Disorderly Content

Wassamatta, Vegas? Can't anybody spring for a word processor with a spell check?

Spotted at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas.
Captured with my iPhone.

If you've tried to read, well, pretty much anything lately, you've likely noticed that good copy editors have been replaced almost entirely by software. And software... let's just say it's no smarter than the people who write and use it. Hence the video below, about which I will say no more, except to thank Ali on my friend Barry's forum for telling us about it:

If I sometimes believe I'm smarter than the average bear, well, maybe it's because there's so much dumbth going around. Take today, for example. I went over to my mailbox to see what my postal representative had brought me. At first I couldn't get my key in; it felt like something was jammed in there. And so it was. When I finally got the key to turn and the door open, I saw that said government official had taken a very large catalogue and twisted it tightly around itself to force it into the box. The only problem: it wasn't coming out again.

First I tried twisting it to make it a tiny bit smaller. When that failed, I went to get a pair of pliers to pull and twist. That didn't get me very far, so I added a box cutter to my arsenal. I had no interest in the catalogue, you understand; I just wanted it out. After twenty minutes of pulling and slicing and swearing, I finally managed to get it out. And as soon as the sabbath ends on the East Coast, I'll be calling the camera store that sent me the catalogue to ask them to stop. Anything I want I'll learn about from their website, thanks all the same.

Pulled from MySpace, and presented without comment:

Writing a blog, it's hard not to sound authoritative even when you really don't know what you're talking about. Especially when you don't know that you don't know, if you get my meaning. So think of this post as a mea culpa for a couple of past wrongs, and an acknowledgment that I might just be wrong at some future date. Yeah, I know; I'm shocked too.

Errata entry number one concerns a post from July about how my new Camry Hybrid claimed it was running low on gas when it wasn't anywhere near that point. Turns out it may not have been lying. I was at a seminar put on by Toyota where they explained a lot more about the magic of hybrids. And one of the ways Toyota reduces pollution is to have a collapsing fuel tank in its hybrids. As the tank empties, it shrinks like a giant concertina, which leaves less empty space in the tank, less room for gasoline to vaporize and therefore less vapor to escape and pollute the atmosphere. Depending on outside temperature, the tank may expand more quickly or more slowly, meaning it won't always fill to max capacity. Which also means you can't double check the car's claimed fuel economy by dividing your miles driven since last fill-up by the amount you just put into the tank. Depending on conditions, you could be off by a couple of gallons.

Erratum number two concerns a post from a few days ago about my Mac's poor performance since its last OS upgrade. Turns out I didn't have the solution after all, although I was in the right ballpark. The Brother software wasn't at fault, as I found out when after rebooting I didn't have the slowdown problems. They did return, and it finally occurred to me that they were most severe on the hour, when a script I had for image processing would run. Buried in that script was a call to a tiny piece of C code I'd written. And which, I realized, I'd never recompiled after my move from PowerPC to Intel. After a one-second recompile I'm back to having a relatively zippy Mac, which will be even better once Adobe and Microsoft get Intel native versions of their Mac apps out. I don't know why that little executable caused such grief for Rosetta, the module that emulates PowerPC code on Intel. But I'm guessing that whatever the problem is, the fact that the code was being executed thousands of times each hour was making a small problem far worse. So it was sort of my fault. And sort of not.

I should have known something was up when I discovered that an email from a new stock photo site I'd just joined ended up in my spam file. But I didn't, despite the fact that the score the antispam program run by my web provider gave the message shouldn't have triggered that reaction. It wasn't until I noticed that two different stock agencies had approved one of my submitted photos but hadn't notified me that I realized something was wrong. And even then, it took a while to put two and two together.

The filtering program I'm talking about is just one stage in my battle against spam. I also have a whole set of rules to capture all sorts of messages the filter doesn't get. Those rules are written in Perl, a wonderfully powerful text processing language that's also really good at letting you (that is, me) shoot yourself (translation: myself) in the foot. Or some other extremity. And so I had done. Again.

The problem is that I had a whole series of strings to search for, any of which will cause a message to be deemed spam and trashed. In Perl, that's a set of parentheses with these phrases separated by vertical bars, the "or" symbol of Perl and lots of other languages. And, not for the first time, I'd accidentally put in one extra vertical bar at the end, like this: (abc|def|ghi|). Which Perl interprets as "get rid of messages containing the string "abc", or "def", or "ghi", or... That last string is empty. Which means it matches anything. Or nothing. And any message that hadn't been stopped by a previous rule gets to this one. And is declared to be spam and thrown away. Oops.

I'd made that mistake before. And I'd written a little job that checks for that string every couple of hours. If it finds it, it mails me a warning. Except of course the warning message ran into the same rule. And it got deleted.

So how did I find this, you ask? Well, I may be stupid and sloppy, but I'm getting better at protecting myself from my stupidity. (And maybe some of the sloppiness too.) Instead of deleting the spam, I throw them all into a file. And I keep a month's worth of these files around; my web provider gives me a lot of space. So once I found and fixed the problem, I was able to go back over today's messages and discover the (very) few good messages that got misidentified as spam. And then went back to yesterday to verify that the problem didn't extend more than a few hours.

So, in the same way that good service when a product fails produces higher customer satisfaction than a product that never breaks in the first place, I've decided I'm smarter for protecting against my own ineptitude than somebody who never fouls up. Yep, that's my story and I'm sticking with it.