Alden Bates' Weblog

First piece of comment spam.

DELETED!

Dagnab spammers.

My strategy for dealing with Yahoo's redirect problem seems to be working. Yahoo has dropped over one hundred redirected pages for www.tetrap.com from its index and is starting to index the proper URLs at nzdwfc.tetrap.com. This should hopefully reduce the number of unnecessary redirects and lessen server load.

It occurred that the reason BlogSpot is over-represented at BlogShares is because Blogger's free accounts ping weblogs.com by default, and that's where BS picks up new blogs. Add to this the fact that Google pimps Blogger via the Google Toolbar, and it's little wonder many of the listed blogs are BlogSpot blogs.

OTOH, LiveJournal is poorly represented (around 3000 listed) because only paid LJ accounts (accounting for about 4% of all LJ accounts) can ping weblogs.com, and the pinging is turned off by default (ISTR). LiveJournal doesn't do much in the way of working with the rest of the blogosphere.

There are even fewer Xangas (about a hundred or so), so I'm guessing Xanga doesn't ping weblogs.com at all.

I also today ran Ad-Aware for the first time in a while, and it reported that a cookie my site generates is a tracking cookie. I suspect this may be because it contains the user's email address. Pah.

I done put some pictures in LJ's picture hosting site finally. This picture below and ther preceeding one (click on "Prev" which you look at the picture) are a couple of photos I took in Lower Hutt last week.

Side of building The demolition of a building in Lower Hutt revealed the side of the building next to it, which had been covered for who-knows-how-long and included some cool antique signage.

When I switched on my PC today, the scanner software which starts up at boot time reported that the flatbed scanner (A Hewlett Packard ScanJet 5100C) wasn't responding. I took a look at the scanner, and the light on front was flashing.Odd, I thought. So I tried the usual measure of unplugging it for a moment and then plugging it back in.

At this point the scan head started moving backwards and forwards and playing classical music.

Yes, I'm serious. It created notes by varying the motor speed

Current theory is that it's a measure designed to make the user think he's gone mad. I googled for a bit but couldn't find any reference at all to an HP scanner playing classical music, so I'm not entirely sure why it was doing that.

Sadly it did not do it a second time when I attempted to replicate the procedure, though the scanner is working fine... All I can say is someone at Hewlett Packard has one hell of a sense of humour.

As Boing Boing reports, the Star Wars Trilogy DVDs contain a wee surprise for Xbox users - there's software on them which automatically updates the Xbox firmware without telling you. Which might spell trouble for people with modded Xboxes.

And you thought it was bad when it was just bored kids putting out viruses. :P

Having been messing about on BlogShares looking at blogs so I can categorise them to get more Karma and Chips, I've observed that a surprising proportion of them seem to be Blogspot hosted. I wonder if this reflects the actual proportions or whether there is something in the way that BlogShares finds new blogs that makes it favour Blogspot blogs.

OTOH it could just be that people tend to link to other people hosted on the same service more readily, so following links around will tend to result in an inaccurate perception.

So I ran RegClean, a Microsoft product, to clean the Windows registry on my PC. It was so thorough that it also deleted a number of references to explorer.exe - resulting in My Computer and folders in general to lose the Open and Explore options on their context menu, and no longer open in explorer by default.

One would think that a piece of software purposely written by Microsoft for cleaning the registry would not do that sort of thing, wouldn't one?

But apparently one would be wrong. The odd thing is I'd run RegClean before with no problems.

Wow!

So clear you can see Mark Hamill's nasal hair!

So crisp you'd swear it was filmed yesterday!

Of course, it's still version 1.2 or whatever we're up to now, but I don't care. The visuals are so clean it hurts.

What I need right now is a huge-ass TV set and 5.1 stereo system.

The Sunday Star Times a couple of days ago had a review of Björk's latest album Medulla. I was a bit confused as to whether the reviewer actually liked it or not. "It's called "Where is the Line?", to which most sensible citizens would surely reply, "several hundred yards short of this song"." he says, but goes on to give it four stars anyway...

Meanwhile there was a bit of excitement in Enya fandom, when a Japanese site reported a release date for an Enya album. Sadly it turned out they'd jumped the gun - as enya.com reports, Enya had recorded a song called Sumiregusa for a marketing campaign, and someone assumed it meant an album was on the way. There's a very-choppy streaming version of the song on enya.com.

It's been four years since A Day Without Rain came out with no sign of another album. With a five-year gap before that, only punctuated by the best of, her album gestation periods seem to be getting longer. :/

With the filming of the new Doctor Who series in the UK, there's been talk of a regeneration story. I have to agree with the idea it would be silly to have a regen story (I'm going to abbreviate this to save typing :P) at the start of the series, due to the fact that after a regeneration the Doctor almost always starts out with an unstable personality and it'd be better to start out with an established Doctor so the audience have a better idea what to expect.

OTOH, I'm all for them doing a flashback to a regen story later in the series. Of course, it's unlikely to be like any regen story we've had before.

Most regen stories are along the lines of "The Doctor regenerates at the start and then has this unrelated adventure". I would think that a modern regen story would make the regeneration part of the story. Little really has been done with the concept of regeneration during Doctor Who's run, other than to use it as a plot device to change the leading actor occasionally.

You could have a story, for instance, where the bad guy tortures the previous Doctor to death, followed by regeneration, then the Eccleston Doctor kicks the bad guy's arse and steals his leather jacket. Or my favourite concept, where the previous Doctor and Eccleston Doctor meet up at the start of the adventure, and at the end the previous Doctor is wounded and sent back in time to the start of the story where he regenerates into Eccleston and encounters his previous self. Just to make things confusing.