Muss My Hair

Points to those who find the nerdly anachronism.

A reassuring message from the MTA. Or from the Matrix.

Maybe this only happens in Astoria. Oh wait, there’s more.

(hilarity thanks to Ed)

Why can’t they make the maps on the plane interactive? I don’t care about the global view or the temperature and local time where I’m headed: I just want to look at the closest most detailed map they have.

I am getting tired of cleaning out registration spam (they don’t comment, but they do create tons of fake registrations), so I’ve added a new captcha thing to the commenter registration. It seems to work fine, and those of you already registered I don’t think will have to do it again. Registration remains pretty easy, folks, so don’t hold back (so long as you aren’t a spammer).

I am writing this _from my iPhone_!

[cue triumphal music]

Now the urge to post while waiting for the N in Astoria can be sated. Many posts about pigeons to follow.

Google had a new service annoounced on the gmail login page yesterday, Autopilot, that would analyze your writing style and answer your emails for you. As you dug deeper it got sillier and sillier, till finally you reach the homepage of the AI, CADIE, which of course, being a cross-section of teh Intarwebs, looks like crap.

Since it’s now the 2nd when I post this Google has taken most of CADIE down since last night, but there’s still some CADIE-invented stuff out there cached:
CADIE’s YouTube channel
Google Brain Search for Mobile
Google Chrome 3D

This eWeek article has a good round up of previous Google pranks

Western Union was still using the wire telegraph until January 26, 2006.

Let me google that for you.

(there’s an about link at the bottom when you are over how meta this is)

Somewhat retouched (the backgrounds are different, I think), but just as weird, all the way from 2001, it’s

Defenders of the Internet.

NSFW, if swearing is bad. Or stupidity.

Been getting many new usersover the past couple months, but none of them ever comment. I don’t know if this is a bunch of lurkers, but since most of names and emails seemed random, I started scanning WordPress sites to see if this was some sort of known spam or hack attempt. Well, finally found something on the blog the creator of MacOSXHints.com runs that describes the same symptoms and what might be up.

With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password. The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit. However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password.

So I went and removed “suspicious” accounts. If I deleted your account, sorry, please sign up again. And yes, I’ve updated the version of WordPress we’re running. Can’t you tell how much cooler we are already?

An IT geek joke posting on Craiglist, by our pal skepticsystem.

So far one resume (not joke) sent in response.

thanks to the Claw

from Spacebarcowboy:
“There is some apocalyptic sh*t going on…”

You get this when you attempt to quit After Effects. The dreamer whose dream you are in is waking up.

Instant runoff voting explained using Flash.

Nifty. Useful? Nifty.

For now can only be installed on a cracked iPhone.

Finally, a decent Morse Code Translator, with audio controls and everything.

I don’t know how long this will last, but through some weird glitch at the Mirriam-Webster site, I was redirected to a nice text-only, no advert, no crapola search page. Some of the search fields don’t work (or I don’t know how to make them work, more likely), but check out the etymology field, for instance. You can put in ‘tagalog’ and get a list of all the words in english that we got from the Philippines (such as ‘boondocks’). Or how about that ‘defining text’ field? put in ‘honey’ and see all the words with that word in its definition.

Perhaps these functions are somewhere on their regular, overly-busy, premium site — I don’t know. Sure is nice to have it plain and simple like this, though.

Hours of wordly fun.