This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Just discovered a tip from Mark Pilgrim about how to combat personal Internet use at work -- you just publish the logs, and let social pressures do it for you. Neat. I think I might suggest that at work myself...

Eric Lippert (via Ned) is the guy responsible for VBScript and lots of bits of the VBS and JS scripting engines. If you work with them all the time, like I do, then this is already fascinating in bits, and will doubtless get more so.

Randomly connected thought: I wonder how difficult it would be to implement a VBS-to-Python compiler? Has anyone got a YAPPS grammar for VBS lying around? ;)

A very short howto about floppy handling under Linux and how it doesn't have to be arse at all.

-----

Avast! It be Talk Like A Pirate Day, me hearties!

Get talking like pirates, ye scurvy sons o'dogs. Ye knows it makes sense.

If ye needs help talking like a pirate (ye landlubber!) then mayhaps ye should avail yerself of a pirate keyboard. I'll sell ye mine for forty doubloons. If I knew what a doubloon was, which I don't. Arr!

aqtree3, my make-an-explorer-tree thing for web pages, has just got a little better. Lots of people complained about how the plus and minus things weren't clickable to expand and collapse the tree; well, now, they are. I'm glad about that; I'm amazed that loads of people are still using aqtree2 when 3 seems to be to be better in all ways :-)

Interesting weblog: ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ. About language and words. And a really big Caterpillar truck at the moment, too, but I assume that that's just a vagary. Question: should I have written the weblog title in real Unicode UTF-8 encoded Greek, or just used the HTML entities like I did? It means "Know Thyself", in case you (or Neo) were wondering. Useful little phrase, that; as Michael himself says, "Some things never fall out of fashion!"

Put @reboot in your crontab (via paranoidfish) -- a crontab entry that runs whenever the system reboots. Like a user-specific /etc/init.d script. That's dead cool, and I didn't have a clue it existed. There's also @daily, @hourly, and so on. Apparently this is in Vixie cron, and I don't know if that's what everyone's using, though...

Dsquared is starting a new little series on the economics of the music industry with Micropayments, microprobability, an explanation of why micropayments won't come any time soon (short version: there's too much overhead on any individual payment to make it worthwhile). Further articles may well be good; his stuff is always excellent, although occasionally a little incomprehensible if you haven't got the first damned clue about economics like I haven't.

Verisign. Jesus wept. Privatising the DNS was such a good idea. Such a good idea. BIND is hacking around it, though, which should help; loads of DNS servers run BIND.

-----

Now, for all your classroom physics demonstrations, The Ideal Scientific Equipment Company Catalog! From the Ideal Scientific Equipment Company (motto: "If you didn't get it from us, it's not IDEAL!"), you can now get your hands on proper weightless inextensible strings (in reels of 200m), frictionless planes, point particles (in all masses from 1g to 10kg), completely rigid bodies ("Have you ever had a demonstration fail due to non-rigidity of an essential part of your apparatus? An ISE rigid body NEVER flexes!"), and Occam's Razor, with its finest Swedish surgical steel blade. All the tools the theoretical physicist needs!

-----

Ned Batchelder has an excellent collection of short essays, mainly on coding topics, but also about his son's autism. Fascinating; while the coding ones don't normally postulate anything new, they're excellent and clear statements of stuff you knew already and could never be bothered to do, like how to write log messages, or why to use exceptions properly.

An autism test (via Ned). I scored 33, which is into the "very high" category; apparently "most people with high functioning autism or Asperger's syndrome score about 35". The idea of a link between hacking and autism is not a new one: a clinical psychologist has suggested that "computers were designed by and for people with Asperger's, who seem to know the language of computers better than social or conventional languages".

On a different note, the test is in Flash. After I'd completed it, I clicked "back" to find out where I'd found the link, and then when I went forward again, I'd lost my position in the test; I had to go through the whole fifty questions again (just clicking "Agree" this time) to get to the end screen where it tells you what the scores mean. This is why Flash is bad.

Dave "Fargo" Kosak wrote a bot to play Star Wars Galaxies (via Alan Green), and it's brilliant. The "Autocamp 2000", as he christened it, plays by the following rules:

1. Join any group that invites you
2. When in a group, follow behind the leader
3. Attack any monster you see
4. Accept all trade requests from other players, then give them a melon

Give them a melon. Really! That's what it does!

It also talks to other players, using the following rules:

1. If someone says something ending in a question mark, respond by saying "Dude?"
2. If someone says something ending in an exclamation point, respond by saying "Dude!"
3. If someone says something ending with a period, respond by randomly saying one of three things: "Okie," "Sure," or "Right on."
4. EXCEPTION: If someone says something directly to you by mentioning your name, respond by saying "Lag."
5. (And remember to accept all trade requests from other players by giving them a melon.)

He's got a transcript of how the bot does at the game. It's hilarious. Shows up just how vacant some MMORPGs can be, too. But mainly hilarious. I mean, it's probably all completely made up. But either this is a real depiction of how funny MMORPGs are or Fargo is a comedy genius, and I'm happy with either.

[Troobacca opens a trade with Farglik.]
[Farglik hands him a melon.]
Troobacca: ...what's this?
Farglik: Dude?
Troobacca: You handed me a melon!
Farglik: Dude!

None

On Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 12:29:45PM +0100, Andrew Spencer wrote:
Darken the sky, for the king is dead. The great Johnny Cash died today in hospital in Nashville, Tennessee.
A sad day, but what a life to have lived.

Yeah, I know. The passing of a true icon.

"In his autobiography, he told of how, in 1967, with "nothing in his blood but amphetamines", he crawled into a cave to die." Somewhere in the middle of a six decade career. Not many people can say that. (In fact, can any people say that? Elvis is dead, Cliff hasn't had any hits recently...)

Not sure what to say. He was old, but he's looked old since about 1985, fergawdsake. And his wife was dead, and he had got famous again, so I don't think he died in misery and penury or anything. He did die in Nashville, though, which has a certain ring of goodness about it.

Cash est mort. Vive le Cash.

None -----

Next year, if none of my grandfather's siblings die before then, there will be 10 brothers and sisters in that family, all of whom are over 70. This will get my family into the Guinness Book of Records. How cool is that?

Roberto Baggio's Free Kick game (via Sean) is the coolest little game I've seen in ages. Take a free kick. I've just stuck an absolute beauty into the top corner.

I rather like Stephen Watson's NetStat applet for the ROX panel, although I need to hack it so that it shows the window first and populates it afterwards when you ask it to show sockets, rather than hanging until the window's populated.

On the subject of ROX applets, I've got two vaguely useful ones in the software section -- a rough clock and yet another "have you got mail" one. The mail one is nice because it displays how much mail you have and how much is unread. It probably only works if you use mutt like I do, though; Stephen has one that's nice and configurable but doesn't show your unread mail count.

Using cellophane to convert a laptop computer screen into a three-dimensional display (via someone, I've forgotten) -- a very cool article. I can't believe that this is that easy. 3D displays for virtually no cost! Why are manufacturers not doing this?

More little scripty bits: since the MPlayer people refuse to take jwz's advice and make MPlayer shell out once a minute to tell xscreensaver to not display (which stops the screensaver popping up while you're watching films), I wrote a (very) little script. This is mpl, which is the default run action for all movies when clicked on:

#!/bin/bash
disable-xscreensaver & DISABLE_PID=$!
echo "Disabling screensaver (PID $DISABLE_PID)"
mplayer -vo xvidix -ao oss -framedrop "$1" -really-quiet 2>&1
echo Re-enabling screensaver
kill $DISABLE_PID

and disable-xscreensaver is:

#!/bin/bash
while true; do 
    sleep 59
    xscreensaver-command -deactivate &
done

That tells the screensaver every 59 seconds to reset its inactivity timer, which works fine.

I've tried using the excellent Sweep audio editor to edit an mp3; specifically, an mp3 of a whole album, so I can select bits of it and save them separately to break up the album into separate songs. However, it doesn't work; Sweep can't open a file that big on that particular machine (presumably it runs out of memory). Has anybody got any other suggestions for easy-to-use graphical audio editors that can load bigger-than-memory mp3s and then save a selected bit of them as a separate audio file? I know about mp3splt which fails both the "easy to use" and the "works all the time" test. I don't want something that will do it automatically based on silence points, and I don't want something that'll go away to the CDDB and get the timings and do it that way, because none of them work properly. I'm quite happy to select the bits I want out of the waveform and save them as separate files and set the id3 tags myself. Any suggestions for software that can handle it? Sweep's a really nice audio editor, except for this one small thing.

None -----

So, I got a load of bumf from the Open University for the first course in my MSc. So, I had better crack on and learn some Java. They also gave us a free copy of Borland JBuilder, which is rather nice of them; I was well pleased to see that JBuilder runs quite happily on Linux. It was rather weird running an installer application on my Linux box, though; not used to installation wizards on Linux at all!

This is not a love song (requires Flash), the new film from the director of The Full Monty, has premiered online; you can go to the website and download it after a small payment. Ooh, I thought, that's a good idea, I like the sound of that.So off I toddle, ready to pay a couple of quid; even if I didn't like the film, I would like the concept to be a success -- this is what I've been talking about for years, the power of the net to cut out the middle man -- but, nope, it's only watchable with Windows Media Player on Windows. There goes that idea, then. They seem to have set it up so that the film's only watchable on the machine you download it on, and that sort of control isn't available if you just offer an AVI for download, I suppose...so I won't be contributing, because I don't have Windows Media Player and will continue to not have it. They're conceptually doing the right thing here, just they've got in the way of it by wrapping it up in DRM things. A shame.