The Smile “The Slip” It’s unfortunate that The Smile records have to carry the weight of questions like “wait, is there never going to be another Radiohead album?” and “hold on, so is this basically Radiohead from now on?” But what can you do? Those are big questions for anyone who’d want to listen to […]

Vader really is the galaxy's greatest detective because he kills anyone who doesn't give him the answers he wants. Just watching him walk up to you, pipe in face mask, fire in his eyes, intimidates you into giving away who the murderer on Cherry St. is. Also, his Force sensitivity is greater than anyone else's. He can just sense if the killer is hiding in the cupboard under the staircase. He doesn't even have to look. He'll hold his lightsaber up to the door and activate it, making it thrust through the guy. This is the kind of shirt you wanna wear around your torso if you're in the middle of writing a genre-bending fan fiction. $7-21 | URL | Paypal Credit | S - 3XL ')}

Amateur physicist B.J. is going on vacation, but he likes to plan things right down to the zeptosecond. "Assume the flight accelerates at a constant speed for the first half of the flight, and decelerates at the same rate for the second half. 1) What speed does the plane need to reach to have that level of time dilation? 2) What is the distance between the airports?"

 

Contrarily, Eddie R. was tired of vacation so got a new job, but right away he's having second thoughts. "Doing my onboarding, but they seem to have trouble with the idea of optional."

 

"Forget UTF-8! Have you heard about the new, hot encoding standard for 2024?!" exclaimed Daniel , kvetching "Well, if you haven't then Gravity Forms co. is going to change your mind: URLEncode everything now! Specially if you need to display some diacritics on your website. Throw away the old, forgotten UTF-8. Be a cool guy, just use that urlencode!"

 

Immediately afterward, Daniel also sent us another good example, this time from Hetzner. He complains "Hetzner says the value is invalid. Of course they won't say what is or isn't allowed. It wasn't the slash character, it was... a character with diacritics! Hetzner is clearly using US-ASCII created in 1960's."

 

Finally this week, we pulled something out of the archive from Boule de Berlin who wrote "Telekom, the biggest German ISP, shows email address validation is hard. They use a regex that limits the TLD part of an email address to 4 chars." Old but timeless.

 

Ross needed to write software to integrate with a credit card payment gateway. The one his company chose was relatively small, and only served a handful of countries- but it covered the markets they cared about and the transaction fees were cheap. They used XML for data interchange, and while they had no published schema document, they did have some handy-dandy sample code which let you parse their XML messages.

$response = curl_exec($ch);
$authecode = fetch_data($response, '<authCode>', '</authCode>');
$responsecode = fetch_data($response, '<responsecode>', '</responsecode>');
$retrunamount = fetch_data($response, '<returnamount>', '</returnamount>');
$trxnnumber = fetch_data($response, '<trxnnumber>', '</trxnnumber>');
$trxnstatus = fetch_data($response, '<trxnstatus>', '</trxnstatus>');
$trxnresponsemessage = fetch_data($response, '<trxnresponsemessage>', '</trxnresponsemessage>');

Well, this looks… worrying. At first glance, I wonder if we're going to have to kneel before Z̸̭͖͔͂̀ā̸̡͖͕͊l̴̜͕͋͌̕g̸͉̳͂͊ȯ̷͙͂̐. What exactly does fetch_data actually do?

function fetch_data($string, $start_tag, $end_tag)
{

  $position = stripos($string, $start_tag);
  $str = substr($string, $position);
  $str_second = substr($str, strlen($start_tag));
  $second_positon = stripos($str_second, $end_tag);
  $str_third = substr($str_second, 0, $second_positon);
  $fetch_data = trim($str_third);
  return $fetch_data;
}

Phew, no regular expressions, just… lots of substrings. This parses the XML document with no sense of the document's structure- it literally just searches for specific tags, grabs whatever is between them, and calls it done. Nested tags? Attributes? Self-closing tags? Forget about it. Since it doesn't enforce that your open and closing tags match, it also lets you grab arbitrary (and invalid) document fragments- fetch_data($response, "<fooTag>", "<barTag>"), for example.

And it's not like this needs to be implemented from scratch- PHP has built-in XML parsing classes. We could argue that by limiting ourselves to a subset of XML (which I can only hope this document does) and doing basic string parsing, we've built a much simpler approach, but I suspect that after doing a big pile of linear searches through the document, we're not really going to see any performance benefits from this version- and maintenance is going to be a nightmare, as it's so fragile and won't work for many very valid XML documents.

It's always amazing when TRWTF is neither PHP nor XML but… whatever this is.

Eagle-eye fans in Discord spotted new tshirts and sweaters for the anime feature film coming in December.

Over at Hot Topic you can now order (or buy at the mall) new apparel and merch for The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, which just had a big kickoff at NYCC weekend of Oct 18-20. We previously reported on new Rohirrim Warhammer sets and other movie tie-in merch.

More LOTR Merch now available

There are even more Rohan inspired options at WB Shop!

Looks like the studio merch machine is ramping up like the days of old, which for many fans is a sign of confidence in the movie which is coming to cinemas in December. You can chat with fans in our dedicated Rohirrim channel on Discord.

Campaign shot by fashion photographer Jean Paul Goude...

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Iconic Polaroid Onestep SX-70 now by LEGO bricks...

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Concept of Nike collaboration...

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Special on the design week in Milano...

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Few incredible photos of a boutique hotel - Treville...

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Amazing KITH flagship store opened in Malibu...

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Universal Favourite made a redesing for the Australian frozen meal delivery company, The Dinner Ladies...

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Partners In Crime - Laboratory page with a 3d, motion design and illustration. Amazing projects.

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An incredible collaboration of two legends that you simply can’t ignore… Porsche and the La Marzocco coffee machine.

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The largest prime number is now 16 million digits longer than the previous record found in 2018, thanks to an amateur hunter and his large collection of high-power graphics cards

A climate-cooling La Niña pattern was expected to develop in the Pacific Ocean months ago, but forecasters now say it won't appear until November

A nearby star that exploded some 3 million years ago could have removed all dust smaller than a millimetre from the outer solar system

A new supercapacitor design that uses only water, clay and graphene could source material on Mars and be more sustainable and accessible than traditional batteries

Complex carbon-based molecules crucial to life on Earth originated somewhere in space, but we didn't know where. Now, huge amounts of them have been spotted in a huge, cold cloud of gas

The largest and most ambitious Martian drone yet could carry kilograms of scientific equipment over great distances and set itself down on the Red Planet unassisted

Single-celled organisms called archaea can become multicellular when compressed, highlighting the role of physical forces in evolution

A massive undertaking to map cancer tumours is providing new insights into how the disease forms, evolves and develops resistance to treatments

The Renaissance artist Michelangelo had carried out human dissections, which may have led him to include women with breast cancer in some of his pieces

Fewer lakes are freezing over each winter compared with past years, posing environmental and economic consequences around the world

DNA analysis suggests Pando, a quaking aspen in Utah with thousands of stems connected by their roots, is between 16,000 and 81,000 years old

The focus is on finance at the UN climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, this month, but countries are a long way from any kind of consensus

Before Mesopotamian people invented writing, they used cylinder seals to press patterns into wet clay – and some of the symbols used were carried over into proto-writing

The British Heart Foundation’s Reflections of Research competition showcases beautiful images captured by researchers studying heart and circulatory disease

A small world in the outer solar system appears to have volcanic activity possibly spurred by liquid water

Shapes created by vortices in water often fall apart, but an odd quantum fluid made from ultracold atoms could support vortex knots that never lose their knottiness

Reaching net-zero emissions is essential for halting climate change - but even after we achieve this goal, parts of the planet will continue to warm. Delaying net zero will worsen these effects

Never underestimate what a single gopher can achieve in a day: one of the burrowing mammals helped boost soil fungi in an area blanketed by ash from the explosive eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington state

Seven major datasets used to train audio-generating AI models are three times more likely to use the words "man" or "men" than "woman" or "women", raising fears of bias

Voyager 2 flew by Uranus in 1986, giving us our only up-close look at the planet – but unusual space weather just before the craft arrived has given us a misleading idea about the planet’s magnetic field

Most assessments of global warming use 1850-1900 as a baseline, but researchers have now established a new pre-industrial reference by using Antarctic ice cores to estimate the average temperature before 1700

SpaceX is preparing for the sixth test flight of Starship, the world's most powerful rocket. Next week's launch – if successful – will be the fastest turnaround yet