Political Commentary

Condimania

Apparently the Secretary of State is quite the diplomat:

A few hours earlier, Mr Armstrong had been declaiming the war in Iraq in forceful tones in front of the nation’s media. Now, he appears to have undergone a quasi-religious conversion. But you can’t blame him. This, it seems, is quite simply the Condi effect.

However much people might dislike the thought of Condoleezza Rice, 51, one of the key architects of the Iraq war, defender of Guantanamo Bay and staunch ally of George Bush, it seems that they cannot help but be won over by the reality.

I don’t know if she can win an election, but as SecState, so far, she seems to be a hit overseas.

Humor

Wrong Building

A Japanese burglar picked the wrong place to burgle:

The burglar, who was unemployed, admitted he was baffled to find himself among sumo wrestlers.

“First I was caught by a massive man. When the lights turned on, I was surrounded by more than a dozen sumo wrestlers. I was surprised,” Kawabata told police, as quoted by Jiji Press.

I’ll bet he was.

This reminds me of the scene in “Tremors,” when the sandworms break into the survivalists’ basement, whereupon it’s blasted by every weapon know to man that’s not belt fed, and the Michael Gross character says “Guess you broke into the wrong God damn rec room, didn’t ya!”

Administrative

OK, What Now?

As I noted on the post update, I thought that I’d come up with a clever way to eliminate a lot of these nonsense-domain spams, by blocking the letter “q” followed by anything other than a “u,” “a,” or a period, comma or space (so we could still write “Iraq”). Here’s now I implemented it: q[ua\ \.\,]

Unfortunately, in testing it, I get a large number of false positives (about 25%) When I see the comments flagged by the new filter, I don’t even see a “q” in the comment. What’s the problem?

Administrative

Regex Bleg

Can someone give me a regular expression for my blacklist that would disallow any four-consonant (lower case) string? I’ve been getting a lot of spam lately like this one:

Name: Ryan
Email Address: ron@fromru.com

Comments:

Well done!
[url=http://cowbtclt.com/gcqj/uqml.html]My homepage[/url] | [url=http://vprqmclp.com/rsyx/vvwl.html]Cool site[/url]

None of these seem to be real domains, so I don’t know what the point is, but they all seem to have at least four consonants in a row. I figure that there are few real words like this, at least in English, so it would keep out the riff raff without impeding genuine commenters.

[Update on Friday night]

OK, as a commenter has pointed out, this would preclude some actual English word (like “strength”). So let’s go for five consonants. My goal is to err on the side of letting good posts through.

[Update on Saturday night]

It doesn’t catch them all, but I did come up with a good trap for them: q[^ua\ \.\,]

Anything with a “q” in it followed by anything other than a “u” or “a” (or a space, period or comma, so we can write “Iraq”) is blocked. A lot of these things have “q”s inserted in them.

[Another update, a few minutes later, after testing]

I’m getting a lot of false positives.

Technology and Society

Oh, Am I Annoying You?

As Paul Hsieh says, you don’t necessarily have to be autistic to find this device useful:

A device that can pick up on people’s emotions is being developed to help people with autism relate to those around them. It will alert its autistic user if the person they are talking to starts showing signs of getting bored or annoyed.

Or maybe cluelessness on this front is one of the defining characteristics of autism.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!