Sigh… Nice weekend, but somewhat melancholy. My parents retired, closing the family business after 73 years of trading – not bad. We gave it a good send-off though, and I think they’re looking forward to some well-deserved travel and hardcore gardening. :-)
Quote of the weekend (from me): “You could have drawn a second bean to indicate plurality.”
The Random Masturbation Synonym Generator – fantastic! [wotever]
An interview with Guido van Rossum, creator of python.
findsyms.py – a handy dandy utility for identifying undocumented parts of the python distribution. Cool.
CAGE, a cellular automata engine for python. Only does 1-d and 2-d automata though – boo!
It’s about time I linked to Principia Discordia, I think…
Apparently, I’m an Oread [hamster]. Now to find out what an Oread is… Ooh, it’s a nymph. Well, I knew I was a nympho already… ;-)
I’m also a girlie duck.
Praise be to Rich for pointing me at The Guardian’s excellent Israel coverage, and in particular, a timeline of events in the region since 1881. Nice.
Two-headed snake found, news at 11.
Just spotted this in someone’s .sig on uknot:
“http://dial00.com – international calls for the cost of a UK call – over 60 countries. No subscription, no commitment, just dial 0871 9000000 and then your destination.”
No idea if it works or not, is legit, etc. – but might be interesting to someone. Ed? :-)
Cool… Britney Spears is an anagram of Binary Presets. There are, of course, many other ways to spell her name, all of them wrong. [popbitch]
Python implementation of Dijkstra’s algorithm for shortest paths – got to be grokked. Also see Guido’s essay on the subject.
Don’t miss this: the secret technology behind google.
Here’s an eloquent, lengthy, highly technical and somewhat philosophical argument in favour of using the Borg pattern in python instead of Singleton: Simple python non-patterns. Nice.
(And, complementing that page, Design patterns in python, which I’ve almost certainly linked to before, but what the heck).
Looks like an interesting read: The Association of British Drivers‘ Submission for the Raising of the Motorway Speed Limit.
Gimboland now has nine banners – the one in use should change at random every fifteen minutes. More to come! Collect the set! etc.
24 Hour Party People reviewed at the good old B. B. of C. [null].
A keynote research paper showing that Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians are genetically almost identical has been pulled from a leading journal. [lev]
From the same site – don’t miss these: I have no idea what this is about, Aqua Dog saves the day, Thunderbears are go!. Fantastic.
“The Toaster is a large picture, seven metres long and four and a half metres high, totally made from bread toasted in different temperatures and for different lengths of time to reach the different nuances that occur between black and white, ochre and rust.”
All Your Brand Are Belong To Us [milk] – Right this very second, chances are there is a marketing team somewhere trying to hijack “All your Base Are Belong to Us” in order to sell you something. Doing this makes their job that much harder.
I particularly liked Tommy Hilfiger (”All your surface area are belong to us”) and Benetton (”All your shame are belong to us”).
At 3 A.M. the faint but persistent sound of distant bass slowly penetrated my dream and dragged me awake. Ah, the students are having fun. Working on the principle that if it was capable of waking me up I’d be unable to get back to sleep, off I went to tell them to put a lid on it. Imagine my susprise when I realised the sound came from not next door (as is usually the case), but two doors down. Standing outside their front door I could truly appreciate the grandeur of the excellent drum & bass being played – but alas there was work in the morning, so I rang the doorbell and did the deed. Fair play to them, there was no fuss, which may have had something to do with the thick pungent smoke hazing the hallway behind the red-eyed chap who answered the door. Enjoy it while you can people, for nine-til-five is beckoning.
Of course, then I was completely wired and had to read for fortyfive minutes before I could get back to sleep. So now I’m really knackered. Urgh…
April and May are going to be good months for planet-gazing. [Thanks, Michelle].
I think people were using the Gimboland archive search thinking it was still the old Google search I used to have, so I’ve implemented a handy-dandy little search proxy which can be used to search Gimbloland, Google, Google Images, and the comp.lang.python archive on Google. Nice.
Who’s playing Glastonbury this year? The organisers won’t announce until they’ve sold all the tickets, but this page has a round-up culled from artists’ own sites. Especially pleasing: Banco de Gaia, Richie Havens. Orbital still a rumour. Oh please… Oh please…
In loving memory of Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.
Who is the “Disco-naut”? Very silly, really…
“The assertion that the working classes no longer exist is being made by a property company which wants to develop a site in central London for luxury housing, despite a 1929 covenant which states that the land may only be used to provide housing for the working classes. The clause goes on to say that they must have stone cladding and a satellite dish on the front, a car stacked up on bricks in the front garden and a doorbell that plays an electric version of Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner.”
I finally got round to reading The MEMS Exchange Architecture today, something I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while but hadn’t because it’s quite long. It describes the architecture of a major project written in python, including several freely released components of the project, most notably the Quixote web application development framework. I’m still looking for some way to move away from Blogger and towards something where my blog entries are held by me (not on some server in California or something), and if I’m going to write my own (which I’ll probably have to, being an anally retentive perfectionist), Quixote looks interesting.
Some miscellaneous black & white photos I took over Christmas: A big wheel in Plymouth.
My parents’ cat Blossom in her natual habitat.
Emma, Rich, Ab, Gareth, Jala & Simon in the Claude.
Jala & Tip at Jala’s sister’s place.
Jala reading at our place.
Phoneboxes in Princetown, with Dartmoor prison visible.
A detail from a painting by Simon’s brother, Toby (yes, the painting’s very colourful!).
A tractor in the snow at Princetown.
I should really upload these to photo.net but I can’t be arsed… :-)
SpecTix, a development environment to build cross-platform applications using the Tk GUI toolkit with multiple target languages, including python. Sounds awesome, wish I had time to try it out…
Another sleep-deprived night thanks to the local students. If I could move out of Cardiff today, I would. Still can’t quite understand why this is more of a problem this year than previously. Is it just that I’m older? Or are they just stupider?
Local U.K. governments in Liverpool and Sheffield are gearing up to allow citizens to vote using SMS (Short Message Service) text messages and the Internet in elections 2 May 2002. [risks]
Damn it, I missed The Truth About Lesbian Sex last night.
Which online personality test are you? [ntk] (I’m the Which James Bond Villain Are You? test).
The Universe within 12.5 light years [charlie] – very reminiscent of Elite. :-)
Five Things You Probably Didn’t Notice in “The Shining”. [girl] To be honest, I only found numbers three and four interesting, but I found them interesting enough to put the link here. :-)
Heard of sheep? (Ta, Jon).
rsync and Debian. Neat.
Cool – the goban screensaver, which plays classic games of Go for your pleasure and elucidation.
Plas y Brenin, an outdoors-activities training centre in Snowdonia. They’ll take your money and turn it into good clean fun. :-)
The library cats map [null] – cool. There’s a load in Penzance.
Much of the scientific evidence showing that ecstasy damages the brain is fundamentally flawed and has been mistakenly used by politicians to warn the public of the dangers of the drug, a report said yesterday. [null]
“The research involved brain scans with a radioactively tagged chemical probe that latched on to the serotonin transporter proteins that ecstasy targets. The thinking was that brains damaged by ecstasy would give off less radioactive ‘glow’ than those where the serotonin cells were intact.”
“But two independent experts told New Scientist there was a key flaw. They said the way brains reacted to this kind of scan varied enormously with or without ecstasy.”
“Some healthy brains glowed up to 40 times brighter than others and even a number of ecstasy users’ brains outshone ecstasy-free brains by factors of 10 or more.”
Excellent. A natty little Python documentation keyword search engine. I’ll have to hook this into my search proxy (ie the search box in the right-hand sidebar) some time, but not right now as I’m too busy working towards my long sought-after stomach ulcer. :-)
Later: OK, that’s done, thanks to my remarkably capable coding techniques which made it possible to add the search in about a minute. Damn, I’m good. ;-)
Even later: Since that’s just a keyword search, I thought I’d better proxy the “full-on find this word anywhere in the python documentation” search as well – so I’ve done that. The search proxy list is getting quite long now…
Funkin’ excellent shop for maps: Castle Street Books, 23 Castle St, Hay-on-Wye, HR3 5DF. The proprietor is not just an obvious and unashamed cartophile, he’s also as mad as a hatter – though of course the two are often closely related. Respect.
The Association For Free Software, “an organisation set up in the UK to promote Free Software to users, business and Government. The AFFS seeks to secure the status of Free Software within the UK and increase public understanding of Free Software among developers and users alike.” [ntk]
Remarkable… w3m is “just another” text-based web browser, until that is, you factor in w3m-img [ntk] which patches it to display images – in your xterm! – and – even geekier! – emacs-w3m, which turns your emacs into a web browser. Hey, who needs Opera?
Wow. I’ve just discovered what happens when you hit Ctrl-R in bash. Go on, unixers, try it. Fantastic, eh? Damn, I love this stuff.
Necessity being the mother of invention, I’ve added a MySQL documentation search to the search proxy.
Last night I dreamt that I met Guido van Rossum and he told me to write a book on python aimed at schoolchildren learning to program for the first time. Wacky!
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences by Eugene Wigner (1960), and The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics by R.W. Hamming (1980).
In the words of Max Headroom, “I don’t know if it’s a joke or not”, but I’ve just read on popbitch that Bob the Builder and Atomic Kitten are going to release a duet for charity, called You Can Fix My Hole Again. :-)
Python Quick Reference (also now in sidebar).
Ah yes, the Banach-Tarski Paradox. Of course.
Here’s an IQ Test which also tells you if you’re too smart for the salary you’re earning.
I got a cash/cleverness coefficient of 11, and “Your IQ is significantly more powerful than the average for your salary bracket. Demand a pay rise while you still have your faculties.”
That’s kinda nice, but what does it say about my ambition & drive? ;-)
The plural of aquarium is, of course, aquaria.
Remarkable Cringeley on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome [robot].
Wow. My girlfriend, Julie, has spent the last six months training to be an RSPCA Inspector – a tough course to get onto, and a tough course to complete. Well, I’ve just heard that she’s the top student this year. Go Jala!
art bash beauty computer-science computing diary drumming earth functional-programming gimboland haskell humour misc music people photo politics programming programming-languages python security shiko software teaching theoretical-computer-science
2010: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2009: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2008: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2007: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2006: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2005: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2004: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2003: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2002: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2001: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
© 2007 Andy Gimblett
some rights reserved
made with WordPress
hosted at webquarry
