abstractplain

off-line for a couple of weeks.

Simple Simon game (Flash). (turn off background music in the top right). My top score 16.

Fiddled with informa rss library a tiny bit to give 0.92 support (copy, paste, tweak of the rss 0.91 parser). Now I can actually read the other half of my favourite blogs when testing apps with this library. I have no idea how this 0.92 parser could have been missing from informa, when it has apparently been the basis for a couple of newsreaders. I guess they could be old readers, or 0.92 could be a new trend. I read up a bit on the different RSS formats while finding DTDs (and imagined DTDs), but decided that that mess was strictly need-to-know only, and I don’t need to know. Was going to teach a pal some java by building yet another newsreader, but when we looked at informa, it does rather do everything for you but the GUI. Nah that’s not true. It’d be nice to have auto discovery of new feeds from a similar community, and some sort of analysis of all the coverage of particular sites. Really want google on a set of feeds (e.g. run google news just on j2ee blogs, for news on “persistence”, or google opinions on the j2ee blogs again, for opinions on “castor”).

Made quicksearches for GNOD’s related music and related books. They’re gnooks and gnoosic, in with my other quicksearches.

“Margret jack-knifes from argument to argument, jigs direction randomly and erratically like a shoal of Argument Fish being followed by a Truth Shark.” - Desperate web site, spot-on simile: www.thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com.

The above via the ever spot-on stegan / e.m., whose ultimate UK leaving-do i am this very minute planning guiltilty (with my glasgow accomplices (accompli?)) to miss. Jealous on her relating of the highland vibe, but you don’t see her mentioning the midgees do you. (tr /enesc /enuk midgee returns (n)mini-mosquiti). The grass, the other side.

No, fair enough, have argued about website is actually Funny As. Desperately in need of not being rendered cyan on navy, shall we make that?

Margret glanced up at me and chattily asked, ‘Can you get back things that you’ve deleted?’ My lips became the thinnest of lines.

Did I mention how fantastic the music of Fela Kuti is? It’s very fantastic. (Thanks (yet blogless) Emma and John). For you to get are the immediate tracks: “Everything Scatter”, and “Zombie”. If you’re the law-abiding type, that makes two CDs.

That’s beaut, The Google Zeitgeist lists Spain’s most popular google query as ajedrez (chess), where most others have nell mcandrews, britney spears, jennifer lopez up there.

“I was surprised, I was happy for a day in 1975″ - Belle and Sebastian, ‘The State I Am In’

Plumb design Visual Thesaurus v2. Haven’t spent much time with it yet, apart from to marvel at the (Java) GUI improvements. “Plumb Design has updated their Visual Thesaurus. Version 2.0 offers a much-expanded UI. Perhaps most interestingly, meanings are given entries along with the words themselves, so that links between words can be seen more explicitly.” via Antenna

Great document on wired news’ redesign and shift to all-css, includes things like the problems they encountered, and figures on their avg page dload sizes before and after (cut out 40% on front page, maybe 25% on a story page, I seem to remember (once the css is cached, that is)). forgot the via - lo siento.

Oh for the other part of my spanish homework I’m using this great on-line verb conjugator, which lets you write a custom template, to only select certain info. So in my case, learning the (few) irregularities of the preterite tense, I use my own query which has customised results for just that conjugation. nice. Of course, I really want this tool in with a dictionary, and a phrase/idioms book.

¿Por qué lloras, bebé? Doing my homework for tomorrow’s spanish class. We have to choose an article on BBC mundo and give a wee talk about it. (Using only 4 verbs, in my case). Ditching my usual high-brow tastes in news stories, I instead selected this article entitled ¿Por qué lloras, bebé?.

(in a quick introduction to google’s news search, coverage in english.)

Now I swear this is lifted straight from a ten-year-old Simpsons episode where homer’s brother invents (using homer’s money) a gadget that translates baby maggie’s exact comments (”Lavish attention on me, and entertain me”, or from the high-chair at dinner: “I want what the dog’s eating.”).

Homer had actually put aside the exact same sum of money for a massage chair - the “Spine-Melter 2000″. He’s not overly impressed when he sees the translation device: “I can’t believe we spent $2,000 on this when right now rollers could be kneading my buttocks.”

And then there’s this dumb commentary that suggests what’s needed is a translator for one’s girlfriend’s tears: “I’m crying because you are a jerk” / “because you are so wonderful”. I can just see me tapping at one of those like a supected-broke petrol guage, or an old miseryguts barometer.

Anyway, I got so into the news story that I haven’t done any actual prep in spanish. Forgive me, oh badly-dressed god of studying hard. Here’s some old stuff i’ve gone on about before elsewhere, about how you can sign with your baby as early as 6 months, while the voice is still too complex an apparatus for them to coordinate and so leaves non-signing kids just crying for what they want. So far I’ve only heard of kids using single signs, not forming sentences - but I haven’t read through many of the plentiful resources on this.
Oh, right, cue cute pic…

ColorMatch 5K generates a colour scheme to match an initial colour you pick. Must extract the functions from the squished 5k javascript src. Via antenna, as is this pointer to the newly all-CSS Wired.

I’m trying to find some rules written up, rather than just ripping the math from the colormatch javascript… So far I found a faq about some colour scheme generation algs, via, I think easy rgb. Also colorwrite java app which generates different types of scheme. relevant doc about scheme gen.

updated: color scheme gen by pixy.

updated: I posted more about this and about the ruby color-tools gem, mentioning some other articles and generators:

Creating colour palettes - Malarkey

mezzoblue § Colour Schemes

slayeroffice palette generator.

barelyfitz article

tip: set up textpad to execute db2 interpreter on current file.

I figured this out a while ago and never looked back… in textpad … configure: preferences: tools: add: program… browse for db2cmd…. e.g.
c:\Program Files\SQLLIB\bin\db2cmd.exe press apply in the tools menu on the left, choose db2cmd (your new tool), to edit it further in parameters enter: /i db2 -t -f $File in initial folder enter: $FileDir

now, write files with db2 scripts in them (semi-colon separated commands, if you’re using the above db2 syntax), and just choose tools: db2cmd (or whatever you named it) to run these through db2 and see output in command results buffer.

I really have to set my blog up to allow categorisation. I’d like to just say #social or #java at the start of my post and have parameterised request url for rss feed allowing filtering of the feed according to these categories. (i use blogger web app exclusively to post, as i work on many machines throughout the day). I guess this is no problem. my blogger template in a dumbly fashions a raw xml doc out of my posts, then i can have an intermediate (php) process recognise nodes with #java or whatever in them, and further mark-up those nodes, so that my html generation and rss generation scripts can easily accesss these category attribs, manipulate the blog tree accordingly. immediately, springs to mind a dhtml collapse on all waffling nodes.

labmice windows info site. and troubleshooting tcp/ip conn with win xp.

Sun Wu Kong.
Only seven years after I saw them, I finally found out the names of the monkey god films I enjoyed so much: Chinese Odyssey - part one: Pandora’s Box, and part two: cinderella. Stephen Chow slapstick, but fantastic.
Now to find them…

jlGui “100% Java Music Player”. Open Source WinAmp clone. Looks quite easy to integrate the bare player component into other apps. Seems a bit fussy about what else is using the soundcard though.

The Invisibles, a great visual quiz for fans of popular-film. via dan9.

There are 25 or 26 hours in my day - on normal circadian rhythms: “Without time cues, the volunteers tended to go to bed an hour later and to get up about an hour later each day. These experiments demonstrate that the “free-running” circadian rhythm in humans is about 25 hours long.”.
I’ve had problems fitting to 9 starts (meeting them at all, or having energy for morning work) since my mid teens. I also have a tendency to work late into the night with high levels of concentration. This is a pain in the ass and a gift. But am I just somehow lazy?

Couple of places these sleep clock problems are documented, but nowhere particularly authoritative.

• Teens have different sleep needs
• Sleep clock problems (the only one that suggests pushing round the clock to fix it… like you won’t just keep pushing!)
• Delayed sleep phase syndrome (this one spouts the most speculative bullshit but its observations are in keeping with my behaviour)

I wonder that the cause of the creep to nighthawk isn’t just laziness or lack of discipling in going to bed that little bit before sheer exhaustion. Obedience to 26 hr circadian before any social / workplace demand. That and it’s quiet at night.

I can’t find in portrait of J Random Hacker where I thought it mentioned the patterns typical of the breed.