When my family visited my brother in Germany, he told us (after all the arrangements had been made) 'The nice thing about your room is that it doesn't have a lock.'

But no one snuck in and murdered us. Or if they did, they replaced the dead person with a good enough imposter that the rest of haven't noticed.

So it's all good.


By the way, my blog layout sucks. Floating images don't stay within the confines of the post div, so I made the label thing clear: both, meaning if the top post is short, the others are forced to be lower than the sidebar. Why do the floating images not stretch the containing div?

From time to time, I'll create a 'hit-and-run website'.

My first one was Mr. Worf's Homepage (which was deleted for unknown reasons, but I've now reposted it at the original location). A link to an parody anti-Trek website was mentioned on alt.tv.star-trek.enterprise, so I wrote a page with a similar style as 'Mr. Worf', and signed the guestbook as him.

Then in 2003, a Foxtrot strip featured Eileen Jacobson complaining about Mandy Berwick who things she's so popular. At the end, Eileen shouts out 'Zero matches on Google, Mandy! Zero!' So I threw together Mandy Berwick's homepage. Sadly, though blog posts and such appeared on Google that very day, my new site didn't for a while. Oh well.

I've since written three fan sites for people I know. There may be others around, but if so, I don't remember them.

It's a fun thing to do. Advice: Freewebs is probably better than Tripod. Of course, you could use your own host,but then it's less anonymous. Blogger also could be used, but blogs are less cool than normal hit-and-run sites.

(Potentially relevant link)

Yahoo! Answers is funner than Google Answers because it has points. XP like E2, essentially. Unfortunately, it sucks big time. This is for several reasons, most of which boil down to lack of accountability. If you look at ten random questions, you'll likely find at least that many incorrect answers, and probably a fair number of 'i dont know'/'look it up's. The people posting such answers get two points for it, and lose nothing for being wrong or unhelpful. You can't downvote the person claiming only three countries ban flag desecration or the morons claiming allosaurus or tyrannosaurus rex as the largest meat-eating dinosaurs or claoming infinity is the largest prime number. Only occationally will you find the incorrect answer being chosen as best answer (an exta ten points), but posting an obviously incorrect answer shouldn't gain you any points.

In addition to the idiots giving and voting for incorrect answers, there's a more prevelant problem--though perhaps a less troublesome one: multiple (often ten+) people will post the same (correct) answer to a question. And I don't mean nearly at the same time so perhaps they didn't see the earlier answers. They can be hours apart, and the same one-word answer will be posted again and again. It's essentially spam, but not considered so by Y!A.

A third problem is that there's little to no community cohesion. On E2, I knew the people and they were--for the most part--friendly. On Y!A, people are relatively unknown and more often trolls than anywhere but Usenet.

Y!A's moderation is this: major abuses get deleted and good (and some bad) answers get extra points. But I could probably gain thousands of points a day just by doing what most people do: post the same, one-word, useless answer as everyone else on simple questions. The primary thing Y!A needs to change is moderation. Punish incorrect and repetetive answers instead of rewarding them.

Oh, and while I'm complaining, it's filled with useless/poorly-formed questions. But that's not quite so bad since you don't gain points for posting questions. (Actually, you lose them, but then regain them when you pick the best answer)

(Potentially relevant link)

My Intro CS textbook--Computer Science: An Overview (6th ed.¹) by J. Glenn Brookshear--described, among other things, the GIF image format. According to it, GIF compression consists entirely of limiting images to 256 colours (as opposed to BMPs which aren't compressed). Of course, as someone who wasn't completely clueless, I knew essentially how GIF compression worked and that BMPs can use 8-bit colours, or even 2-bit colours.²

What I didn't know until today was that GIFs can in fact be more than 256 colours. That's amazing. (Note for people like me who have animations deanimated: the true colour GIF at the above link is an animation.)

¹ I think 7th ed. was recommended, but those of us who'd bought the used copies had 6th ed. and that was fine too--so long as we noted this one error in this one table we used. I later got a 4th ed.

² My professor, of course, was fairly clueless. He was in IT, and while he may be a good IT person, his C code would contain lovely keywords like 'If' and 'While', he told us i/5 + i%5 would give us i/5.0, and probably other nutballish things. A nice guy, though, and I believe fairly competent at his job when it doesn't consist of teaching courses outside his area.