No ******* Profanity, *********!

Over the past couple days I’ve had the pleasure of building a profanity filter for the PHP app we’re developing (no sarcasm, it’s really been fun) . Regular expressions, tolerance thresholds, real-time context-sensitivity algorithms (ok, maybe not that) and big lists of swear words in numerous languages.
Speaking of which, if you need a good list […]

Comments are Back

As you may have gathered from the comments on the “No Comments” post, comments are now back. Amusingly, that post about no comments got more comments than any other post this month. You lot are fickle readers, you are.

No Comments

I’ve updated my install of WordPress but in the process my WPBlacklist plugin stopped working. It turns out that it’s been silently blocking dozens of comment spam a day and now that it’s gone, they’re all getting through for moderation.
Rather than deal with the deluge I’ve disabled comments until I find a suitable replacement.

Aeriosa performing on the Vancouver Art Gallery this Friday

This Friday Vancouver dance group Aeriosa is performing in and on the Vancouver Art Gallery. You read that right: on it. Rock climbing meets dance (and that picture there just happens to be a shot of my friend Julie Lebel rehearsing for it).
The outdoor performance starts at 7:15pm and $10 will get you into […]

PHP “Fatal Error” Follow-up

It should be mentioned that I consider PHP’s running out of memory in this case to be a bug and not a feature or expected behaviour. The inability to connect to a database should not result in the error I’m seeing but rather should result in the error being handled gracefully (esp. when you factor […]

PHP “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted” solved

Late yesterday afternoon, after I installed a PHP app we’re building onto one of our testing machines, I started getting the following PHP error:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 43 bytes) in /var/www/client/dir/libs/adodb/adodb.inc.php on line 3850

Which means that PHP has run out of the 8 megs of memory […]

Japanese IRS Phishing Scam

I enjoy a good phishing scam every now and then, particularly the one I received today purporting to be from the IRS and offering me a $63.80 tax refund if I’d be so kind as to click on this link and enter my credit card information:

http://ns0.msl.ne.jp/~takeshi/%20/%20/index.html

Poor Takeshi, seems he might be the unwitting gateway to […]

“Let them eat Tastykake”

While reading Barry C. Lynn’s The Case for Breaking Up Wal-Mart about the monopsonistic practices of the mega-giant I came across this great line:

“Let them eat Tastykake.”

I assumed this was the author’s witty use of Newspeak and googled to see if there was any prior Orwellian usage. Imagine my surprise: Tastykake.
In hindsight what surprised me […]

How Telus Lost a Customer

Part of moving in the modern age is getting all the services necessary for daily life connected to the new home. Not water or electricity or heat but the real necessities like cable and internet access, the important ones around which life revolves. Two days ago I would have thought, given the recurring revenue streams […]

See This Band: Mudmen

Chances are if you went to university in Ontario you’re already familiar with Mudmen, probably without even knowing it. Chances are at some point you got good and drunk to ‘5 O’Clock’ or ‘Saturday‘ at least once. ‘Saturday’ is what you’d call a drinking punk’s anthem. And then there’s ‘Underdog’ which, in my opinion, may […]

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