Huddled Masses

Posts Tagged ‘Funny’

So I recently got some new AOL buddies in a folder called “AIM Bots” ... which as far as I know of, I never asked for, and don’t know where they came from. A couple of them looked interesting … but this one in particular I couldn’t figure out what it was, so I figured, what the heck, it must be a bot, lets just try asking it …

[new] I’m taking my AIM nick out of this page, because annoying teenage girls keep IMing me because they actually want to chat with a bot and they can’t tell which one of these is me. (Maybe they just don’t bother reading the article). So where you see “Me” below, imagine you see my nickname.

Me > What are you, and how did you get on my buddy list?
spleak > Hi, I’m Spleak, your guide to everything celebrity, from Lindsay Lohan to My Chemical Romance. What’s your name?
Me > ew
spleak > Very creative name, but I’m afraid it’s too long for me to type over and over again. Can you please try again with a shorter name?
Me > Shorter than two letters?
spleak > Okay, I will call you Shorter than two letters?. So… I’m a 21-year-old girl. How old are you?
Me > 205
spleak > 205? Ha ha… are you sure? Please enter your age again… your REAL age, that is …
Me > 2
spleak > 2? Ha ha… are you sure? Please enter your age again… your REAL age, that is …
Me > 8
spleak > Sorry, you are not eligible to talk to Spleak at this time.
Me > Hurray!
spleak > Sorry, you are not eligible to talk to Spleak at this time.

So, yeah … apparently this is some new form of advertising.

So David Morgenstern over at eWeek has an opinion piece claiming that “PC users should forget their outrage and come to understand that life isn’t fair. The Mac platform is more secure than Windows and will continue to be so.”

Just for fun, I’m not going to try to debate that. It’s absolutely true (as he points out) that practically all of the “in the wild” viruses, trojans, and other malware target Windows. Of course, it’s also true that practically all of the software in the world targets Windows. Yeah, there’s plenty of Mac software, and plenty of Linux software too … but numbers-wise …. Yah, anyway. I said I wasn’t going to debate that … instead, I’m just going to poke fun at his ridiculous arguments.

Still, no matter how much you might consider this comparison an unfair shot, it is real. The Mac is a better platform when it comes to security and malware attacks.

I’ve used Macs since 1984, and I’ve been infected by some malware twice. Two times.

Now, I’m sure many of you can echo what I’m about to say, but with longer dates. I got my first PC in high school, sometime around 1990. Since then, I’ve been running DOS and Windows. The closest I’ve ever come to being infected was when I put other people’s infected floppies in my PC to run a virus cleaner on them … or maybe when I had a look at the source code for the Melissa and “I love you” javascript bugs… I’ve literally never been infected. Sorry David. That’s not an argument about macs vs. PCs, it just shows you’re not very careful.

By my reckoning of the installed bases for each platform, there should be many more exploits for the Mac. Depending on how you calculate the number—2, 3, 5 or whatever percent—shouldn’t there be that corresponding percentage of viruses on the Mac in these lists?

... Scripting News listed the site’s readers by browser. Firefox was the largest (49.76 percent), and Internet Explorer came in second (23.43 percent). However, Mac-only browsers Safari and Camino were next in line (21.31 and a guesstimate of 2 percent, respectively).

Well, I didn’t want to debate exact numbers … but now you’ve got me riled up. It’s preposterous to even mention the visitor logs of a single website when discussing computer market share … Read the rest of this entry »

I have a funny story about politically correct toys. Well, cautious toys, anyway.

We got this “Word Whammer” from LeapFrog this week. They make these fridge toys that come with a bunch of letter magnets, and three slots that you can put the letters into. When you put a letter in, it reads it and pronounces it phonetically, like: “Eff! Eff says fuh, eff says fuh, every letter makes a sound, eff says fuh!”

Except the Word Whammer is special. It can pronounce whole words! Well, only three letter words, but still. If you put P-I-N in, it says: “Letter Pee, Letter Eye, Letter En. Press the three letters to hear your word” ... and when you do, it says: “Pee, Eye, En; Pin! Pih, iih, nuh; Pin!” and then encourages you to play some more … if you put C-A-T in and press all three letters, it says “Cee, Aeh, Tee; Cat! That’s one of my favorite words! Kuh, Ah, Tuh; Cat!”

What’s amusing is that LeapFrog is so careful not to offend people …

If you put G-O-D in, it doesn’t know the word, so it just says: “Gee, Oh, Dee; Guh, Oh, Duh” and then suggests that you do another word — now to be fair, that’s just the default behavior for words that it doesn’t know, but really, I mean, if you’re teaching it words, why would you leave out god?

It gets funnier if you put D-I-M in, it will say “Letter Dee, Letter Eye, Letter Em. Press the three letters to hear your word” and then you press them, and it says “Duh, Eye, Em, Dim! Great word, try another one” so you just switch out the I for an A, and it says: “Letter Dee, Letter Aeh, Letter Em; Let’s build a word! Put three new letters into the Word Whammer!” Yep, it won’t even phonetically pronounce it! Nothing you can do will get it to do so … all it will do is repeat the letters and then tell you to start over with three different letters.

It’s been awhile since I posted something this unrelated to programming, gadgets, or my life, but I’m rather amused by the latest news about Canadian mad scientist Troy Hurtubise of Project Grizzly fame. This is the guy who tested his grizzly-proof suit by jumping in front of a 5-ton pickup truck going 30 miles an hour and claims to have invented the Angel Light in a dream, allowing him to see through walls, kill goldfish and destroy electronics … and the “God Light” which he thinks can cure cancer...

Anyway. His latest publicity stunt is a trip to stand around looking like Robocop in downtown Toronto, in hopes of getting a military contract to produce Starship Trooper-like suits for the Canadian military. While this seems like the perfect occasion for a series of jokes about the Canadian Armed Forces, what I really want to know is: What happened? Supposedly he was going to do this on Saturday, and yet the only mention of it (other than the original Hamilton Spectator news) is on the usual silly news sites which are just reporting on the Hamilton story.

Well, since there’s no further news, feel free to watch these old Discovery Planet videos: Fire Jeep, and Fighting Fire with Fact, and read about how Berkeley’s got the perfect partner to this suit working in their robotic exoskeleton.

Technorati Tags: ProjectGrizzly, BulletProof, FireProof,Science, Technology, Canada, Hurtubise

I hadn’t seen the news anywhere that Internet Explorer 7 was going to be delivered as a high priority update, thus automatically installing it for the large percentage of the populace that uses automatic updates… in fact, the first hint I had was when the Internet Explorer 7 Blocker Toolkit showed up on my Microsoft Downloads notification list.

My first reaction was to think that Microsoft is loosing it’s mind, and is so fractured internally that one group is actually trying to prevent the distribution of Internet Explorer 7. However, after visiting the download site I quickly realized that this “Blocker” only blocks automatic deployment by Windows Update. It doesn’t stop people from installing it by hand (through the update site or otherwise). Essentially, it’s a tool for corporate IT departments that want to postpone the upgrade until they can thoroughly test it — not trusting Microsoft to decide when IE7 is ready for prime time. OK, so it’s still slightly wierd, but at least in this light, it doesn’t look like Microsoft in-fighting .

Edit

I had a look around, and they’ve got screenshots of the upgrade process on the IE Blog, and I’m now midly reassured that I’m not going to get a phone call from my mother trying to figure out what happened to her browser. I mean, I may still get a call … IE7 doesn’t look at all like IE6, but at least she’ll know what happened (from the looks of it, there will be a clear screen letting her know she’s upgrading IE), so she’ll just be wanting to know how to get her old interface back, and I’ll be well prepared with the easy answer: Just download Firefox mom.

Technorati Tags: IE, IE7, Firefox, BrowserWars, Web, Windows, Microsoft

Normally, I don’t indulge in linking to other people’s blogs just because they’re interesting … but I’m making an exception for Kyle MacDonald, because he recently completed his quest to trade one red paperclip for a house.

Yep, you read that right. He started with a red paperclip, and bartered his way through a doorknob, an electric generator, a recording contract, and a snow globe … to end up owning a house in Saskatchewan in less than a year! (actually, he’s making the final trade on the anniversary of his first trade, so it technically took him a year to get from paperclip to house). Really impressive. He should be a used car dealer … or a horse trader.

Adobe Acrobat’s Portable Document Format (PDF) is a great file format primarily because it allows documents formatted for printing to be sent electronically in a format that is viewable on nearly all operating systems. This includes things like formatted mathematical formulas, inline images with text wrapped around them, page-based layout, columns and all the niceties usually associated with printed documents. Of course, Adobe has added lots of features over the years, including clickable indices and bookmarks, inline hyperlinks, etc. Despite all of this, you should not use PDFs to deliver content on your website.

There are a few legitimate reasons why you might need to use PDFs to provide downloadable content, particularly if that content needs to be usable offline, or to use mathematical formulas, or to be searchable. GeoShell, for instance, has an online wiki for documentation, but provides a downloadable copy of it as a PDF file so that users can access the documentation offline and have it be searchable and everything. But again, in general, you should not use PDFs as part of your website.

There are a lot of reasons why you should not use PDFs on your website. For starters, they’re generally bigger than HTML files, they force users to load another application, and they force a different form of interaction. Some (few) users might not even have Acrobat Reader installed (remember, Windows doesn’t include a viewer). Many savvy users resent PDFs and actively avoid them when possible because they don’t want to run the extra software (why do you think Google has a “View as HTML” option for PDF links?)

But the coup de grA?ce is usability. If you still can’t see why PDFs should be avoided, let me tell you story of how a PDF affected a friend of ours, and in fact, how PDFs may be affecting some of your users, those people you seldom hear from, who are actually the end target of all your labor. Read the rest of this entry »

That’s right matey, it’s done rolled around to Sept the 19th again, and shiver me timbers if that doesn’t mean it’s time to talk like a Pirate all day. Now quick, tell your mates about it before I blast your scurvy hide out of the water … arrrr!

Well, gas prices keep getting higher … but this is ridiculous [laughing]