Category Archives: hacking

tag clouds improve visibility

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which, to the daughter of a pilot such as mine fine self, is counterintuitive in the extreme, but there ya go. The world don’t make no sense. Deal.

So here, without further ado, is the tag cloud that engtech rigged up for us WordPress users. I could paste this into a page, but what the heck, it’s not dynamic anyway, and nobody ever reads my pages except bitter Midwesterners and confused Bristolliacs.

Tag clouds, if you’re not finding the concept listed on the Weather Channel, are indices of the tags/categories used on a blog, with the size of each directly proportional to the number of uses of the tag. I had no idea I posted about politics this much!

By the way, I didn’t tag this with every tag that’s relevant, because that would be spamming the tag system, and we all know how I hate that. At least, those who crossed me once and now have to keep changing their names, yeah: they know how I hate that.

That this particular version of the tag cloud is all overlappy-like is on the one hand a bug, but on the other a perfect metaphor. You doubt? Read more of this blog and all will become clear.

Tag me, bay-bee!

                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Created by WordPress.com Tag Cloud Generator by //engtech

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Valentine’s how-to: the nastiest prank in the world

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STD, yoMaybe not the nastiest, come to think of it, as this only applies to those with sex lives that exist in the physical world and not just the universe of slash fic.

Inspot is a truly useful, life-saving website that helps those who’ve been infected with harmful diseases inform others of their risk and encourages a pro-active and positive approach to sexual health. As such, it deserves our wholehearted support and I for one applaud it.

However.

It’s also a tool ripe for abuse; the perfect way to mindfuck someone who has it coming. We at the ol’ raincoaster blog would never encourage you to unleash this monster on an innocent party, but what about those who have it coming? Well, that’s quite another tale of mystery and imagination.

Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are more common than you know. In the U.S. alone, there are 15 million new cases each year. Talking to your sex partners, even virtually, helps take away the stigma associated with STDs. AND it’s scientifically proven to reduce transmission.

** Did you know that some of these STDs make it 6-10 times more likely to transmit HIV from an infected person to his or her sex partner – no matter who has the STD first?

TIPS ABOUT THE SITE

  • Notify everyone you’ve had sex with in the past six months. Oral sex counts, too.
  • Try looking through your old emails and your online address book to complete the list.
  • If you decide to compose a personal message, put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Think about how you were told—what you liked and what you didn’t—and put the best of it into words.
  • You don’t have to provide detailed medical info—this email card will automatically provide links to what they need to know.
  • You can send postcards anonymously or from your email address.

Take a damn good look at that last line and then reach out and touch mindfuck someone.

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tag cloud nine

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raincoaster's tag cloud is so way taggier than yours, yo!So there it is: the raincoaster tag cloud, which idea I got from Seismic Twitch who got the Cthulhu chandelier from me so that is what you call fair trade. Thanks to WordPress.com and their security restrictions it’s not dynamic, but at least it does exist and feature Cthulhu rather prominently, even though it appears to imply that God hates Helen Mirren, which even if it were true I would have no way of knowing, so call off the lawyers and the priests already!

When you cast your bread upon the waters, it often returns to you in strange and unusual forms, even if an thousandfold. I mean, who needs that much bread pudding? But after casting nearly two thousand blog posts upon the blog pond, the internet gave a great heave and tossed the following back at me:

the raincoaster game!
Jessica Coen says so!

I have my own game! Mother would be so proud!

In moderately unrelated news, Google has recently re-jiggered their jigs and re-mastered their masters and greased up the series of tubes known as the internet and as a result my Page Rank, which had been a solid and more than respectobiggle 6 back in the day, but which had plummeted to a juicy 0 after the domain change, has clambered back up to a moderately impressive 5, although there is still lost ground to be regained. Operation Global Media Domination has suffered setbacks before, but it can no more be killed than it can be exorcise: like antimatter, OGMD is inherent in the very nature of the universe and should it be eliminated by some unthinkable and unspeakable metaphysical conflict, the existence of existence itself would cease to be, the snake would swallow its own tail, and the world as we know it would vanish in a puff of hyacinth-scented fairy dust.

And nobody wants that to happen, do they?

Got credited “submitted by” on BoingBoing for submitting Helm’s Deep in Candy, which they and TORn picked up: did fuckall for my hits, actually, and Technorati is still steadfastly refusing to see the damn link. They hate me. Mutual, babes, mutual. But I still get up to twenty hits a day from my comments on the Helm’s Deep post: very strange, but I’ll take ’em!

BTW, I outTechnorati BoingBoing on a search for Helm’s Deep in Candy. *thrilled*

Also, the Guardian picked up my Fart Tax story, which I got from the Guardian, and named it “Best of the web” but of course I didn’t get a screenshot. D’oh! Going on the resume anyway. It is a strange kind of incestuousness indeed that makes the participants BOTH look good, but god knows I’m not proud. Arrogant, yes: proud, no.

Rev it up, baby! 

In extremely-related news, I found this delightful little metric on Blogpond. How could raincoaster here resist something called EgoSurfing? I ax ya. My results, which vary between 10,000 and 12,000, give me a ranking of “Common” which is surely the first and last time someone will be able to get away with calling me that; you can insult me, but only if you manage also to give the impression that I am original in my sordid vileness: is that too much to ask?

Recently I was whining about the effect of blog quietude on hits and a friend of mine expressed complete bafflement at my interest in the subject; more than this, he managed to imply that working for fame was invalid, whereas working for money was right and good. More on this some other time, but being, as I knew he was, of a quantifiable turn of mind, I simply looked at him and quietly said “During the time I’ve been visiting you I’ve gone up seven thousand, five hundred places on Technorati.”

Where is your 2% annual raise now?

And finally tonight, also in OGMD news, we present some of the top searches that have led people to the ol’ raincoaster blog. Let us give thanks to Donnie Davies, may he rest in peace, Helen Mirren‘s tits, and the immortal triad of Beautiful Agony, Beaver Shots, and Blackzilla.

Strangely, nobody wants to look at Doug‘s beaver shots. They much prefer Lori’s. Maybe I should host a sort of photographic carnival of beaver shots, an internet-wide challenge for the best beaver shots out there. But that would artificially game the hits, and that would be so, so very far beneath me.

Wouldn’t it?

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Technorati Favorite me!

Donnie Davies performs God Hates a Fag: the infamous video

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Yes doubters, it’s the real thing! Now that every single one of the Right Reverend Donnie Davies‘ websites has had the plug pulled on it, the entire Internet, apparently, experiencing the online equivalent of a Coyote Morning, the banned video is hotter than Helmand heroin. 

Naturally from the very first we at the ol’ raincoaster blog have been on this like santorum on a rentboy. The video file was lovingly ripped at great pain and uncountable expense from a ripped copy of a ripped copy of a MySpace video which had been smuggled out of Celebrities in the bottom of a converted Boblbee, and God, who hates a fag by the way, only knows what the quality is like on this poor bugger. Sod’s law.

Yes, people, it is a joke. You may climb down from the ceiling now.

Latest UPDATE HERE: what MTV doesn’t want you to see!

Lyrics over the hump…I mean JUMP!
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petard-hoisting in our time: the Yard arrests top gov’t official

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Never forget 

and, apparently, using the post-paranoid age’s patented warrant-less taps and hacking provisions, which Blair‘s own government shoved down the throats of a complacent nation. Whoops, won’t do that again soon, will ya?

The Guardian has a report on the panic at #10:

Yates was the man who authorised the arrest of Ruth Turner, the rather earnest daughter of a theology professor and, more importantly, head of government relations at Number 10, on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. The move has set the government and the Metropolitan Police at war. What began with four police officers banging on the door of Turner‘s flat in Waterloo at dawn now threatens to end in a constitutional standoff, raising fundamental questions about the relationship between politicians and the law.

And more of the same, with bonus “senior government officials interfering with an investigation” here.

Downing street was plunged into a full-scale war with the police yesterday after senior officers hit back at criticism of the way the cash-for-peerages investigation is being handled.

They responded after Cabinet Minister Tessa Jowell expressed bewilderment at the manner in which Ruth Turner, Number 10’s director of devolvement relations, was arrested at home at dawn – while former Home Secretary David Blunkett accused police of ‘theatrics’. Yesterday Scotland Yard made clear its anger at what it sees as undue political pressure. Sir Chris Fox, the former president of the Association of Chief Police Officers who remains close to Scotland Yard, accused political critics of ‘scheming to discredit a very important inquiry’. Chief constables feared a potential threat to police independence, he added.

and, best of all, Iain Dale has the story about how it was the coppers hacking into the computer system at #10 which provided the smoking gun. This would, of course, have been illegal but for the shiny new surveillance measures that have been enacted since The War Against Terror began.

…An independent IT expert was then sent in by detectives, with the permission of Downing Street, to look through communications records, it claimed. But the Sunday Telegraph suggested that detectives had obtained high-level permission to “hack” into the IT system remotely…