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Day: 17 December 2002

Game: Wrath II

December 17, 2002
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[Wrath II]By the same person that made “Lost Your Marbles“, there’s a largish Flash game (which includes Harvey from LYM in the loading screen) called Wrath II.

Starting off with the introduction of “And on the sixth day, God created man. By the seventh day, he’d realised his mistake. And “B—-r!” was the word.” should give you an idea of what you have to do. Still not clued up? Well, the instructions (from “Encyclopedia Satanica”) state: “What a bummer… You created mankind in your own image huh? Bit of a silly thing to do wasn’t it. So naturally, they’ve run amok, and really p—d you off, right? Sounds like punishment time”.

Yes: you finally get to play God! Starting off with just a lighting bolt, as you progress through the levels you get a Hay Bomb (a sort of time delay bomb), a flood, earthquake, “angel of death”, and a “bonzai volcano”. But it’s not so easy to kill those awkward humans, sheep and cattle. Angels, aliens and even the Lord Of Darkness – Satan himself – will try and stop you…

Search: Google Cache oddity

December 17, 2002
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[Google Pigeons]I’ve just noticed a slight “oddity” with my favourite search engine Google. Basically, Google has a cache facility which enables your to see what the page was like when Google indexed it using their Googlebot spider. Extremely handy if the site you are trying to access is unavailable for some reason.

Google also offer the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer users (a Mozilla version is also available) which makes available certain items such as “Search From Toolbar” (saving you going to the Google homepage) and direct access to the cache.

Now, here’s the oddity: Accessing the cache of my blog via the Google Toolbar gives me a URL in the format of http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fblog.rac.me.uk (ok, there are a few more parameters, but I’ve reduced them to “bare minimum”). That link currently shows my blog with the latest entry dated November 13 2002 at 12:31am (entry “Game: Fling That Cow!“) – however, performing a search and then clicking on the ‘Cached’ link produces a URL in the format of http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:QGa9rQIfcj0C:http%3A%2F%2Fblog.rac.me.uk – with a “last entry” date of December 15 2002 08:11pm (entry Movies: Films I’d like to see again) – just 2 days ago.

So: why has Google got two cached copies of the same page? Obviously the search system is using the “fresher” copy, but it’s still given me a reason to stop and think. And what does the QGa9rQIfcj0C bit mean? A bit of playing has shown to me, so far, that it’s a unique identifier for the page in Google’s cache: searching for other pages from my blog resulted in the code “OdxOQ8hwqvMC” (November 12th: Pick On George Bush). “Adjusting” the cache URL to read http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:OdxOQ8hwqvMC:blog.rac.me.uk still shows up the individual entry page instead of the front page (which you would have thought by the format of the URL). fEJraafpn4cC is the code to my Games and Fun category page

Someone else has noticed this at Webmaster World, but no useful information came from that discussion.

Oh well – if I find out anything more (it’ll be interesting to find out if the “cache IDs” remain static over time), I’ll let you all know 🙂

Movies: Films I’d like to see again II

December 17, 2002
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[Weird Al Yankovic Troll]Continuing on from Sunday’s post of which films I would really like to see again, here’s another couple of movies.

Basically, Weird Al Yankovic’s “UHF” and “Troll” are two movies I’d like to watch again: but there’s a slight problem. Both films are only currently available on DVD – NTSC Region 1 (US and Canada). These means that my Region 2 (UK and Europe) PAL players just will not play them. Therefore, thanks to the regionalisation of DVDs, the makes of those movies have lost a potential customer who would have happily paid shipping from the States to the UK…

Anyway, on with the rambling:

Continue ReadingMovies: Films I’d like to see again II