User talk:CE

Gotta say, not sure I get it. You're a band/a song/a video/a what? Or just this you is you saying here I am, and then here's a video? Cool enough old ska, I didn't freak out over it. :)--Caustic Logic (talk) 09:06, 4 November 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm a User, and a song can say more than thousand words. You should see them live. ;o) --CE (talk) 16:06, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

Email?
How is your email? Not doing well I guess :-( Petri Krohn (talk) 22:29, 8 August 2013 (UTC)
 * True on my end too. Failure notice, took too long to respond. --Caustic Logic (talk) 23:07, 8 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Did not get any notice.
 * Off topic: Check out this one-legged guy's media gallery! In Afghanistan in the 1980s- In Saudi Arabia on July 15th. In Latakia killing Shia on August 7th. -- Petri Krohn (talk) 23:47, 8 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I was about to notify you over the board yesterday, but I checked the website and it said that the system was down for maintenance. A quite long maintenance already. Checked again now and take a look at what it says. What a sad state of affairs. I'm not surprised though and that's the reaction I expected from that kind of great service (contrary to your hosts, guys ;o)). Well, I'll have to look for a new address. Sux. You hear from me. --CE (talk) 11:45, 9 August 2013 (UTC)


 * You should have mail from Latvia. --CE (talk) 13:26, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Contacted Urs. --CE (talk) 01:56, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

What is DEADBEEF?
DEADBEEF is the secret handshake. It is not a throwaway user name and certainly not our search engine optimization spammer.

DEADBEEF or  is hexadecimal for 3735928559. It was the bit vector that was used by IBM's AIX operating system in the late 1980's and early 1990s to mark newly allocated areas of memory that had not yet been initialized. You would only see it if you analyzed a core dump of a failed program. If the characters  showed up then most likely your program was trying to access uninitialized memory. (See Hexspeak and Magic debug values on Wikipedia.) What the user is trying to say with the user name is 1) He is over 40 years old. 2) He has done postmortem forensic work before. – Both good qualifications for the work we do here. He may also be indicating that he is aware of our topic area. (Spammers usually are not.)

As to the tastelessness of the user name: It is true that I was a bit shocked when I saw the text for the first time. I thought it was tasteless for IBM to use language like that in their operating system. But I quickly understood the utility of the hex code – it just cannot be unnoticed. Anyway, if it is good enough for IBM it is good enough for us. -- Petri Krohn (talk) 19:55, 22 September 2013 (UTC)


 * You explain whose "secret handshake" this is, and why we should treat this person different than all others, or the account stays blocked. --CE (talk) 20:21, 22 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Re why we should treat this person different?
 * For the simple reason that this is a real person. He passes my Turing test.
 * I have adopted the policy of blocking "zombies" on sight. This is because they all fit the pattern of our one and only spammer: female sounding throwaway user names, sometimes the names of some real 17 year-old n00b. Blocking this one SEO spammer is the only reason we block accounts. We should not start blocking real people, unless they say or do something really stupid. -- Petri Krohn (talk) 20:49, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Doesn't convince me. The person is unblocked. 24 hours to speak up. --CE (talk) 20:59, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Was Deadbeef blocked? Sounds worth giving them a chance. Haven't we given a permanent chance to random zombies we just never got around to blocking? Is the risk that great? --Caustic Logic (talk) 23:42, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Just blocked now, not a while back. Okay. On the other hand, zombie is a s zombie does. But maybe an eccentric genius we want here needs weeks to get back to it. Really eccentric, maybe months. Can we e-mail and prod them? That's probably not set up? How does that work. --Caustic Logic (talk) 23:45, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

About out banning and blocking policy in general. We have one permanently banned user, the SEO spammer. The accounts I have blocked are not because of being silent, but because I have identified them as sockpuppets or likely sockpuppets of this one user. The giveaway sign is his untraceable throwaway usernames.

On other issues, I think this site needs more humor. -- Petri Krohn (talk)