Satya's blog - 2005/04/

What's with all the remakes and making movies from old comics and stuff? Scooby Doo, er... I swear there was another based on some comic. Batman, of course, but that's not quite a re-make. Apparently there's a Superman movie in the works.

Hmm, just saw this: The Wiz, which includes Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, haha!

Anyway I just saw something on TV about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory starring Johnny Depp, and I was like huh? what's with all the remakes, next thing they'll have Angelina Jolie as Dorothy in the Blizzard of Oz or something. Mary Coffin, the summer horror show. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang... let's not go there.

How many separate databases does it take to screw in a customer? Or, how many does Suncom have? They misspelled my name (of course) when I first subscribed. Then I asked them to correct it. They did -- now it shows up correctly in one place but wrong everywhere else, including my paper bill.

About a month ago I switched plans from the Unplan to the Unplan. (Yes. It reduces the monthly bill and gets me a new phone.) That seems to have confused them. To begin with, they charged me about $160 instead of the $90-ish it should have been. After calling them, they credited the amount, or fixed it, or whatever. but their online bill thingy still shows the wrong amount.

Then they did a EFT off my credit card. Correct. They did it for about $90. Correct. So why does the online bill thingy still show that I owe about $160? Only one explanation -- separate databases that don't talk to each other. Sigh.

(delivery temporarily suspended: host smtp.comcast.net[IP] refused to talk to me: 450 too frequent connects from [my IP], please try again later.)

Good, this should reduce the spam from zombies.

Yay, I just wrote a mechanism for getting people's comments on my blog, via email, into a database. Then I can approve them, reply to them, delete them, etc. and the blog software (that I wrote and really need to release soon) can pick them up from the database and incorporate them into the static blog pages. Er, I still need to do that part.

Link to article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4413155.stm

Okay, the BBC is rubbing me the wrong way. They say, Confusing "geek speak" used by experts and media included "phishing", "rogue dialler", "Trojan" and "spyware". Yes, that's about as confusing as "transmission" "clutch" "timing belt" and "camshaft".

Okay, the word "phishing" is a little opaque, but would you prefer to call it "blongatta" instead? What would you call it? Perhaps the BBC can invent new words to replace the confusing ones? If we used a word that already existed, it would be more confusing, no?

Other confusing geek speak: mouse, right click, unplug, power.

Hey, people? Use the web. Use Google, use wikipedia. Apparently some of the words "being bandied around are more suitable for a computer programmers' convention than for people who want to go online at home". Er, yes? You don't see plumbers stopping every minute to explain what a ballcock is, do you? Doctors don't say "the patient was poopy" when writing in the journals, do they?

Sigh. This is just an attempt to dumb things down.

"Tiny drives set for space boost" says the BBC. What do you suppose that means? Does it mean smaller spaceship engines, leading to a rise in space travel? Or does it mean smaller computer hard drives with greater capacity! Turns out it's the latter. I'm seeing more and more stupid, ambiguous, misleading, content-free headlines. This from the BBC, who you'd think should know what they're doing.

http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/ is pretty cool. Unfortunately, people use it to block unobtrusive ads like Google's Adsense. I usually leave unobtrusive ads alone. If it starts singing and dancing, though, it's adblock time.