Haibane.info

Author: fledgling otaku

  • injection spam

    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.

  • the golden goddess of daytime

    Oprah Winfrey is indeed a semi-divine figure, on the landscape of daytime television. She rules it like Pharoah ruled Egypt. She rises like the sun god Ra in a flame of gold over her talk show empire.

    Which is why I find this sculpture by controversy-affine artist Daniel Edwards to be so fascinating:

    Oprah Pharoah

    The artist is known for being provocative in his celebrity-inspired sculptures; he’s crafted one of Britney Spears, giving birth, naked on a bear skin rug. Other targets of his attention are Prince Harry and Paris Hilton. Overall you get the idea that he’s obsessed with celebrity royalty (and royalty celebrities). He claims Oprah is the closest thing America has to a living deity, so he crafted her exaggerated sarcophagus. It sort of makes sense.

    Of course the attention the sculpture of Oprah is getting hinges on how it’s supposedly insulting to her, but i actually think on that score that it works as a homage rather than insult. It’s a combination fertility-goddess image with Pharonic qualities. In that sense, as a fertility totem it suggests Oprah as a mother goddess figure which I think is fairly accurate as far as symbolism goes.

  • the future is Blu

    Congratulations in advance to Ubu for joining the Haibane Renmei renmei. Almost as noteworthy are his comments about the state of the R1 anime industry, partly in response to Steven’s earlier comments about the size of the market and even earlier commentary about the impact of fansubs. Ubu writes,

    At nearly 40 times the going rate for an American series, fansubs be damned: they aren’t giving value for their money, and they will go out of business if that’s their plan.

    In fact, I worry that it is their plan — to self-justify retreating from the R1 market. […] there’s obviously a fundamental disconnect between Japanese management views and R1 market conditions.

    I have to agree that the problem isn’t fansubs. The disconnect is at least partly because of region-coding. However, it should be noted that Blu-Ray (the likely victor of the nextgen DVD format wars, at least as far as anime is concerned) compresses Japan and the United States into a single region. I’ll leave informed speculation as to the ramifications of that to the experts, but it’s definitely time to start taking Blu-Ray into account.

  • in memoriam: STS-107

    sts 107

    debris

    patch

    The definitive timeline of events. Here’s what I wrote that morning, 5 years ago. Eric Berger also looks back.

  • 17 below

    It’s 17 degrees below zero. Today’s high will be 1 below.

    The good news?

    Welcome to the Marshfield School District

    **ATTENTION**
    SCHOOL IS CANCELED FOR WEDNESDAY
    1-30-2008
    ALL SCHOOL ACTIVITIES ARE CANCELED FOR TODAY

    normally at 7am I’d be starting the Process of wrangling Junior Otaku out of bed. A reprieve!

  • I have been assimilated

    sa500153-medium.JPG

    It’s so cheap to register a custom plate in Wisconsin that I just couldn’t resist. I’m going to remain agnostic about whether my plate is big-endian or little-endian, though.

  • kids

    Two cute kids I met in Colombo, named Husain and Alefiyah:

    kids

    Their hometown in India, Pune, is my father’s hometown and the origin of my family name.

  • still scrabbing

    The deadline came and went and Scrabulous endures. Logging in this morning, scrabbers see the following message:

    Hi folks 🙂

    We are really grateful to the entire Scrabulous community for the exceptional support that has been provided. It is amazing to see that a small application has touched so many people across the world! There has been a lot of speculation about the future of Scrabulous and it is currently impossible for us to comment on this matter. However, like always, we shall update you as soon as we can.

    In the meantime, please click here to enjoy a song created by an anonymous Scrabulous fan. 🙂

    Best Regards,
    Rajat & Jayant

    Since they haven’t ceased and desisted as they were ordered to by Hasbro, one assumes that they probably have sold out, and that the game will either be rebranded as official Scrabble. The alternative, that they are planning a less-infringing skin for the app (along with some changes to game mechanics, the way the analogous boggle-clone bogglific has recently done), is also possible, but means that Rajat and Jayant have probably invested in a good (expensive) lawyer who is engaging in delaying tactics. The latter strategy is actually the better business one, since rebranding the site somewhat to evade the infringement attack preserves their hefty income stream. In that regard even an expensive lawyer is still an investment in securing the future of their business model.

  • TripIt

    I’m planning a trip to San Antonio next week, as my wife has a conference in town. I usually assemble all our various flight, hotel, car rental reservation info myself and manually create a travel summary, pulling in maps from google and whatnot. However, for this trip I am trying something new, a service called TripIt, and I am duly impressed. All you do is forward your email confirmations for your flight, hotel etc to their email address and it scrapes the data for you and assembled your itinerary, along with relevant info like weather and maps, automatically. There was some duplication but it was easy to delete the redundant items. Highly recommended if you’ve got a trip planned in the near future.

  • open thread

    what are you all up to?

    Oh, forgot to mention. It’s been insanely cold here. So insanely cold that our front door is frozen shut. All pizza deliveries must be routed through the garage.