Posts from December 2007

[The Culinary Institute of America]

The real reason you learn to make sauce Mornay ['cheese sauce'] is not for eggs Benedict, Welsh rabbit, or potatoes au gratin. The real reason you learn to make sauce Mornay is that you bought some foolishly expensive herbed, veined goat cheese to impress your girlfriend's parents at Thanksgiving, which they politely ate but did not finish, and now that it's nearly Christmas with no food in sight, you're fucking hungry and you don't care whether that's a 'delicate rind' or 'disgusting crust of mold.'

Sauce Mornay: because you paid too much for that cheese to admit it's gone bad.

- Z

'television static' translates to 'myrornas krig,' or 'battle of the ants.'

- Z

Has the American conservative movement lost its focus? According to the statistics page from 'Conservapedia: The Trustworthy Encyclopedia,' it seems as though American conservatives are just as preoccupied focused as ever.

- Z

OK, I admit to being a webcomics geek, and a tagline of 'Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines' sounds like the kind of thing that's already been done a bajillion times before. But when faced with 'Are you man enough for this,' Steven Frank of Spamusement came up with 'Derek Jeter, carrying a fishing pole and a keg, atop a riding lawnmower on the flatbed of a pickup, deep-fried and smothered with country gravy.'

That is unusual talent.

- Z

To anyone who considers him or herself an adventurous eater, I recommend "Steve Don't Eat It," a website wherein a guy named Steve eats things he ought not to.



I think the term "ROFL" is used too often and never literally, but I came very close. Don't worry; there is a happy ending.

- Z

From: molly miller
To: webmaster
Subject: Dance
Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2007 08:52:52 -0700

Are you really doing the hokey pokey tonight?

- Z

OK so we've got two Halloween parties to go to tonight, and I'm only wearing one costume. The roller girls will understand my costume without explanation, but I'm afraid it will likely leave many or all of you scratching your heads. I can hear it now: 'I understand you're a roller girl, but what's with the potato masher?' I will not answer your question. I will refer you to this blog.

The QCRG All-Stars* played against the Steel Town [Hamilton, ON] Tank Girls this past summer in a game where the officiating was bad and the sportsmanship was worse. Derby is a rough sport, but this rapidly became unsettling on an almost visceral level. Anyway, the costume is a Tank Girls' uniform.

That does not explain the potato masher. There is a Tank Girl whose name is Cheese Grater. She carries around a cheese grater. I'm not sure whether the name or the kitchen implement came first, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to ask. It's pretty random, but it's not any less random than, say, a potato masher. And I guess cheese is relatively badass as far as dairy products go, but consider this: if someone chucked a piece of cheese at you, you'd be angry but mostly confused. But if someone chucked a potato at you, you'd be IN PAIN!!!!!

- Z

_______________

• ie, anyone who wasn't busy that weekend

"Winter in Blogville" by Jennifer ("14221") Wutz-Lopes (Buffalo Spree, Nov 2007, p26)

Someone ( everyone!) over at Estrip.org has their panties in a bunch about something to do with the fact that they are not taken seriously as bloggers. Take a number and get in line, I say.

But estrip is by far the most colorful screenshot in the bunch.

- Z

Because I know everyone's been holding their breath for this, here's the HTTP auth Javascript server-side script and database layout

Notes:
- does not require any hooks in your HTML code; just make sure your form has fields named 'username' and 'password' and import the Javascript
- can be attached to any form with an access-restricted target; script will pre-authenticate and, if successful, send the rest of the form as usual.
- You're not going to be able to use the server script as-is because it's kind of dependent on other parts of the project. You're not going to be able to read the server script as-is because it's Python. [Also in the full version you can change your authentication realm, and users in the special '_administrator' realm can log in to anyone's site.]
- no backwards Internet Explorer compatibility code in the Javascript
- on successful authentication, 'validate' returns 204 No Content. on unsuccessful authentication, server returns 400 Bad Request.

- Z

You know, I just can't fucking leave well enough alone. This morning @paul mailed me a short Surebert script to do logins, which works, yet I'm still hacking this HTTP auth problem. Stay The Course, right?

But I got it solved. 1: Never send 401 Unauthorized without a WWW-Authenticate header. It's not allowed, and you'll get what you deserve. RFC 2617 briefly mentions using 400 Bad Request to report miscellaneous failures to the browser, and sure enough, that resets Safari. 2: If the script detects a failure, send another request to the same URL using a bogus username. This will of course fail, resetting Firefox in the process [thanks @kookcity2000]. I think that's a gruesome hack, but if it works it works.

Why do I care about HTTP authentication? Most importantly, I want to support authenticated, noninteractive web services [specifically an authenticated RSS feed]. Since this code will have to live in my server somewhere, I might as well get some mileage out of it. HTTP Digest is often overlooked but it's a nice middle ground between static hashes [which are plaintext-equivalent] and full-blown encryption [CPU load].

Source code available upon request.

- Z