Quote of the Day: “Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a villain in a James Bond movie.” — Dennis Miller (via /.)
Slashdot confirms the LJ buyout rumors, and starts more about LJ banner ads for all. Here’s the official announcement from LJ.
And I have no WP spam yet! I was thinking of adding a second checkbox if the new one wasn’t enough, but it’s looking good so far.
I was considering This Chick’s anti-spam checkbox solution to fight my continuing spam problems, but I decided to go with Gene Shepherd’s step-by-step solution. Jeff Barr has a similar approach.
They all work the same way: add a new required field to the comment form, and spambots designed for the average blog comment form can’t fill it in right. Manual spammers can still type in their spam, but they don’t send 100-200 spam comments a day. I also noticed that I hadn’t renamed wp-comments-popup.php, so I changed that, too.
I’ll be backing down on my moderation requirements to see how well the new despamination works, so you can say “incest” in my comments again (for the time being). Now to post a test comment…
[Update] The test worked, but I think the spam is still coming in. I wonder if they’re scraping each HTML form. I may need to use This Chick’s trick after all, since it has the added human-interaction barrier.
[Update II] Note the snazzy new checkbox.
Slashdot fosters rumors that SixApart is buying out LiveJournal. SixApart makes MovableType and TypePad.
[Update] My favorite comment comes from Pentomino:
[Slashdot] has many features similar to Livejournal, most notably the friends list, and the view of friends’ journals.
Slashdot even goes one better — you can also define a foes list. If LJ had that, it would be World War III.
Pentomino himself has no foes.
Quote of the day: a /. commenter says The BSD license is free as in “Working for Apple for free”
The management apologizes for the recent blog outage. I’m not sure exactly what happened or how it got fixed, but it wasn’t the spammers. I suspect it was a problem with the host’s upgrade to PHP 4.3.10. As an added bonus, the 406 error also seems to be better now.
On the other hand, the Tech categories missing from the category list in the sidebar were entirely my (and WordPress’s) fault. I had no posts in the parent Tech category, so WordPress and company were bumped off the list. I added an arbitrary post to the Tech category and now all is well in WP 1.2-land.
We await WP 1.3 eagerly, or maybe they’ve upped the next release to 1.5.
The management apologizes to anyone who stumbled across some particularly nasty comment spam in the blog recently. I’ve deleted it all and banned the obvious words, but I think I may be in for a new round of comment spamming. I could install all sorts of anti-spam plugins, but instead I’ll wait and see how much my recent changes help.
And wait impatiently for WordPress 1.3.
I read a couple of books that sounded like sci-fi on the flap, but turned out to be something else. A Hole in Texas by Herman Wouk sounded like an exciting tale of the Superconducting Supercollider and a sub-atomic space race with the Chinese, but it ended up being mainstream fiction. Is it just me, or are all mainstream novels about adultery at bottom?
It started out so well, too. Wouk does a great job of showing the business end of science–the funding, the rivalries, the power-plays, the government shutting down the SSC halfway through. It could have been sci-fi, but then the hunt for the Higgs boson decays into a mid-life crisis tour of Hollywood and Washington. Even though Our Hero is married to a gorgeous, intelligent woman, he has to attract the attentions of at least two other gorgeous, intelligent women. It’s a bit of overkill if you ask me; I’m assuming that mainstream readers identify with such handsome, successful adulterer-protagonists, but I didn’t.
But I knew Wouk was a mainstream writer. I was prepared to forgive the usual real-life filler. I was less willing to overlook the off-stage, hands-off solution of the scientific mystery. The resolution of the science plot just fell out of a satellite at the end of the book. There was no buildup, no pieces to put together, nothing. It was black-box science, as if the boson were just a prop for Our Hero to push around in between encounters with his women. It was believable, but it wasn’t science fiction.
Dead Lines by Greg Bear also failed to be sci-fi. A mysterious company comes out with a new kind of cell phone that transmits instantaneously, with no noise and no energy. It may sound like a sunny transhumanist tale, but the dark and scary tone lets you know right off that the second law of thermodynamics is not to be flaunted without dire spiritual consequences. The dead are restless, the businessman is soulless, and things go from bad to worse to Evil with a capital E.
It works fine as a horror story, but the science is never adequately explained. Some genius stuck a plug into the afterlife and all we see are effects, never the cause. I think Passage by Connie Willis is a far better mix of the supernatural and the scientific–it has all the spookiness, but with a believable explanation (at least before it jumps the shark). But if you like your horror with a veneer of sci-fi, give Dead Lines a try.
This is a LJ meme (by way of Rocky), but I’m putting it here in the blog since it’s about writing in general.
1) The basics — edit as you go, or get it out and fix it later? How come?
Get it out and fix it later, mainly because later never comes. I think my prose is wretched while I’m writing it, but after I give it a rest it doesn’t look so bad.
2) Death to adverbs? Use in moderation? Sprinkle liberally? At the author’s discretion?
Death to adverbs. Every single adverb dies, except for those that are only called adverbs because they don’t fit into any other part of speech, either (e.g., either, only, not, etc.). It’s never the right time to use an adverb.
3) Do you start with a whole story, usually, or a spark of inspiration that turns into something else? If it’s a whole story, does it change as you go, or stay solid?
A spark that turns into something else. If I do try to outline ahead of time, like I did for NaNoWriMo, the story still changes significantly as I go.
4) Do you believe in One True Characterization in fanfic, or do you think there’s a spectrum? How broad is the spectrum?
I believe in the One True Characterization, but I sin against it frequently.
5) You’re wandering away from fanfic into the hallowed-yet-terrifying world of profic. What do you miss the most? The least?
I won’t say I miss the feedback, since so few people send feedback anyway. I miss the depth of a shared world, the subtle in-jokes, and the fun of playing off canon. Even in tie-in pay-per-fic you can’t really do that the way you can in fanfic.
What I miss least is the crazy people. Real Editors don’t have a lot of tolerance for lunacy or viciousness. It’s nice to see consistent grammar, spelling, and plotting as well, but they’re nothing compared to the pleasant company of the sane. I admit real writers can be preachy and condescending sometimes, but they mean well. They’re just trying to Help the Wee Newbies; they’re not stalking or defaming their fannish enemies like some people I’ve met in fandom.
There’s already a blog devoted to the tsunami. On LiveJournal, mabfan recounts Europe’s worst earthquake/tsunami. For tsunamis in general, see the WWW Tsunami Information Resource.
Don’t think you’re safe on the East Coast. There are several ways it could happen here - if Cumbre Vieje in the Canary Islands drops a huge chunk of itself into the sea, if Portugal has another earthquake like the 1755 terremoto, or if the continental shelf starts cracking up. It could be bye-bye Boston at any time…
I have sci-fi reviews to blog, but somehow it gets to be a quarter to midnight and I haven’t blogged them another day. Instead you’re getting a link-dump of monumental randomness.
I think most of these came from Jeffrey Zeldman or Todd Dominey, but I’ve lost track of the details.
I did a Stargate meme in the LiveJournal, but I left out Sam/McKay as one of my favorite pairings. He’s definitely a love-to-hate kind of character, and I’m looking forward to seeing him on Atlantis—as soon as I figure out what order to watch SG-1 S8 and SGA S1 in.
Warning: S8 spoilers ahead.
So far I’ve seen New Order. I thought Sam was too harsh with Fifth—one minute she’s all weepy and regretful, and a commercial break later she’s telling him she’ll never love him and never be happy in replicator fantasy land. She could have at least admitted that it was possible, or that she was tempted. Fifth is a nicer guy than McKay, and she admitted she was attracted to him. And Fifth is much cuter than Pete.