炸 - Zha4 - Deep Fry, Explode

There’s also 炒 - Chao3 - Saute, Stir Fry and 煎 - Jian1 - Fry. For example, you’d 煎 a fried egg, 炒 some fried rice, and 炸 French Fries.

Now there is some controversy here. Zhongwen.com and my dictionary BOTH maintain that when you’re saying 炸 as Fry you use second tone, fourth tone means Explode. Jenny says THEY’RE BOTH WRONG and you use fourth tone for both!

萬 - Wan4 - Ten Thousand

Yes, there’s a word for 10,000. It goes like this:

(note that to actually say 100, for example, you would say 一百 - Yi1 Bai3 - One Hundred)

Following that same pattern, I can count up to 千兆 - Qian1 Zhao4 - Thousand Trillion (a quadrillion), but I don’t know how to count higher. My dictionary doesn’t have the words.

Well actually I suppose I can count to ten quadrillion minus one (9,999,999,999,999,999). Counting higher is a mystery for another day…

Now, the real reason why 萬 is the word of the day. Check out how to say World Wide Web in Chinese:

萬維網 - Wan4 Wei2 Wang3 - Ten Thousand Dimensional Net!

I like it better than World Wide Web, I might start using this even in English.

Update: The messy-78 oversight committee has ruled that images of puppies in danger do not meet community standards.

爪 - Zhua3 - Claw

爪哇 - Zhua3 Wa1 - Java (the language)

It does have an RSS feed, you just have to read the source code to BlogEd to find it.

Here it is. It has some problems. But you can get headlines and notification of updates through it.

on the Java road…

Looks very new. No RSS. RSS here. Uses his homegrown weblog tool, bloged.

His weblog is part of the new Java.net site, put up by Sun, O’Reilly, and CollabNet.

Another part is dev.java.net, which looks like a reimplementation of SourceForge for Java projects.

謝 - Xie4 - Thank

謝謝 - Xie4 Xie5 - Thank You.

You can respond with:

不客氣 - Bu2 Ke4 Qi4 — Don’t be polite.
不用謝 - Bu4 Yong4 Xie4 — No need to thank.

Or, I’m told that in Taiwan, they now say:

不會 - Bu2 Hui4. This literally means “Can’t”.

Plus some bonus pictures for you. Susan and Aidan:

And, Chris and Ellen’s new house! It’s finished (really) and they’ve moved in. 我們的呢?

寫 - Xie4 - Write

For everybody who wants to 寫 and 講 - Jiang3 - Speak better, I’ve made this URL:

minutillo.com/steve/wotd

It always shows the latest word of the day, with the archives beneath. Link away.

字 - Zi4 - Character, Letter, Word

Here’s hoping Mr. Sandler stops writing so many 錯字 - Cuo4 Zi4 - Wrong Word — Typos. He also has a Jenny to tell him that his Chinese is all wrong. Too bad her site is broken, I’m curious about her now.

Four Dimensional Rubik’s Cube. By Don Hatch. More cool stuff at his home page.

遵 - Zun1 - Follow, Observe Obey

I think 遵 is one of those words that doesn’t really mean anything alone, to say “OBEY” you really need to say 遵從 - Zun1 Cong2 - Obey, Follow.

b2 has a serious security hole. It has been fixed in the latest released version, but you may be vulnerable if you haven’t updated. I didn’t pay much attention to this when I first noticed it, but watch out! I just scanned my logfiles, and script kiddies from all over the world have been using it to attempt to break into minutillo.com! Luckily, the security hole is only exploitable if PHP’s braindead register_globals configuration option is turned on.

You can protect yourself by immediately deleting gm-2-b2.php and blogger-2-b2.php. They aren’t used for anything but importing posts from GreyMatter and Blogger, so you can safely just rm them.

Those files have a bug whereby the attacker can pass in the URL a path that will be used as b2’s include path, instead of the normal one. That path can be a URL! So the attacker can put a file called b2functions.php on a site they control, and then set their site as the include location, and your server will happily execute it (again, only if register_globals is on). I found attackers attempting to cause all sorts of mischief, from deleting the home page, to opening up a shell that they can use, to a complicated script that would have uploaded some C code, compiled it, and then executed it, doing who knows what! I didn’t get the code to see what it would have done.

I also found some particularly lame attempts, one of which copied the sample code from that Bugtraq posting, but didn’t realize that you have to replace ?b2inc=http://attacker.com with your own site. They were also quite confused by my view-source feature, they would use Google and search for the vulnerable file names, and find them in the source viewer. Then they’d try to append the hack to the end of that URL, the one that is just viewing the source, not the one that would actually execute the vulnerable file.

Brief, easy to understand description of the Slammer worm. 376 carefully crafted bytes, sent to one server, replicated explosively and took down large sections of the Internet in just 15 minutes. Cool!

+ =

開 - Kai1 - Open, Start

開放 - Kai1 Fang4 - Open (no restrictions, open to the public)

原始碼 - Yuan2 Shi3 Ma3 - Original (original document) Code — Source Code

Together, 開放原始碼 means Open Source. But it wouldn’t be right unless I also define:

自由 - Zi4 You2 - Freedom, Liberty

軟體 - Ruan3 Ti3 - Soft System — Software

Together, 自由軟體 means Free Software.

FoF now has a SourceForge project! You can use that for feature requests, bug reports, general questions, whatever. I’ve uploaded the code too. I uploaded 0.0, tagged it, then updated it to 0.1, and tagged that, for no good reason.

This also means there is a new easy to remember URL to get to FoF:

feedonfeeds.sourceforge.net

煙 - Yan1 - Smoke

The question of the day: Will 三喵 keep her promise to quit 抽煙 - Chou1 Yan1 - Draw Smoke — Smoking this October, when the state wide smoking ban goes into effect? TUNE IN THEN TO SEE!

Salam Pax’s first column in The Guardian

I have discovered Love Hina / Dungeon Keeper II crossover fan fiction.

This can’t be happening.

Keitaro was relieved. His work was finally done. Well, for a while, anyway. Steel doors, secret doors and magic doors filled the entire Dungeon… well, the current, unexpanded Dungeon and he hadn’t gotten around to the orders for traps yet.

He decided to step out and get something to eat, plus maybe talk with Naru or one of the other girls. He didn’t know what Narusegawa did around the Dungeon, other than fight.

“Myu, myu!” came a strange call from behind Keitaro as he neared the hatchery. He turned to see a small turtle flying toward him. It’s legs were similar to those of a sea turtle rather than the land-based turtles.

The same guy has all sorts of other horrifying fan fiction.

Still working on FoF 0.2, and things are getting tricky. The bad part is I actually just used LEFT OUTER JOIN. The even worse part is now I need CONNECT BY by MySQL don’t got it.

癒 - Yu4 - Heal, Cure

To be healed or recover from a sickness is 痊癒 - Quan2 Yu4. And that’s what Jenny’s doing very well, after having her wisdom teeth out last week.

Ha! Even Zhongwen.com can’t resist.

道 - Dao4 - Road, Path, Way

This is the 道 as in Taoism. It is related to the 陰陽 stuff I mentioned before. All I know about Taoism I learned from Taoism Drunkard, so instead I give you The Tao of Programming:

A master programmer passed a novice programmer one day. The master noted the novice’s preoccupation with a hand-held computer game. “Excuse me,” he said, “may I examine it?”

The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the master. “I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium, and Hard,” said the master. “Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human.”

“Pray, great master,” implored the novice, “how does one find this mysterious setting?”

The master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it underfoot. And suddenly the novice was enlightened.

Nothing can be talked about but the Eternal Tao.
Nothing can be named but the Eternal Name.

贏 - Ying2 - Win, Beat

Great story about a BBS at Waxy.org. It’s part of a project called “Newly Digital”, which you should visit. Some of the other stories are pretty good too.

I used to visit some local BBSes as well. There was Devil’s Hopyard, with message boards, a Risk game, and users with handles like Dream Scribe and Imperial Wizard. I was “MAGMALUS”. Towards the end of my BBS days I was promoted to elite level, and given access to some secret boards and download areas. That was a great day!

There was Bruce’s Bar and Grill, which had MULTIPLE PHONE LINES! That’s right, several people could call in and use the BBS at the same time! It also had a nice color scheme and a memorable touch-tone sequence. The main reason to call in here was to use the real-time chat. My friends and I would call in at the same time and cause trouble. You could impersonate other users by typing something as yourself, then a bunch of blanks, (to wrap to the next line) then a name and a fake statement. You had to get the ANSI codes just right for it to be convincing. The obvious target was Bruce, the sysop.

Then there was Amphibian Cafe. I had an Amiga, and Amphibian Cafe was where I got my 0-day warez. I spent many an hour downloading cracked disk images at 9600 baud. There was one problem with Amphibian Cafe:

The owner, Hellbender, would sometimes hang around at the BBS console and chat with unsuspecing users. I’m looking through listings, trying to decide if I want to download some tracker MODs or maybe get another disk of “It Came From The Desert”, and now I have to make nice and chat with the sysop.

From BBSes I moved up to some of the early online services. We tried GEnie and Compuserve. They were pretty good, but so expensive! Of course, once I got to college, (circa 1992,) I quickly learned about FTP, Telnet, Usenet, Gopher, and then finally the World Wide Web.

I don’t think I ever even tried to call one of the old BBSes back.

My influence is worldwide.

Curious about Feed on Feeds, but don’t want to install it? Try it out! Mikel Maron has installed it, and invites you to play with it. Be nice though.

Does that name sound familiar? He’s the same guy who created The World as a Blog which if you have never seen, you should check out.

More scary analysis of the unfolding IE/Microsoft/AOL/Netcape/Mozilla situation at Zeldman.com.

If you’re just joining us, last week AOL and MS kissed and made up. AOL gets $750 million, and the right to use IE in their product for 7 years.

But it turns out Microsoft has previously announced that IE is dead! IE is no more, ceased to be, its development processes are now history. If it wasn’t part of the default install it’d be pushing up daisies. It’s kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisibile!! IT IS AN EX-BROWSER!

餵 - Wei4 - Feed

Not to be confused with 喂 - Wei4, which is what you say when you answer the phone.