I must now curse you all

I'm not sure who takes more blame for this, Jay Lake or Charlie Stross, but I got it from one of them, and now you must get it from me:

Hover Bacon

Now, how do I fix this?

Oh, gods, this is so Omaha and me:

Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head. It's the end of the day and you and your nerd are hanging out on the couch. The TV is off. There isn't a computer anywhere nearby and you're giving your nerd the daily debrief. "Spent an hour at the post office trying to ship that package to your mom, and then I went down to that bistro -- you know -- the one next the flower shop, and it's closed. Can you believe that?"

And your nerd says, "Cool".

Cool? What's cool? The business closing? The package? How is any of it cool? None of it's cool. Actually, all of it might be cool, but your nerd doesn't believe any of what you're saying is relevant. This is what he heard, "Spent an hour at the post office blah blah blah..."

You can be rightfully pissed off by this behavior -- it's simply rude -- but seriously, I'm trying to help here. Your nerd's insatiable quest for information and The High has tweaked his brain in an interesting way. For any given piece of incoming information, your nerd is making a lightning fast assessment: relevant or not relevant? Relevance means that the incoming information fits into the system of things your nerd currently cares about. Expect active involvement from your nerd when you trip the relevance flag. If you trip the irrelevance flag, look for verbal punctuation announcing his judgment of irrelevance. It's the word your nerd says when he's not listening and it's always the same. My word is "Cool", and when you hear "Cool", I'm not listening.

Information that your nerd is exposed to when the irrelevance flag is waving is forgotten almost immediately. I mean it. Next time you hear "Cool", I want you to ask, "What'd I just say?" That awkward grin on your nerd's face is the first step in getting him to acknowledge that he's the problem in this particular conversation.

100 things about which I could make lists of 100 things

This is one of those "techniques" that seems to be going around. I thought I'd give it a shot:

( 100 Things about which I could make lists of 100 things )

And now to bring us all back to reality: U.S. Populace Lurches Methodically Through The Motions For Yet Another Day. I can't wait for the U.S. Senate to call committee meetings.

Head, meet wall. Wall, meet head.

RFC 3986:

Note, however, that the "%00" percent-encoding (NUL) may require special handling and should be rejected if the application is not expecting to receive raw data within a component.

Groan. Nothing in the OAUTH spec says that applications may not return '%00' encodes.

I haven't figured out the implications of this yet. I'm using NUL to signal end-of-line within the sort routine. If it's encoded when it goes in (and it has to be, as Apache provides the queryinfo string with a NUL (as opposed to a '%00') to mod_fcgi, mod_webware, and other apache-to-appserver interfaces that way) and it passes through the three-step (decode, analyze, re-encode) without interruption, I'll probably be okay.

If not, crap. I'd hate to have to implement a struct-based, length-stored string handler. Again.

I suspect I'm worrying about nothing at all (well, literally, I am, but that's a different story), and overengineering this thing to handle broken clients (which, if they're borked, probably don't generate valid signatures anyway, right?) with pathological CGI argument encoders.

I hope so. Y'know, this is why we have high-level languages.