I added some text to the template for individual posts, just above the comment entry box, to show exactly how to use the spoiler tag. Therefore no one has any excuses any more for not doing it right. From now on, untagged spoilers will be deleted unconditionally.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 10:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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So y'all saw me post a TMW about mechas the other day. Someone at Ace's picked up that link. (Certainly fellow meemunuvians (or is that mumeenuvians? Mumeemunians? meemumumeemeblbblllbl) are welcome.)

Then a couple of small fry picked it up.

Today, The Comics Journal linked to it.

Then someone in Maryland posted it to a newspaper bulletin board.

I wonder whether it's going to spread further. It's likely. This hasn't happened to me since my TMW about The Matrix, more than a year ago.

Meanwhile, someone linked to my most recent post of flash loops, but I don't have the slightest idea who it was.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 11:21 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Roger Ebert is involved in contract negotiations:

Roger Ebert has turned thumbs down on thumb reviews for "At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper."

Ebert, who is negotiating a new contract with the syndicated TV show's distributor, Disney-ABC Domestic Television, is a copyright holder on the signature "thumbs up-thumbs down" judgment that's part of each film review.

He has "exercised his right to withhold use of the `thumbs' until a new contract is signed," the Walt Disney Co.-owned company said in a statement released Friday to The Associated Press.

Health problems have kept Ebert from appearing on the show for more than a year, with guest hosts filling in. In the new season starting this weekend, co-host Richard Roeper will be joined for the first few months by movie critic Robert Wilonsky of the Dallas Observer.

Two episodes have been filmed so far without the catchy thumb assessment, which has become a staple of movie marketing and, in turn, a big part of the show's influence.

I wonder if I'm going to get sued?

UPDATE: I don't see how you could copyright this. You might be able to trademark it, but that's an entirely different thing. If Ebert holds a trademark on that, he certainly could prevent that show from using it without her permission. But trademark protection is much different -- and I'm not even sure I believe it would survive court challenge.

Not that it would matter to me if I got served. Ebert's got a lot more money for lawyers than I do, and thus the Golden Rule applies. ("Whoever has the gold makes the rules.")

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 08:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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There are a couple of problems with the new category listings linked on the sidebar. First, all the posts which I retroactively assigned to categories don't show any comments in the category listings, though they do in the main thread where they originally occurred.

Second, it seems that in some cases the "more inside" and "go to individual post" links in the category listings change the URL but reload the category listing from that new URL instead of expanding the post.

I've informed Pixy about this, but right now he's got more important things to work on (preparing a major demo for his business partner) so we'll just have to be patient until he can get that cleared up.

What I'm seeing is that his demo is going to be damned cool. But there's only one of him and he has to prioritize his time.

In the mean time, if you get caught by the second problem, you can directly change the URL manually after you try (and fail) to load it from the category listing. The work-around is to take out the second-to-last term. So this

http://chizumatic.mee.nu/valkyrie/valkyrie_1_the_great_meganekko_conspiracy

doesn't work. But if you edit it to remove the "valkyrie" term in the URL

http://chizumatic.mee.nu/valkyrie_1_the_great_meganekko_conspiracy

then it works fine.

I've added this to a list of problems I'm accumulating that I've reported to Pixy which I think may have fallen on the rug. Someday when he announces, "I'm bored. What is there to do around here?" I'll send it to him.

(I hope it's clear that I'm trying to be funny about this but I'm not annoyed or indignant in any way. I'm grateful for being allowed to use the system, and I think Pixy has done one hell of a fine job on it. I also understand very well how it goes in a project like this, and I've actually been extremely impressed by how reactive Pixy has been to most of the problems I've reported to him. This post is not an attempt to embarass Pixy or shame him into working on this problem. He is doing the correct thing by working on his demo.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 07:49 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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I think Daze.net (apparently the operators of DNS Central) is gone. I can't find a site associated with them that answers.

In any case I don't intend to wait for them. I just got onto the NuNames site, and now it seems NuNames offers its own DNS service. So I switched over to that.

I don't know how long it will take for propagation, but probably a few hours at least. (The acknowledgement email said 10 hours.) But as it's happening, if I'm here I should notice it because I'll start getting traffic that isn't references to the top rotation picture.

UPDATE: It's begun already. I just got a refer from ask.com. Looks like the NuNames DNS sent out the record almost immediately; the 10 hours is probably a conservative estimate for how long it takes to reach everyone.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 06:38 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Based on my log files, it looks like something bad happened about 2 hours ago. My network connection is fine, but all attempts at incoming access to my server have stopped working -- or at least, I'm not getting any. (And if you're having a hard time seeing the top rotation picture, this is why.)

I'm wondering whether something weird happened to my DNS entry. Could someone do a DNS on "denbeste.nu" and post the result? It ought to resolve to 70.90.130.45, but I bet it doesn't.

I tried accessing denbeste.nu using a proxy and got a timeout. That's quite disturbing.

UPDATE: I changed the banner template so that it accesses the top rotation picture using the direct IP instead of my URL. And now I'm seeing hits. Something must have happened to my DNS entry. I wonder what?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 07:01 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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So I just spent two hours going through the entire posting history here starting from late May, and tagged most (though not all) of the posts with a category. Here's what I ended up with:

Cheesecake
Daily Life
Divergence Eve
Engineer's Disease
General Anime
Haruhi
Japanese
Never Watch
People
Shana
Shingu
Site Stuff
Valkyrie
Weird World
Yucie

I considered having a "Hollywood" category but decided not to bother.

For the moment this isn't on the sidebar, because I want to find out whether there's a macro that produces this list automatically.

UPDATE: Pixy showed me how to put it on the side bar, but the macro isn't really working fully. More to come.

UPDATE: Bingo! Thanks, Pixy!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 12:14 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I first learned the C programming language in about 1978. We used it for the firmware of the 1240 logic analyzer at Tektronix.

Over the years it's been amazing to see how C has set a standard for what a language should look like, and to see how other languages either consciously imitate it -- or consciously deviate from it.

I've been studying Flash, and I'm starting to get into "ActionScript". ActionScript 2.0 is essentially C, except with some odd changes. It's nice to see that the "switch" statement is exactly the same, for instance, and they use braces and semicolons exactly the same way. On the other hand, as an interpreter it's a lot more loose about variables. And it doesn't have an "enum" type.

We didn't have that initially, either. But it's one of the great additions to the language, and Actionscript doesn't support it. Bummer.

I just figured out a way to emulate that ability, however. The only problem is that compiler doesn't enforce rigor the way it would with a true enum:

public var state:Number;
public static const state_off:Number = 1;
public static const state_init:Number = 2;
public static const state_running:Number = 3;
public static const state_stopping:Number = 4;

This at least allows me to use names to assign the state instead of magic numbers.

Parallel programming is interesting. I grew up in serial programming models. The 1240 had two processors in it, but communications between them was a drastic bottleneck and one was a lot smaller and slower than the other, so it wasn't really parallel programming.

My first encounter with a completely parallel execution model was a "language" called "LabView" from National Instruments. I put scare-quotes around "language" because you didn't enter it using text. You created a "program" using a graphics editor, because a "program" looked like a circuit diagram.

What you were doing was to create dataflow diagrams. Execution was the problem of the run time engine, which would run a process block whenever there was enough data to make it possible for it to run.

Once I got used to it, it was actually a really neat way to do the thing I was trying to do. If I'd had to write that program in C it would have taken me 6 months. As it was, I got it working in about 3 weeks -- but the first week and a half of that was getting over the cognitive shock and trying to learn how to think parallel instead of serial.

Flash isn't quite that parallel, but the way you can have multiple things running at once, plus the way you can nest or unnest them, is very flexible. I'm beginning to get my mind around that part, but Actionscript is a bit more complicated.

I'm beginning to think that for some of the kinds of things I want to do, I'm actually better off creating entire independent state machines to run different parts of the display, and letting them communicate with each other using flags and state variable changes. I know that's gross, but it's cleaner than the alternative.

Using a request flag means that the governing state machine can do a clean startup and a clean shutdown and can guarantee that it doesn't stop running in the middle of a loop iteration. The result is a cleaner visual result, without jarring transitions. And at least you can encapsulate it inside of public functions, to hide the grossness a little.

You are getting sleepy... sleepy...

But nesting animations is fun, too. You can get some very complex motions, especially if you make the loop-lengths different. The blue arm's cycle is 52 frames, the orange arm's cycle is 40 frames, and the spring's cycle is 16.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 05:25 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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(Via) Thirteen Blog Clichés and I'm happy to note that I'm not guilty of any of them. (Any more.) (Not even #11.)

Nor #13, "No comments allowed", any more. But I don't agree with him that "a blog without comments is not a blog." He gives a nod to "exceptions for massively popular blogs where comments clearly don't scale" but he doesn't know the half of it. A popular blog that posts controversial content and permits comments will get swarmed with hostility, and it wears on you. Over a period of days, even weeks, you can ignore it. But constantly being beat up, even by people you don't respect, gets really old.

Believe me, I've been there. Even without permitting comments, just the hostile email wore. Being in the Technorati Top #100 is less nice than you might think.

What I've got going these days is a lot more fun. A core group of us who all blog, read each others' blogs, and share a significant interest. A rather larger group of readers who tend to read all of us. Non-controversial subject matter, and relatively small overall readership.

I think Shamus has noticed what he lost when "DM of the Rings" got so popular. He went from a typical post having 5-10 comments to a typical post having more than a hundred. You know what? It stops being fun to read your comments when there are so many.

He says that when "DM of the Rings" ends (another three weeks or so) he's going to do another capture-comic but he's going to give it its own home. My guess is he's made a deal with Pixy and it'll be a mee.nu blog -- but we'll all find out when the time comes. But it won't be on "Twenty Sided" and I get the impression that Shamus is hoping that his readership on that will decline again, back to the cozy comfortable level of the old days.

[Yeah, yeah, #10. Cut me some slack. I don't do it very often, and anyway it's one of our shared interests.]

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 07:12 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Every once in a while I see some obnoxious spider crawling through a bunch of files on my server. I've got a "robots" file which is supposed to prevent that, but a lot of people out there who run crawlers aren't very principled about that kind of thing. (My robots file says, "Googlebot, MSNBot, Answer.com-bot, come on in. Everybody else, go to hell." But it doesn't help very much, since most crawlers ignore it.)

A lot of those out-of-control crawlers turn out to be in China, and I've toyed occasionally with blocking China entirely in my firewall. It would be easy to do; it's all in a couple of A-level IP blocks. (Somewhere I've got a link to a list.)

But I saw a different one today: [38.100.41.102]. ARIN just says that the 38 IP block belongs to "Performance Systems International". It's one of the original companies, back in the early 1980's, who were granted A blocks of IPs. So this tells me jack.

A reverse DNS on that IP comes up blank for me. But a trace route... ah, yes. A trace route stops at 38.112.21.142, which reverse DNS's to CYVEILLANCE.demarc.cogentco.com.

Cyveillance is scum. (That's my opinion, which is protected speech under the First Amendment.) They're in the business of scanning the web looking for any references to their customers' names or products which might be negative, so that the customers can issue C&D's and/or threaten with libel suits. Or at least that's how they began; apparently they've branched out into other things since then. But the foundation of their business is data scraping.

It's no wonder that Cyveillance's crawler ignored my robot file; it's exactly the pages which are protected that way which are most likely to be juicy.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 02:10 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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