Wil Tan » fun

Haiku ads don’t work

wil — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 06:21:03 +0000

Actually they do! I couldn’t resist but to click on the following when it showed up on my Gmail interface (even though I have heard of Woot before):

This goes to show that when it comes to ads, creativity pays off.

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Why 1/5 of Americans Can’t Locate The U.S.

wil — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 06:45:57 +0000

Found this gem on Digg, made my day!

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Nice Spam

wil — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 05:25:31 +0000

James wrote about weird spam, I’ve got another nice one. This was downloaded to my inbox just moments ago; it uses a spam-detection-circumvention technique that I’ve never seen before, i.e. making it into an ASCII art, how reminiscent of old times…

I’m surprised that spammers could be bothered.


Q     Q                                              QQQQQ                                             Q     Q
D     D  D    DD     DDDD   DDDDD     DD            D     D  D    DD    D       D   DDDD               D     D    DD    D       D  D    D  D    D
O     O  O   O  O   O    O  O    O   O  O           O        O   O  O   O       O  O                   O     O   O  O   O       O  O    O  OO  OO
O     O  O  O    O  O       O    O  O    O          O        O  O    O  O       O   OOOO               O     O  O    O  O       O  O    O  O OO O
 G   G   G  GGGGGG  G  GGG  GGGGG   GGGGGG          G        G  GGGGGG  G       G       G               G   G   GGGGGG  G       G  G    G  G    G
  G G    G  G    G  G    G  G   G   G    G          G     G  G  G    G  G       G  G    G                G G    G    G  G       G  G    G  G    G
   H     H  H    H   HHHH   H    H  H    H           HHHHH   H  H    H  HHHHHH  H   HHHH                  H     H    H  HHHHHH  H   HHHH   H    H

HHHHH   HHHHH   HHHH   HHHHHHH          HHHHHH   HHHHHH    H   HHHHH  HHHHHH   HHHHH
B    B  B      B          B             B     B  B     B   B  B       B       B
B    B  B       B         B             B     B  B     B   B  B       B        B
BBBBB   BBBB     BBB      B             BBBBBB   BBBBBB    B  B       BBBBB     BBB
M    M  M           M     M             M        MMM       M  M       M            M
M    M  M           M     M             M        M  MM     M  M       M            M
MMMMM   MMMMM  MMMMM      M             M        M    MM   M   MMMMM  MMMMMM  MMMMM

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BugMeNot, Let Me In!

wil — Sat, 12 Jun 2004 04:59:48 +0000

My dear friend, these are real time savers, so take time to learn to use it (don’t laugh, time-saving tricks do take time to learn, i can only help by explaining how to use them). Introducing…

1. http://www.bugmenot.com/
2. http://www.mailinator.com/

I chanced upon BugMeNot.com while browsing for projects in http://mozdev.org/ where I found the BugMeNot extension for Mozilla, which links you to the BugMeNot.com page to retrieves a pair of username and password that lets you access a password-protected page that you are browsing (those that require free registration, but you’re not interested in wasting time and effort to fill in their stupid form, and even if you do, you’ll stuff some junk into the text boxes anyway.) Here’s how it works…

Install this bookmarklet (Right click, and Add To Favourites or Bookmark This Link, call it BugMeNot!). Whenever you arrive at one of those irritating sites (site #1, site #2) telling you to “register for free in order to view the full article”, click on the bookmarklet that you just added, if the site is in the BugMeNot database, you’d see something similar to this, use the username and password to access the site. That’s it! At the time of this writing, BugMeNot claims to have 4397 sites “liberated”, HAHA!

So I was reading the FAQ on BugMeNot.com (I love reading those things!) where I found Mailinator.com – a free service that lets you conjure up any email address ending with @mailinator.com on the fly, then check for mails that arrive there. Picture this: you arrive at yet another register-before-you-download-our-free-trial site (we will then send you an email with the download link/password in it), you try to see if BugMeNot has something for you, nope. You go to the registration page, stuff in something like ihateforms@mailinator.com in the email address field, fill in asdf for the rest and submit away. Then, go to www.mailinator.com and wait for the email (Note: Mailinator FAQ says that mails are deleted every few hours.) Once you’ve done that, don’t forget to go back to BugMeNot.com to share your username and password

At the moment, however, the BugMeNot extension really isn’t worth downloading, because it doesn’t provide much more than what you can do with the bookmarklet. Well, it does add itself to the context menu of the page you are browsing so you don’t have to search for it in the plugin folder.

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Gmail, Gopher, Giveittome!

wil — Tue, 25 May 2004 23:30:35 +0000

Gmail—everyone seems to be talking/blogging about it, some have managed to get it just by asking, so I thought I owe it to myself to at least try asking here:
Anyone with a spare invitation wishes to help a mate out?

Gopher—being able to navigate to this gopher url is just too much for me to handle, almost makes me tear! Go Gopher!

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NetHack

wil — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 17:45:17 +0000

Life’s too good and I find myself playing nethack again. First I tried looking for it in my FreeBSD VM, I thought they used to distribute it in the default installation… nevermind I found Rogue and was playing it for a while. Then I went to download the windows version of nethack so I can play it without having to fire up VMWare.

I’m now using the IBMGraphics option, which looks pretty darn good! I’ve also managed to get PuTTy to display the IBM line drawing characters properly by going to the “Translation” item, select “CP437″ under Character set translation and select “Use font in both ANSI and OEM modes”. Also, I needed to use “Courier New” or “Lucida Console” fonts with the “Central European” script to make it look right.

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Brahma Kumaris

wil — Mon, 15 Mar 2004 15:34:10 +0000

Came back from a Brahma Kumaris Raja Yoga Meditation part I weekend retreat in the Blue Mountains, still very excited from the revelation of Soul Consciousness. We’ll be going for part II of the course on 2nd April, more soul food!

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Toys and Flybar

wil — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 15:21:51 +0000

Was reading Slashdot and saw a link to Toy Fair’s Top 10 Strangest Products review, some of the stuff is really funny..

Especially the Flybar.. this stuff is supposed to bounce you 5-6 feet off the ground! Imagine how irritating it would be to see them on the streets! I thought skateboarders were morons… to think that I was doing quite a bit of Rollerblading almost 10 years ago.. guess I’m gettin’ old. *sigh*

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viWord community on Orkut

wil — Sat, 21 Feb 2004 05:37:20 +0000

I’ve created a viWord community on Orkut, and spammed the Vim community with an announcement

While creating the orkut community, I quickly whipped up this crappy logo for it

In any case, if you’re on Orkut and would like to join, just search for ‘viWord’ or use this link.

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viWord 0.2

wil — Sat, 21 Feb 2004 05:02:38 +0000

I have made quite significant improvement to the first version of the macro, a lot more usable now. Give it a try again if it didn’t quite work for you.

Grab it here. See the README.txt within for installation instructions.

Changes include:
“/” – find text
“n” – next occurence of the search text
“N” – prev occurence of the search text
“^” – go to beginning of line
“C” – delete to end-of-line
“G” – go to the end of file
“:w” – save current file
“.” – repeat last command
“dd” – delete current line
“s” – substitute (works with count prefix too)
“p” – paste (not exactly Vim’s behavior, only works as Ctrl-v)

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