September 2004 Archives

Programmer’s Day

Apparently it’s Programmer’s Day, so Paul, Bryn, Claire and I put together an old low-end Pentium into a dual-booting Red Hat/Windows 98SE box, and racked up some classic games of the 80s and 90s. Fab.

There’s actually some debate about whether Programmer’s Day should be included as a Wikipedia entry… as there’s not a lot of evidence that anybody actually supports it, except for a few hardcore geeks (most of whom discovered it on Wikipedia or a site that uses it as a source) and some Russians who started a petition.

In any case, we had a lot of fun, and we’ll be doing it next year.

Homosexual Intercourse Exposure To Be Reduced By Highland Cattle

In this news story on Ananova, it is reported that a Dutch town is hoping to reduce occurrences of gays using their park for sex by filling it with Scottish highland cattle, which will apparently “scare them off”.

It’s a weird world.

Lottery Scratchcards And Illicit Hallucinogens

Damn weird: last night I dreamt that I found a lottery scratchcard which had not been completed – just two of it’s sixteen panels had been scratched off. While I’d not be fool enough to buy one (the mathematics is simple – the lottery is a stupidity tax), I’ll happily play one I didn’t pay for, and so I scratched off the remaining panels. The scratchcard was a £1000 pound winner. I claimed the money, and spent it all on LSD. Coincidentally, I can’t remember much of the dream after that…

JavaScript Random Quote Generator

A friend sent me an e-mail yesterday asking if I knew of a simple random quote generator that she could embed on her web page. So I’ve written one, and I’m making it available here on the off chance that anybody else wants it too. It’s implemented in JavaScript, and works simply by including a separate .js file within the document. The ZIP file contains both the .js file (which will need to be edited in a plain text editor such as Notepad, to insert your own quotes) and a .html file, which provides an example of it’s usage. Unzip both to a folder and double-click on the HTML file to see it in action.

Download QuoteGen (ZIP file, 1.07KB).

Violently Ill

Argh.

The worst part of being so horribly ill is the moment when you’re dashing to the toilet before you pebbledash the floor with your arse… and at that moment you realise that your stomach is about to eject it’s contents, too. What a paradox.

In any case – it’s not all bad news: the Ship & Castle has been re-opened. It’s now run by Ian Blair, the man behind The Mill. They’re still doing real ales (albeit a very slightly reduced selection), and the redecoration of the place has given it a lighter, more ‘open’ feel. Sadly, the jukebox has been changed, and several of the better rock ballads CDs have been replaced with “Now XX”.

Are these two bits of news related? Perhaps.

Gonna go throw up again…

Happy Fun Weekend

It’s so much nicer coming back to the office on a Monday after a weekend both relaxing and productive, with lots of happy fun time with friends. Managed to tidy the flat, do heaps of laundry, have a successful Troma Night (three films, a decent crowd, and everybody hung on in ’til the end despite knackeredness), a sedate but moderately successful Geek Night (Carcassonne and Chez Geek). All good.

Plus, I managed to find time to learn a fair bit about mod-rewrite, the Apache module that lets you do all kinds of useful things like canonical URLs, content negotiation, proxying content, fallbacks, etc. (as used on Scatmania to make the ‘nice’ URLs you see with the date and post name embedded into the pseudo-folder-structure). Fab. And managed to help Bryn with his new web site, which I’m sure you’ll all be seeing later this month.

And in actual news, BBC News reports that a Swedish man has been issued with a £90 ticket for illegally parking his snowmobile in Warwick, despite claiming never to have been there and that his snowmobile was in his shed in Bollstabruk at the time.

The Scary Baby Conspiracy

Now here’s an idea for an Illuminati: The Game Of Conspiracy “Illuminati” card – The Scary Baby Conspiracy. Suggestions for the Scary Baby Conspiracy’s unique win condition and any special rules are welcome (from anybody who actually knows what Illuminati is). Fnord.

On which note – it’s Geek Night tonight! Hopefully we can have a couple of games of Carcassonne and perhaps one of Hacker.

A.I. Nuts, Again

Do you remember a week or two ago I wrote about a guy who patented the “Ethical Rules Of Artificial Intelligence”? Well – it looks like he’s read my article and placed his own comments. I’m quite surprised and impressed that he took the time (away from his heavy schedule of philosophising or book-signing or whatever) to come and read my counter-arguments to his ideas, and placed comments of his own (albeit mostly pre-fabricated stuff).

Here’s to you, John LaMuth.

Sweet Sounds Of Perl

Claire‘d like this, as she’s been programming a lot of Perl recently:

There’s a guy who uses Perl code to generate music in nightclubs. So far, so good. Well, now, he’s taken to writing the code that generates the music live, in front of an audience. Of course, this brings up a whole suite of new issues, technological and otherwise. If you like Perl, or synthethised music, read the article.

Mr. Sinus Theater 3000 In Name-Theft Lawsuit

The Austin Business Journal reports that the makers of Mystery Science Theater 3000 are taking to court the makers of a new show, Mr. Sinus Theater 3000, in which a group of guys sit in front of a cinema screen and take the piss out of the films they watch. And fair enough: it seems to me that this is quite obviously an attempt to cash in on the fame of the now-dead series, MST3K. Although if it’s not – and it is just fair use and parody… then Best Brains would be complaining that their parody-ridden show was itself the victim of a parody… umm…

In any case, go read the story.

Sick And Wrong Use Of Emacs

I’ve been made aware of an easter egg in emacs, a text editor.

Fire up a copy of emacs, hit meta-X (alt-x), then type doctor to talk to an ELIZA-like chatbot. Better yet, type psychoanalyze-pinhead to… well… you’ll see…

Have my two-tone, 1958 Nash METRO brought around..
I don’t understand.
So this is what it feels like to be potato salad
Do you really think you might want to be a potato?
Don’t SANFORIZE me!!
Are you frightened by that?
It’s OBVIOUS.. The FURS never reached ISTANBUL.. You were an EXTRA in the REMAKE of “TOPKAPI“.. Go home to your WIFE.. She’s making FRENCH TOAST!
Possibly your sex life is related to this.
I feel partially hydrogenated!
What makes you think you feel partially hydrogenated?
What I want to find out is — do parrots know much about Astro-Turf?
Earlier you said you would like to be a potato?
Well, I’m INVISIBLE AGAIN.. I might as well pay a visit to the LADIES ROOM..

Etc.

World’s First Room-Temperature Plastic Magnet

New Scientist reports that researchers at the University of Durham have created the world’s first plastic magnet to work at room temperature (previous plastic magnets worked only at extremely low temperatures, typically measurable in double-digit Kelvins).

I’m sure I’m likely to be corrected on some minor point by any of the physicists who read this blog, but – for dummies:

Traditional (and naturally occuring) solid-state ferric magnets work by having their composite atoms aligned to all ‘face the same way’: the difference in potential between the ends of the atom causes a magnetic field, and the combined action of these is what makes the magnetism. These can be created by heating the metal (freeing the movement of the atoms) and then exposing it to another magnet (aligning the atoms) before allowing it to cool. More on magnets from Wikipedia.

Conversely, these counterpart plastic magnets are composed of a two-part polymer and the magnetism is induced by the alignment of free radicals within the plastic.

Plastic magnets have applications in computer magnetic storage, mechanical medicinal implants, and other fields.

Hide & Seek

Following the success of our last game of hide & seek in the Castle, Paul, Bryn, Claire and I went for another game last night. Ah; the simple joys of childish fun – legging it around a darkened ruin at night. Right up until silly screaming girls filled the area. Then we left.

In other news, I’ve been playing far too much The Ur-Quan Masters (a.k.a. Star Control 2). If you like retro space exploration and trading games, give it a go (it’s free). Fantastic soundtrack, too.