sensitivity in URL redirects under Apache. The problem is that the case insensitivity of the URL's on our Mac XServe has spoiled our users into expecting case insensitivity in all URL issues on our servers.

Unfortunately, redirects are case sensitive. Obviously, this is to keep server load down, since the server must chew through the list of redirects for every file request. When you have to do regular expression pattern matching on a list of patterns for every request before anything else happens, you don't want the added overhead of checking every letter against its upper case, lower case, accented, umlauted, etc. counterpart. That's many times the CPU cycles than a simple case-sensitive string comparison.

So an email goes out today with an uppercase character in the URL. Normally, not a problem, but it was done in a URL that is being redirected (they wanted a short URL that has one word instead of two words after the domain name), and they didn't check the URL before sending it out. Result: broken link.

One option would be to add another redirect with the offending case-sensitive spelling, but this would incur a server performance penalty on every single request from now on. Sending out a correction is apparently not an option, and I was getting threats of going over my head to the department head.

But I found a cool solution. In the 404 page, just drop in some Javascript to detect a URL with an uppercase character in it, and if one is detected, correct it, and either redirect immediately or offer a link. Simple, and only incurs a server hit when someone actually gets a broken link. Even better, it handles all case sensitivity problems that may occur in the future. Gotta love nice, simple solutions that defuse nasty problems.

Watch Me Change

The Gap's pushing around an attempt at viral marketing called Watch Me Change. In it, you can create yourself as a 3D avatar, and then watch yourself do a strip tease. Funny and creepy at the same time. Of interest to me primarily because it was done in Shockwave3D.

Your Government for Sale at Work

The Daily Kos has a great juxtaposition of two news items that came down today. Ask your government, "Should a company be liable for illegal uses of one of its products?" The answer you will get is: "Well, that depends - what would benefit the big corporations more? Let's just take it on a case by case basis."

Catch 22

When my buddies come into town to game, I usually have a balancing act to perform. If I spend too little time with them, they feel like I've dissed them, and it's less likely they'll go to the effort of coming into town next time. (With a baby, it's even more difficult than before for me to go to them, so it could mean the end of buddy gaming altogether.) On the other hand, the more time I spend with them, the more I risk my wife feeling like a gaming widow, which could damage marital harmony and preclude future gaming sessions as well.

Usually, I can manage the competing interests okay, but this past weekend, I had another party vying for my attention: myself. I didn't even really feel like gaming - all I really wanted to do was just lie down and do my corpse impression. Still reeling from the lingering sickness that's been coming and going for the past three weeks, I was being hit particularly hard those few days. Between the fever, chills, coughing, sore throat, sinus headache, and general malaise, I was pretty cranky and irritable. Because of all the drainage nausea, nothing ever sounded good to eat, so I ended up not eating a lot, which made me feel weak. All I could really stomach was Gatorade for some reason.

But the worst part was that I had a hard time sleeping more than a couple hours a night, which caused me to actually fall asleep gaming on my poor DM at one point because I was so exhausted I just couldn't keep my eyes open. I hope he didn't take it personally - I felt really bad about that. Sometimes, you just succumb to the relentless barrage of weariness when you're sick.

On the home front, I spent too much time in bed when I got home from gaming, exasperating my wife, who was beginning to feel like a single mother. And I pushed myself too hard and exhausted myself, trying to pretend that I was feeling better than I was. So, unfortunately, I don't think I did a good job balancing things this time. Everyone was annoyed at me at one point or another.

I did make one good call, though. I opted out of the movie that the guys wanted me to go see with them so I could stay home with the boy and let my wife go do some things she wanted to do. They went to see Fantastic Four, and apparently, it's a stinker - one of the guys "kinda" liked it, while the other two gave it a thumbs down. It would have been a bummer to burn good marriage capital on a bad movie.

It's going to happen again in a month or so. Maybe next time, I'll do a better job of it. It will help if I can not be sick this time.

My boy went under the knife today

My son went under the knife this morning to get tubes put into his ears. Even though this is the most common surgery on children in the country - our doctor told us he has performed this operation thousands of times - any time you put your kid on anaesthetics, it's scary.

My son was scheduled for his operation at 7:30am, and they asked us to be there at 6:30 to prepare. So, we were. We went through the various things we have to do, and finally got into the pre-op area when the anaesthiologist came in. He prescribed a syringe full of liquid for him, which we administered.

We were talking with him a bit afterwards, and he tells us that he gave our son more drugs than he typically does. Why? Because our doctor likes to sleep in, so the surgery would probably start closer to 8:00.

WTF?? First of all, if the surgery is going to start late, wait to give my kid the drugs, don't double up! And second of all, if the surgery isn't going to start at 7:30, don't make us come in early. Because my son was not able to drink or eat anything for a long time before the surgery, he was pretty miserable in the morning - all this did was extend that when he could have been sleeping.

The drugs hit my son pretty hard, when he came out of it, he was crying inconsolably. My wife nursed him, but it didn't really stop the crying. Immediately after nursing, he vomited it all up. I can't help but wonder if that was perhaps due to the extra drugs.

Is this just crazy-daddy parent myopia? Or does the patient have the right to expect minimal drugging and promptness on the part of the surgeon?

I must be domesticated

It's official, I'm a domesticated adult male consumer. The reason I know is that I just got the big jones for, of all things, a faucet. That's right, you heard me.

Hansa's Hansacanyon has been percolating around the blogosphere recently, and every time I see it, I fall in love all over again. I want this damn thing.

Sure, the industrial design on it is sexy, but the thing that really piques my interest is that someone has, after all these years, made one of those "well, duh!" usability innovations on an item that we have all been using dozens of times a day for, what, almost a century? The faucet has a red and a blue LED in it attached to a temperature sensor. When the water is hot, it glows red. When it is cold, it glows blue. You can tell at a glance the temperature. When you see it, you just wonder why this isn't a mainstream feature. Brilliant innovations like that, even on such humdrum items as a faucet, are simply cool, and I want to have them around me.

Unfortunately, the Hansa Web Site is so perplexing that I see no way to order it. Probably just as well, since the style doesn't go with anything in my house currently. I'll just have to admire her from afar.