Apology Form

Posted on June 16, 2008 | Leave a comment

This could save a lot of work. Anyone got a PDF version so it can be filled out online? 😉

(Hat tip to Hud)

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Posted in Humor

The Real First Day of Summer

Posted on June 16, 2008 | Leave a comment


is obviously today. School let out late last week, the weather’s great, and–following a dip of a few days (graduation parties? Father’s day?)–Atomic Avenue traffic just set a new morning record.

Sadly, since our whole year tends to focus on the San Diego Comic-Con, summer is actually my busiest time of all. I don’t normally catch a break until a month or so after Comic-Con when all the action has died down a little. Hopefully, this year we’ll be able to get free and take that big cross-country trip we’d been dreaming of for the past few years. Even with record high gas prices, you don’t get too many chances to road trip it across America seeing as many of the lower 48 states in one go as humanly possible…

Well, that’s the motivation, at least… now back to coding…

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Posted in Atomic Avenue, Life

700,000 Comics for Sale!

Posted on June 16, 2008 | Leave a comment

Woohoo! Atomic Avenue passed the 700,000 comics for sale mark today! We’re now at more than nine times the number of books available as all of eBay’s comic auctions–combined!

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Posted in Atomic Avenue

We Love Robots
But Not on Our Forums (Sorry!)

Posted on June 10, 2008 | Leave a comment

Even though I was in the middle of More Important Things (which, by definition is sort of…well, everything), it was that fourth forum spam message in six hours which sent me over the edge. Suddenly, the idea of retro-fitting our third-party (and incredibly hard to decipher) forum software with a CAPTCHA to help deter spam robots went from the “sometime where I get a few hours after Atlas’s release” timeframe to Right Bloody Now.

“CAPTCHA’s (“Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) are those squiggly, hard-to-read sets of letters which are popping up more and more frequently in order to make it difficult to overwhelm forums and other systems with automated attacks. The theory goes that by requiring a human being to actually pause and decipher such letter codes, the spammers out there will find their productivity cut from being able to attack millions of systems per day to at best hundreds. More commonly, the automated scripts they employ will simply fail in their efforts and move on to the next system on their list.

I’m not in love with filling out CAPTCHAs myself, but I was really getting tired of deleting spam. On the bright side, it seems to have (temporarily) stopped cold the flood of new, patently bogus accounts which we’d see piling up in the forums as “pending approval”. (We’d always required new account owners to activate their accounts by clicking an email link–a simple measure which by itself would stop hundreds of bogus spam accounts per month). Adding a simple CAPTCHA at registration seems to have at least temporarily helped stop even more.

So, although anyone who knows us at all knows that we love robots here at Human Computing and Atomic Avenue, Spambots (and their dirtbag owners) are not at all welcome. There’s no stopping determined spammers who want to spend a lot of time posting messages, but when being a professional spam-creep depends on posting millions of bogus messages per day, it doesn’t make any sense to do it where it’ll take you longer to post the message than it will for the board owners to delete both the spam and your account.

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Posted in Atomic Avenue, ComicBase, Geek Stuff

Holy Cow! Big Updates and Big Praise for the Editors!

Posted on June 8, 2008 | Leave a comment

Have you guys been checking out the last couple of updates to ComicBase? Thanks to a trove of comics we brought back from Germany and England (as well as new submissions from customers), we’ve managed to add almost 15,000 comics to ComicBase in the last two weeks alone. To put that in perspective, that’s about 3/4 as many issues as existed in the entire first release of ComicBase some 15 years ago!

I also wanted to give some much-deserved praise to Shiaw-Ling for all her amazing work researching and pricing thousands of comics written largely in German, with publishing histories that would be befuddling to even the most experienced native speakers. It’s difficult, important work, and unfortunately, some of the worst of it (I’m thinking of “Illustrierte Klassiker” — “Classics Illustrated” in German) is yet to come. But it’s been an enormous undertaking, and I, for one, am very impressed by what she’s accomplished in just a few weeks. Well done, Shiaw-Ling! (And not to be outdone, thanks to Mark for handling thousands of additions and corrections to the database this week as well! [and thanks to all of you for sending them in!])

Next week: cracking the 400,000 issue mark?

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Posted in ComicBase

The Last to Know: Quebec and Newfoundland

Posted on June 8, 2008 | 1 comment

I obviously need more Canadian friends to give me the 411 on things like this, but in tracing down an ordering problem on the system today, I figured out that PayPal was resenting that “Quebec” had a state code of “PQ” (“Province de QuĂ©bec”), even though that was exactly what the official database maintained by the International Standards Organization had for it as the abbreviation.

So why was PayPal’s API treating the state as invalid? It seems that sometime around 2000, Canada officially changed the abbreviation for Quebec to “QC”–and for good measure, changed Newfoundland from NF to NL (“Newfoundland and Labrador”) . The ISO database I’d loaded in some years ago was a bit outdated, it seems, and as a resident of “CA” (California) all my life, it never occurred to me that the state/province abbreviations would ever change, barring a war or civil uprising.

Garr… or, rather, C’est la vie…As the French (and French Canadians) would say. Perhaps this little bit of trivia will come in useful for someone else someday…

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Posted in ComicBase

Frankfurt: The Photos

Posted on May 31, 2008 | Leave a comment

(My brief, post-Erlangen trip to Frankfurt, Germany. Requires Adobe Acrobat/Reader)

Frankfurt

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Posted in Travel

Erlangen: The Photos

Posted on May 31, 2008 | Leave a comment

(trying this out as a PDF slide show. You’ll need Adobe Reader (a.k.a. Acrobat) to view it)

erlangen

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Posted in Atomic Avenue, ComicBase, Travel

Heading for Home

Posted on May 27, 2008 | Leave a comment

I’m writing this from the departure lounge of British Airways in Frankfurt International. Like Heathrow’s infamous Terminal 5, there seems to have been a bit of…err… remodelling going on in this lounge. This caused the trip to the gate to involve a long and circuitous set of detours which led up and down multiple staircases, past janitor’s closets, through construction zones, and not a few empty corridors the sort which one envisions oneself being mugged in. Nevertheless, I made it, got our trade show display checked in (it’s going through Terminal 5, so I don’t need to see it for a couple of months), and am currently wondering whether to go for the “Coffee and water or softdrink.. only €4.70!” ($8). I think not.

Unfortunately, this little outpost of the airport doesn’t seem to have a newsstand, so my plan of blowing all my remaining Euros on German kids comics won’t be happening this trip. I may still luck out at Heathrow, however, and at least pick up a ton of Postman Pat and Fireman Sam comics. Or at least a bottle of water for less than $4.00…I hope.

That’s the boarding call… I’m off!

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Posted in Uncategorized

A Brief American Comic Fan’s Guide to Weird Stuff in Germany

Posted on May 26, 2008 | Leave a comment

I personally hate travelogues, so I’ll stick to the weird or funny stuff. Standard disclaimers apply about all this being just one guy’s experience, which may or not apply to other people, or in fact, the rest of Germany.

Germans Conserve Like Crazy. Their gas is something like $10/gallon at the current exchange rate, so it’s no surprise that they drive small cars and take the train a lot. They’re also really serious about recycling bottles, adding on a deposit (Pfand) of what amounts to 40 cents per bottle to something as small as the Diet Coke (a.k.a Cola Light) you buy at the train station. They’re also hugely proud of new (and very impressive) skyscraper projects they’ve got which boast solar power, 98% recycling, and more.

Cold drinks cost a ton. Go to a supermarket and you can pick up liters and liters of beverages for a couple of euros. Buy a beer at a liquor store and it can cost as little as 80 Euro-cents/bottle. But want that Coke or beer cold? Prepare for a hurting like you’ve rarely seen outside of a comic convention. Think: $3.50 for a typical bottle of Coke. Oh, and there’s that 40 cent deposit thing as well. Since the beverages themselves are cheap, I can only conclude that the expensive thing is the coldness itself. Maybe it goes on sale in winter…

Beer costs the same as Coke. The news is not all bad on the beverage front.

They don’t “bag and board”. Maybe it’s the variety of comic sizes they deal with in the German market. Maybe bags and boards also have a 40 cent deposit on them. But for whatever reason, it seems like almost every comic on display at the comic convention came either not bagged at all, or bagged in a makeshift, 20-year old open-top bag. Boarding was near-nonexistent. It really was like going back in time to the 1970s when kids like me who’d never seen a comic shop would use any bag we could find to try to preserve our comics. Still, despite some price tags that ranged over a hundred dollars for some comics, few seemed to think that bagging and boarding was important–and it certainly wasn’t standard. Anyone know why?

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Posted in Comics, Travel