Gilda Goodbody, heiress to the Goodbody Hat empire (motto: "Wear a Hat. Wear Two Hats") shamelessly flaunted her wealth by deliberately losing an average of fifty-five hats per month.
Daze of Our Lives

Mark Twain’s “Roughing It”: The Cayote

December 29th, 2009 at 2:01 pm (Fruit Bats)

The following excerpt was the inspiration for Chuck Jone’s Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cat-and-mouse team created at the Termite Terrace studio at Warner.

Chuck Jones and Termite Terrace (inset)

Chuck Jones and Termite Terrace (inset)

Excerpt from Chapter V of Mark Twain’s Roughing It.

Along about an hour after breakfast we saw the first prairie-dog villages, the first antelope, and the first wolf. If I remember rightly, this latter was the regular cayote (pronounced ky-o-te) of the farther deserts. And if it was, he was not a pretty creature or respectable either, for I got well acquainted with his race afterward, and can speak with confidence. The cayote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want.

Illustration from "Roughing It"

Illustration from "Roughing It"

He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he is so homely!—so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful. When he sees you he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out, and then turns a little out of the course he was pursuing, depresses his head a bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the sage-brush, glancing over his shoulder at you, from time to time, till he is about out of easy pistol range, and then he stops and takes a deliberate survey of you; he will trot fifty yards and stop again—another fifty and stop again; and finally the gray of his gliding body blends with the gray of the sage-brush, and he disappears. All this is when you make no demonstration against him; but if you do, he develops a livelier interest in his journey, and instantly electrifies his heels and puts such a deal of real estate between himself and your weapon, that by the time you have raised the hammer you see that you need a minie rifle, and by the time you have got him in line you need a rifled cannon, and by the time you have “drawn a bead” on him you see well enough that nothing but an unusually long-winded streak of lightning could reach him where he is now. But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever so much—especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed. Read the rest of this entry »

PHPBB3 Spam Control Mechanism as of version 3.0.6

December 14th, 2009 at 7:51 am (Dust Bin)

In the article, PHPBB 3.0x Registration Spam Control Mechanism, a guide was presented on how to tighten up access to the well-known bulletin board software, focusing on the registration component where anyone can sign up as a new user. The scheme was meant to make it more difficult to automatically sign up using common exploits. At the time of writing, the software version of interest was 3.0.4. As of the current version, 3.0.6, the scheme described will not work, owing to changes in the software. This article will briefly go over a new scheme that suits the newest version.

The image verification method has been incorporated into its own class and is located in the normal install directory, here: /includes/captcha/plugins/captcha_abstract.php. This class affects both registration and anonymous posting, unlike before, when the code was specific to the target areas. So, in addition to registration access control, anonymous posting will receive the same treatment with the following modifications to the file (line numbers are approximate):


25 class phpbb_default_captcha
26 {
27         var $confirm_id;
28         var $confirm_code;
29         var $confirm_char; // mod
30         var $code;

41                 // read input
42                 $this->confirm_id = request_var('confirm_id', '');
43                 $this->confirm_code = request_var('confirm_code', '');
44                 $this->confirm_char = request_var('confirm_char', ''); // mod
45                 $refresh = request_var('refresh_vc', false) && $config['confirm_refresh'];

308                                 AND confirm_type = " . $this->type;
309                 $result = $db->sql_query($sql);
310                 $row = $db->sql_fetchrow($result);
311                 $db->sql_freeresult($result);
312
313                 if ($row)
314                 {
315
316                         $this->code = $this->confirm_char . $row['code']; //mod
317                         $this->seed = $row['seed'];
318                         $this->attempts = $row['attempts'];
319                         return true;
320                 }
321
322                 return false;

The lines of code, added or altered, shown above, are marked with “//mod”. So, lines 29, 44, and 316 are the mods. Line 44 is the bit that retrieves the symbol randomly generated in the functions.php file (see previous article for more details). Line 316, having a slightly different look from the previous version, is the section of code where the symbol is integrated with the CAPTCHA code during the verification stage. These changes replace those described in the previous article affecting the ucp_register.php file located in /includes/ucp.

The changes to the templates described in the previous article are basically the same, but now include the template for anonymous posting, for example, posting_editing.html. The javascript code placed originally in the ucp_register.html template should go into the head portion of the overall_header.html template. The latter would cover both contingencies. The call to the dencoder function might also be placed in the footer template, but seems benign enough in the respective templates for registration and posting anonymously. Of course, depending on your theme, you may need to refresh the templates after you’ve made changes to these files. Needless to say, the image verification service should be activated.