Alden Bates' Weblog

Weeee!

OK, so a few days ago I complained about Movable Type not having a static paging option for category archives. There's several dynamic solutions out there, this one which uses mt-view.cgi, and MTPaginate which does it using PHP, but I'm old fashioned when it comes to web publishing and like my files static if possible.

Over the last few days I've been developing a plug-in for Movable Type, and it's finally in working order. My category archives are finally paginated, and the pages are all static so you don't get database hits every time someone looks at it. There's a bunch of tags defined so you can print things like "Page 1 of 15!" and have navigation links.

There a number of non-portable things at the moment, like it hardcoding the file extensions to html, and the back-end is really ugly and a bit hacky in places, but once I've tidied it up, I'll be able to release it into the wild...

Testy McTest

Here's an interesting bit of information I wasn't previously aware of: If you tell Internet Explorer that you're working offline, then MSN Messenger loses the ability to connect. Even if you're actually online. Once you tell IE that you're working online again, off MSN will go.

Computers! Can't live with them, can't insert them into Bill Gates.

I've ranted on about hotlinking images on my site before. I find it rude because they're using my bandwidth to decorate their own site with pretty images. Although I've put some measure of protection on, sometimes people will try it and not bother to remove the link when it doesn't work. I thought it might be useful to list the top 5 hotlinked images:

	The V for Vendetta comic image from the Comic Connection article from TSV 26, for obvious reasons.
	A convention photo of Tobey Maguire, predating the release of Spider-Man.
	The Greg the Bunny icons, particularly the ones of Tardy and Count Blah.
	Turdy, the alien from The Outer Limits. I'm still not sure what Turdy's appeal is. Maybe it's his smile.
	Thing, from The Tomorrow People.
	An old Dead Can Dance image. Just a picture of some arched windows which I no longer use on my music site - the one currently gracing the DCD page is a DVD screenshot.

I believe the most effective way to prevent undesired image hotlinking is to prevent Google Image search from indexing the pictures on a site; The vast majority of hotlinkers find the images via Google image search.

As a side note, myspace recently added a mechanism for reporting offensive images - there's a link at the bottom of each profile page - so it may be that the most effective way to deal with myspace hotlinkers is to redirect the image to a copy of tubgirl or similar, then report it. I do notice that hotlinking from myspace appears to have reduced drastically on my site since they've introduced this.

A number of things about Movable Type are still bugging me.

1. I upgraded to version 3.31 the other day, and it was still really horrible to do. Why do there need to be so many library files? Why does the directory structure in the zip file seem so bizarre? Why can't I download a zip which doesn't have all the dynamic stuff (which I don't use) in it?
2. The switches to notify weblogs.com/technorati keep switching themselves off for no apparent reason. WTF?!
3. No static paging option for category archives (there's a plugin to do this in a dynamic fashion).

I've been thinking of writing a plugin for paged archive files forever, but the learning curve for writing MT plugins is daunting.

I'd like to switch to Wordpress, but this is why I'm not:

1. The back-end is still fugly (not really much of an issue as there are plugins to fix this).
2. I'm not sure if Wordpress can keep the filenames of the posts the same. If it's smart it can.
3. Still no static publishing option.

The last one is a bit of a hurdle for me. Why does Wordpress depend on accessing a database server simply to construct content which rarely changes?

I stopped off at Pak'n Save to fill up with petrol on the way home today and discovered two things:

1/ The new hub caps I got were a bad move. The tiny holes in them make it practically impossible to check the tire pressure without actually removing the hub caps.

2/ One of my tires has a slow leak. It was down to 9 PSI!

Bugger!

There are two reasons I've been quiet recently: I've been catching up on DVDs madly, and I've also been getting the "Doctor Who and Shada" novelisation ready to go online. Shada was never completed by the BBC*, nor was it published in book form by Target**, which lead Paul Scoones to write it in 1989. Although it's been reprinted a few times, now it's online as an ebook. Hopefully this should make the many people who've asked about it very happy. :)

As well as the book's text, there's a number of extras, including extensive author's notes, a comparison of material with Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and a behind the scenes article. Also the Making of Shada article in TSV 26 has been revisited and rewritten. Kudos to Paul for assembling an amazingly detailed amount of information for this story!

* Although Big Finish recorded it as an audio play with the eighth Doctor recently.
** Target novelised most of the original Doctor Who series, bar the five stories which the NZDWFC subsequently novelised.

You may recall a while back I got two emails from Amos Zongo, one about some gold he had, and another claiming he was the Auditor General of the Bank of Africa looking for some foreigner to offload $16 million with.

I just got another email from Amos, who is now a doctor and the bill and exchange manager, and has $25 million lying around. Sadly for Dr Zongo, two important pieces of information in his email suggest he's already too late:

"...In an account that belongs to one of our foreign customer who died along with his entire family in November 2000 in a plane crash."
"The Banking law and guideline here stipulates that if such money remained unclaimed after FIVE years, the money will be transferred into the Bank treasury as unclaimed fund."

Missed by 8 months! How sad!

Oddly enough, I got an email a while back from one Dada Oman, who also claimed to be the bill and exchange manager at the Bank of Africa, and has some $20 million handy...

It appears whoever wrote this sign:

... had an exceptionally strong Kiwi accent...

I swear, these scams are getting more and more bizarre.

From: "babiya traore"
Subject: USED RAILS (R50-R65) FOR SALE
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2006 10:47:53 +0000

Dear Sir/Madam,

RE: USED RAILS (R50-R65) FOR SALE

Our company is the direct selling mandates to Burkina Faso Railway Corporation and have in stock up to 1.4 Million Metric Tons of Used Rails (R50-R65) for clearance sale, at very reasonable prices. the available rails are located in five different Rail Yards in the country.

This clearance sale is necessitated by the impending privatization of the Corporation and the need to decongest our rail yards in preparation for the privatization.

Prices are negotiable on FOB, CNF and CIF basis. Site inspection, physical verification and confirmation of product quality and quantity are allowed before signing of contract. Offers are invited from serious end buyers or Agents that has access to serious potential end users/buyers

Sincerely,

Dr.BABIYA TRAORE
[Address snipped]

WTF would I want with 1.4 million tons of used rails? Are they simply spamming as many people as they can in the hopes of hitting someone with a pressing need to build a railway?