Haibane.info

I was out of town this weekend, to celebrate my daughter’s first birthday in Chicago with my parents, so I figured that I’d throw a fun post up on the blog for you all to enjoy. Unfortunately, Akismet seems to have decided to stage a coup in my absence and tried to eat everyone’s comments, which seriously blunted what would have been a really fun thread. I just returned home and found Akismet drooling like Smaug over its hoarded commentary, loath to release them until I forced it to my will. Maybe it’s time to look at serious spamtrap alternatives.

In the meantime, how about that wacky telescope thingy, eh? (sigh). I know. Thread’s dead, baby.

was out of town this weekend. My inbox is a nightmare - over 500 messages not including spam. I am seriously considering nuking it. Step 1 towards email independence is simply knowing when to cut your losses. If you sent me an email, please comment below so i know what to prioritize.

not to be outdone, 1,000+ unread items in google reader? Not for long.

Daniel Dare is one of those web personalities you come across who you might initially think is a crank, but after integrating over time you see that they have a subtle depth. He’s largely hostile to belief and subscribes to the Dawkins ultra-rationalist condescension of spiritualism. I haven’t asked him directly but I suspect he would strenously disagree with the inconvenient truth that rationality itself is flawed. At any rate, he’s got a blog and it’s worth subscribing to on RSS.

I think he’d be one of the most interesting people in Twitter if he were to get the Zen. In the meantime, I’ll settle for his Tao.

Astro has suffered a loss. He will be fine, but that sort of thing always cuts deep.

I thought I was done with this, but it seems that Wordpress v2.3.3 did not fix the injection spam loophole; I was just hit by another injection spam attack on my previous post (now cleaned up). I’ve closed user registration on the blog for now, though of course you needn’t register to comment thanks to the captcha plugins I have installed. I suggest that all WP bloggers do the same and keep an eye out for injection spam by monitoring your RSS feed.

I’ve upgraded to v2.3.3 which closes a security hole that was permitting spammers to “inject” spammy links directly into posts via xmlrpc.php, and thereby avoid the “nofollow” attribute that is automatically applied to links in comments (ie, the usual mechanism to deprive comment spammers of the PageRank mojo they seek). The spam was surrounded by “noscript” HTML tags, which meant that they were invisible in the browser, thus hiding the links from detection and removal. However, since RSS feedreaders do not interpret javascript, the spam was revealed, and I am grateful to Dave and to Gothmog for alerting me to the problem.

If you have a WP blog you should upgrade ASAP to the latest version. FYI to all the otaku blogs I link to on my blogroll here, I have not noticed any spam links via your feeds, though I am a bit behind on my reading. You all should upgrade asap.

Hey all, just a heads up that I’ll be filling in as well while Aziz is out of the house. Just some info, I normally blog @ gnxp and @ gnxp.  I’m a nerd & a geek wrapped up in one package.  My geekiness tends to express itself in a nostalgia for Dr. Who and a contemporary interest in science fiction & high fantasy.  In the domains of nerdiness I’m into evolution, hard-core!

I’ve been kindly asked to provide a few musings while the master of the house is away for a short spell. I’m slightly nervous, as the responsibility feels great. It’s like being asked by a neighbor to look after their home while they’re away by bringing in the mail and rummaging through their closets for that lived in look.

So a bit about myself.

I’m Dave Kim and have known Aziz since back in the day when climbing over fences was the standard transportation method. Although we haven’t lived in the same zip code in a long, long time, the magic of modern technology has kept us in touch, more or less, over the years. And since we were raised on the same fluorinated water, we have the same geeky tendencies. In fact, most of my sci-fi sensibilities are because of his influence.

These days I live in the UK, near Cambridge to be precise. I’ve been here now for the past six years but still get back to the States about once a year. Just enough for me to recharge my ‘Why is everything so expensive in the UK’ batteries.

I used to blog in a pseudo anonymous manner, since being Dave Kim on the internet is like being a needle in a needlestack, but haven’t in some time. But I’m sure it’s just like riding a bicycle and it will take me at least month before I start driving away readers like I used to.

I’ve added ScottSM’s WP_Folksonomy plugin to this blog. This means that you, the readers, now have the power to tag any post you please. I realize that this is a bit like giving the inmates the keys to the asylum, but I’m the least sane among ye, so I look forward to your impositions of order on my chaos.

Astro has formally closed up shop:

Over the years I’ve had a lot of fun with the Astronomicon. Via the discussions here I’ve met quite a few people whom I’ve never met face to face, yet I consider good friends. Several have emailed me to ask what was up with this site, so I decided to write this last post rather than just fade away. It is pretty clear that I have poor impulse control and will certainly be writing again sometime in the future. Just not here. I imagine that people who were interested in what I had to say will find me again eventually.

Our web community is small enough that any blog departure is a noticeable one. Astro/John is a good guy and I hope to see him here and elsewhere in comments from time to time. And the next anime blog he starts has a reserved slot on my blogroll.