Happy New Year

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp!
And surely I’ll be mine!
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

We twa hae run about the braes,
and pou’d the gowans fine;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,
sin’ auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

We twa hae paidl’d in the burn,
frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
sin’ auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gies a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak a right gude-willie-waught,
for auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

Happy new year, one and all, and here's hoping it's a good 'un!

(no subject)

Found via slashdot: The EU Council does not stream the meetings in a Linux-friendly way, because "[they] cannot support Linux in a legal way."

So what does the FOSS crowd suggest? Theora, a codec that isn't even out of alpha. I can't speak for anyone else, but last I knew "alpha" meant "for early testing only, may be extremely buggy and fail in bad ways".

Personally, I'd recomment RealPlayer. They're the only one who've actually got the whole thing of *streaming* video right, and as a bonus it runs under all major systems.

(no subject)

Hmm, Opera doesn't seem to like doing HTTP auth with a password with high ASCII (ÁÉÍÓÚ and friends). Curious. I thought HTTP was supposed to be 8-bit safe, and given that the password will be Base64 encoded anyway (if not hashed) they've got no excuse.

Edit: Well, either I'm mistyping the password or Firefox doesn't like them either (mistyped, Firefox works. Opera doesn't). How odd. Lemme check the RFC...

...yep, the username is defined as being 8-bit text excluding a ':' and the password is defined as any valid 8-bit text. The only characters not permitted are non-white-space control codes (0 .. 31). The spec even says to assume ISO-8859-1 for high ASCII.

Right, let's have a look with a packet sniffer...

...ah-hah! Opera transmits accented characters in some sort of multi-byte encoding (probably UTF-8), and there doesn't appear to be a setting to change this. Bad Opera.

Ban Hammer!™

The following IP address have been larted with the Ban Hammer™ on my gallery, for excessive and frankly stupid spammage (my gallery does not use bbcode):

IP	rDNS	Whois
85.255.119.131	85.255.119.131-xbox.dedi.inhoster.com	Inhoster hosting company
85.255.119.74	85.255.119.74-xbox.dedi.inhoster.com	Inhoster hosting company
195.225.177.3	none	NetcatHosting
195.225.177.46	none	NetcatHosting

Interesting that these are all web hosts, as opposed to compromised computers. And, if my reading of the rDNS is correct, the first two are dedicated servers. All but the last run web servers, which return identical empty html documents. Some key headers are identical as well (though the ETag is different):

Server: Apache/1.3.36 (Unix) PHP/4.4.2
Last-Modified: Tue, 07 Feb 2006 12:06:58 GMT

The fourth address has nothing running on port 80. Hmm.

(no subject)

Amusing text to see in a spam:

Spammers are not giving up; in fact, they are getting smarter