Zone38 Presents...
Letters to the World

10-Aug-2007

Sick transit, glorious Saturday

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 2:58 pm

…Just found out that Athens Transit is no longer running bus route 25 anywhere near my apartment on nights or weekends. They’re no longer serving East Campus or even College Station west of the Utterly Pedestrian-Unfriendly Oconee Bridge on Saturdays.

And there’s no other route that is anywhere reasonably walkable in 100°F heat on a Saturday, particularly one when there aren’t any campus buses running. Like, for instance, tomorrow. Not so much of an issue when the campus weekender bus is running…but that won’t be till next weekend. Same thing for night routes— the only other night route that runs near those stops starts next Thursday (see update below).

The closest route, therefore, is route 5— but that’s about a 3/4 mile walk up Agriculture Drive. And remember, this is in weather approaching, if not over, 100°F.

Did I mention that the stops no longer served by the route are in the vicinity of an awful lot of international students’ apartments, and a fairly good number of those students don’t have cars?

::facepalm::

Guess I’ll just have to stay cooped up in my apartment for the weekend…

[Edited to add: For those wondering how I just found out about this, I’ve been out of Athens for most of the summer. Just clarifying that, since I know someone’s bound to bring it up…]

[Edited 2007/08/11 to add: Whoops, I was misreading the campus bus rider’s guide. Turns out that night service starts back this Monday, not Thursday! Granted, that’s only three days anyway, but at least I feel a bit safer if I happen to be wandering around campus at night…]

01-Aug-2007

Why word boundaries are important

Filed under: General — codeman38 @ 9:04 am

A recent server-side change in Windows Live Messenger was designed to prevent anyone from sending a link to a domain ending in “.info”, because so many of those were being used for spam and viruses. Never mind, of course, all the perfectly legitimate .info domains (as few as they may be, admittedly)…MS thought it’d be best to just block them all. Not just the URL, but the entire message containing it.

But that’s not the worst part.

The worst part is that there is no check for word boundaries whatsoever in the filter. None.

So good luck linking to anything on www.infoworld.com through Windows Messenger. And forget about sharing any C# code snippets that refer to MessageBoxIcon.Information.

Oh, and even sadder? This isn’t the first time Microsoft’s done this. A while back, they started blocking any messages containing “.scr” – thus shutting off all discussions about java.awt.ScrollPane, among other things.

(Thanks to the Worse Than Failure forums for pointing this bit of absurdity out to me…)

© 2001-2024 codeman38. Powered by WordPress.