Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Tramadol
August 16, 2004

I don’t know what it is, but I know that it is evil. I got about ten comments over the weekend referencing the stuff on various posts. It’s a new flavor of comment spam.

These guys are doing something new; something that I would hae done if I was an evil comment spammer. They read through a post to find some keyword and match it to their database of retated quotations. They post that quotation as a comment with a link to their completely unrelated Tramadol site. At first glance it looks like what they wrote is related to your post, but then you realize what has happened, and it’s not related at all.

I like your colors
August 13, 2004

I created a little color toy that goes out to a web site you specify and retrieves the colors that are used there. It looks though the HTML of the site and through any referenced CSS files. Each color appears as a little circular chit with the hexadecimal color value next to it.

The scanning mechanism uses some regular expressions to search for color values, which are typically stored as a hash symbol, followed by 6 hexadecimal digits. I also have the expression search for HTML color words, in case the web author has memorized them for use in his designs or did something even crazier, like used Frontpage.