You may have read in any one of quite a few places why eBaumsWorld sucks. There have been forum invasions, DoS attacks and nasty name-calling, but what’s this really all about? In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, picture this:

Imagine you’re a budding artist, or a musician, or maybe a Flash user. You release a piece of work on your website, maybe making it a showcase so that people come to visit your site and see your other stuff. You submit it to Google, maybe a few forums and people start trickling in, then BAM – your work appears on eBaumsWorld without your permission, and suddenly people are sending his link arouns, not yours. In the meantime, Eric Bauman rakes in thousands of dollars per day in advertising and you don’t see squat. That’s why eBaumsWorld sucks.

If you have work on eBaumsWorld and you want it removed, you’re actually supposed to email Eric Bauman and ask him to remove the offending file. In reality, this doesn’t do shit because Eric has more money than you, and he and everyone at eBaumsWorld basically don’t give a f*ck.

Currently, SomethingAwful.com is compiling a list of stolen content which they intend to submit to eBaumsWorld requesting said content’s removal.

Oh dear, I just wasted almost 2 hours watching this drivel on Sky Movies. I thought to myself “it can’t be that bad, surely?” Sadly, it was worse. This is possibly the worst film I have had the misfortune to see in the past ten years (and that’s including Pitch Black): bad acting; bad premise; bad effects; bad dialogue and generally bad everything done very badly indeed. Avoid. 2/10.

Discuss this travesty here.

Tonight I spent a few moments automating some more of my new Lottery Results so that I could leave it going while I went about doing other stuff. Tonight it was the turn of the ‘results email batch send’ to get the automation treatment.

The first part of this was to take the script I’d already written and turn it into a function. I only have to supply it with two variables (the draw type and the date) and it’ll go off and churn out email for everyone who wants it. All other variables can be deduced or extracted from tables using just these two items, so it’s pretty easy to plug into my script.

The next part was to have all these email sent out without overloading the server. From past experience I can only send out 2000 or so messages sing mail() before something breaks (sendmail, possibly). My way around this is to bang as many messages as I need into a MySQL table and use this as a mail queue. A simply cron job checks this mail queue every 15 minutes and sends anything that needs sending, up to a current maximum of 100 messages. I will eventually build some mail tracking web-bug into the emails so that I can mark the ones that are read, and possily remove people who are not reading their mail from the mailouts.

I should know if this is working or not by tomorrow’s draw.

I hate brushing my teeth. Every night I stand in front of the mirror and tell myself that I won’t gag, that I won’t cough my guts up, and that this will all be over in a few minutes. It never works.

To get the required brushing time down I use an electric toothbrush – possibly the original one out of the Ark but that’s only because I’m tight. No matter how I start, or how quickly I whip the thing around my gob, I always want to start retching. It’s like some twisted Pavlovian reaction or something.

The situation is so bad that I’d rather not brush the damned things at all, and I confess that I have gone without brushing for days, even weeks at a time before now. Sadly that was all before M came on the scene, and since she won’t kiss a mouth that smells like something died in it the brushing is pretty much mandatory.

I think I need me some hypnotherapy to get out of this “Toothbrush! Cough it out!” mindset. Sigh.

I don’t normally go in for causes, and even less so when it’s something that doesn’t affect me, but just recently the RIAA has gotten far too big for its boots and needs teaching a lesson. From phpn2t… Patti is the New York working mother with five children who’s decided she’s not caving in to Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music or EMI, the multi-billion-dollar members of the Organized Music cartel which has been trying to extort ’settlement’ money from her, and more than 17,000 others like her, including school kids. She is NOT willing to be blackmailed for something she didn’t do and when she presents her case to a jury on an as-yet to be determined date, she’ll be the first to meet these hard-core, multi-billion-dollar bullies with their teams of PR hacks, their bought-and-paid for politicians, their unimaginably vast financial and legal resources, face-to-face. And she’s doing it alone, without expert help or legal representation. — 8< --- The RIAA is a front established by some of the major music companies to put fear into so-called ‘music pirates’. They issue lawsuits like confetti at a wedding and generally settle out of court. They start proceedings not knowing anybody’s name, then use bullying tactics to intimidate end users into settling for whatever they can afford… and sometimes everything they have. This is the same RIAA that sued a 12-year old girl living in the Projects for $2000. This is the same RIAA that sued a deceased grandmother. This is the same RIAA that sued a woman who didn’t have a working computer. They’ve sued a 66-year-old grandmother, a single mother, MIT, Napster, MP3.com, a boatload of students. and even Internet Backbone Providers. Now they’re even going after song lyric websites. Pretty soon it’s going to be easier to list the people they haven’t sued.

My new UK National Lottery website is finally live. I won’t say it’s finished as such, but you can get the result for the Lotto, Lotto Extra, Thunderball, HotPicks, Euro Millions and Daily Play right off the front page by heading on over to:

Lottery.Results.web.com

All of the UK National Lottery draws are catered for, so you can enter your Syndicate’s numbers and have the site check them every time a set of numbers is drawn. More subscriber-only features will be implemented when I get round to it, such as the ability to generate a report for the entire history of your syndicate’s numbers.

Currently the subscription fee is £1.50 a month, but if you join right now you’ll be able to use the whole of the site for free until 31st March or something. I may extend this free period if I feel I need to do more work on it before it’s worth charging for.

I’ve recently completed a manual mailout script which means you can now get your Lottery Results in your email. This still needs to be automated, but for now I can rest easy knowing that everything’s working to some extent. There’s still some stuff to do but the new site is working a treat now.

You can discuss the new Lottery Results website on the forum

Dear Distinguished Collegues,

We would like you to peer-review our findings in the above field.

Having monitored the content of the Security Now! podcasts, we have graphed the number of excited pauses and temporary stutters from Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte. We plotted the number of occurrences of the phrases ‘Well,’ and ‘you know’ in each of the transcripts and divided them by the transcript filesize (plain text), and multiplied by 100 to achieve a usable index.



Preliminary Findings:

From the data obtained, it was suggested that:

• The presenters were very excited about their first episode.
  
• Episode 7 got Steve Gibson going on his favourite topic.
  
• Neither presenter was very excited about Episode 11.
  
• The Excitability Index trend is gradually downwards.
  

Future work:

It is possible to deduce the number of times Mr. Laporte is corrected by counting the occurrences of the phrase ‘Oh, okay’. Examining the trend for this phrase may show whether he is learning to think before speaking.

Thank you for your attention, your comments would be appreciated.