Blog

  • Dad’s Visit

    December 5, 2004

    Go ahead. Make my day.Dad came to stay with me for six weeks, starting on Thanksgiving Day! We’re having a good time, and I’ve already found some surprising things that I never knew Dad doesn’t like spicy food, because he is slightly allergic to it. Dad is allergic to crustaceans! Dad is into Frank Herbert’s “Dune” series and Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” series, because he found these books in my room and read them. We’re currently collecting them for him to take home. Dad likes the occasional dram of Scotch. He prefers hard liquor to wine and beer, too. Who knew what fun Dad could be! :-)

    Mooncake?Dad also brought some fun chinese goodies over, such as this mooncake. Or is it some kind of other cake? I forget. It was still tasty.

    We went to rent a cello from Johnson’s Strings in Newton on Saturday. As Emily said, it was a cool place. He’s been practicing cello only for about a year and a half…apparently, it’s something he’s wanted to do for quite some time, so now he’s doing it. It’s awesome.

    We had dinner tonight at YouYou’s, here in Nashua. It wasn’t the best meal I’ve had there, and it was quite smoky and loud tonight. Dad found the miso soup to be a bit sour, the tea to be a bit heavy on the roasted rice, and the sushi to be prepared with inadequate length, pressure, and wasabi. The vinegar wasn’t too good either apparently, “In Japan”, he said, “each restaurant makes their own vinegar.”

    This information was presented in quite a genial way, so it seemed educational rather than critical. In the past, would I have reacted in a less favorable way? Maybe I’m mellowing out too. I’m glad that we’re connecting.

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    DSri Seah
  • Theory vs. Practice

    December 4, 2004

    I scan the search keywords for my website periodically to see how people are finding it, and occassionally find people hitting an article or two to find the answer to a specific question. Sometimes I’ll annotate articles to be a little more helpful, especially if the question seems to be of universal interest to my fellow nerds.

    Today, I saw something search terms that inspired an entire new article, related to this previous post on flea control:

    Search Terms: can i wash my cat with 20 mule team borax My Helpful Answer: NO

    Still, it’s a logical question…since the borax works by shrivelling up flea larvae like salt on a slug, I’m pretty sure you don’t want to do that to your cat, but ask your vet. While you’re at it, get the Advantage or Frontline stuff. It works waaaay better at nuking fleas than anything else I’ve tried.

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    DSri Seah
  • Paper Houses

    December 4, 2004

    Visit Site Concept: a house made of recycled cardboard that can be assembled like a piece of IKEA furniture. When you move, you can pack up your house and take it with you. Inexpensive, saves landfill, and stores rainwater as ballast so the wind doesn’t blow it away by accident. One of six environmentally friendly, pre-fab, and Austrialian Houses of the Future.

    Via Slashdot.

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    DSri Seah
  • Beating the Syndicate

    December 4, 2004

    It’s interesting to see how art and commerce collude to make money in an eyeball-driven media marketplace, and just how territorial people can be about protecting those structures. What people forget is how fragile even the mightiest of institutions can be, once people realize they have a better choice, and that choice is freely accessible. Buggywhip and barrel makers may welcome the syndicated cartoonist to their club of outmoded artisans, as entrepreneurial web cartoonists assault the newspaper cartoon page with new business models.

    The idea is that popular web cartoonists offer their strips for free to traditional newspapers, in exchange for advertising or exposure. The syndicated cartoonists, described in this WebSnark editorial, are naturally upset. Scott Kurtz kicked the controversy off at SDCC 2004, for those who want to delve back a bit deeper.

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    DSri Seah
  • ThreeStrikesSpam Mystery

    December 3, 2004

    I’ve been trying to figure out where these extra escaped slashes were coming from in my comments… I finally tracked it down to some code in ThreeStrikesSpam, the plugin I used to block comment SPAM.

    The code activates when a comment is being processed, before wp-comment-post.php actually executes and posts the comment into the WordPress database.

    The problem occurs because there’s some code that calls add_magic_quotes() to make sure that everything is “parsed, cleaned, and stripped corrected” in ThreeStrikesSpam.php. The same function is called again in wp-comments-post.php, which double-encodes slashes and screws up single and double-quotes in the comments.

    My guess is that I should disable the add_magic_quotes() call in wp-coments-post.php, since some of the function calls in 3SS probably depend on having escaped strings to work properly; I haven’t looked too closely at this yet.

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    DSri Seah