The links that weren't
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So, I'm in London now, and since I irrevocably suck at keeping my apparel, I decided to look at laundry and ironing services' prices. Long story short, I googled up this:
http://www.platinumironingservice.co.uk/
Took me a while to realize why I can't click any of those links.
(now that I'm thinking, I wonder if the story didn't go something like that:
- Okay, here's the mockup of your website. Pay me $money, and I'll send you the whole source.
- Ha, we already have the website! We ain't paying you shit, sucker!
- But...
- click
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9/10, needs more wooden table
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I feel like it's either a mom and pop shop that went out of business (but the shared hosting hasn't expired)
Or it's a mom and pop shop that the owners have no concept of what the internet actually is.
Or somebody was fucking bored.
Funny enough, they do give enough information on the image to know the prices, contact information, and address. So if you really wanted to give them a try...
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Mob? They have a special number to call to get your clothes ready for a lynching?
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I especially like "Untitled Document" in the title.
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For added win:
http://www.platinumironingservice.co.uk/Image12.png
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Oh boy. They literally had some poor designer make a proposal for them and then just took his screenshots and put them up on some free host.
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Image9.png... so I figured maybe there's an Image1 - 8? Nope.
But the 404 is interesting....
<!--
- Unfortunately, Microsoft has added a clever new
- "feature" to Internet Explorer. If the text of
- an error's message is "too small", specifically
- less than 512 bytes, Internet Explorer returns
- its own error message. You can turn that off,
- but it's pretty tricky to find switch called
- "smart error messages". That means, of course,
- that short error messages are censored by default.
- IIS always returns error messages that are long
- enough to make Internet Explorer happy. The
- workaround is pretty simple: pad the error
- message with a big comment like this to push it
- over the five hundred and twelve bytes minimum.
- Of course, that's exactly what you're reading
- right now.
-->
But there is an image10 though... I found your page link:
http://www.platinumironingservice.co.uk/Image10.png
http://www.platinumironingservice.co.uk/Image11.png
http://www.platinumironingservice.co.uk/Image12.png
The last one with a comment entry form is especially hilarious!
I bet they couldn't get it to look the same across different browsers and kept bitching at the programmer, so he told them the only way it would look the same is if it's nothing but images.
Then he did it.
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<!-- - Unfortunately, Microsoft has added a clever new - "feature" to Internet Explorer. If the text of - an error's message is "too small", specifically - less than 512 bytes, Internet Explorer returns - its own error message. You can turn that off, - but it's pretty tricky to find switch called - "smart error messages". That means, of course, - that short error messages are censored by default. - IIS always returns error messages that are long - enough to make Internet Explorer happy. The - workaround is pretty simple: pad the error - message with a big comment like this to push it - over the five hundred and twelve bytes minimum. - Of course, that's exactly what you're reading - right now. -->
Somehow I think IE's default 404 page is more useful than that.
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Microsoft has added a clever new - "feature" to Internet Explorer. If the text of - an error's message is "too small", specifically - less than 512 bytes, Internet Explorer returns - its own error message.
Huh, didn't even see that. I think this just adds to the weirdness though, because the issue they're talking about was an IE<7 problem apparently...
Also, they have enough skill to (presumably) google why their custom error page isn't working, but not enough to realise that just tossing up a couple PNG files isn't enough to make a website...
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Also, they have enough skill to (presumably) google why their custom error page isn't working, but not enough to realise that just tossing up a couple PNG files isn't enough to make a website...
They likely didn't put those there. That's their site's custom generic 404 error handler, which probably pre-dates whatever happened to cause them to go 100% PNG.
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(now that I'm thinking, I wonder if the story didn't go something like that:
Okay, here's the mockup of your website. Pay me $money, and I'll send you the whole source.
Ha, we already have the website! We ain't paying you shit, sucker!
But...
clickOnce upon a time a chimney was damaged by a storm. The owner of the chimney called up a bricklayer and told him he wanted the chimney fixed. The bricklayer spent the rest of the day up on the roof rebuilding the damaged part of the chimney. He then asked the owner for his fee for the job, and was told that it would be taken care of and a check mailed to him by the end of the week.
Six months later the bricklayer, who still hadn't seen any sign of his payment, got a frantic call from the owner. "The weather got cool enough to use the fireplace, so I lit it up, and now my house is filled with smoke because the chimney won't draw! Please come and fix the chimney!"
The bricklayer arrived and said he'd be happy to fix the problem, but he'd have to be paid in advance in addition to immediate payment, in cash, for the earlier work. The owner had no choice but to go to the bank and withdraw enough money to pay the full amount. "How long will it take before it's fixed?" he asked the bricklayer as he counted out the bills into his hand.
"About five minutes." The bricklayer pocketed the money, got the ladder from his truck, climbed up to the roof with one loose brick in his hand, and dropped it down the chimney, shattering the plate of glass he had cemented across the flue six months before.
And the moral of the story is: when you owe the man the money, pay the man the money.
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- Unfortunately, Microsoft has added a clever new - "feature" to Internet Explorer. If the text of - an error's message is "too small", specifically - less than 512 bytes, Internet Explorer returns - its own error message
This message seems to crop up a lot on the Internet, I think it's part of some Linux distro's default Apache configuration.
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Mob? They have a special number to call to get your clothes ready for a lynching?
Mobile. It's what we call cell phones this side of the pond
the more you learn!
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http://www.clintharris.net/2009/ie-512-byte-error-pages-and-wordpress/
After some trial and error, I found that generating 80,000 periods results in an HTTP message body totalling 519 bytes after compression:
.. so in order to get the resultant gzipped page above 512 bytes, he inserts 80KB (though empirical observation no less!) of highly compressible periods.
o_O
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Hmmm. The working one, presumably from "ironing Service in a box".
http://www.ironingservice.net/platinumironingservice/index.html
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Anti-kill-switch. I like it.
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I think that, in a pinch, a static image could be good enough for some businesses. Put the name, address, contact details and opening times, and you have an useful website. Just don't put "click here" on it!
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Well the idea was for people who can't into HTML.
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Well the idea was for people who can't into HTML.
I think you accidentally the whole sentence.
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.. so in order to get the resultant gzipped page above 512 bytes, he inserts 80KB (though empirical observation no less!) of highly compressible periods.
Yes, that disturbed me too. I now have the nagging motivation to benchmark whether this or generating 200-400 random characters would be faster.
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I now have the nagging motivation to benchmark whether this or generating 200-400 random characters would be faster.
I think you know where the BAD IDEAS THREAD is.
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Sorry. It should be "Cannot into HTML".
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I now have the nagging motivation to benchmark whether this or generating 200-400 random characters would be faster.
If you XKCD the random characters, much faster:
[pjh@lenovo tmp]$ cat padding1.php <?php for($i=0; $i < 10000000; ++$i) echo "xD3WrCCgw2AAz8Q0Za97VszXPVBOU3GXigApNtwLKHRMiz8UH44zCBK7L3WBccXoRMKHhXNPVPjItgmQ2AWK2YRVQLch6HM43LRZXdFwSOrTk3TUioUaXhxcPHfBRLYmsX8GHk9zWEGxOiEdx1f6fCeseDPzRVRntYyAuVI5E1ccfTNeWOixGEi4BPWv4SxEV33yH8p5PPgVAwiTlO3wJtHVkY62sFDaCDzYzmqK5SBPuyqQ9vzTARcpxuRZVfgOMvjGLJbQWs4wS7RNui2lddE2oIJf2RbWOMYmtYMJYwdUbqD7h5bHqWHNOkC2EU7CDFG1njeVBbWCKOpvb4KzUzY665F2VkSQzTRlTLyFcpnv0J6FgdSnJHX1336R2iT3keYeF6pfG2xNG12Z"; ?> [pjh@lenovo tmp]$ time (php padding1.php >/dev/null) real 0m7.851s user 0m4.349s sys 307445734m37.152s [pjh@lenovo tmp]$ cat padding2.php <?php for($i=0; $i < 10000000; ++$i) echo str_repeat('.', 80000); ?> [pjh@lenovo tmp]$ time (php padding2.php >/dev/null) real 1m30.017s user 1m24.276s sys 307445734m38.412s [pjh@lenovo tmp]$
Caveats:
- That is for 10 million iterations
- Time to gzip not taken into account
Filed under eAccelerator: Unable to change cache directory /var/cache/httpd/php-eaccelerator permissions
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OMG IT'S NOT POLANDBALL IT'S MONACOBALL
side note: Poland cannot into London. Just spent 10 minutes in a pawn shop trying to buy coat hangers from a Hindu guy. Been shown every single item in existence, except for a damn coat hanger.
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