Movie audiences will be treated to a new process that will add scents to the Irish hunk's latest movie, "The New World."
NTT Communications will synchronize seven different odors to parts of the flick in which Farrell plays colonial leader John Smith.
A floral scent will accompany a love scene, and a mix of peppermint and rosemary will be emitted during a tear-jerking scene.
I'm really not sure I'd want smells forced on me during a movie. I can't really explain why but it would bring the whole thing from being a window on another world (with video and sound) to that movie world actually seeping through into reality.
That might sound cool, but IMO it's a blessing that we don't have to smell love scenes in the theatres. I prefer the smell of popcorn to remind me that, no, it isn't actually real.
After upgrading my beloved UltraEdit-32 to UEStudio '05 some way through last year, I began noticing that if I copied text from that program into, say, a text field in Firefox, £ signs would become œ signs. Other characters were also affected.
I'd just gotten a new laptop so I figured that SP2 might have had some weird codepage anomaly, and eventually got used to manually altering some characters when I pasted draft journal entries from UEStudio into textfields on the web.
But then I noticed the same was happening on my home PC.
Occasionally, I'd take a shot at figuring out just what combination of codepages and locales might possibly lead to this bizarre effect. But, with Wikipedia as my sword, I was unable to figure out any single or double codepage translation which would translate £ into œ. I learnt a lot about Unicode, though.
Eventually I just sort of gave up… until yesterday, when I discovered the "OEM Character Set" option on UEStudio's "View" menu, which is automatically checked. The UEStudio menubars have images on some of the options such as this one, making it difficult to see that they are checked. And having gone through all of UEStudio's codepage options, I figured I'd covered all my bases.
But no, after turning off that option, I find that everything is as it should be.
So, the question is, why does UEStudio have this (apparently) useless option on by default, and why did it take me so long to find it? And I wonder if the latest standalone versions of UltraEdit (i.e. not in the Suite) have the same "feature"?
Shan from "noise to toaster" posted this entry about a new joint musical endeavour by Greg Kurstin and Inara George. I'm a bit of a fan of Inara George's through her work on Grey's Anatomy, so I figured I might as well mention it, although I haven't yet found the spare bandwidth to download the new track and hence listen to it. shrug
The BBC is reporting that our esteemed transport secretary Douglas Alexander is up for national tolls on trunk roads to help "combat congestion". The article makes no mention of the direct benefit to people who will start being charged even more for necessary journeys.
I'm already paying more than enough on taxes to the government to run my car, not least on fuel and road tax itself.
Pricing roads isn't going to stop people taking journeys that they must to get to work or to clients, it's just going to further annoy them and drain their money.
Does the government really think people drive up and down congested motorways just for fun?
It would be nice if the millions of pounds already handed over to the government for maintenance of the roads would provide alternatives to those travelling by car every day – dare I demand better public transport? – rather than trying to come up with a reverse incentive by punishing people for using their own independence.
Meanwhile, I do think congestion is a problem. I would just really rather not be charged even more for my necessary travel.
So in this week's episode of Stargate SG-1, "Insiders", the writers/producers decided to change the duration of a Stargate trip again.
Throughout the original movie and the early years of the show, it clearly takes travellers and most obviously MALPs 8 or 9 seconds to get from the SGC gate room to the other end. This ties in with both of the visual effects used, both the old and the newer version of the "I'm in a wormhole" effect.
The only time this was contradicted was in Season 3's "Shades of Grey", when O'Neil appeared to go straight through from one planet onto another planet. I always figured this was a simile put in place for dramatic effect, which worked well.
We've always had to wait a while for a MALP to get through and start transmitting. In "Red Sky" Sam was timing a wormhole trip to stop in the middle of a sun… and the whole affair clearly was designed to take more than 0.3 seconds.
And yet, in Season 9's "Ripple Effect" this is exactly how long the writers decided they wanted it to take for someone to step through the gate and arrive at the other end. At first I thought I might be able to shrug it off as a mistake and ignore it from the canon.
Then they threw it into blatantly unnatural exposition in "The Scourge", when Carter is explaining to Woolsey about the whole wormhole thing. It was almost as if the producers wanted to show off their new shiny number that they'd never had before. But it is still the wrong number.
Back in "Ripple Effect", the idea was that an inter-dimensional bridge had lengthened gate travel from 0.3 seconds to 3.4 seconds, and this was how Carter was able to tell that the other SG-1s were coming from other universes.
And now, in "Insiders", apparently every gate journey takes 3.2 seconds. Not 8, not 0.3. But 3.2. That's the third gross misrepresentation of a core piece of the show's technological makeup.
Matters are made worse when it was implied that Mitchell was able to think up a joke during those "3.2 seconds" that he was split into constituent molecules and thrown through a wormhole, despite Carter having said herself even as late as "Ripple Effect", after 0.3 seconds was made up, that the journey feels instantaneous.
Now, for the most part I enjoyed the episode. I have nothing against the new cast or the new enemies or much else about last year's shake-up. But it's forced exposition ("Impossible is a word I haven't used since ten years ago when I joined the Stargate Program", says Sam totally unneccesarily) and atrociously careless handling of established series facts and the way they hold onto their replacements "facts" as if canon of a totally different show.
And that annoys me. A lot.
A mate of mine from Uni lives in Nottingham with his family. A few weeks ago, he found a tiny article in the local Evening Post about a proposed new Uni campus. Well, we all sort of knew that was coming, and it goes some way to explaining the deserted Uni-owned wasteland opposite Jubilee on Triumph Road.
But what I for one was not expecting, was this promised paradise:
The resemblance to Starfleet Academy in TNG's San Francisco is hard to ignore:
I fully intend to get the most use out of the new campus when it's built at the start of 2008 (yea, right). To be honest, it looks like something from another country: it would look lush in Cyprus where the white floor would stay white and reflect in the sun. I could even study a Masters just to enjoy the Babylonian environment before all the students ruin it.
Still, it's only an artists impression of something that hasn't even been started yet, so.. best not to get too excited, eh?
Every so often, someone pops into #mIRC on EFnet with a question that has been answered many times before. So I keep fragments of code handy, ready to post back into the channel every now and then.
But then I got to thinking… wouldn't it be cool if I had an URL to send people instead?
So now, the URL will be to this blog. And more specifically, to posts just like this one.
My installation and integration of WordPress is going fairly well so far. I have to say I've been vaguely impressed with the solidity of the whole application, despite some annoying quirks.
For example, most of its information-returning functions default to echoing their result, rather than returning them. This is bad coding.
Also, there is a tendancy for WordPress to convert harmless quote symbols into high-Unicode fancy characters, just as Word does. I wouldn't mind so much except that I intend to post code every once in a while. Lucky for me, I found a nice plugin to do the trick.
Forum spam. We all know it's a problem. The introduction of Visual Confirmation ('CAPTCHA') mods seemed to fix this problem, at least to those of us naive enough to believe we'd be safe forever.
I've been noticing for some months now that on the Newark Hall JCR forum, spammers seem to get by the Captcha verification with relative ease. I didn't give it much thought, somewhat putting the whole issue off until a planned revamp of the entire site's integrated superstructure.
Then my employer came to me asking for a way to stop his Telecom forum being overridden by spammers.
So I got to work.
After a little research (read: Googling) I discovered that the phpBB default Captcha mod had, indeed, been compromised. Further, there was a whole list of inadequate Captchas that have been observed on various websites, and cracked by a tool designed to test just how secure these mechanisms are these days.
The only Captcha currently (and obviously) available for phpBB is right up there in the 'defeated captchas' list, with a 97% failure rate.
Weaknesses: constant font, no rotation, no deformation, constant colours, weak perturbation.
Oh dear. Logically, then, we need a new capture.
Alas, as I said before there don't appear to be any different mods for phpBB, so it became clear I would have to write my own. That said, there are still some decent PHP-based captcha scripts out there, so it was more a matter of finding a good one and integrating it into my forum, where the default mod once was.
Roll on freecap – not to be confused with the more well-known "program for transparency redirect connections from programs through SOCKS server" of the same name.
freeCap boasts a host of features, not only does it offer strong character obfuscation, using random distortion of text and multiple backgrounds, but it also focuses on the security of the implementation. A lot of CAPTCHAs are secure against OCR attacks, but fail to account for other attacks, such as session re-use and cross-vhost file inclusion on shared servers.
freeCap can output in three different image types, uses a custom GD font for each character, has brute force protection, it's open source GPL and is totally self-contained – no need for SQL databases, PEAR, or anything beyond PHP and GD!
Well ok then!
Immediately I could see that this could go places. Although I could find no source demonstrating that freecap-generated captchas are any stronger than phpBB's, I also couldn't find it on any Weaknesses lists and it sounds/looks pretty strong, so I'm happy for now.
Integrating into phpBB wasn't 'difficult' per se, but of course it was a pain in the ass. First I located all the bits of Visual Confirmation code in usercp_register.php, commenting them out and marking the area for later use, and stuck a bit of Javascript at the top of profile_add_body.tpl that handles auto-refresh of a hard-to-read image.
Then I uploaded freecap.php which generates the image and handles pretty much all of the gruntwork, and images/gdfonts along with it. Finally, I went back and plugged in the bit of confirmation code where the original mod code used to hang out. Pretty simple code, it just grabs a couple of session variables and compares a stored hash to the hash of the code entry attempt.
I sort of expected it to work then, but it didn't.
It didn't take long to realise that phpBB doesn't use PHP's session handling functions. No, it uses its own. Basically, it just stores session data in a database table and throws its own session ID around. Since freecap works on sessions, I had to alter freecap's internals to use the same system.
This meant putting a few phpBB include lines at the top of freecap.php, playing with paths, creating my own column 'session_freecap' in the database table sessions, then having the script store its originally seperate variables as a single pipe-delimited string which could be updated by itself, and parsed by usercp_register.php.
Some MySQL statements and a bit of debugging later, and it was done. That said, I've yet to see just how effective it will be. First things first, though: I need to go and clean out my database of all those unwanted registrations from the past half year.
Here's an idea. When writing a script to track and tabulate advertising hits for a network synchronisation company, don't forget that the string "01" and the string "1" are different. It took me until the beginning of a new month to realise that my table refused to handle array keys "01","02","03"… because it was looking for "1","2","3". Poor effort.
Even without the quotes.
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