Posts
- 4th
- Lucasarts Adventures → After years of Amiga deprivation, I’m finally able to play Beneath a Steel Sky again, thanks to ScummVM and the generosity of Revolution Games! (UAE didn’t run it well)
Ah, the good old days of openly conspiring to steal things in full view of the victim, ridiculous actions that invoke the same response each time, crazy [...]
- Life Ink Blot → Life, the cellular automaton (as opposed to Life, the thing that people who think Life, the cellular automaton, is great don’t have), is great. If you’ve never heard of it, have some links:
Google search → Should return lots of relevant results.
Life in a Java applet → Excellent implementation with good examples.
Load up that applet, open [...]
- 9th
- Typo of the week → "Finest paoking and moving service in Brazil"
- AW523 - Space Warfare → Crazy American university course
- This week oi arve bin… → Blog engines, smoking, jabberwocky, maths a-levels, town gas
- Terminator 3 → Terminator 3 has only just come out in Brazil, so I went to see it, and it was a lot better than I expected! (I expected it to be a mindless trilogy ruining hollywood cash-in.) Instead, it turned out to be a reasonably well themed standard action film; as good a sequel as could be [...]
- The Perfect Sentence → Approximating a perfect sentence?
- 10th
- Adam’s Lynz → I was looking through the old Lab6 archives recently, and noticed the Lynz page, with its horribly broken Excel spreadsheet. That was then. Now I have GNU bc, an arbitrary precision calculator, and for what it’s worth, the number of lynz is now ten to the power a 548 digit number: somewhat larger than the [...]
- The Psychology of the Unthinkable → A paper observing differing moral outrage at differing taboos.
- Mystery chemical reaction → What’s going on here?:
Melting?
The white thing is a shoe shaped hunk of something that’s meant to make rooms smell nice. It’s on top of a plastic pen box. The melty-looking streaks running down the side are not running freely; they’re solid. They’ve assumed this position after months of being slowly melted. [...]
- When you’re online, you’re a superhuman → Internet addiction is actually information addiction
- 11th
- Clue: The Movie → I just watched Clue (The Movie) again tonight. I love it. Whenever you rewatch a film, you notice something new, but this time I noticed something which was obvious as well as new: it was written by Jonathan Lynn, of Yes [Prime] Minister fame. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before! Compare Wadsworth [...]
- 12th
- 20 Questions → Animal and vegetable?
- Permalinks → Chronological namespaces are the only way for a website to be scalable
- Google Calculator → Google continues to show off its computational surpluses by integrating a calculator into the search box. Are they trying to build a command line for the web? I wonder how long until it evaluates Python expressions? Perhaps they could get the CPU cycles from Toolbar users.
Searching for 2^1023 gives you the answer, but 2^1024 evidently [...]
- 13th
- First computer: Sinclair PC200 → My first computer
- Things to do in Barra da Tijuca → Barra da Tijuca is a soulless expanse of freeways, carparks, megamalls and apartment towers, jutting out of Rio de Janeiro. You’d struggle to tell the difference between it and almost anywhere in the USA. It’s certainly not a bad place to live compared to the rest of the city - crime is low, houses are [...]
- 14th
- Links → My daily/frequent reading list
- Fire Jugglers → At traffic lights in Rio, the cars come to a halt and the entertainment begins. Every busy intersection in the city has a small population of beggars who have over the years realised that their chances of getting handouts greatly increase if they perform a little trick in front of the cars. This marketplace lasts [...]
- 16th
- Amazon reviews of Godel, Escher, Bach → Amazon.com reviews are an interesting thing. Anyone who gives a book 5 stars is most likely overrating it, anyone who gives a book 1 star is probably trashing it for some nitpicking political reason, and anything in between makes boring reading. This is an unfortunate internet truism: the easiest way to stand out is to [...]
- Running two Linux systems on one machine → Here’s a nice trick. Let me explain the context. I’ve just installed Gentoo Linux, and while it’s nice and clean, there’s a lot of stuff on my old Mandrake partition that’s still useful, namely GTK1 apps, and anything that uses the old Gnome libraries. Since I’m not using Gnome on the Gentoo installation, I don’t [...]
- 18th
- 19th
- Finding North → In ancient times, scurvy dogs would find their way home by looking at the stars and doing something clever which I don’t know about. I live in a city, so if I want to see the stars, I have to go on holiday. It’s the light pollution. That means people in cities have no method [...]
- 20th
- 21st
- 22nd
- Veganism → Vegan diet lowers cholesterol, kills.
- 24th
- 26th
- Further Reading → Netglish: Unicode as alphabet, XML as grammar.
- The Chess-Player’s Handbook → I love Victorian literature, for the sheer sense of objectivism it projects. To the Victorian male, the world was a perfect heirarchy, with God at the top, scum at the bottom, and himself slowly working his way up. The wives were above the scum, but decisively below the breadwinning head-of-the-household husbands, because God said so, [...]
- 27th
- 28th
- 29th
- Rolling Deep → It's too dangerous to be caught shallow
- UTF-8 → I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my Unicode lifestyle. What does this say?: Portugues.
Update: This problem arose as I tried to write a comments system for this blog. The mechanics of accepting form input, processing it, and appending it to a page is simple enough, but when doing stuff like this, there’s one [...]
