I was playing a round of TF2 CTF just half an hour ago as an Engineer, when suddenly I heard the achievement guitar riff play as I stepped onto my teleporter entrance. Startled, I looked down at the bottom of the screen to find that I’d gotten the achievement “Selfish Teleporter: Take your own teleporter 5 times in a round.”

Now, I’ve taken my own teleporters more than five times in uncounted rounds of TF2, so I knew it wasn’t some long-neglected General achievement. Intrigued, I did a quick Google search but found nothing. I searched the Steam forums. Nothing! Puzzled, I looked back at my list of achievements. It did not appear there under any category. Now, I’ve never heard of custom/server-specific achievements before, but that doesn’t mean they’re not out there. But I couldn’t find any mention of them on mod sites like FPSBanana. Of course, I didn’t think to take a screenshot.

So I’m wondering; has anybody else seen or gotten this achievement? Did Valve silently/accidentally roll out part of the upcoming but unfinished Engineer update?

You know those Flash banner ads? The ones that feature silhouettes of dancing girls hawking mortgage refinancing? Or popups that play audio? Or the classier but mildly bandwidth-hogging corporate videos? While I appreciate that advertising is paying for content creation, it doesn’t erase the fact that a lot of Flash content is really annoying- and it can measurably delay pageload times on my crappy home DSL connection.

But then a colleague at the University turned me on to ClickToFlash, a Safari plugin that not only automatically disables the loading of flash content, it comes with this added little bonus: being able to load H.264 content from YouTube that is normally only sent to iPhone users, while us poor non-mobile Luddites are stuck with much crappier video quality. But no more, thanks to this handy plugin. I’ve been using this thing for a couple of weeks now and love it. If you’re a Safari user, install this bad boy without delay!

K.C. Green, tellin’ it like it is.

I don’t know about you, but it astounds me that you still have to set up an Exchange account through the Windows control panel instead of through Outlook. It’s not that it’s difficult, but it’s needlessly opaque, especially since users expect to go through Outlook, which is, after all, their mail application. I suppose I shouldn’t complain—job security and all that—but it’s baffling.

For the last few weeks I’ve been baffled by Safari complaining that this site was a malware host. The most puzzling aspect of the whole ordeal was that the Safari/Google malware warning referenced the IP address 74.222.134.170, and not 208.97.175.192, where it actually resides. A direct
Google malware query on the domain came back clean, too, so it didn’t seem, on the face of it, that my webserver had been compromised.

A perceptive fellow on the Google Webmasters forum noticed the following bit of fun in my source code that looked like this:

Thinking it was a result of an injection exploit like this person found, I went over all my WP files (plus my theme directory) with a fine-toothed comb, but found nothing. A further bit of digging turned up other Wordpress users who were encountering the exact same problem. The iframe code was inserted directly into posts, but by what means, nobody seems to be sure.

I will—shamefully—admit that both my WordPress admin and FTP passwords were pretty weak, and could have been brute-forced pretty easily. They’re much stronger now, and I’ve updated to WordPress 2.8, and the three posts here that contained the offending code have been cleaned. I haven’t seen any new malicious insertions since taking those steps, but I remain suspicious. If you see anything even remotely weird in the next couple of weeks here, let me know.

Web 2.0, HTML 5, and CSS 4 are all very well and good, but all these highfalutin newfangled languages all share one common, glaring failure: no explicit blink tag tag support. Similarly disappointing is the utter lack of any further development of this noble bit of markup—and <blink> has been around for something upwards of a decade!.

To rectify this latter outrageous deficiency, and drive acceptance of the former, I propose the following expansion of <blink> functionality:

Element: <blink>
Syntax: <blink start rate color perchar>

Note: <blink> does not support the style or class attributes, as it is commonly agreed and understood that if you are using the <blink> tag, you have neither.