Barry Carter's Blog (experimental)

I’m a big fan of Dilbert, and like reading/replying to the comments
other people make on the strips.

Although many forums allow you to watch topics for new
messages/comments, United Media Syndicate (UMS) won’t notify me when a
new Dilbert comment is posted (ie, no per-title notification).

I can turn on notifications on a strip-by-strip basis, but UMS has an
unusual rule: you must comment on a strip to be notified of comments
to the strip.

To date, UMS has ignored my requests for per-title notifications and
per-strip notifications without requiring a comment.

So, I decided to “help myself” by posting a generic comment to each
Dilbert strip, so that I could be notified of new comments. Actually,
I skipped the last few months worth of strips, since the more recent
strips garner dozens of worthless comments. All the “good stuff” (in
terms of comments) is in the earlier strips.

The process involved isn’t difficult, and should work for other UMS
comics too:

• If you look at the source of http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1999-07-07/ (for example), you’ll notice:

  {input type="hidden" name="PrintPath" value="/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/00000/7000/100/7123/7123.strip.print.gif" /}

  (except with angle brackets, not braces)

  The “7123″ is the “strip id”, which appears to be unique across all
  UMS comics. In other words, there is no 7123 for the Ziggy strip.

• Then, scriptmatically download all strips. I used a triple loop
  where the year ran from 1989-2012, the month ran from 01-12 and the
  date ran for 01-31. Of course, you’ll get errors for nonexistent dates
  like 2003-02-30, etc, but that’s not a big deal.

  For Dilbert, the stripids are: here.

• Now, login to the Dilbert site normally, and use Firebug (or
  network sniffing) to find the cookie UMS sends you. It will look
  something like this:

  Cookie: __qca=P0-1139712539-1324358578740;
  __utma=90561551.1243507441.1424358579.1330180073.1430184206.26;
  __utmz=90561551.1324358579.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none);
  v_comment=%5B57771%2C56970%2C128404%2C41144%2C65838%2C56974%2C56146%2C55391%2C56746%2C57149%2C1153938%2C8052%5D;
  bcookie=285cb7721b48175f1c99; PHPSESSID=3lp3fsfejlgn2oqri5pd1p022;
  __utmc=90561551; meebo-cim-session=22d2338227f65b801e472;
  __utmb=90561551.14.10.1330384206; cid=788245123

  Now, to make a comment on strip 7123 (for example), just do this:

  curl -L -d ‘PrimaryKeyID=7123&Type=Strip&DateStrip=2000-05-19&Message=I+am+making+this+comment+solely+to+get+notifications+since+I+couldnt+find+a+way+to+get+notifications+without+making+a+comment&x=123&y=34&Notify=on’ -H ‘Cookie: [use the cookie you got above]‘ http://dilbert.com/comment.process

  Note that the “DateStrip” does NOT need to match the actual date. The
  above command comments on the 1999-07-07 strip, and the ’2000-05-19′
  is completely ignored.

After I’d run the script, several people commented. Here are my
responses (visit the URLs to see the original comments):

• http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-03-29/

  @usessimpletools I’m actually interested in all the Dilbert strips and
  all the comments. Just because *I* don’t have something interesting to
  say on a strip doesn’t mean that the strip’s not interesting or that
  others may not have an interesting comment.

• http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-04-04/

  @varunachar My goal was to get notifications on all strips, so I ran
  an automated script. You’ll notice that I didn’t already have a
  previous comment on this strip.

• http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-01-27/

  @Welshman09 I realized after the fact that people will get email
  notifications when my generic comment posts to a strip they’d
  previously commented on. This was unintentional. My goal was to get
  notifications of new comments, not to “spam” people’s inboxes.

• http://dilbert.com/strips/2010-02-29

  @marileetombo Those were great times, weren’t they!

• http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-02-24/

  @ewood Why not? If it’s because you got too many emails, see reply above.

• http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2004-04-01/

  http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2003-11-01/

  http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2007-01-01/

  http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2002-01-01/

  @MarillionFan Yes, I wanted to go all the way back to the first
  Dilbert strip. No, I didn’t see any of these emails until the script
  stopped running. I’m hoping this will motivate UMS to offer per-title
  notification.

• http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2003-07-06/

  @dilogic Hopefully, this blog entry answers your question?

• http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2007-01-15/

  @McFortner Thanks! There’s an engineering solution to every problem!

• http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2006-08-31/

  @garrisonaw Thanks!

• http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1989-04-16/

  @leibnix How did you feel about me before this? Tell me about your mother…

  @danopia Deliriously so

The title of this blog post refers back to:

http://wordpress.barrycarter.info/index.php/2011/06/10/commentia-dilberta/

which is probably now much worse.

If we could hook everyone up to virtual reality, and give them 8 cubic
feet of space (1 foot by 1 foot base times up to 8 feet height), we
could fit a world population of 7 billion into a cube with sides of
about 3826 feet (less than a mile), much smaller than most people
would think.

Even if the world population grows at 3% (it’s actually closer to 1.1%
now), the cube’s side would increase by only about 38 feet per year,
at least for now. This rate would increase by 4.5 inches per year
every year.

By the year 5497, the cube’s side’s velocity, excluding relativistic
effects would be the speed of light. Of course, it’s impossible to
reach the speed of light, so this just shows relativistic effects
would become significant by 5497.

By the year 6132, the cube’s side would be accelerating at an uncomfy
5g (again neglecting relativistic effects).

Of course, building something 3826 feet high would be difficult
(world’s tallest building is currently only 2723 feet), so what if we
gave everyone 1 sq ft, but didn’t try stacking them on top of each
other?

For now, we’d need a square that’s 16 miles on each side (about half
the size of the city of Hong Kong), growing at a rate of about 0.25
miles per year, accelerating at about 19 feet per year per year.

Of course, by 4495, the square’s side would be accelerating at an
uncomfy 5g, and, before that, in 4099, the square’s side would be the
speed of light (again ignoring relativistic effects).

Supporting calculations: https://github.com/barrycarter/bcapps/blob/master/sphere-of-humanity.m

I was originally going to describe a “sphere of humanity”, thus the
title of this blog post. However, constructing a large sphere seems
even harder than constructing a large cube, so I changed it to
cube. But, since “sphere of humanity” sounds way cooler, I left the
blog title as is.

Thanks to Daylight Saving Time, Albuquerque’s latest sunrise is at
7:31am MDT on November 3rd, even later than the 7:16am MST sunrise in
early January.

In fact, if you live south of 46 degrees north latitude (about 60
miles north of St Paul, MN!), your latest sunrise occurs on November
3rd, not early January.

Source: http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneYear.php

Answers: http://www.quora.com/Daylight-Saving-Time/Which-day-has-a-later-sunrise-the-day-before-Falls-Daylight-Savings-Time-or-the-Winter-Solstice