A message to capitalists...

Get the fuck off my internet

THIS is why the 'net exists

Okay, forget the other time I said why the internet exists. I've actually found it now. The internet exists so that people can act like whatever random carpfish they want without disrupting folk in the "real world."

Let me explain. Wikipedia is a "real world" place. It has information about real things; it's a resource, a tool. On the opposite end of the spectrum (we've all been there, admit it) we've got Illogicopedia, where users can type whatever godforsaken nonsense they wish and have the whole world laugh at it. The Chocolate War never happened! There's no such thing as a clog spider! Illogicopedia is where people go to relieve themselves after researching and typing out all the seriousness of the Wikimedia projects.

And it's where I've found a new home...

Malware

Malware is software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owner's informed consent. It is a portmanteau of the words "malicious" and "software". The expression is a general term used by computer professionals to mean a variety of forms of hostile, intrusive, or annoying software or program code.

Earlier today I got struck by malware. Damn smart malware at that. It passed through my avast! virus scanner without as much as a squeak, then proceeded to attack my registry for a whole 10 minutes - causing Spybot S&D to spout out an error message every time the bug struck. What's more the clever bugger actually deleted itself and left the registry attacker on somewhere in the nether regions of my PC.

That's why people should all get a Mac.

After I just switched the computer off, just to see if the S&D errors stopped somehow, my computer then proceeded to stop working. A whole half hour of watching my faux Apple loading screen being followed by the black screen of death. I just screwed around with the BIOS settings and rebooted it until it could actually reach the login screen. Which it eventually did. But now, to be overly safe, I've abandoned that account. Luckily I had already set up another account for just such an occasion. So I can quite happily access all my files and programs from my malware-d username, without ever having to use it.

Oh happy days.

But seriously. What exactly is the point in malware? The people who make it don't exactly earn anything off it (apart from adware and keyloggers, etc) but viruses and programs that are just made to stop your computer working - What are they for? All they ever do is inconvenience people. It's just stupidly non-sensical.

*gets his gun*

Meme

Wiktionary defines a "meme" as being

Any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity.

And memes are really something. Unless you're a common web goer, then you won't know what a good meme is. Basically it can be anything from a quiz, to an image macro, to something that you can say. As long as it fulfills the above definition, it's a meme. And memes are EVEYWHERE! From LiveJournal to your average forum.

An example of a meme, let's see, is the Drawing Personality Test; common with the more artistic folks on LiveJournal. Par example:

You tend to pursue many different activities simultaneously. When misfortune does happen, it doesn't actually dishearten you all that much.
You have a peaceful mind, viewing the world with calm and serenity. To you, life is not about struggle and strife but about existence and co-existence.
You like following the rules and being objective. You are precise and meticulous, and like to evaluate decisions before making them.
You have a sunny, cheerful disposition.

An image, in this case the interactive part of the test, then some made up thing supposedly derived from that image. This is what most memes are made of. Interaction and result. The result is the only reason you interact, and to interact you must pass through webpages of adverts. Thus memes equal money.

Awesome win.

Shock horror! Google goes wrong!

Yet another contradictory blog post

Earlier today search engine giant magnate corporation with nice teeth Google did something that no one on earth expected to happen. They screwed up. SHOCK HORROR! IT'S A SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE WHEN THE CENTRE OF ALL INFORMATION GOES WRONG!

If you haven't heard - that's people who don't read The Register - Google's Personalised Homepage service, found here. Went and did a runner, per se. A currently unknown number of users either had their pages reverted back by many months or had them wiped altogether. I use Google Homepage. And I was, quite happily, not affected.

But that's not what this blog entry is about is it! It's about how a slip up by one company can blow the world to smithereens. The web has (almost, just wait) gone crazy over how the company that just became the most powerful company in the world has gone and lost what must be a few servers of data. Data that just vanished into thin air! Gone! Poof! Zero! Zilch! Complete zippo!

Amazingly none of the tabloid news sites have declared it an "OUTRAGE" yet. In fact not many sites have shown it up at all. Nearly all discussion regarding the problem has been on blogs and discussion boards.

Google have told people affected to not do anything, as that won't help the situation. So if you are affected: Don't do anything. If you're affected in the sense that your brain is currently in "OMFG THIS IS WRONG!!!1111" mode then please put a bucket over your head and jump into a river, you're not helping.

Climbing Olympus

Bigger! But better?

phpBB3 "Olympus" promises to be the best thing to hit the forum scene since... well, phpBB2. With a refreshed layout, new admin system and a whole host of new features, it's enough to make any community administrator to piss themselves in anticipation.

However all is not as it seems. Unless you've taken the beta versions to take a look for yourself then you're bound to have already been won over by the new charms. But look closer. The code is new. The file structure is new. Everything has been completely rebuilt from the ground up. "Good!" you may be thinking, "They've been working hard!" True. But think about it. Backwards compatibility: gone. All the mods and themes for phpBB2 will just not work. And that means that there's gonna be a whole lot of waiting until phpBB3 can start to compete against it predecessor.

It's this reason that makes phpBB3 a pain to use. And even though mods and themes for "Olympus" already exist, they're not cheap. The whole point of BB's open source-ness is so that it's FREE. Yet people are taking advantage and cashing in on the hype.

God I can't wait for this thing to come out of beta, then maybe we can FINALLY get some good stuff for this.