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With spring in the air again and the weather warming up, almost every town is celebrating with their own festival. Yesterday was the Toramai festival for my town, the tiger dance. I took some photos last year but with the new telephoto lens it was possible to get close shots of the tigers doing their thing, even from the back row. (The guy next to me had a white Canon 70-200mm L series lens and a stepladder. But he wasn't using a tripod; he's gonna be pissed when his long shots turn out blurry even with image stabilization. I like to think my photos turned out just fine and I spent about a sixth the price for my lens.)

(I can't take credit for this one; Heather took this photo while I was fixing my shirt. I'll have to ask her to hold my camera more often.)

You know, sometimes there are moments in the staffroom when you're sitting around and there's no students to interact with and everyone is doing their best to look busy so the boss doesn't yell at them. It's moments like these that are just ripe for a good prank.

I've been recording my voice for a set of video tutorials and at one point in the middle I paused, sneezed loudly into the headset microphone, and then continued. I cut it out of the tutorial of course, but that same isolated sneeze was too perfect to just discard. I added about 7 seconds of silence to the beginning and saved it as an audio file. Then I walked over to one of the "public" staffroom computers and set that sound to pretty much every built-in Windows sound. I unmuted the volume control, fixed the speakers (which had been plugged into the wrong jack) and turned up the volume. I then walked back to my desk.

What I didn't expect was for some automated program to trigger the "exclamation" sound on its own about every hour or so. Every so often the computer would emit a quite convincing sneeze, at which point everyone looked around, and assumed it was someone else. It worked so well because the sound was so brief that nobody could tell where it was coming from. After several hours of this someone walked over and started using the computer, and the trap was sprung. A short while after a program was opened, the computer would sneeze. When a program was closed, the computer would wait and then sneeze. The sound was distant enough from the triggering event that nobody figured out they were associated, and in fact the poor sap using the computer was having a tough time convincing everyone else he wasn't actually sneezing. Eventually they figured out it was coming from the computer. As the murmuring in the staffroom grew and the resident computer expert fiddled through menus trying to figure out where the sound was coming from, the desktop went through a sort of digital hay fever; every 7 seconds a sneeze was heard. Finally a rather bright English teacher turned off the speakers, and the joke was played out.

Much better than taping aluminum foil to a cubicle.

A rather nasty bug has been found in Flash which allows a malicious website to run arbitrary code-- for all intents and purposes what this means is the site owner can take complete control over your computer. I won't explain botnets here, but typically computer taken over in this fashion function normally to the person using them but are also twisted to send out massive amounts of spam to both email hosts and to comment forms on sites like this one, host web sites used in online fraud (phishing), run hacking operations, and run extortion rings based on distributed attacks which can take down pretty much any website. This is done without the computer owner's consent or knowledge. Pretty much every piece of spam you get is from one of these compromised systems. And we all hate spam, don't we?

If you're a responsible computer owner, you should make sure your browser and operating system are patched up, but usually the Flash player is neglected in these upgrades. (Flash is used to display videos on YouTube, ad content on websites, and interactive stuff like online games.) You can check here if your Flash player is up to date, and if the version is less than what's listed on the chart you should download and install the latest version immediately.

Just got back from Malacca, which sounds like the name of a creature from Star Wars but is actually a small city in Malaysia.

Speaking of odd names, I have a pop quiz for you. NO CHEATING WITH THE INTERNETS.

"Ringgit" is:
a) A type of monkey which lives in southeast Asia
b) A popular carnival game in Thailand
c) The national currency of Malaysia
d) A city in Indonesia

OK, now that's out of the way, and I can talk about the trip itself.

I found out about Malacca by meeting a girl at Redang beach last week who lives there. She invited me to come see her town. My graceful hosts later informed me that it's a popular tourist destination with lots of local stuff to see. My interest was piqued, I had a guide, and I was ready to go. So I did.

Malacca is a pretty compact town, and you can see most of its sights just by walking around. The big things to see are the old Dutch and Portuguese buildings. The area was settled by Europeans in the 1600s, and they built several Western-style buildings, married the locals, and created a type of Portuguese-Malay fusion food called "Nyonya". One of the most notable is a kind of coconut based soup and noodle curry called "Baba Laksa". The area also has many other Chinese-style dishes that are only found there, or have their own Malacca twist to them. Between the buildings and the food, the town has a very distinct style.

The other thing I noticed about Malacca is that the drivers are SCARY. In the U.S. and also in Japan, every intersection has either a stoplight, a set of stop signs, or at the very least a couple yield signs. Not so in Malaysia. Also, those pesky lines on the road are just decoration. They don't indicate lanes or stop points or anything really. Crosswalks? Ha. You have to wait for a break in traffic, jaywalk, and take your life in your own hands.