Archive for August, 2005
Imagine the geek excitement of an er… friend of mine when news burst out all over the internet that there was a leaked copy of Apple’s Mac OS X being bittorrented all over the place and running on x86 PC hardware.
How could I he have possibly resisted downloading said software for ‘evaluation purposes’.
A DVD image is a hefty thing to download, so two days later he was one big file better off, but had no idea what to do with it. Some reading later revelaed that extra software was required and a further days worth of downloading was embarked upon.
Add in another day to download the correct software and he was ready to test drive his new PC-Mac.
He starts up the OS X and instead of a nice Mac interface, there’s a full screen picture of a naked guy bent over pulling his arse open*.
Fantastic. Thanks internet hoaxers for the four day long build-up to the biggest software-based anticlimax ever. My friend is incredibly disappointed.
* - Yes, the goatse guy
August 22nd, 2005
I had no idea it was so complicated.
August 17th, 2005
A passing comment by someone at lunchtime…
“You could put turbines at the tops of pylons. Just stick it in a big square frame or something”
Wow. Wind powered pylons, carrying the electricity that they generate. Who should I tell about this? The world needs to know.
I’ve been getting freaked out recently at the number of ways that the world could be destroyed with me on it. The world is a distressingly fragile place and we need to get off it as soon as possible. Never mind this ‘destroyed by the hand of man’ crap; the world is perfectly prepared to destroy us all in the blink of an eye with or without us burning all the oil we can find. Mother nature has hated us ever since we stopped being apes, possibly longer.
Here is a brief list of some of the things that currently scare me on an armagedon scale.
- The sudden onset of an ice-age. No-one knows what triggers ice-ages, only that they happen incredibly quickly.
- The flipping of the Earth’s magnetic field, resulting in our atmosphere being swept away by cosmic winds.
- A catastrophic meteor strike. We’d have no warning, and a warning probably wouldn’t help anyway.
- An exploding super-volcano.
- A worldwide influenza pandemic.
- Some kind of major war.
- The unpredictable climactic effects of a sudden halt in the burning of oil due to putting turbines on the tops of pylons.
Not only would that last one be potentially terrible, but it would also be partly my fault because I blogged it first. Not only this, but this blog post destroys any hope of getting a patent for the idea since everybody now knows about it. This means I’ll be cooked alive in the Earth’s burning atmosphere completely penniless.
August 17th, 2005
Tonights obsessive website coding frenzy brings you something which should probably have remained uncoded for so many reasons. Here are the top three reasons…
- It’s too wordy and it takes too long to work out what it’s for
- It requires email addresses to work, and therefore incites spam-fear
- It has the real potential to make people cry
So now that I’ve given you the excited sales pitch, go over to my latest creation and see what you make of it.
August 16th, 2005
I don’t really ‘get’ podcasting. It’s a nice idea I guess but any podcasts I’ve listened to are… well… really really boring. They kinda remind me of playing with a tape recorder when I was wee, but beyond a vague nostalgic value I’m not really sure what all the fuss is about. Perhaps this podcasting nonsense will just blow over.
I did listen to one this morning but that was only because the volume was really low and I forgot it was on, so it worked out ok as some kinda weird, chatter-based ambient music.
So… can anyone recommend any podcasts that will help show me the value in this new fad? A thirty-eight minute mp3 of someone interviewing their parents just can’t compete with radio 1 for use of my ears, you see.
Or maybe I’m missing the point? Maybe I should be searching for podcasts with subjects that interest me.
Whatever… podcast recommendations please. I demand to be entertained.
August 15th, 2005
These NASA photos make me feel dizzy just looking at them.
August 12th, 2005
In case you’ve looked at yesterdays post already and dismissed it as rubbish-talking crap, I have just improved the making-sense properties of the ‘chat to the internet’ toy thing.
It now makes a more thorough analysis of potential replies and selects only the choicest of responses. It also now selects from four different search engines to stop it repeating itself if you say the same thing twice.
It is now slightly more likely that your conversation will have some kinda sense to it.
Now all I gotta do it get it to be made popular and have my server blocked by four major search engines. Hurray!
August 12th, 2005
Why am I awake? Because I’ve been obsessing over a website I thought of and started as a lunchtime project today. I can’t rest until it is done.
Presenting…
Chat to the internet
Now I may sleep.
August 11th, 2005
I’ve just found some of my clothes in the garden. Seems the filter fell off the back of the tumble dryer’s drum and it was blowing my clothes outside through the wiggly white tube like some sort of clothing air-canon.
August 11th, 2005
My current lunchtime project is the application of hard scientific analysis to the game of poker using a randomly made-up mathematical style. So far, it has produced:
However, in terms of scientific insight into solving a game of incomplete information it hasn’t produced very much. For the sake of those who love pretty graphs however, here’s a nice treat for you.
The blue trendline maps the tightness of a player, with the loosest play being towards the right. The pink line indicates the number of hands you would expect to win if you played like that. As you can see, if you play more hands, you win more hands.
This is now proven scientific fact. I thank you.
August 3rd, 2005
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