E-Dribble

One hundred and twenty three.

That’s how many condoms full of nose candy they found in a Nigerian’s stomach during the routine “Hey, your a Nigerian so we need to x-ray you” process at a border crossing. The amount of cocaine equaled almost 2 kilos.

I think it’s fantastic that the Nigerians are branching out and trying new things.  As an added bonus, on the rare occasion that a condom bursts, we will get some fantastic Youtube footage of people trying to fly and chewing their fingers off.

It’s a win/win.

Lego is building an MMO for every person that spent hours upon hours building large blocks out of smaller blocks.  Some people have built incredible things with the blocks.  I was not one of those people.  Instead, my masterpieces usually looked like a multi-colored blob that were shaped roughly the same as the blocks they were made up of.

I’m hoping that cyber-me does better at block building that the real me has in the past.  I’ve signed up for the closed beta and will let you know if the people at Lego deem me worthy to assemble fake blocks together in an MMO setting.

In line with their plan of world domination, Google decided to turn GMail into a Facebook clone, with their most recent addition being “Buzz”. Most of us(myself included) found out how to turn it off. Not all were as charitable as I and began bitching in earnest.  You see, Google made it a royal pain in the ass to turn it off.  They let you think you were turning it off with the handy link at the bottom of the page when in reality you were only hiding it from your view, allowing their social network to gain users that didn’t know they were part of a social network any longer.

For those of us that despise social networking, Google has finally added the ability to actually opt out of the bullshit that is “Buzz“.

Or, it’s just another button that doesn’t do what they say.

The guys at Techdirt are making fun of the NY Times because the paper thinks that they should charge Apple users $20-30 dollars a month to be able to view the NY Times on their Apple iPad.  Techdirt regurgitates the whole paywall fiasco that the NYTimes perpetuated recently to emphasized their folly.

I think anyone willing to pay upwards of $700 for an iPhone with a weight problem will very likely pay $30 a month to read what the NY Times considers news-worthy.

I’m speaking, of course, about forms.  I’ve written in the past about my attempts to build a bot proof and spam resistant form.  I use the two terms independently because they are two very different things.  Even if you block bots, you’ve not necessarily stopped the humans that post to test the forms as well as posting actual spam. If you’ve built the form correctly, it’s actually impossible to completely block spam.  A human posting spam is indistinguishable from a human using your form for legitimate purposes.  Well, aside from the fact that they’re stupid.  And evil.

I digress.  Let’s get to the form bits.  In my past posts, I’ve spoken about broad concepts that have worked for me.  This time, I’m going to provide the actual code I’m using.    With my latest change of checking for a valid MX record, I’ve completely stopped spam on the form that I’m using this on for over a month.

(continue reading…)

While I could spend all day linking surveys hosted by entities that hate Apple and skew the numbers in their favor to make Apple’s latest must-have product look like an abysmal failure(ok, you got me.  I linked one), I’m going to pass, if only because they’re not funny.  What is Apple if it isn’t a company that inspires laughs?

Which leads me to this hard-hitting comparison:

This is the kind of fair and balanced journalism that I can get behind.

In the case of Firefox, it seems to be a case of diminishing returns.

Let me just say before starting this that I love Firefox.  The ridiculously large number of addons are the biggest draw for me with standards compliance coming in at a close second.  Recently though, the ballooning of the browser has been getting in the way of my productivity.  It’s become fucking slow, for one.  The browser is beginning to take as long to start as the operating system itself.  Secondly, I’ve started having problems with flash inside the browser.  Other browsers are using the same flash plugin without issue, so I have to assume that it’s Firefox botching the implementation of it.

As often happens with me, I began grazing upon browsers in search of greener pastures.  Almost always, this ends up with me back at the application I started with, but this time may be different.

(continue reading…)

While all the reputable news outlets were busy telling you how fantastic the iPad is, I felt as if I was doing my reader(yeah, I’m down to one, unfortunately) a grave disservice by not doing my part to explain to the world what made the iPad so great.

Then I found out I didn’t have to, since Peewee Herman has already done it for me.

If you absolutely, positively must commit a crime that is likely to gain enough notoriety to require a sketch artist to capture your likeness in order to share with the area, then you should consider making Bolivia the home base for your crime spree.

Add some glasses and part the hair a little differently and I think I may have found the culprit:

I noticed in my refers today something that made me smile:

Notice the one at the bottom.  I looked back in the last year and  five other people searched for “how to commit arson without getting caught” Doing a traceroute on all six IPs shows that proxies were not used during the search.

Here’s a pro-tip for all six of you.  If you think it’s a good idea to search the web for this without using some kind of blind proxy, then you are not the type of person that will succeed at this particular endeavor.  Think about hiring a professional.

Don’t know where to find one?  Just Google it.

Edit: This is better than I ever could have imagined.  Since posting this, 11 more mental midgets have visited to find out how to torch something without becoming the latest sausage recipient at the local prison.

Thanks for the smiles.