Quixotic Evil

"... Today, the effort continues to prove telepathy's existence. ..."

Source

I'd love a career where a shit day today wasn't a near-perfect guarantee of a shit day tomorrow.

... how something that should be small and insignificant can keep coming back to bug you? Well, maybe those of you who are less of a pedant and control freak get it less, but then I think maybe my point is that some things that are small and insignificant to everyone else clearly aren't to me.

There follows a somewhat unfocussed rant in the grand tradition of expounding on irrelevant opinion when one has no actual content for the 'blog.

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I've added some new functionality to my Cryptomail, which will send messages to people under your choice of [relatively] simple alphabetic cipher. It's more fun than it sounds ;)

I expect a couple of issues with it, still: if you do have problems give me a shout.

Update: For those who didn't already guess from the comments, I've fixed the link, which otherwise was fit to demonstrate only my custom 404 page.

Contrary to the PHP documentation,
$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] can include the port number.

The HTTP/1.1 header spec does include the port number in the Host: field (unless it's the default), but the HTTP_HOST entry in the server variables array in PHP is not supposed to: the official documentation makes no mention of it and some of the community documentation I found specifically assumed it was not the case.

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I'm looking around for someone who has known me for two years and is 'a professional person or a person of standing in the community'. The accounts manager thinks for a moment, and decides that maybe our sister-company's MD counts: she rings him and asks. After a few moments of trying to suggest professions, she's told that the only professional qualification he holds is membership of the Magic Circle...

WTF? The printer notifies me when it's busy. It requires user intervention; contrary to the message it appears to require input even if you leave it until it's no longer busy. Surely that's what the print queue is for...

Part of the reason I've been quiet for a while is because I've been spending all available blogging time working on a new style for this place. Since I installed Nucleus and had the initial panic about how it looked like all the other templates that were available, I've done nothing beyond the odd tweak. Although saying that, all I've done now is made a new stylesheet, more or less: I'll have a switcher working soon.

Comments, suggestions and the like (and especially bug reports) are welcome. I particularly want to hear from IE users, since I couldn't test that while I was working on the sheet as an alternative one (because IE doesn't respect alternative stylesheets...) and now I can't get anything out of it at all.

Update: Wow, this new IE is as bad as ever, if not worse... I'm going to have to put the old style back. Firefox users are welcome to use their View menu to switch the page style to 'New'.

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Apparently there's something unusual about today. Don't ask me; I don't know.

By way of a non-WoW post, I'll take this opportunity to enthuse about one of the current 'reality' game shows. The Search is on Channel 4 early on Saturday evenings. Although in principle much the same as all the other voting reality gameshows, I (and most of my friends) have more in common with the contestants of this one than I ever would with Big Brother.

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WoW contains plenty of pop culture references (too many, some say), but none of them have crept up on me and jumped out like this one.

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Last night was a mildly amusing one in World of Warcraft. Those whose enthusiasm for my writing doesn't exceed their aversion to posts to which they don't know the background are welcome to turn away now.

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Once upon a time, I put in a plugin to track referrers. I thought I might be able to show the top ones in a table. That isn't the case without rewriting the plugin, because the one I have doesn't really do anything filtering, sorting or grouping, but I still keep the plugin running, chugging away with its little database table of almost every referred visitor I ever got.

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So on Friday I ended up leaving the office, doing a customer site visit (for the second time in as long as I've been there). I asked yell.com for the route, which was fine, but then my colleague offered to lend me her TomTom, which seemed unlikely to do harm.

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