PCR's notepad » funnies

Google translation funny bug

David Dernoncourt — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 21:13:03 +0000

Translation from English into English isn’t supported

General safety on Facebook

David Dernoncourt — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:30:56 +0000

Recently, Facebook made an apparently large update to their “safety center”, a help chapter designed to help users remain “safe”. Globally, it’s not particularly interesting, but the important safety tips can be a fun read:

Never share your password with anyone.

=> In case you’re stupid

Adjust your privacy settings to match your level of comfort, and review them often.

=> In case you aren’t curious enough to configure your account. Probably then you aren’t curious enough to be reading the safety center, but whatever…

Never share your password with anyone,

=> In case you’re stupid and you can’t read

and be cautious about posting and sharing personal information – especially information that could be used to identify you or locate you offline, such as your address or telephone number.

=> Don’t fill your profile

Report users and content that violate our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

=> In case you can definitely read… (and have some time to waste – which is likely to be the case since you’re on Facebook anyway)

Block and report anyone that sends you unwanted or inappropriate communications.

=> In case you don’t understand that receiving a text isn’t dangerous (I promise, it isn’t, unless you compile it or something)

Remember that while Facebook has always been based on a real name culture, and using fake names is a violation of our policies,

=> So don’t share your personal information but do share your name. Wait, isn’t that a personal information?

people are not always who they say they are.

=> In case you think your computer would refuse to upload a photo of someone else than yourself.

Use caution when accepting or sending friend requests, and keep in mind that it is always risky to meet anyone in person whom you don’t know through real world friends.

=> In case your parents never told you not to speak to strangers.

If you did learn something from the quoted texts (I seriously hope you didn’t), well, maybe you would like to keep reading. I actually learned something from this page: this post is getting me a cyberbullying point*. Hurray!

* or maybe actually a few. Damned, this test is harsh!

Quick statistics competence assessment

David Dernoncourt — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:32:58 +0000

Do you understand the following comic?

If you don’t, your statistical skills require an emergency treatment (unless you actually don’t use statistics) because you are likely to draw erroneous excessive conclusions.
If you do, well, I can’t conclude.

Some Erepublik internals exposed

David Dernoncourt — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:25:08 +0000

Those of you who play Erepublik most likely know about the standard useless error message you get almost every day:

Although fun at the first time, this isn’t exactly exciting when you keep getting it 25% of the time. The dominant hypothesis about this recurring issue was a global site overload, but I could never see a clear proof of it. Well, today I finally got a real error message, in the form of a pretty detailed symfony exception report.
From this, we notably learn that:
- Erepublik runs in PHP 5.2.6 with Apache 2.2.9 on Debian Lenny, using MySQL.
- Erepublik uses the symphony framework, version 1.0.19 (NB: current stable version is 1.4.1…)
- their reCAPTCHA private key was: 6LfEGgIAAAAAAByJ6OCst1yen_O1TPe6vE4LtQ6t (I guess they should change it now…)
- they must have so frequent errors that they apparently didn’t configure symfony to e-mail them the errors (app_sfErrorNotifier_emailTo: error@mysite.com)
- they seem to have a memcache server at 10.100.5.16:11211
- the error does come from an overloaded database (too many connections)
See the complete error file for more details. All this isn’t really fascinating, but it helped me wait until the overload calmed down

Edit: bonus, the maintenance picture (rarer than the error one, although not exceptional) just popped up too. Here it is:

Content protection by DRM

David Dernoncourt — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:35:45 +0000

Approved player, approved connection, approved screen, approved content.

Text messaging harms written language

David Dernoncourt — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 20:51:00 +0000

The rising popularity of text messaging on mobile phones poses a threat to writing standards among Irish schoolchildren, an education commission says. The frequency of errors in grammar and punctuation has become a serious concern, the State Examination Commission said in a report after reviewing last year’s exam performance by 15-year-olds.

read more | digg story

Bounty offered to kill pirate DVD sniffer dogs

David Dernoncourt — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 16:52:00 +0000

Lucky and Flo, the two Labradors who helped sniff out nearly 1 million illegal discs last week within days of joining Malaysia’s anti-piracy effort, have been moved to a safe house. A source had tipped off officials about a bounty offered for killing the sniffer dogs, “The dogs are a genuine threat to the pirated disc syndicates”

read more | digg story

P2P file-sharing ruins physical piracy business

David Dernoncourt — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 08:25:00 +0000

If the likes of the MPAA, RIAA and IFPI are to be believed, file-sharing is causing worldwide havok, costing billions of dollars and creating unemployment. It’s true that some people are feeling the P2P effect; they’re called ‘physical pirates’ and one of them says that file-sharing has ruined his business.

read more | digg story

Help key: How to idiot-proof your parents’ computer

David Dernoncourt — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 19:41:00 +0000

This is something that may be near and dear to your hearts: Mom and Dad are calling to ask about this porn pop-up phishing thing they just typed all their credit card info into. Or maybe Grandma wants to make a MySpace page. Regardless of the situation, you have some older folks in your life who probably have a computer.

read more | digg story

Woman accuses Yahoo of stealing her image

David Dernoncourt — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 22:02:00 +0000

An Ohio woman is demanding $20 million from Yahoo for allegedly using a photo of her without her permission for a welcome e-mail sent to new users.

read more | digg story