Four Island

I've written on my blog about spam before, but then I was really just making fun of some pathetic spammer's attempt at spam. Oh wait, that's exactly what I'm going to do now. Oh well. :P

As some of you know, I use Gmail as my primary email service. My first email address, though, was through Yahoo! Mail. Yes, I've now realized that Yahoo! is terrible, but I keep the address as an alternative address because my Gmail account is really my personal address. Anyway, I was checking my Yahoo! address the other day because I was expecting some email when I decided to check the Spam box. My Yahoo! address seems to get a lot of weird spam, so I thought I'd go ahead and scope it out.

Wow. I have seem some weird things today. Let's start off with a puzzle. Tell me what you see wrong with this picture:

Yes, I find it quite humorous that the email is clearly from someone named Kevin, yet the subject line says "My name is Mariya". Lolwhut. Here's another one:

Who are you? Nicole or Elena? Either way, you're some stranger on the Internet emailing random people. These emails are best seen through when you're not even the correct target demographic. It's pretty funny. :P

Here's an odd thing I've noticed happen several times with spam at my Yahoo! address:

My Yahoo! address is not ".@yahoo.com". Would that even be possible? But I seem to receive a lot of spam that doesn't seem intended for me: the other two spam emails I showed, plus most of the spam I receive at that address, is sent to a slight variation of my address, but is, for some reason, sent to me instead.

That third picture there is from a 419 email, too. Again with the incorrect demographic. Seriously, I am waiting for some 8 year old with an email address to reply to one of those with "Um, okay, I like money, but I don't have a bank account and mommy told me not to talk to strangers so um I guess bye".

Yeah, this post is pretty weird, but I just saw those emails today and wanted to rant. Really, spammers are so stupid! Example:

Is that even English‽ While that is extremely stupid, that's not really what I meant. Well, it sort of is. What I mean is that spammers don't seem to even try to seem valid anymore. The majority of the Internet know what spam looks like and some, gasp, even know to avoid it! I mean, does spam actually do anything for spammers anymore? What with spam filters and users with an IQ over 5 that exist nowadays?

There's also the fact that, due to the Age of Social Networking, email is largely dying out. I don't say this happily, I relish in email. I get giddy when Gmail Checker Plus pops up with a new message, most of the time only to become disappointed when I see that it's from formspring and it's notifying me about a "newly" answered question that I saw 5 days ago. The death of email isn't a topic for this post, however, though I would like to talk about it at some point.

Really, I'm just ranting on how spammers are stupid and often times, the only reason I would ever see a spam email is because I voluntarily go into the Spam box with the intention of making fun of the idiots that spam people. The only possible use I can see for spam these days is DoS, or possibly scamming stupid people with no spam filters on. Regardless, spam is stupid. And that's the end of my rant! :P

I'm a bit insane. Yes, I know you all knew that. Anyway, as I make my rounds across the Internet, I find random stuff that I just have to rant about for no reason to people that wouldn't count as extant in a court of law. So, I thought I'd post a big batch of short rants here. It's my weird social commentary!

When I get bored, I occasionally go to some random old date and read all the Daily WTF post preceding it. :P Some five years ago, The Daily WTF posted the following in one of their "fail collection posts":

Are ya WTF-ed out yet? Let's hope not, otherwise you'd miss out on Duane Homick's discovery of the strftime documentation ...

%S is replaced by the second as a decimal number [00,61].

The Daily WTF

I could scream quite a few things right here, but I think the best way to describe what's wrong with this is a sentence found later in the referenced document:

The range of values for %S is [00,61] rather than [00,59] to allow for the occasional leap second and even more infrequent double leap second.

strftime documentation

Yeah, right back at'cha.

Another time I was rather bored, I randomly went to http://bored.com. It was a real site. :P I actually found a really fun game called Red Remover, but that's off the point. I found something that made me laugh and I had to post it here:

Okay, I know what you're thinking: "Starla, don't make fun of advertisements. It's just not worth it." I know, I know, it fails in many ways. But what really got me is how this advertisement, which stages an IM conversation from some person offering me a gift if I click a big button entitled GIFT (which I would've noticed on an IM program :P), is totally platform-specific. See how different the calculator I opened up looks from the Windows XP-style advert?

And don't even go there with the calculator. I'm running Ubuntu Linux.

Anyway, so, um, perhaps I am a bit obsessed with Lady GaGa. Lol, anyway, I had heard a rumor claiming that the video for her song Telephone was to be released yesterday. Sadly, it was not, but while I was frantically searching Google, YouTube and Twitter, I found this hilarious typo of the day:

Okay! That was random.... and fun! Perhaps I'll post more of these short posts at other random times. Or perhaps I can stop writing cop-outs and actually do some blogging. :P

Yesterday, I was looking through the Wordpress plugin archive and I found one that was actually released that day. It was called Houdini. It seemed interesting (I always judge books by their covers :P) so I took a look. What I saw.... shocked me. To quote the description:

The fact is the internet is open can lead to theft especially to content stealing and plagarism.

Until now, there was very little to discourage and deter this serious crime. Yes content theft and plagarism is a crime in some jurisdictions.

You cannot rely on others or the authorities to continue to police the internet as they do not have enough resources. You need to protect your content and deter this theft.

The basic form of content theft is to copy and paste your content to another medium.

Well Houdini, prevents this using a little known special algorithm that prevents copying by making the selected text that is targeted by the perps to be copied, to disappear! Yes disappear!!! The only way to recover is to reload the page in the web browser. If they try again, the content disappears again. As long as they keep trying to select and copy your content, the content will disappear before they can get a chance to execute the copy command!

After a few unsuccessful attempts, the theives will move on to a easier target.

Your safe!

PHK Corporation

....WHAT?!?!?!? Nevermind the author's poor English skills, what are they talking about? It's not technically possible to prevent content theft and this odd little method will annoy normal blog visitors (who are probably less technical than the evil plagiarists) who just want to copy a sentence. Honestly, saying this is like claiming that you wrote a virus that prevents people from turning off their computers. I've already thought of 5 ways to circumvent this kind of "protection":

1. Go old fashioned and turn off JavaScript. Yep, the script is rendered useless.
2. More advanced content thieves likely don't just go around to random blogs and copy/paste off of them. They write screen scrapers, small programs that visit sites and download specific parts of the site. As these do not render pages and simply download from them, the script isn't even seen by the scraper.
3. Due to the nature of the Internet, anyone, and I mean anyone, can see the source code of a website. It's done differently in different web browsers, but it's always pathetically easy and, as it simply shows HTML code instead of parsing anything, no scripts are run.
4. RSS. Syndication feeds are normally viewed in feed readers with little to no JavaScript interpreter. Script bypassed.
5. There's this cool little button on most keyboards that says "Print Screen". Even on the keyboards that don't have it, there's usually a key combination that achieves the same effect. It takes a picture of whatever's on the screen. No selection occurs and yet the thief has a copy of your article. They do, however, have to retype it, so this keeps the lazy thieves out.

This is fun. Does anyone else see any other ways that this plugin fails? Feel free to share!

Anyway, if there's something that's so important that you have to go to extreme measures to prevent people from plagiarizing it, you probably shouldn't be putting it on the internet. It's annoying, but the sad fact is that the nature of the Internet prevents copy protection from being possible. The only way to prevent copy theft is to prevent people from accessing the files in the first place, which would only be possible by not putting the files on the Internet in the first place. There are ways of circumventing certain methods of content thievery (like using a CAPTCHA would block out screen scrapers.... and severely annoy your readers) but they aren't worth it. Just stick with the old fashioned method of dealing with plagiarists: tattle to Google so their PageRank drops into the negative values. :P

EDIT: I was going to email the author of the plugin a link to this post, but by the time this post came out (my pending queue is annoying sometimes), someone had already told the author about the plugin's problem. We're currently having some fun arguments :P:

• [Plugin: Houdini] View source?
• [Plugin: Houdini] Plugin is useless

Recently, I was toying around in CompizConfig Settings Manager because I wanted to see what effects were available. I did find something interesting: I could make anything full-screen by pressing -F10, but that's not what this post is about. One of the other effects I saw was entitled "Zoom Desktop" and I tried it out just to see what it did (which should have been evident from the title).

So, I initiated the effect by right-clicking while holding down super. Nothing appeared to happen, so I decided to disable the effect. Nothing happened. I frantically clicked on the disable button and nothing at all happened. "Oh god, I've ruined my computer," and "Haha! Cats meow," were some of my prevalent thoughts at that point.

Some of you may be screaming at me at this point, but I was seriously stumped. I spent a half an hour trying to disable the effect because, while a key binding for initiating the effect was present in the configuration manager, no key binding for disabling the effect was. Eventually, in sheer desperation, I hit the Escape key. As if by magic, the screen popped back to normal and I was left feeling like an idiot.

There are two problems that I see in this (other than the fact that I have no common sense). First, from a Xidet point of view, what if the user wants to bind "disable zoom" to another key? Oh my god, what if someone wants to use a keyboard combination instead of a mouse combination?! :P No, that's not my main argument, I just wanted an excuse to say "Xidet." :P

The real problem is with idiots like me. What if some user goes into CCSM like I did and enabled an interesting looking effect to see what it did and didn't think of pressing Escape to disable the effect? It says nowhere on the form that Escape will stop the effects of the effect (lol). I was ready to shut my computer down to get out of the effect. Think of how much data could've been lost! :P

Anyway, the point of this odd rant (and I do seem to be making a lot of those recently :P) is that the lack of documentation had a possibly destructive effect on my data. Instructions have to be easily visible for idiots like me.

For a very long time, I've disliked Apple and most of its products, especially the Macintosh Computer. I've received a lot of unnecessary flack because of this as it is, of course, my opinion. It's not like I'm bombing Apple HQ, I'm just (perhaps too vehemently) stating that I don't like them.

Because of this, from now on, I will not be taking part in discussions about Apple Incorporated unless they are to do with their one product that I like: the iPod. I will not be bringing up Macs in conversation and I will make every attempt to not partake in conversations involving Apple because nothing good ever comes of it.

The truth is, Macs and I will never be friends. Maybe TimTam's right, maybe I do have a slew of mental disorders that physically prevent me from using a Mac without throwing things at it, but in my experience, the Mac has not been a particularly intuitive computer. That is an opinion and I don't want to see any flame comments.

I am only deciding this now because of the recent bout of Hatkirby-bashing in the Mac thread on The Fourm. I stated my opinion and used a few jokes and I got 3 people yelling at me. Let me look up the word "opinion" in the dictionary.

Hmm.

**o-pin-ion** (ə pin´yən) *n*.
1. a belief not based on absolute certainty or positive knowledge but on what seems true, valid, or probable to one's own mind; judgement
2. an evaluation, impression, or estimation of the quality or worth of a person or thing
3. the formal judgement of an expert on a matter in which his advice is sought

My opinions are mine because that is what opinions are. That was from the real, physical book dictionary. Perhaps the online dictionaries that most people are used to these days have a different definition, one that defines an opinion as some sort of rough draft that others have to fix because the bumbling original author made some mistakes in writing it. This is the last I have to say about the subject.

For once, I do not expect any comments.

There are two things that I find very stupid about Facebook: its apps and the people that frequent it. Not all of them, obviously as I use Facebook and I'm not calling myself stupid, but Facebook and its users have been annoying me so much that I just have to rant about it.

First of all, whenever I reload the page, I have upwards of 5 notifications. That's good, right? Wrong. Not a single one of them is from my friends (or if one is, it's too high up on the list to be visible as the notification list does not have a scrollbar), they're all from Facebook apps.

No. No I freaking don't care what people think of me at first sight because there's no way a stupid Facebook quiz that I have never used and never asked for notifications from would know. And no, I only know 2 people from my family that are on Facebook and I've already added them to my Family Circle whatever and it's been that way since I joined Facebook in April! And I don't care what my horoscope is and I really have to wonder what on earth the numbers and the request for me to "start [my] zoo" mean. And I have never, ever played Scarab Solitare and I don't know why you would think I would want to. And I already took all of my friends' quizzes when they made them.... six months ago! If you notice, there's only 1 real notification in there that I would actually care about and the rest of them are pure garbage. Why?!?!?!

My other peeve is that a whole ton of people on Facebook are so gullible! There are so many Facebook Groups that advertise things like "Get Notifications When People View Your Profile!" and "The New Facebook Chat: With Video!" that are so obviously fake that it's actually incredibly stupid that so many people fall for them. Doesn't anyone realize that something is off if, to enable this "Facebook feature", they have to join a group, invite all of their friends and go to a remote website that isn't part of Facebook? The one I just looked at also had you give them your email address and complete one of those idiotic IQ tests which are full of spam and advertisements "to prove that your a human" [sic].

People need to realize that if there's a new Facebook feature, it will either be automatically enabled or it will be available as an app that is officially endorsed by Facebook. It disgusts me how many people fall for the ones that were put up as applications and state in the corner "This application was not developed by Facebook" or those that can't even spell "Facebook" correctly. I'm pretty sure that the people behind Facebook can spell and capitalize correctly.

So there's my rant about Facebook. I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way and it's time something happened to fix this. People should be able to filter their notifications (I know that there's a way to do this but it doesn't do it correctly) and some action has to be taken against the league of false "Facebook features". Feel free to comment, vote and deblatog. :P

As some of you may know, Ubuntu 9.10 was released a few days ago. I was really excited because each new version of Ubuntu comes with great new features and other improvements. However, the upgrade process needs to be improved upon.

As some of you may also know, I have never undergone a peaceful Ubuntu upgrade (except for Hardy to Intrepid, and incidentally Intrepid is my favorite release of Ubuntu :P). Gutsy to Hardy failed mid-download the first time, after which the upgrade button stopped appearing in the Update Manager, so I had to download the alternative CD and upgrade using that, which actually took 8 hours and resulted in Four Island going down for a while. Intrepid to Jaunty was done in a situation without my laptop charger (which technically is my fault) which nearly resulted in my computer powering off in the middle of the upgrade (which would have been bad). And now Jaunty to Karmic is not an exception.

The first thing I did when I got home on the day Karmic was released was to boot into Ubuntu, open the Update Manager and click "Upgrade to 9.10". I was then informed that downloading the required packages would take 27 days with my internet connection. Umm.... not quite acceptable. So I switched to the wired network, after which the download halted. I was confused, so I thought of restarting the download. No. After I clicked cancel, the Upgrade button vanished from the Update Manager just as it had done in the Hardy upgrade and do-release-upgrade wasn't a help either.

So I decided to do what I had done with the Hardy upgrade and download the alternative CD. Except, for some reason, my Internet connection was wavering like crazy, so I used the torrent to download it. At the rate it was downloading, it really would have taken 27 days to download. So, for some reason, I switched to Windows and tried downloading the torrent there. Surprisingly, it completed within an hour.

I then switched back to Ubuntu, mounted the ISO as a fake CD drive and upgraded using that. I was then notified that the disc only contained 1200 of the 2052 packages I required to upgrade. What?!?!?! Why wouldn't the disc contain all of the packages if it was meant for networkless upgrade? Annoyed, I let it download the rest of the packages, but it only managed to download about 100 of them because my Internet connection was so bad.

The next day, when I was out, I used a free WiFi network to download 200 more. However, there were still 600 packages I needed. When I got home, it downloaded packages for about 8 hours. Finally, the download completed and the upgrade started, though I fell asleep before it finished.

The next thing I knew, it was 3 AM and Ubuntu was showing a message stating that the upgrade was complete and that I should restart. Internally rejoicing, I restarted the computer. I noticed the new boot splash and the new login screen. It looked a little memory-expensive to me, but I let it pass and logged in to see my beautiful new OS.

The first thing I noticed was that the mouse no longer worked. I'm seriously, the mouse wouldn't move or click. At all. I opened a terminal using my majestic keyboard skills and googled the problem. Absolutely no helpful information on it at all. And the next thing I knew, the entire screen had gone gray and was covered in spazzing "E"s. ....that wasn't good.

I restarted (I actually had to pull out the battery to get the computer to turn off) and the mouse still wouldn't work. The gray screen problem hasn't yet reappeared, but my productivity is majorly impeded by the fact that I cannot use the mouse. I deeply hope this problem will be fixed soon because I'm becoming increasingly annoyed with 9.10.

So, there's my Ubuntu upgrade experience. Not very positive. Has anyone else here done the upgrade? Post your experiences in the comments section. Bye!

Um.... yeah, this post was meant to be posted months ago.... so.... okay. :) And thanks to Drifty for nagging me to post something, because my blog was dying.

Continuing on with my new trend of laughing at the messed up things I did when I was younger, I give you "The Mystery of the Ancient Fountain of Dreams", an RM2K3 game I made. Yes, the title is longer than the legal limit. Anyway, I was looking through it the other day because that was just the thing I was doing and I found some pretty stupid things in it that really made me LOL.

Warning: This game is based around the Kirby universe and contains aspects from certain Kirby games. If you have an aversion to Kirby coughDriftycough, you may not be interested. But then again, you may be.

The game starts out by asking you what you'd like your name to be. Don't know why it does this as during the entire game, you are referred to as "Kirby Star." A short movie then plays which was terribly made and consists of only 5 frames that last about a minute each. Weird. Plus, it makes a incredibly bad ASOUE-reference in the fourth frame by trying to relate two completely unrelated things.

You then wake up on a mountain cliff. What the negative? What's worse is that the mountain cliff is called the "Drian of Peace." I must have been on drugs. There's a soldier-guy standing there and if you walk by him, he tells you (after you call him "handsome") that the "Sultina of Drivsalkanty" wants to see you. Wowwwwwww. I was really bad with names, apparently. And "Sultina"? Is it just me or does that sound like a rasin? Plus, if you talk to that soldier from the side instead of walking in front of him, he says "OLA AMIGO."

The Sultina looks like a nun. But the conversation follows very casually, from Kirby's "Doy, I do!" response to a question to the Sultina's todo list for Kirby: "Find the Fountain. Defeat Nightmare. BOOM. Dreamland saved." Weird. Also funny is this short snippet: Kirby asks "Oh my gosh, are you serious?" and the "Sultina" says "Does this face look unserious to you?" Besides that not actually being a word, the face next to the text doesn't actually look that serious.

The Sultina also gives you a sticker which she says will make the King of "Drinia" trust you. Wow. A sticker. If you walk a mile northwards of her house, you can find the King guarded by one stupid guard. Actually, you can only see the King's mustache and below. He's too high up on the screen so most of his face got cut off. The King then will sell you stuff. He's a King, but he's selling you stuff. Weiiiird.

Next, there's a pyramid to the west with "Nightmare" in it. You have to battle him. He's pretty hard. After you beat him, he screams "Nooo!!!! How could you beat me? I will be back! Yes! Very very soon!" He vanishes and these random Kirbies appear, to which Kirby tells them that falling asleep on a mountain cliff made him want to take a vacation at a resort. WTN.

Two weeks later, Kirby's lounging around at Rainbow Resort and weird stuff happens. Kirby goes to bed and starts talking to someone who's not there. Suddenly, the walls freak out and Kirby gathers his imaginary friends to go do battle with Meta Knight. They appear in this random (carpeted) outdoor area that is full of petrified fountains, barrels of who-knows-what and beds (like in Superhero Movie :) lul). Not only that, but there are also spastic boulders and strings of rocks moving southward like snakes. Kirby then stands on a random square and gets shot by Meta Knight. Therefore, he is not in any of the ship scenes.

Kirby's friends somehow get onto Meta Knight's ship and one is making faces into a camera. Wait a minute, that's not a camera, IT'S A CANNON. :) The scene changes to a diliapitated room where a hostage conversation takes place, but there is no one there. Plus, there is a random boat that looks like it's in water but it's actually on the floor and the floor is messed up with random tiles. And at the end of the conversation, fog fills the room. Plasma Kirby then battles this random thing that I cannot identify (though my siblings insist on calling it "Yogi Bear")

Scene cuts to the main deck where Dark Matter shouts "Release the main weapon!" after which it starts snowing. Dark Matter and Nightmare merge to form "Dark Nightmare", which, for some reason, looks like a hybrid of a dragon and a clown (in chipset). In battle, it looks like.... I don't know. Really weird. After you defeat him, he shouts "NO! YOU CANNOT DEFEAT ME!" Meta Knight then fuses with the thing to form "Meta Knightmare" which looks like the Grim Reaper (in chipset).

Then the scene cuts to a random Kirby running in place in the carpeted Sleepy's commercial from above. Then it cuts back to the ship. Random. There is a battle and stuff. After the battle, the scene cuts to a random building that looks like it's in the middle of a desert. The Kirbies are all in it, talking. Most of them are in a row except for one who's looking at them all and one who's randomly standing in the bottom-right corner. I like to call him "Time-Out" Kirby, because he looks like he's having a time out. lol.

There's some strange scenes after that and then Kirby returns to the "Ancient Fountain of Dreams" to re-battle Nightmare and then the game goes into OMG Destiny! After that, there's battle, and then the "credits". I always had this thing about making the Credits of my games a big deal. This.... wasn't my best effort. Especially considering the extremely high number of copyright mistakes I made. I'm pretty sure I didn't create Kirby and Nightmare :). There's a lot of lawsuit-factor in there :).

Anyway, yes, it's really random and quite funny at times. I thought that if anyone was interested in playing, I'll put it up for download. Because it's RM2K3-based, it requires Windows. However, there's a walkaround! If you are running Linux (preferably Ubuntu), this game has been tested with wine and it works fine. The only problems are a) the background music doesn't work and b) the video at the beginning of the game causes WINE to crash. To get around this, you can load Save File 1 which puts you right after the video has ended. :)

Anyway, download TMOTAFOD here! You know that was an abbreviation, riiight? :) Also, because this game has a lot of battling in it (I don't like the battling), I added a little cheaty. When you go to the "Sultina"'s house, talk to her bookcase and you'll automatically grow to level 99. That way, you can skip the battles with little difficulty and focus on the (probably unintended at the time) comedy aspect of the game.

EDIT: Several people (read: two people) reported recieving an error when trying to download the game and I had no clue what the problem was until.... I realized I had mispelled TMOTAFOD. I put a T a the end instead of a D. Sorreh! I've updated the link now so you should be able to download. Thanks! :)

Oh no, Starla's going to rant again. :) Yes, I've come up with another little mini-rant, this time about "Posting for the sake of posting."

The other day, I was reading a Yahoo! Answers topic called "What were typical foods and drinks in the 16th century?". Most of the answers were helpful, but scrolling down, I found one from "Virgina J" that simply said "WINE I DUNNO". ....if you don't know the answer, then why are you posting?

Spamming, or more specifically, post-count ballooning, is annoying. It, by definition, doesn't help the conversation or topic where it's posted. Pointless posting is a nuisance, mainly propagated by people who want a high post count. I is eating cheeze.

This sort of links in with my "Should I disable post incrementing on A Deck Of Cards" debate. Most fourm games are just so you can post and have fun doing so. Can you say "I LUV 2 BALLO0N MI P0ST COUNT"? I thought so.

Anyway, yes, I'm random. And I finally made that "rant" tag. :)

Ah yes. Due to some sortof reasonable reasons, I recently had to install McAfee Internet Security Suite on my Windows partition. A certain Wi-Fi network I depend on doesn't allow me to connect unless I am running "approved" anti-virus software. So, after the fee, I attempted to install.

Oh, would you look at that? McAfee comes with this new-fangled (you know I'm kidding, right?) download manager thing that downloads the programs for you. I loaded it up, and it just sat there and clicked. You know the sort of click, as if Internet Explorer is refreshing the page over and over again. Yes, I lost sanity. Easy fix though: Mute the speakers. But that didn't help me install McAfee.

I searched teh interwebz and found that the most likely problem was that I already had a virus. So I downloaded McAfee Stinger (which thankfully worked) and scanned my computer. Three hours later, it completed and told me that there was nothing wrong. GAH.

After a while, I found out that another problem may be that I didn't uninstall my trial copy of McAfee properly. So I ran McAfee's MCPR.exe program thingy and forced myself to restart the computer. Nope! Didn't do anything.

Exasperated, I finally tried the "Virtual Technician" thing it provides on the help page. It ran some sanity fixes (such as clearing the DNS cache) and lo and behold, the download manager worked! That was weird!

Wait a minute! After the download manager did a lot of stuff, it just sat there and told me that the installation had failed. .... I then tried the Virtual Technician a few more times and the installation a few more times and it finally worked. But that had taken QUITE a while. And all so I can continue to email people during Lunch. Hm. :)

One last thing I'd like to mention that's annoying me: At the bottom of the support page for McAfee, they have a button labeled "Fee Based Support". Is it just me or is it unfair to change people for support? For instance, a company could build themselves up (so they get good reviews) and then deliberately introduce bugs into their programs so people have to pay to get them fixed. Hopefully that's just me being paranoid, though, right? ....right? :)