Dave's Free Press: Journal

violence, pornography, and rude words for the web generation

 

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geeky politics rant silly religion meta music perl weird drinking culture london language transport sport olympics hacking media maths web photography etiquette spam amazon film bastards books bryar holidays palm telecoms cars travel yapc bbc clothes rsnapshot phone whisky security home radio lolcats deafness environment curry art work privacy iphone linux bramble unix go business engineering kindle gps economics latin anglo-saxon money cars environment electronics
Thu, 7 Jun 2012

Google are naughty little liars


[click image to embiggen]

Oh dearie me. I was trying to buy some tickets to a show at the Barbican, and got this error from Google Chrome. Translating into words that actually mean something useful instead of their "helpful" message, they're saying that the Barbican's SSL certificate couldn't be validated. Unlike every other browser, they provide no way for those of us who know what the hell this means to work around the problem.

Thankfully, I have another browser - Firefox - available, so I could use that. Lo and behold, Firefox thinks that the certificate is Just Fine, and shows me that it's authenticated by Verisign. Why on earth would Google not accept this cert? Dipshits.

Posted at 21:19 by David Cantrell
keywords: geeky | security | web
Permalink | 0 Comments
Thu, 30 Jul 2009

Sainthood FAIL

In a deservedly-hagiographical article about the Blessèd Joanna of Lumley, BBC News Online's related-links-ometer made just a teensy boo-boo, linking to this obviously silly site. Here's the proof, in case they fix it.

It's not a very good spoof site though.

Posted at 21:45 by David Cantrell
keywords: bbc | silly | web
Permalink | 0 Comments
Wed, 25 Mar 2009

Wii FAIL

Oh dear. I think someone needs to tell the Japanese that "UK & Ireland" isn't a language.

(Yeah, I know, none of the others are too)

Posted at 22:09 by David Cantrell
keywords: language | web
Permalink | 0 Comments
Tue, 22 Jul 2008

Wikipedia: WRONG AGAIN

Wikipedia has a reputation for being of rather low quality, particularly in the humanities. In the sciences and technology it is supposed to be pretty good. But today, I found an error in their article about ... the triangle. One of the most basic mathematical concepts. And they got it wrong. Joy.

OK, to be fair, it's only subtlely wrong, is correct for the majority of cases, and one could argue that the context in which the inaccurate information is presented makes it OK. But I disagree.

In a section called "Basic facts" they first mention that triangles were described thoroughly by Euclid. Good. In the next paragraph, they say that the internal angles add up to 180°. Not so good. They only do so in some spaces, the most commonly known of which is the Euclidean space. Anyway [click click click type click] I've fixed it now. I wonder how long it'll stay fixed, or whether some wanker will revert my pedantry.

Posted at 00:31 by David Cantrell
keywords: geeky | maths | web
Permalink | 0 Comments
Thu, 22 Nov 2007

Liquidised Baby Pandas

I am shocked to find that the phrase "liquidised baby pandas" doesn't appear anywhere on the interwebs. Until now. I suppose this might be because pandas are fierce beasties with big pointy teeth that will fight like demons to stay out of the blender.

Posted at 18:09 by David Cantrell
keywords: web
Permalink | 0 Comments
Mon, 27 Aug 2007

I, pornographer (again)

A company called Trend Micro, who provide shoddy internet filtering disservices, have determined that my CPAN dependencies website is pornographic. Obviously, children need to be protected from the horrors of mod_perl code.

That's three times I've been accused incorrectly of being a pornographer now, all of them incorrectly.

update: this 'ere journal is also apparently porn. Yay! I'm special!

Posted at 10:42 by David Cantrell
keywords: meta | web
Permalink | 0 Comments
Fri, 1 Dec 2006

Interwebnets roundup

Some things that got my attention in the past few days ...

David Cantrell's home burnt down and now he lives in an old bus, according to the Dallas Morning News. You too can get bizarre stories about your evil twins emailed to you with Google Alerts.

A retard tried to ban a couple's Christmas peace symbol because, well, clearly, Christ was only joking when he said "blessed are the peace-makers".

And finally, I owe the hip-hop community an apology. I have previously dismissed all their work as "illiterate shouty crap". But now Baba Brinkman, a Canadian student of Mediæval and Renaissance English, has set the Canterbury Tales to music. It's still shouty crap, of course, but illiterate it is not.

Posted at 21:37 by David Cantrell
keywords: music | religion | web | weird
Permalink | 1 Comment
Thu, 28 Sep 2006

mod_bandwidth for teh win!!!!

Most of you will not be aware that I run a mirror at home of recent episodes of The Linux Link Tech Show. Whenever there's a new episode, or they get slashdotted, my DSL gets hammered which means that I get a really sucky slow connection for anything I want to do to the rest of the world.

So a few weeks ago I installed and configured mod_bandwidth. It didn't appear to work and I left it until later to fix it. I have now fixed it, by the simple expedient of turning it on by HUPping Apache.

Doh!

I've not imposed much of a restriction - the tllts mirror can eat up to about 97% of what's available, leaving just enough for me to do important things like ssh to this 'ere web sewer of mine and witter in my journal.

Posted at 10:24 by David Cantrell
keywords: geeky | web
Permalink | 2 Comments
Thu, 13 Apr 2006

I, pornographer

A company called Sonicwall, who provide dodgy internet filtering disservices, have determined that this site is pornographic. So that's DHA's next job sorted for when the bottom falls out of the programming market.

I have emailed them asking for an explation. I don't expect to get one.

Incidentally, this is the second time I've been incorrectly accused of being a pornographer. A pint for whoever can tell the amusing story of the first time in a comment here!

Posted at 23:20 by David Cantrell
keywords: meta | web
Permalink | 2 Comments

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