RKNet Blog... Thing

I have noticed that on two perfectly functional laptops (running Windows XP Pro) that when using Digg, Opera 9.27 crashes. Not just a hangup, or a page malfunction, but a full on Windows application error which forces me to end the process and restart the browser altogether.

Having using Digg a fair amount in the past with various versions of Opera (this one included), I can only conclude that this is a new issue and is most likely due to a change in the code which runs Digg. Does anyone have any insight into this most unfortunate turn of events? Error pasted below for those who can interpret these things.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Application Error
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1000
Date: 5/20/2008
Time: 6:27:57 PM
User: N/A
Computer: GIANIA
Description:
Faulting application opera.exe, version 9.27.8841.0, faulting module opera.dll, version 9.27.8841.0, fault address 0×001b4c12.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74 Applicat
0008: 69 6f 6e 20 46 61 69 6c ion Fail
0010: 75 72 65 20 20 6f 70 65 ure ope
0018: 72 61 2e 65 78 65 20 39 ra.exe 9
0020: 2e 32 37 2e 38 38 34 31 .27.8841
0028: 2e 30 20 69 6e 20 6f 70 .0 in op
0030: 65 72 61 2e 64 6c 6c 20 era.dll
0038: 39 2e 32 37 2e 38 38 34 9.27.884
0040: 31 2e 30 20 61 74 20 6f 1.0 at o
0048: 66 66 73 65 74 20 30 30 ffset 00
0050: 31 62 34 63 31 32 0d 0a 1b4c12..

P.S. I am still bubbling over with anxiousness for the official release of Kestrel!~

Fake Stephen Colbert, a twitter user posting under @stephentcolbert, has been unmasked. Luckily, the psuedostephen opted to share the reasoning behind this Twitter-Digg deception.

It’s really fun to see someone take a silly experiment and launch it to the next level, a silly experiment with wide recognition. Of course, with Stephen Colbert’s huge popularity these days, is it really any wonder that a Twitter account that was updated with some regularity would get noticed?

As noted in the Fake Stephen’s article, there was already an @stephencolbert when Fake Stephen went to register. However, that person had updated very infrequently, and had stopped updating a very long time ago overall. Even though @stephencolbert had 10,000, without updates it was just another idle account. When I checked earlier tonight, Fake Stephen’s account, @stephentcolbert only had 5,000 followers. Yet it was this account that hit the front page of Digg and got called out by Comedy Central themselves. Proof that one of the keys to recognition within a social environment is to be social! (Duh.)

I kind of hope that Fake Stephen carries on in some way, shape or form. It might be a nice addition to the pantheon of other Fakes out there. Like Fake Steve Jobs.

This morning my mother copied to me via IM an email or a page she had found. Within contains the most complete list of paranoias, hoaxes, wishful thoughts, and general falderall ever generated via email chain letters. It is a tremendously entertaining read and I absolutely have to share with you all. Oh, and if you don’t digg, del.icio.us and put this on your facebook then bad luck and extreme misfortune will infest your pathetic soul for all eternity. Bill Gates told me so. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

This is pretty cute and I thought you’d get a few healthy chuckles from it. :) I just want to thank all of you for your educational emails over the past year. Thanks to you, I no longer open a public bathroom door without using a paper towel. I can’t use the remote in a hotel room because I don’t know what the last person was doing while flipping through the adult movie channels. I can’t sit down on the hotel bedspread because I can only imagine what has happened on it since it was last washed. I can’t enjoy lemon slices in my tea or on my seafood anymore because lemon peels have been found to contain all kinds of nasty germs including feces. I have trouble shaking hands with someone who has been driving because the number one pass-time while driving alone is picking your nose (although cell phone usage may be taking the number one spot) Eating a Little Debbie sends me on a guilt trip because I can only imagine how many gallons of trans fats I have consumed over the years. I can’t touch any woman’s purse for fear she has placed it on the floor of a public bathroom. Yuck! I must send my special thanks to whoever sent me the one about poop in the glue on envelopes because I now have to use a wet sponge with every envelope that needs sealing. Also, now I have to scrub the top of every can I open for the same reason. I no longer have any savings because I gave it to a sick girl (Penny Brown) who is about to die in the hospital for the 1,387,258th time. I no longer have any money at all, but that will change once I receive the $15,000 that Bill Gates/Microsoft and AOL are se nding me for participating in their special e-mail program. I no longer worry about my soul because I have 363,214 angels looking out for me, and St. Theresa’s novena has granted my every wish. I no longer eat KFC because their chickens are actually horrible mutant freaks with no eyes or feathers. I no longer use cancer-causing deodorants even though I smell like a water buffalo on a hot day. Thanks to you, I have learned that my prayers only get answered if I forward an email to seven of my friends and make a wish within five minutes. Because of your concern I no longer drink Coca Cola because it can remove toilet stains. I no longer can buy gasoline without taking someone along to watch the car so a serial killer won’t crawl in my back seat when I’m pumping gas.. I no longer drink Pepsi or Dr Pepper since the people who make these products are atheists who refuse to put ‘Under God’ on their cans. I no longer use Saran wrap in the microwave because it causes cancer. And thanks for letting me know I can’t boil a cup of water in the microwave anymore because it will blow up in my face…disfiguring me for life. I no longer check the coin return on pay phones because I could be pricked with a needle infected with AIDS. I no longer go to shopping malls because someone will drug me with a perfume sample and rob me. I no longer receive packages from UPS or FedEx since they are actually Al Qaeda in disguise. I no longer shop at Target since they are French and don’t support our American troops or the Salvation Army. I no longer answer the phone because someone will ask me to dial a num ber for which I will get a phone bill with calls to Jamaica , Uganda & Singapore and Uzbekistan I no longer buy expensive cookies from Neiman Marcus since I now have their recipe. Thanks to you, I can’t use anyone’s toilet but mine because a big brown African spider is lurking under the seat to cause me instant death when it bites my butt. And thanks to your great advice, I can’t ever pick up $5.00 dropped in the parking lot because it probably was placed there by a sex molester waiting underneath my car to grab my leg. I can no longer drive my car because I can’t buy gas from certain gas companies! If you don’t send this e-mail to at least 144,000 people in the next 70 minutes, a large dove with diarrhea will land on your head at 5:00 PM this afternoon and the fleas from 12 camels will infest your b ack, causing you to grow a hairy hump. I know this will occur because it actually happened to a friend of my next door neighbor’s ex-mother-in-law’s second husband’s cousin’s beautician… Have a wonderful day… Oh, by the way….. A German scientist from Argentina, after a lengthy study, has discovered that people with insufficient brain activity read their e-mail with their hand on the mouse. Don’t bother taking it off now, it’s too late.-

• @rodzilla I like the idea of searching for music a lot more than I do uploading it all ala muxtape’s model #
• @rodzilla it’s so much fun, I’ve already done at least 3 #
• @rodzilla hahaha. that makes sense, I’ve been going ga-ga over the service lately #
• going to play on mixwit now, I just can’t help it #
• @rickjulian Fage is the beeeest! Oh my goodness. with cherries? nom nom nom #
• @rickjulian even better! I wish it wasn’t so expensive. you ever try Kefir (yogurt drink by lifeway)? #
• @rickjulian lucky! :) i wonder if it’s safe to mail order yogurt… #
• @rickjulian is she still raving at whoever will take the bait? #
• got some curious traffic earlier, makes me wonder if I’m being watched (in a good way i hope) #
• @geechee_girl I stil haven’t quite gotten the hang of hash tags #

Editor’s Note: Seriously, non-stop Tweeting all weekend.
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One of my Digg contacts fired this over to me and it’s definitely worth sharing.
Really lovely photography here, I was highly impressed.
ch-ch-check it!
http://www.digg.com/travel_places/Unreal_Landscapes_pics

First the preamble:

I use a few Linux distros at home and at work, and being a half-baked nincompoop, I prefer the shiny new ones that end in “buntu”. The 64-bit version of Kubuntu is what I run at the office, and I have installed my preferred web-browsing application, Firefox 1.5.x, with my favorite themes, and a ton of useful extensions, most of which I need for work.

Among these extensions, there is a slick little application called Sage. This is an RSS reader embedded into Firefox, which is almost unspeakably convenient. I am expected to do research at least some of the time because my job demands it. Therefore, I am subscribed to numerous feeds, some authored by unabashed marketroids in Manhattan, others by squirrelly black-leather-jacket types in exotic places like Prague.

Every once in a great while, the workload becomes, um, constipated. Don’t get me wrong, there’s never a shortage of things to do around the place, but lately we tend to hyperfocus on a few high-priority items at a time - as opposed to taking a more holistic view (as in “HOLY FUCKING SHIT WE HAVE SO MUCH TO DO HOW THE FUCK ARE WE GOING TO DO THIS GIMME A CIGARETTE YOU PEEEN-ARSE YES I KNOW I DON’T SMOKE” etc). It might be perceived as inefficiency but our deliberately selective awareness of imminent doom allows us to actually get things done without the embarrassment of pissing our collective pants in abject terror after suffering massive aneurysms.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah. Slow day at work. Reason: we have a balky cms built in deprecated php. The code is liberally commented in at least one Central European language, but aside from that, documentation is scant. This cms has the quirky habit of eating posts according to some fiendish glitch. Programmatic functionalities combine with traditional meatbag error and really weird things happen to our precious data. We would like to begin serious repair of the website but there is no way to do this, at this time, without using this cms. (By the way, if you want to know what using our cms is like, imagine if Franz Kafka wrote Catch-22).

So, we must wire Switzerland and tell them to put their finest gnomes to work. By tomorrow, we expect these gnomes to be busily engaged in pulling meaningless strings of ones and zeroes from the mysterious innards of the database and weaving them into more or less normal html.

In the meantime, there’s various personal crises and dramas to fill the available time. All this stuff, on top of a two-long-island-iced-tea lunch and a nasty sugar crash caused by socially mandatory birthday cake, makes me stupidly susceptible to opening up the feedreader and clicking links. As a result I am now fully briefed on a variety of current events in the nerd universe.

First, let’s start off with what we already know. At 9pm EST yesterday, instead of deleting forum spam like a good boy, I was glued to my monitor, drinking a beer and watching as Digg rioted. This was absolutely fascinating. I’ve tried to spam Digg a few times so I know what kind of raw power was needed to unleash something like that, and believe me, the power level over there was waaaaaaaaaaay over nine thousand. A few places like the nefarious Forbes.com (more on those assholes later) were Diggbaiting this story earlier today (reposting a similar story at their own url in an attempt to attract backlinks), and earning upwards of 1000+ diggs. If I was into AdSense arbitrage I would have done the same thing. Digg is famous for funneling huge traffic to popular pages, enough traffic to crush a server. Some of those visitors will click an ad or two. Wash, rinse, repeat - voila! There’s your business model.

What was most interesting was Kevin Rose’s attitude. I was really impressed that he decided to side with the majority of Digg users. Unfortunately this flies in the face of all business sense (wherein you are supposed to avoid getting sued and do nothing except increase shareholder value, regardless of the collateral damage). In the more profit-minded areas of the intarwebs he has been damn near vilified, not so much for taking a stand, but the manner in which he took it. However, this issue involves more than just money. This is a matter of ethics. The future is at stake here, and rather than defer to the corporate interests involved, Kevin Rose did what was right. We won’t know the outcome for a while, but a line has been drawn in the sand, and a million computer enthusiasts are loudly saying with one voice “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

But, I’m beating a dead horse with all this Digg stuff. We all know about that shit. What I am really interested in is space.

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“Illegal number?? My ass. You can’t make a number illegal! I’m posting this everywhere.” Seems to be the reaction of every Joe and Jane Interwebz User out there. Even I Can Has Cheezburger is getting into it now!

Folks also took this opportunity for some ”wikiffiti“ at Digg’s expense. In case anybody didn’t know, Digg got absolutely plastered with the supposedly offending number over and over again. These posts were originally subject to deletion, because Digg really wasn’t down with the idea of being sued. However, the shovelers over there would not rest until they had dug a five-times lifesize homage to this “illegal number” into the face of the internet, up to and including Digg itself. Kevin Rose has responded to this unstopable human wave in the only way that seems fitting.
Also, a few priceless images:
http://photos-682.ak.facebook.com/ip002/v71/230/117/6607382/n6607382_30744682_6068.jpg

http://photos-942.ak.facebook.com/photos-ak-sf2p/v81/89/106/6026408/n6026408_33533942_9534.jpg

http://i19.tinypic.com/5×4v4nc.jpg

Unless you've been living under a rock without the internet or any human contact, you have undoubtedly heard of a phenomena referred to as “lolcats” or “cat macros” and sometimes “oh god another fucking lame ass meme”.
http://www.icanhascheezburger.com is a collection of these pictures, mostly cat-related but there are a few gems that center around other members of the animal kingdom. Maybe I'm lame for saying so, but I think cats and pictures of cats with really obvious or bizzare or blatently misspelled captions are really funny. I couldn't tell you exactly why I think so; perhaps in this small way I'm rebelling against the blah-ness of what's popularly considered funny. Then again, these cat pictures are getting awfully popular… 473 del.icio.us bookmarks and counting, and about 251 diggs last I checked! WOW! Maybe I'm not such a rebel afterall, or maybe all it means is I'm not alone in enjoying snickering quietly to myself and muttering “oh I see what you did there” at bold captioned pictures of cats!

read more | digg story

Just to give you a taste of what you're in for if you aren't terribly familiar with the whole “cat image macro” thing, I give you the namesake photo of the site!

Table of Malcontents' fan base is full of rabidly creative geniuses of multiple disciplines. Today Camillo Miller proves his musical acumen by submitting a jingle for ToM! Give it a listen, I think you'll agree that no matter how it fits in theme, it's a really great tune.

Go FETCH! I promise you (especially those of the “indie” persuasion) won't be disappointed.

read more | digg story

Remember a while back when I started Words to Know? The first links I provided were on things like the golem, and the homunculus.

Well, thanks to Fulguritus, the first WTK of 2007 (volume #7, no less!) is going to feature some more curiousities of alchemical and religious histories. Since I consider this a landmark, lucky Words to Know, we’ll make this one extra verbose! Not just Wiki links here, folks! Read on. :)The link chain begins with the Jaquet-Droz automata, a set of curious dolls created in the 1700s. The first thing I thought of when I saw the photos on the Wikipedia article was: “Rozen Maiden!”

For those who don’t know, Rozen Maiden is a manga and an anime about a set of living dolls created by a master dollmaker and their life with a young boy named Jun. (Without Spoilers / WITH Spoilers (but more info) - See Also: Desu [nsfw])

Reading up about these automata made me curious, so I started digging around in that article. An automaton is defined, in brief, as “a self-operating machine.” That definition immediately brings to mind two things: 1 - The Uncanny Valley and 2 - Man’s unnending attempt to synthesize life. Not just “create” life - since any horny, unchecked teenager is pretty likely to “create” life - but to actually synthesize life using methods that would generally be considered non-standard.

One item in the automaton page stuck out: the description of and his coded Book of Stones. Cryptography is interesting in and of itself, but the ties to alchemy were what compelled me to read more. Down near the bottom of the article Geber is mention of the possibility that the term “gibberish” is derived from his name. Which is both plausible (were it not for contradicting evidence) and amusing, seeing as all his alchemy-related writings were encoded and therefore not able to be read normally.

As it turns out, Geber’s alchemic goals appeared to point towards Takwin. As it states in the article, the reason for his experiments towards this end is translated as “The purpose is to baffle and lead into error everyone except those whom God loves and provides for!”

This immediately reminded me of the golem and his role in Jewish mythos as a living protector created from mud.

Jinkies! Just a hop-skip and a jump to get me to come back to one of my first Words to Know research topics. From French robot dolls to ancient magic mud men in only a bajillion links! ;)

I could go off on these and more tangents for a while, but I’ll save it for another time.
Until next time, happy reading!