Category: Geekery

Thoughts on “Visitation”

Poor, poor Eli…

You know, Eli doesn’t have much luck with women. First he falls for a girl who just wants to be friends (and starts turning into an alien), then he falls for a girl who gets murdered, then he starts chatting up another girl and her head explodes.

Seriously, the women on Destiny would be well advised to keep their distance. The guy’s a major jinx.

Kitten Attack!

OMG Kittinz!

So I’m at work today and I need to prevent a directory of pdf files from being accessed outside of links on a specific page. Now to anyone who knows anything about Apache servers the solution is obvious, throw something together in an .htaccess file.

So I did. I used modRewrite to detect the referrer, and redirect any unauthorised requests. And because I wanted to make sure it was working (modRewrite is, after all, essentially electronic voodoo) I decided to redirect said bad requests to KittenWar. You know, like you do.

All well and good. I confirmed that the redirect was working, ranked some kittens, and then edited the .htaccess file to remove the redirect. Then I tested it again.

I got kittens.

I checked that I’d edited the right file. I had. I re-uploaded it, checking that I was uploading the correct file as I did so. I tested the link.

Kittens.

I deleted the .htaccess file off the server, checked the link to confirm it was broken,  re-uploaded and tested it again.

Kittens.

I telnetted in and examined the .htaccess file on the server. No mention of kittens anywhere. I got the other guys in the office to test the link on their machines. No kittens. I tested it on my machine again.

Kittens.

Realising that it had to be a browser issue I closed Firefox and restarted it. Twice. I checked the link again.

Kittens.

It was at this point that I discovered that ALL attempts to access ANY part of the website were redirecting to KittenWar, which would seriously complicate any attempts to get it finished for the important meeting tomorrow. With no other ideas I uninstalled Firefox, then reinstalled it.

Adorable kittens.

I rebooted, and reinstalled Firefox again.

More adorable kittens, mocking me with their adorable eyes and pink little noses.

Finally in sheer desperation I tracked down and installed an extension that would flush the DNS cache. I had no idea how an .htaccess file could poison my DNS cache with kittens, but I couldn’t think of anything else to try. I installed it, rebooted, ran it, and checked the link.

No kittens!! Finally!!

Then it was time for lunch.

Goddam kittens… ;D

WORD IS NOT A VALID HTML RENDERER!

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

I’ve just spent over two hours trying to get an HTML email to render properly in Outlook.

I have never been this close to sending a death threat to Steve Balmer in my entire life.

Four Weddings and a Precious

Stupid Fat Hobbits!

Four Weddings is not a show I would consider watching in a million years, but the preview clip that’s been doing the rounds is hilarious.

Things I want to know…

a) Where in Hades did they dig up a Gollum impersonator?
b) How are the other brides completely unaware of who Gollum is?
c) Why do the other brides seem to think that they  have a right to complain about the wedding being “ruined” by having Gollum there? You know, given that it’s not actually their wedding?

And – for the record – while I think this is hilarious I would not invite Gollum to my wedding 🙂

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