Gimboland is now a member of the webloggers webring – navigation links may be found at the bottom of the sidebar. Groovy.
So, I’d like to say hello to, on my left, James at Feed My Head, and on my right, Louise at non-sequitur spanikopitas – a couple of groovy looking sites I’m pleased to meet. :-)
Alan Moore knows the score. Two Alan Moore stories via robot wisdom: one, two.
It’s a real shame that this is advertising what it is, but this ad is intense and excellent (thanks, Alan).
Both Saviour and Victim – more Black Hawk Down background. [robot]
The special forces, over-confident and hopelessly ill-informed, raided, in quick succession, the headquarters of the UN development program, the charity World Concern and the offices of Médecins sans Frontieres. They managed to capture, among scores of innocent civilians and aid workers, the chief of the UN’s police force.
A month will not be enough. Trust me, I know about bugs. :-)
I particularly liked Henry Smolinski and Hal Blake’s entry. Known for: winged automobiles. Demise: a suddenly wingless automobile.
Cheese racing! [ntk] Do NOT attempt ‘indoor cheese racing’. This is strictly an outdoor sport. (This includes tents!)
[ 2002-02-05: Oh wow, I had a cheese racing dream last night. I'd forgotten about it, but just now I re-read this entry and remembered. Can't recall any details, except it was disgusting. :-) ]
How much porn is there inside a print cartridge? [milk]
We figured the folks at the Davis library would would know where hot scientific erotica belonged according to the Dewey Decimal System.
Blogger is really starting to piss me off. It keeps telling me it’s published my changes, but it hasn’t. The FTP log even looks like it has, but it hasn’t. If I sign out and sign in again, it works. Gaaah.
Apparently, If I were a character in The Lord of the Rings, I would be Elrond. Who would you be?
evany is always a pleasure to read, though she doesn’t update often. Don’t miss the African Grey story from Tuesday, December 18, 2001. Love it.
My two favourite pieces of software in the world are python and emacs. Bringing these worlds together, we have pymacs, which “allows Emacs users to extend Emacs using Python, where they might have traditionally used Emacs LISP”. Groovy.
Might have to have a look at this later, from home: Superbowl ads [blah].
Later… OK, took a look at a few of them. I really liked “Mini Fridge”, “Card”, “Hank Aaron”, and “Parrot”. “Satin Sheets” was OK. “Clydesdales” was self-indulgent senti-patriotic-mental crap, as far as I could make out.
“Kevin Bacon” is good, but only if you’ve seen this. Watch the ad first, then follow the “this” link.
HTML Hell from Eric Raymond. Good points one and all, with the possible exception of the hit-counter moan. I like my hit counter. It tells me if anyone else is looking at my site without all that tedious mucking about with apache logs. By the way, on the whole, no-one else is looking at my site, it seems. ;-)
Hmmm, the webloggers webring seems to have disappeared into the ether. Distressing.
Here’s a short but fascinating discussion of Alan Moore’s From Hell by an American Freemason, concentrating on the negative attitudes towards Masonry the book/film may inspire.
Love’s not just blind, it’s deaf. [robot]
Percentage of unique words in lyrics. Average word length. Frequency of “love”, “heart” and “baby”. These were the criteria used by a US study of boy, girl and teen bands. The researchers picked albums by four of the biggest pop acts around – Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and ‘N Sync – and pitted them against an album by Pink Floyd, their musical opposite.
Goodies via ntk: The Sentinel Chess Set, The Jim Royle Comedy Machine.
Well, I’ve just got back from my parents’ house in Cornwall after spending most of Sunday, Monday, and part of Tuesday laid up in bed with tonsilitis. The best part was the fever and delirium on Sunday night, when my mind tried its hardest to turn itself into a computer program for solving the problem of Jack The Ripper. Pleasant. I’m pretty much better now, thanks to the modern miracle that is antibiotics. Complete the course, people!
I’d gone to Cornwall for a celebration (on Sunday) of my grandmother’s 90th birthday (on Tuesday). I missed the celebration because I was in bed, sweating and gibbering quietly, but did get so see Nan on her actual birthday, so I guess that made up for it. Missed out on lots of great food though… :-(
Regarding Jack The Ripper: my delirium was certainly inspired by seeing the movie From Hell, on Saturday afternoon, which was a big mistake anyway, because it sucked big time. Ian Holm was very good as Dr Gull, but the script was ham-fisted, Johnny Depp was very disappointing, and worst of all, well, why the hell do Hollywood have to turn everything into a bloody love story? I mean, come on, you have these five East End prostitutes, and four of them are as “raggedy-arsed” (to quote Neil Gaiman) as you’d expect, but there’s this one pristine beauty (Heather Graham) with gorgeous hair and flawless skin, and it’s just so AAAAARRRRGH! I mean, love interest? In a Jack The Ripper movie? I really hope the book isn’t so agonisingly contrived – surely not, Mr. Moore?
The other big news is that today I became an uncle for the first time! My sister-in-law, Claire, gave birth to a 7lb boy at about 3:30 this afternoon. Bookies’ favourite is currently “Adam” but that might change. Congratulations, Mike and Claire, and thanks – now I get to be a mad-haired Uncle Andrew, like in The Magician’s Nephew.
Get on over and read QA Confidential at Leisuretown right now. Seriously. :-)
Actually, if you haven’t got a good half hour or so, don’t, because it’s rather long. But do write “QA Conf” on a post-it note and stick it to your monitor to remind you to read it later. Perhaps over a sandwich. Go on, spoil yourself…
Groovy New Scientist article which Phil pointed me out: Knots are quantised. Barmy.
Want more knot theory? How about Warwick University’s MA3F2 Knot Theory course – all notes online! Writhe is defined here. I can just about follow this, but once again, I say, barmy.
The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick – unmissable if you’re a “Dick head”. [robot]
Went to see my GP this morning, and was very confused by the way she kept referring to snot as “watery discharge”…
Born to curl. Combining the intrigue of chess, the precision of marbles and the work ethic of Hilda Ogden, curling is so deadly it makes crown green bowling look like Rollerball.
Lord Of The Rings meets Blackadder – excellent. [null]
Reminds me: I’m currently reading Bored Of The Rings for the first time since I was about twelve, and I’m pleased to report that it’s still reducing me to tears quite regularly…
Seen on comp.lang.python: “Maybe compared with Perl, where if your cat sits on the keyboard, the resulting code is as likely to run as anything you write.”
The combination of Snack and a scripting language makes it possible to create sound tools and applications with a minimum of effort. This is due to the rapid development nature of scripting languages. As a bonus you get an application that is cross-platform from start. It is also easy to integrate Snack based applications with existing sound analysis software.
Heard an article on Radio 4 last night about bootleg mixing, where two completely different records are mixed together to produce something new.
The canonical example is Freelance Hellraiser’s Stroke of Genie-us, which combines the guitar riff from The Strokes‘ Last Night with the vocal of Christina Aguilera’s Genie In A Bottle. I grabbed a copy off gnutella today and I’ve been listening to it non-stop – it’s fantastic.
Interested? Check out The Next Thing Isn’t Always Big for a snapshot of the scene today. Apparently.
Routing issues have prevented me getting onto Blogger lately. Now resolved, ie I’m Back. :-)
Some interesting python database related items I should check out when I have time (ie never, probably):
Database Objects – “a dynamic object-oriented, repository based layer on top of the Python DB-API II spec.”
Gadfly – “a collection of python modules that provides relational database functionality entirely implemented in Python.”
MetaKit – “takes the middle ground between RDBMS, OODBMS, and flat-file databases – yet it is quite different from each of them.”
I think it’s obscene that ZDNet refer to someone who says “HTTP … is the only way to get an a reliable end-to-end connection over the Internet” as a “guru“.
Loads of cryptology stuff – thanks Malc.
Predicting America’s next attack – bombs away! [greg]
Note the lack of countries in the bottom-left quadrant…
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (as conducted over AOL Instant Messenger). [greg]
My brother Michael, the pround father, has sent me some photos of my brand new nephew Adam – sweet! Once again, congratulations to Mike and Claire!
The Blue Marble – some lovely images of the Earth from space.
I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who said, “why do we call it Earth when it’s obvious it should be Ocean?”… I like that.
Not actually part of the Blue Marble pages, but here are some really nice satellite images. Examples: Cornwall, Kathmandu, Bernese Alps (including Eiger), pyramids at Giza, Nasca lines in Peru, Mongolia, and of course, The Great Wall.
Unix Programming Frequently Asked Questions including How do I get my program to act like a daemon? – groovy.
Joyously, I got my home ADSL connection working with Linux last night, using the open source drivers. I’m pleased to report that all went well, the instructions were easy to follow, and the solution is “nice” (eg doesn’t involve patching the kernel). So it’s no more Windows(TM) rubbish for me any more, buddies… :-)
Gimboland history at Alexa’s Wayback Machine.
Threads, Tkinter and asynchronous I/O – an idiom I think I should try to grok.
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