From Penny Arcade comes this great Fox News report about how child molesters can use a Nintendo DS to rape your children.

Even if you don't own a Nintendo DS, this is worth having a laugh at.

Total Bunk.

Say you have a webpage, with a background image and a select box. In Internet explorer 5.5, you will run into an issue where the background image won't fully load, and the contents of the previous page will be your background instead. Moving the scroll bar will sometimes fix the problem, or sometimes make it worse.

That is, if you are using IE 5.5 in stand-alone mode, along with IE 6.0.

Which goes to show, the only sane way to browser test is to install VMWare or have a separate machine for every IE version you need to test. Yes thats right, a separate computer for every (Microsoft) browser that you need to test.

Imagine that.

Insert heaping of scorn upon Microsoft here. Man. Just make your browsers stand-alone-able already.

In standards-compliant mode, compatibility with other versions of Internet Explorer is not guaranteed. When standards-compliant mode is switched on, the rendering behavior of documents might differ in future versions of Internet Explorer. You should not use this mode for content that is fixed in nature, such as content that is stored on a CD.

MSDN Library

Rasmus wrote about the "No Framework PHP MVC Framework. And so many people missed the point, it becomes almost funny. First of all, there are a bunch of Ruby on Rails wonks who are obviously dismayed by the entire idea that using a framework, especially one with a central controller could actually be harmful. This is something that Avi and I talked about earlier, albeit in a slightly different content.

Railing on Rails

Probably the most annoying, asinine, and missing-the-point-entirely, is an entire blog post that claims to compare the no framework PHP version with Rails. Look, I am not about to rag on Rails. It is obvious that it does something right and good for a lot of people; in fact, installing and playing with rails is very high up on my todo list.

One of the things that bugs me about this comparison it is at the end of each subsection is a running tally of lines of code written, as if that is the be-all and end-all of programming. If it really had to do with how many lines of code we wrote, we'd all agree that a language like scheme is best, and we'd all program in one language.

But really, the biggest thing is this, I'll just quote the relevant authors, and let them speak for themselves:

I don't have much of a problem with MVC itself. It's the framework baggage that usually comes along with it that I avoid. Parts of frameworks can be useful as long as you can separate the parts out that you need. As for MVC, if you use it carefully, it can be useful in a web application. Just make sure you avoid the temptation of creating a single monolithic controller. A web application by its very nature is a series of small discrete requests. If you send all of your requests through a single controller on a single machine you have just defeated this very important architecture. Discreteness gives you scalability and modularity. You can break large problems up into a series of very small and modular solutions and you can deploy these across as many servers as you like. You need to tie them together to some extent most likely through some backend datastore, but keep them as separate as possible. This means you want your views and controllers very close to each other and you want to keep your controllers as small as possible.

--Rasmus

The controller handles the requests of the user. Every request goes through a controller first. The controller uses the model and view to create a response. In this application, one of the tasks of the controller is to load a list of products, using the model. The controller gives this list to the view, which turns it into HTML.

--Jules

The difference is obvious. Rasmus is talking about why using a monolithic controller might not be a good thing, and shows us how one can get round that using his language of choice. Jules is showing us that his language and framework of choice is so much better then ours because his framework writes all his code for him. Glossing over the fact that Rails itself has, just as a guess, several kilo-lines of code. So I guess that means that PHP is better, because it only took PHP a few hundred lines for what took rails thousands.

Now as I said, I don't have it in for Rails. I don't actually believe that a framework is better then a language for writing web applications. I think both have their place.

Object Fascism

The other funny/annoying part of the comments to Rasmus's blog is the OO-Zealots, another great quote:

I think you are doing a lot of damage with this posting. Do you realize what's going to happen if ONE of the 30 programmers in the building I work in find's your post? For years I have struggled convincing fellow programmer's that PHP is NOT a simple scripting language for the gamers and what not, that it actually CAN compete with J2EE and ASP.NET and C# if used where appropiate. To read this from the creator of the language....I'm still shocked

--Jurgan

Now, at work, I have to deal with a J2EE app. I am not sure if it is a representative sample or not, but let me tell you: if the J2EE/huge-framework method is the right way, then I'll throw my lot in with the bad-guys. Trying to change just one small aspect of this system becomes an exercise in pain. This droplet here, is it configured by the params and oparams in its XML? Or is it configured by its properties sheet? Or is it configured by some other XML configuration file somewhere else? In actual fact, I am also willing to explore the very real possibility that there was a very particular reason for the at-work system being laid out like it is, and I am going to try my very best to learn it as best as I can, without letting my prejudices getting in the way. It isn't going to be easy, but it will be well worthwhile.

Anyway, the central point here is that you can talk till you are blue in the face about how PHP is a perfectly valid language, about how it can be used appropriately, until you are blue in the face. 90% of them will not listen. They don't care. The C# guys spent a fuck-tonne of money becoming certified by Microsoft. They are firmly, and proudly locked in. If they have to admit to the possibility that there is another perfectly valid way of doing things, their house of cards comes crashing to the ground. The same can be said with the Java guys. They love their Bondage and Discipline language, and wear their love proudly. It is so much easier to sneer at a language that challenges what we think of as "good" then it is to actually learn from and learn about that language.

To those guys, I say "So what". Let them spend countless dollars on training and education on broken languages. Go learn Scheme, Haskell or something. Go see what the fuss is about continuations and web programming, so that the next time they start to sneer in your direction, you can retort with something like "Oh, I'm sure glad your language of choice solves every problem. Why aren't we all using Language X for everything? Quick tell the world!". Language advocates are annoying and dumb, and should be treated as such. Don't treat them as people to convince, but people to scorn.

Okay, sorry, this got a little ranty. But language advocates piss me off. There is a big difference between loving a language, and loving a language to the exclusion of all others. I'll finish off by pointing you to this great entry about Java by Steve, titled: Execution in the kingdom of nouns.

I ran into another Yet Another Social Networking Software. In their front page, in all its second-level-headline-glory was this:

Store 4 U, Send 2 Your Friends

I won't check it out. I've been soured and sullied from ever going to that site again. It might just be the killer web app, (but I doubt it, it seems like more web2.0 du jour) and I still won't go.

AOL speak is so lame.

It's been a little while since I have ranted copyright. But This article just pisses me off to no end.

Music sales in Canada dropped 4% in 2005 to $536 million, the Canadian Recording Industry Assn. reported Thursday.

The dip is part of a 10-year decline that the CRIA blames on illegal music downloading.

Except, the RIAA, the big brother to the CRIA, as been known to fudge their numbers, and claim things like music sales are dropping, when really they are gaining in the face of a recession. So have music sales really dropped 4%? Does it have to do with piracy, or does it have to do with the number of music retailers online? Does it account for non-Canadian music e-tailers that sell to Canadians? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I rather suspect it goes something like "We cherry-pick whichever makes it look like we are losing the most money!"

Maybe the real answer to the question is that Canadians don't need to buy that pop album because it is all we on the radio. I don't know the state of radio for the rest of Canada, but if Calgary is any indication, it is pop, rock, more pop, and a little bit of country. To be hones,t I haven't really looked into buying music online, but I rather suspect that a dollar per song is about right. So, say a full CDs worth of songs (call it 10-12 songs) is almost equal to the cost of a music CD (10-15 dollars). They're selling bits. There is no artwork, no packaging and no inventory. Shipping is incredibly fast, easy and cost-effective. Why aren't the savings passed on to the customer?

Another problem. "Illegal music downloading"? Errr... no. It is legal, according to the Supreme Court of Canada and our current copyright legislation. But what gets me is this quote from the CRIA head honcho:

"As legal downloading surges ahead in other parts of the world, Canada is marooned on the sidelines," said CRIA president Graham Henderson. "The goal of a vibrant digital marketplace in Canada will remain beyond reach until our legal environment encourages people to buy music instead of passively accepting theft on the Web."

So wait a second. You lobby to get higher levies on blank media, because Canadian copyright law allows private copying, and you get it. Now that you have it, you want Canada to make private copying illegal? So you want to have your cake, and eat it too then? I see.

Funny how this "News Article" from variety just listens to one side of the story. Sounds to me like they got it from a press release.

I fucking HATE trackback spam. Spammers are doing to trackbacks what they did to Usenet and are doing to email: making a perfectly good service absolutely unusable because, in a nutshell, they fucking suck.

The latest back of trackback spam I got points to a page at http:// www .myjavaserver .com/ ~casinosandpoker /videopoker.html (not hyperlinked, don't go there.) which contains some "encrypted" Javascript. Here is a hint kids, you cannot fucking encrypt Javascript, because the clients browser needs to decrypt it. Decrypting it is as easy as looking at the code, and executing it in a sandboxed environment to see what it is doing. This particular chunk of Javascript builds a form with a hidden field, with the name ref, and the value is suposed to be the referer, and then submits that form . For my non technical readers, it basicly logs where you got the link to that site from (the trackback on my site) and then sends that off to a new site (http:// www .best-pokerrooms .com/).

Well that is what it is supposed to do.

These assholes screwed up. They assumed that the server is running PHP (it's not).

Boy, wouldn't it suck if someone put up some arguments to wget and cURL to fill up their referer logging mechanism full of junk?

Man. That would SUCK.

Especially since they get their ad revenue from external Javascript. Which isn't downloaded.

Man.

I hope no-one does that.

wget --post-data="ref=http://StopSpammingBlogs.com/TrackBackSpamSux" \
--referer=http://stop.spamming.blogs.org/StopTrackBackSpammingBlogs \
--spider http://www.best-pokerrooms.com/

curl --form ref=http://StopSpammingBlogs.com/TrackBackSpamSux" \
--referer http://stop.spamming.blogs.org/StopTrackBackSpammingBlogs \
--request POST http://www.best-pokerrooms.com/ >/dev/null

Randomize the urls to be, well, whatever you like really. Just keep the www.best-pokerrooms.com url the same.

Update: Metacharacters are your friend... Certainly don't do this... lots.

Update 2: User agent selection is also good. No-one should ever do this, because it would be oh-so-terrible if it was harder for trackback spammers to scrub their referer logs.

Update 3: Now I am the dumbass, it appears that --spider in wget only performs a HEAD request, not a POST. So I fixed the wget command.

wget --post-data="ref=http://`pwgen 50 1`.com" \
--referer=http://`pwgen 50 1`.com \
--user-agent=`pwgen 50 1` \
--output-document=/dev/null http://www.best-pokerrooms.com/

curl --form ref=http://`pwgen 50 1`.com \
--referer http://`pwgen 50 1`.com \
--user-agent `pwgen 50 1`
--request POST http://www.best-pokerrooms.com/ >/dev/null