Oh boy, oh BOY!! I’m so happy!! Apparently quite a few people have decided to send me Wicked screensavers, very many more have Approved me, LOTS want to discuss That movie with me, and a hell of a lot are asking for my details! YAY!

While I answer all this wonderful email, please visit this place. It’s fun. Really.

— sergio at 04:28 PM  

You’ve seen me fret and obsess endlessly about the site code, CSS and backend. So far, I’ve removed all tables in the html code, moved on to a purely CSS based layout, updated the site to be w3c Compliant and tested in as wide a variety of browsers and platforms as I can. I’ve turned this into my own, personal vendetta of usability. I visit Overcaffeinated repeatedly with text browsers and make sure everything displays correctly (thus logging the only hits from those user agents, since no one in their right mind would visit a Webcomic Site with a text browser, apparently). You’d think I’d be satisfied by now, but actually, this is only the beginning. You see, I’m deeply obsessive and I regularly drink myself way over the Recommended daily Caffeine intake. These are not particularly good traits to be paired, mind you, and from time to time I’ll find myself fretting over the most minimal details of the site’s overall layout (and when I say from time to time I mean every freaking waking hour).

The next step in my World Domination Scheme is —*places pinky in mouth corner*— to put more content in that column to your left, which right now sits there all lonely and forgotten. Namely: I’m looking into installing web Polling software in the server and running weekly polls. I’d make one asking how many of you want that feature, but I don’t have polling software installed. Maybe later. I’m also looking into switching from Blogger based ranting to Movable Type. Blogger has been very good to me and I love what the Google guys did with it, but it may be time to move on to a more flexible solution.

Oh, and sometimes I make comics and even Wallpapers.

— sergio at 12:33 PM  

Movie Review: Tomb Raider 2.

I don’t usually review movies this bad because I figure everyone can realize that they suck after taking so much as a cursory glance at the Movie Poster, let alone the trailer. There are so many things wrong with this movie it’s hard to focus on particular ones, but I do have some personal favorites in the contest for the all-time most ridiculous piece of crap scene in a movie award.

First off: What’s with the Goddamned Shark??. Here we have Lara (Collagen-lips Angelina Jolie) doing her kicking ass act in a temple buried underwater, when she’s suddenly left without means of transportation back to the surface, so what she does (obviously) is cut her own arm to attract a shark with the blood, and when said half-ton animal is about to strike and presumably, eat her… SHE HITS HIM. Yep. In the nose. Very hard. Hard enough, apparently, to force the animal to make an incredibly cartoony and stupid face and let her hop on board, grabbing his dorsal fin and taking a ride to the surface.

…

For simplicity’s sake, let’s overlook the whole bubbles in the blood effect, which was blatantly ignored. There’s something about the very basic slugging-a-Shark-in-the-face action that makes me feel all squirmy and at a loss. Am I supposed to think Lara’s cool? Or maybe I’m supposed to enjoy the non-stop action rollercoaster ride?. I cowered in my seat at the stench of the poorly directed piece of shit, is what I did!. I can’t help but think this stuff came straight from the ass of a very sick marketroid at Paramount. Either that or the producer was on crack.

This scene would not be nearly as insulting hadn’t I seen the same kind of resource used masterfully by Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon in their 12-issue miniseries that jumpstarted The Punisher Title again. Here’s the very witty piece of Comic that I’m talking about:

Click on image to see what this is about.

SEE THAT, LARA? THAT’s how you slug a giant beast in the head!. Pfft. Don’t watch Tomb Raider 2. If you hated the first one, you’ll hate this one even more. If you loved the first one well… What medication are you on? I could use some of that.

— sergio at 05:04 PM  

Securing Code is hard. Despite the image of coolness and glamour that Hollywood has presented to us for quite some time, the actual task of programming decent, secure code (or breaking half-assed, insecure code, for that matter), involves a lot of late night-coding, documenting and is generally seen as a low priority in project planning. Recently, this field got a lot of attention through a major shakedown: The Blaster worm propagated wildly and hit a rather large bunch of computer systems Worldwide.

Now, Computer Security is a touchy area. Although not everyone is expected to keep up to date with the latest news in bugtraq or closely monitor all security patches released by Redmond, we techno-geeks were able, up until now, to attribute most of the security related problems to the interface between the chair and the computer. That is, The User. Most virii (the Kournikova virus comes to mind) require some sort of action by the dim witted user in order to spread. We all know how that works: You receive an attachment promising to show you the boobs of * insert hot actress here * in full, glorious detail. You just have to double click on the harmlessFileNotAVirus.exe file, and you’re set!

Well, not this time. Connected to the interweb? — you’re vulnerable. Running any version of Windows? — you’re vulnerable (although the worm only attacked win2000 and XP, all versions have the vulnerability). Using the default color scheme in Windows XP? — you’re vulnerable (well, not really, but it’s so fucking ugly you should change it just to be on the safe side). As computers all over the world scanned port 135 in a colossal game of tag, we could just patch and watch in disbelief as coworkers running unpatched machines started screaming that the freaking thing had hit them. Before I knew what the payload was, I called home and warned my family not to connect to the internet (yes, my home computer was unpatched — I’ll live in shame until I commit seppuku to cleanse my honor).

While technically the damned Blaster thing was a worm and not a virus, it did have the ability to install arbitrary software on a home user’s computer. THAT IS BAD.

Without getting into the technical details of this, I think this event should mark a change in the perception software developers must have about our own work. It’s about time we stopped making half-assed excuses and blaming the users for our lack of foresight. It’s about time we started demanding security checks to be accounted for in the planning stages of our projects. The cries of But there will always be insecure software! should be met with Only if we keep writing it!. You hear me, fellow developers! Take the reins of your destiny and bitchslap the damn thing! Cleanse the Bugs! Tame the Gotos! Free the Mallocs! Get fucking jiggy with it!!!

Out now.

— sergio at 03:04 PM  

I spent no less than 6 hours last Sunday optimizing the CSS code for the menus, finding out more than any mortal should about CSS inheritance and generally making this or that improvement so you guys and girls could take a look at the site and it would look exactly the same as it did before. I may be a very sick individual, but there’s no legal ruling on that yet.

Of course, not everything’s the same. If you look under the hood of the site, you may notice that the code has been dramatically simplified. The html is much cleaner, and if you turn javascript off, all rollovers still work. It’s like magic, only.. it’s not. But it’s still cool. Kind of.

I haven’t been slacking off in the comic, so don’t worry. I’ll upload the new strip tonight (so we have a Wednesday update). I’d like to thank everyone who’s been emailing me. It’s great to hear from you people. For those who don’t know, my email address is sergio@overcaffeinated.net. Let me know how you like this stuff, and any suggestions you may have.

On to the technical part: A lot of the CSS hacking I did was due to the inconsistencies in the implementations of the Standard by Microsoft and Opera. Mozilla and Firebird work like a charm. Explorer is really buggy and requires the largest amount of hacks (can’t say I’m really surprised), and Opera has very few bugs and is the strictest of them all. Getting pixel-perfect alignment of all elements in these 3 browsers was a rather complicated task. So the 5% of you who use Opera to visit the site can be confident that it will keep on behaving as expected. The 4% of you who visit with Internet Explorer 5.0 should upgrade to 5.5 at least, or bear with the odd display glitch in the menu area until I get around to fixing it. As for the 0.3% of you who still visit with 4.x Netscape browsers: This site, and all the web, for that matter, is not meant to look like that, you know? there are actual colors in the site design! please, please upgrade.

As far as I know, the design should work fine with Safari, Galeon and text-based browsers, and doesn’t display well on Konqueror. If you’re using any of these and you notice any problems, let me know. I’ll see what I can do.

Yes, as you may have noticed, I find web technologies to be very amusing.

— sergio at 10:48 AM  

Behold! A new comic rears its head! Truly, a momentous event this is. In case you’re wondering, the movie they’re watching is The Boondock Saints (I never get tired of that one). Brownie points if you can name the original sources for the three references at the end.

— sergio at 02:54 AM  

Aaaand…. There you have it. The new design is obviously up, but there’s still so much more to do until everything’s fine and dandy. I hope you like this new look. There’s a lot of change to come still. The homepage and comic section are already updated, but the other sections still point to their versions with the old design. Hopefully I’ll finish fixing everything tomorrow afternoon.

The new comic will hopefully be up soon. I’m sure you’ll understand that I will be late on this one since I’ve been somewhat busy. ‘Night.

— sergio at 02:04 AM  

You may have noticed that the shoutbox now looks horrid. It’s all part of my elaborate strategy to take over the world and change the site’s design while at it. Next comic is still in the inception stage but I think it will be up before Wednesday along with the new design. If you have time, please take a look at the new homepage (beta) and let me know what you think by emailing me or posting in the shoutbox. All suggestions and critiques are greatly appreciated. There have been many changes and there are more to come, but it’s a somewhat mature design by now. I will post specifics on the design and the technology snafus I ran into while making it at some point or another. Bear in mind that it’s still in beta and most menu links point to nonexistant pages. That will be fixed when it becomes the main site design. Thanks =)

— sergio at 12:18 PM  

Quick update: Fellow webcomic author / geek extraordinaire Litazia has featured the Overcaffeinated cast in her latest comic (and done a great job of it too) so go visit her comic, The Tao of Geek. It’s cool!

I’m still working on the new site design and it’s coming along quite nicely. Hopefully I’ll be able to roll it out today or, at worst case, before Wednesday. Due to the frantic battle I’ve been enduring against the evil that is Cascading Style Sheets, I haven’t actually worked on the new comic, but hopefully it won’t be very late. I’m optimist about that. Out now.

— sergio at 01:27 PM  

After the notoriously on-time comic last Monday and my lenghty review of Titus, I haven’t spoken much. Truth is, I’ve been busy making a new design for the site. I have grown tired with this one (which was supposed to be a temporary fix from the outset), and I want to try my hand at using some newer web technologies in the site. Namely, I want to get rid of most (if not all) tables that clutter the html (make all the layout CSS based) and redesign this place to accomodate more of my future needs. This is my playground. I like to have fun with this site. Worry not, for this will have no effect upon the comic, which will keep on going as advertised (and hopefully will be on time more frequently).

If you haven’t checked out the News at the home page, you may want to do so. I’ve been updating frequently with little internet gems that I’ve found amusing. Hope you will too. Also, since a new month is starting, please VOTE once a day. This helps Overcaffeinated get a good place at the TWC list. Last month we did well, staying at around 40 for most of the month. Let’s try to do even better this month, and thanks to everyone who’s been voting. You have my utmost gratitude =)

— sergio at 12:11 PM