This sounds like SUCH a bad idea

This morning, Wikia is rolling out cool features on the controversial Wikia Search engine.

Starting today, if you do a search on the engine and don't like the results, you'll be able to change them.  Your changes will apply not just for yourself, but rather for everybody.

This sounds like SUCH a bad idea.  Bad enough that people try to manipulate Google's PageRank engine (and that Google deprecates search results for sites it thinks are trying to do so).  But on Wikia, it goes far beyond that:

If you think a result on a search result page is too low or too high in the listings, you can influence its position by rating it.  You can delete entries entirely or hand-write new ones.  You can also rewrite the text of a search result, including adding code to the result (to insert, perhaps, a site-specific search, like Google's search-within-search).

Or perhaps to insert malware into search results, or to redirect search results for a competitor's site to your own, or ...

This sounds like complete anarchy.  Whoever can edit fastest, wins.  What's the point of a search engine when you don't know from one day to the next whether you can trust its results at all?  It's the next best thing to a ouija board.

Resolving a problem

Well, a bug, actually.  In XV.  Who else out there still uses XV?  Sure, it's old, but it still works as well as it ever did.¹

When you go to print an image, though, XV's calculation of the as-printed image resolution in dpi is, uh ... well, let's be polite and call it imaginative.  Or we could be impolite and say the dpi value is calculated by a crack-smoking monkey playing with a Ouija board.  It certainly doesn't bear much resemblance to reality.  It calculates different as-printed resolution (different by about a third) for the same image printed with the same margins on the same paper on the same printer, depending whether image and page are in portrait or landscape orientation.²

This patch fixes that and makes the dpi figure pretty accurately (i.e, ±1dpi) reflect reality.  If you don't already know how to apply it, you probably shouldn't be messing with it, and probably don't use XV anyway.

[1]  OK, so it doesn't scale images as cleanly as, say, the Gimp does, and it has never displayed GIF animation.³  Nobody said it was perfect.

[2]  Or, more clearly, with either both image and page portrait or with both landscape.

[3]  And besides, you have Xanim for that.  Right?  :)

Semi-random thought

I got an unsolicited invite to Plaxo a while back from someone who appears to be a headhunter.  Now Plaxo just sent me mail reminding me the invitation is about to expire.

I can't help but think ... whose idea was it to name what's basically a social-networking site something that brings to mind, before anything else, dental hygeine and tooth decay?  And the second association that comes up is an English brand of stuffing mix.

Hello?  Anybody at home down there in Marketing?