soledad penadés

repeat 4[fd 100 rt 90]

… because this has been happening for a couple of years now and you don't even reply to my support tickets.

Check my triplicated search results by yourself!

I heard Google's blog search was a better search engine for blog stuff. What do you think?

Note: I very very rarely use Technorati, since its search results tend to be quite polluted with things like this one. But it is used by Wordpress to show you the latest links to your site and that's why I'm seeing those threesomes each time I log into my admin panel. And it's ridiculous!

The web team, composed exclusively of interns, made a request to their project manager:

– We'll need a php editor, the trial license for Ultraedit in this machine has expired and we can't be disconnecting the network cables each time someone starts Dreamweaver so that it doesn't detect we are all running the same license.

– Ok, just download something in emule and try to crack it. Don't know, Zend Studio or something. It's ok, as long as you have space in your computer for installing it… Just make sure you download it in your home computer, since we have a very limited network connectivity and we can't afford to use the office's network for downloading large files. We don't have budget for development tools either.

Some years later, different country:

– I'm afraid I'll need Flash CS3 for doing this…

– Ok, no worries. Just let me know which package you need and I'll buy it.

(10 minutes later)

– You can find the software in this folder. License key is there as well.

* sole is trying to pick her jaw, which got stuck in the floor, with no luck.

I was trying to polish it a bit more and then announce it but mr.doob just decided to go ahead and promote our latest idea, mapspam.net, in digg (feel free to digg it, of course).

What you can see is a very preliminary draft of a for-fun project. I showed mr.doob a wordpress plug-in that I was developing for getting spam statistics, when all of a sudden we began to have crazy ideas like "and what if we placed all these spammers in a map instead of just getting a table with percentages?".

We still have a lot of features to be shown, which are hidden while I finish the interface, plus the wordpress plug-in which we'll presumably distribute in some kind of closed beta way so that we can assess how well does it work.

Meanwhile we need the spammers to collaborate and contribute with their shit to the site! If you're one of these viciously perverted v14gr4 advertisers, for all means, spam it! We need your c1.alis, en-largements and all that in our site!

If you're not a spammer, you can also help us by linking to mapspam.net, so that spammers may hear about a site which greedily devours every spam it finds and shows it in a map (and does more things in the future, I hope).

PD: By the way, isn't it a great name? mapspam! it's a palindrome and can be read the same whether you begin to read in one or another direction!

In almost every programming language, parsing errors tend to be boring, and PHP is not going to be an exception… unless you get one of these:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM

If you aren't aware, what it means is "Oh, there's an unexpected double colon where it shouldn't have appeared".

But even if it's a bit obscure, sometimes it's funny to get this error. Just for contrasting with all the plainly boring rest, like unexpected '}', unexpected ',' … all that. Even more funny is that those characters ('::') are also defined as T_DOUBLE_COLON. But why did the programmers decide to use the cryptic error message is something of a mistery for me yet.

The first time I got the error I thought I had found an easter egg! Either that, or the php interpreter had gone nuts…

I have had to register in this website and holy crap, I hardly could finish the process! I'm amazed there's so many people registered even with captchas like this one. Is it an V or a X? or an N?

But I presume they might be having lots of spammers overcoming their captchas so that's why they need to push it further and make it more and more complicated, even if that means that us the mere mortals can't use the site. Not that I care (except when I need to register, obviously) but I have been working on something which I think it's what they'll need in the future. Without further ado, here it is: the next captcha generation for myspace forms!

Featuring absolutely unreadable text, horrible colours, distorted and unexpected music which clashes violently with whatever you're listening to (I've added several songs playing at the same time so you can feel the pain even if you're not listening to anything right now).

The colour scheme is carefully designed to fit perfectly with every single page in myspace and therefore it requires Flash 9, so it can push the adoption of Flash 9 amongst the internet community thanks to thousands of teenagers willing to show their intimate side to the world, while also making the linux 64-bit system and other exotic systems guys get angry because they don't have a player for watching this monumental piece of crap.

Isn't it nice?