Good Old Slashdot

Back in the days (like in the 90's) I used to read Slashdot, the geek news site. I don't anymore, I waste my time elsewhere these days.

But today I found out a pretty cute thing about Slashdot. They send random silly quotes in their response HTTP headers. If you don't understand what I just said, it means that when Slashdot talks to your browser it includes some stuff that is unnecessary and which the browser will simply throw away. But this extra stuff is actually silly quotes.

If you're on linux you can do curl -I slashdot.org to watch all the headers.

Here are some examples:


X-Fry: Sweet justice! Sweet, juicy justice!
X-Bender: Stop doing the right thing, you jerk!
X-Fry: But this is HDTV. It's got better resolution than the real world.
X-Fry: The butter in my pocket is melting!
X-Bender: I'm tired of this room and everyone in it!
X-Bender: My full name is Bender Bending Rodriguez.


Wow, these guys really have a thing for inserting silliness everywhere.

Wordle

Wordle is a nice online service for creating word clouds. Here's some words from my blog:

From this there are a number of feature that I would like wordle to improve on. First of all, when reading off a blog it's clear that they're just concatenating the different posts. But it seems that they forget to insert a space between the posts which results in some funny words with a period in the middle. Secondly it would be nice to be able to treat several words as a single one. In the above example you can see that I've written "Star Wars" quite a lot. But the words "Star" and "Wars" are treated separately. It would be swell if I could say that any occurrence of the word "Star" before "Wars" should be treated as a single word.

Fancy Pants Adventures: World 2

Finally! I have waited so eagerly. A couple of years ago I came across this incredibly awesome flash game called Fancy Pants Adventures. It's a platform game in the style of Sonic the Hedgehog and sports a really cool main character which is very well animated despite being a stick figure. I really enjoyed it, the only problem was that the game was too short. But already from the start it advertised that there would be a continuation.

And now, much to my joy, the sequel has been released: Fancy Pants Adventures: World 2. And it definitely lives up to my expectations. We meet the same main character but now he has learned a few tricks, like sliding in oil. He can even slide up oily walls. The music is also largely the same, which I don't mind since I liked the music a lot.

So what has changed? Quite a lot. Now there is actually a story to the game but that particular part I don't consider to be an improvement... The graphics has gotten quite a face lift and there are some levels which are quite beautiful. There are also some clear influences from other platform games here. The levels are generally longer and offers more varying game play that World 1.

The secret levels are now more well hidden and have gotten quite a bit of attention. Each of them uses graphics from/inspired from some other game made by friends of Bram Borne, the man behind Fancy Pants. Some of them are not only bonus level but are also a bit tricky to get through.

Another new game element is a kind of golf that can be played on each level. On each level there is a snail and if you jump on it its shell will remain and you can kick that around. The goal is to get the shell into a special hole. The price for doing so is a new color on your fancy pants.

The final boss is also a bit more of a challenge in World 2 compared to the pretty harmless penguin in World 1. This time it's a rabbit which has some clear influences from Bowser in Super Mario World. It took me a while for me to figure out how to beat him and even then he can be a bit problematic since he's throwing spiders at you from time to time.

All in all I really like World 2 and all the improvements it made. My only problem with it is the same as with World 1. The levels are too small and the game is too short. It took me twelve minutes to complete the game the first time. The second time I found all secret levels. I wish there was more. I'm already waiting on World 3.

George Lucas in Love

Following up my latest post on Star Wars, here's a movie about how George Lucas found the inspiration to Star Wars while being in College. It's a really well made little movie that takes inspiration from Shakespeare in Love and applies it to George Lucas. Lots of fun stuff for Star Wars geeks. Enjoy!

Star Wars: you don't need to see the movies to know them

Here's about the funniest thing I've seen in a while. It's a recap of the original Star Wars movies (episode 4-6). It's retold by someone who hasn't seen the movies. Laughter warning for Star Wars fans!

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

QOTD - "It's obvious"

Conal Elliott discusses the use of "It's obvious" in discussions and how it thwarts creativity. He summarizes the basic misconception as follows:

I understand discussions of what is “obvious” as being founded on a fallacy, namely believing that obviousness is a property of a thing itself, rather than of an individual’s or community’s mental habits (ruts).

Validation

Here's a wonderful little short movie which I can heartily recommend. It's called Validation and has won more prizes than I knew existed. It's only ~16min so it's a quick watch. I saw it on my lunch break today.

Via Ulisses Costa.

QOTD - Comparing Obama and Bush

On comparing Obama and Bush:

It's like comparing pumpkin ice cream to poop.

Found on reddit.

Hierarchical tabs

Over at the Chromium blog they have a nice article about their thoughts on tabs in Google Chrome. Clearly they've given this quite some thought and also studied how users use the tab functionality to organize their surfing. One particular thing that I learned was that in Chrome they loosely group together some tabs that come from the same origin. But that's not the point of this post.

For quite some time now I've had another idea on grouping tabs together. I think it would be interesting for a browser to have hierarchical tabs. Hierarchical tabs would allow certain tabs to contain a whole new set of tabs, much like directories are a kind of file which can contain files.

Most people already have a first approximation of hierarchical tabs. The bottom layer is that which is provided by the window manager, showing which programs are currently running. For instance, right now I have a file browser, Open Office, Evince (a pdf reader) and Firefox running. The next level is in the browser itself which of course contains the web pages.

Allowing hierarchies of tabs would allow grouping together sets of tags quite nicely, and would help solve the problem which tab overflow when the number of tabs grow large.

I realize though that it would require some thought and experimentation to see if this can work out. One problem is that deep hierarchies will take up screen real estate. But introducing an arbitrary limit on the depth doesn't feel like a good measure either. Another problem is how to easily create a new "directory" tab and send tabs into it. The risk is that the user interface becomes unwieldy.

I know that there are some experiments out there but the one I've seen, Tabgroups is rather underwhelming. It doesn't really deserve to be called hierarchical tabs.

All in all I'm not sure whether hierarchical tabs can be made into a useful feature. But I can't stop thinking about it. I would be totally excited to see some serious experiments with the idea.

The "Napoleon Dynamite" Problem

Yesterday I saw the movie Napoleon Dynamite. And what did I think of it? If you've read my blog you might think that you can figure out what I thought about the movie based on other movies I liked and did not like. But as it turns out Napoleon Dynamite is a very particular movie in this respect. It is particularly difficult to predict what people think of this movie, even when their movie tastes are well known. And that made me really curious, I just had to see this movie.

Netflix is an online company that lets you rent as many movies as you like against a monthly fee. For them, it's important with happy customers that wants to keep renting movies. And one way for them to make their customers stay is to give them accurate recommendations. In fact, making accurate recommendations is big business for them. Netflix have had people working on improving their recommendation system for many years. But after some time they hit a well, they didn't make any improvements anymore. Or if they did, they were minuscule. But they still had their mind set on improving the recommendation system so they took drastic measures: in the spring 2007 they announced a competition. Any programmer who could improve upon Netflix own recommendation system by 10% would win the competition. The prize was set to one million dollar.

Given that kind of prize money this has naturally attracted a whole lot of programmers world wide. And initially they were making good progress towards the 10% goal. They were making leaps of several percentage units coming up to seven, eight and now even over nine percents improvements. But as they crept closer to the goal it keeps getting harder to make new improvement. And as it turns out there is a small class of movies that turn out to be extra hard to predict. And the hardest one seems to be Napoleon Dynamite. This movie has some special quality that makes it singularly unpredictable. It is this movie and a small set of others that are fooling the algorithms to make anymore progress.

You can read about all this in more detail in this interesting article in New York Times.

So, what did I think about Napoleon Dynamite? It was not my kind of movie, I didn't like it at all. It was actually a pain to watch it until the end but I forced myself though it. But I can see why some people like it. The movie is set in an 80's style and the protagonist is an incredible looser. I would have maybe appreciated the retro style if I liked the rest of the manuscript but as it is now it didn't help the film a bit for me. The people in the movie are quite angry with each other and that's one thing I certainly don't appreciate in a movie, especially if it's over small stupid things. The only redeeming things for the movie is the intro and the fact that the ending is a happy one.

Wine

I've mentioned a couple of times that I use Wine to run applications on Windows on my Ubuntu Linux laptop. So it's high time I give it the praise it deserves: Wine, I love you! Well, in a platonic way anyway. I'm really impressed with what this application does and how well it achieves it. Sure, I've tried a whole number of Windows applications that it doesn't handle but it doesn't matter. For me it's more like for each program that actually run it's a bonus, a happy surprise. Today I tried one of my favorite games Happyland Adventures and it ran perfectly, although I had my screen set on such a high resolution that window of the game was a mere dot in the middle of my screen as it runs in what I believe to be 640x480.

Earlier today (well, technically yesterday) I also managed to find AppDB, a database which records how various Windows programs work under Wine. The interface is a little cluttered but apart from that this is an extremely helpful thing. Just go there, look up your favorite Windows program and see how it works for others. Even if it doesn't work right out of the box some people might have found out a little trick to make it work. Pure awesomeness.

For me Wine makes life on the Linux side quite a bit brighter.

Eye of the Tiger

I've just hear the most brilliant cover ever! I was browsing around for music in Spotify and came across a title I knew well,Eye Of The Tiger. But the artist was a big surprise: Paul Anka. He has made an album called Rock Swings which contains some surprising covers. And his version of Eye of the Tiger sounds nothing like the original, it's a big band swing version. The only thing left from the original is the lyrics, it has none of that pumping electric guitar. Yet I couldn't help laugh when I heard it, barely recognizing the original behind the cover.

Batman suing Batman

I've blogged about Batman before. No, not the guy in the cape living inside comic books and recently on the movie screen. No, it's the city in east Turkey. I find the name incredibly funny. But the fun doesn't stop there. It turns out the city mayor of Batman is now suing Warner Brothers for their use of the name Batman.
What can you say? The guy is obviously greedy. But it's also the case that the city has gained more reputation from the movies than it had ever could have managed for itself.
I read somewhere that the city has a bad reputation in Turkey for, among other things, the high rate of suicides among young women. So maybe they're looking for to improve their image. But suing Warner Brothers won't help I'm afraid.

Oh, and by the way. The Dark Knight is a really good movie. My DVD is arriving in two weeks.

CSI

Right now I'm sitting in my sofa and watching the second episode of CSI (Las Vegas that is, the original series) from this season. And no, I have not downloaded it. I think this is some kind of record for Swedish television. Never before have we been so close behind a show that's imported, at least as far as I know. One month and eight days. But I guess we will see more of this now that people are starting to download stuff from the internet. It's only the translation that's going to hold it back from being shown the same week.

I've followed CSI pretty much from the beginning. And I really like how the show is aging. Many shows fall in the trap of trying to ramping things up. But CSI has remained low key, focused on what it does well. It has kept to the weird cases and the scientific curiosities. I like that. It's too bad that all my favorite characters are taken off the show.

QOTD

Sometimes I come across a quote that very succinctly captures the essence of some thought that I have had for myself but never quite managed to distill to my satisfaction. Todays quote is such a quote. Once you read it it seems so obvious.

A large enough quantitative difference
makes a qualitative difference.

Paul Hudak

QOTD

Which is worse, ignorance or apathy?
Who knows? Who cares?

Murdoch James Gabbay, on the TYPES mailing list

Word of the Day: Troglodytic

troglodytic adj.
Of or pertaining to troglodytes, or dwellers in caves.
(From AllWords.com)

Thanks to Mr. Willingham on the Haskell-cafe mailing list for making me aware of this word.

J.J. Abrams Wants To Write Interactive Fiction

Occasionally I play interactive fiction games. If you're not familiar with the genre it used to be called text adventures back in the 80's when it was popular. The sole form of communication (at least in the pure games) is text, the game produces text for you to read and your actions in the game are controlled by typing commands with your keyboard. These games aren't produced by any companies anymore but there is a vivid and very much alive community which not only plays these kinds of games but also create new ones.

The reason I'm mentioning this is because I just saw a short video snippet with an interview with J.J. Abrams (of Alias and Lost fame). He got the question if he would like to write computer games and what kind it would be. It turns out he would want to write interactive fiction.

I find this interesting. J.J. Abrams' scripts often feature some kind of great mystery which makes people really hooked on his series. But as the series progresses it's very difficult to keep the excitement of these mysteries alive. This happened most notably with Lost. But I think this concept could work a lot better in a game and in particular in interactive fiction. There you don't have the problem of keeping the mystery alive for umteen seasons. You don't even have to reveal the hole thing, only enough to keep the game play exciting.

I would love to play games by J.J. Abrams, I hope he get around to write some one day.

Word of the Day

Todays' word: discombobulate

Real life Tron

If you, like me, is a fan of the 80's movie Tron I recommend you read the following blog post about how a programmer not only recreated the light cycles game but also accidentally managed to reproduce the way Tron manages to escape into the computer. The blog post is: Real Life Tron on an Apple IIgs