Posts

  • 17th
    • The Null Post → All self respecting automation starts at zero, and so I present the Null Post, which has failed, since I’ve had to explain what it is, contradicting nullity.
  • 19th
    • Best Spam Title Ever → I was going to write something about a spam subject line, but of course, everybody else got it too. Oh, and sorry about degenerating into a standard linkdump blog after only one post, but what can you do about it? I’m going on holiday tomorrow so… oh, gah… hnnggh. I can’t take it. I [...]
  • 27th
    • Fire XOR Cold patch for Nethack → This is the documentation for a patch for Nethack 3.4.1, the classic roguelike timesink that’s been in development for nearly 15 years, and still has ASCII graphics. That means all the development time has gone into gameplay, and as a result, it’s probably the best game there is. Download the patch here A while ago Rob [...]
    • Typo of the week → In Tim Cahill’s lazily entertaining (but rather formulaic) collection of short travel stories, Hold the Enlightenment, there is a passage that reads as follows: In 1997, a British racing team, driving a car powered by a pair of jets, broke both the sound barrier and the world land-speed record - 763,053 miles per hour - on [...]
    • Worst. Film. Synopsis. Ever. → I’m still testing, so here’s summore filler. The Filmworks, Manchester’s vast cavern of cinema, had this sysopsis of The Matrix on their website: To save the world of the future, a software computer expert in modern-day America is brought into contact with a mysterious character called Morpheus, the inhabitant of a universe some 2000 years in the [...]
    • Old Chemistry Set → Well lookie what we have here: Age 10 years and over Since I’m moving house in a few weeks time, I thought I’d cut down on the amount of junk we have to take by using up this old chemistry set. Since the only chemistry I remember is the production of Evil Concoctions, [...]
  • 28th
    • Assorted thoughts from the last few months → The thought of having a proper blog has been in the back of my mind for a long time, so I’ve been collecting links from here and there. I (will?) try to do lots of primary reading to keep the blogosphere infochurn high, but obviously all these must’ve been linked from somewhere, else how would [...]
  • 29th
    • What did I do before this post? → I’ve just read High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby, and isn’t it good? Best first book since Iain Banks’s Wasp Factory. (Oh, except this wasn’t his first book. I just wanted somewhere to say how much I liked Wasp Factory really.) Anyway, it’s a story about the incomprehensibility of everything we do, and how love tears up [...]
    • Hand drawn games → A while ago, I got some pictures from two of my favourite games, and redrew them by hand, in the GIMP. No rulers, just colour picking and flood fill, and a shaky hand. Here they are. Syndicate Zool
    • By god CSS is manky → I struggled for ages to find a way of centering a div which contains an image and a caption. All I want is for it to shrink wrap to the width of the image, and extend down as far as the caption goes, but no! It doesn’t think the caption is worthy of being shink [...]
    • Contact Me → (This deserves a higher level URL like /2003/contact/ but I haven’t got around to writing that part of the blogging software yet, so this will have to do.) Here is my email address. You’ll have to type it in by hand; yes, that means you spammers too. Don’t be discouraged though…. I love getting email (2/3 [...]
  • 30th
    • A good CS101 coursework task → Last summer I learned C++ and Python, finally grokking object orientation. Thrilled with my my newfound objectivism (haha! I’m so funny!) I set about writing a complete simulation of the entire universe, first in C++, and then in Python when I got bogged down in things like copy constructors. You might be surprised to know that [...]
    • Today’s reading theme: category theory → More MLP, with the things I thought about while reading. I just read Vernor Vinge’s True Names, and a phrase popped out at me: …being a person is more than symptoms. As far as I can tell, no, it isn’t. You can’t devalue emergent phenomena just by calling them symptoms. Hate is just a chemical reaction, but [...]
    • Worst Pun Ever → I wrote an awful, horrible pun a while ago. Here it is: Once upon a time, in an ancient Swedish village, there lived an old man, Marten Senburg. He was no ordinary old man though; he was the Orchard King, and all the fruit growers of the land bowed down to his wisdom. His birthfruit [...]
  • 31st
    • XPointer rethought-up → Just had an idea. A URI is a name used to refer to any document on the web, and an Xpath expression is a name used to refer to any part(s) of an XML document. Why aren’t these integrated? Wouldn’t it be lovely to be able to refer to any piece of information on the [...]
    • Switching from Galeon to Firebird → Part of the long term plan for this site is to assign permalinks to every thought I ever have, and layer a non-discrete category system over them, with the aim of gaining some insight into AI, or at the very least build a functional long term memory. Right now though, it’s just a blog, and [...]