abstractplain

This is quite fun actually! www.try2hack.com/levels. no googling!

Timed out at level 6, lunchtime over, boys.

Great (lite) text-fuelled sequence-diagramming tool (with source) at www.zanthan.com/itymbi. And there’s a great application of it, jadvise-sequence, which will make seq diagrams of any threads as they run (you don’t have to make any code changes). Good fun so far for exploring AWT goings-on - you immediately see the main thread doing its simple bit, and an AWT thread handling your ui interaction.

I’ve been quiet on the old blog because I moved to a moveabletype engine, (see draft blog, here’s the rss), but don’t like the look of the default template and am damned if I can be bothered coding html and css. Anyway, I blogged to both, because the tools are so good I didn’t want people to miss them!

via this January post on James Strachan’s blog. (It’s good doing a via; after the branch (three hours later) it brings you back to what you were looking for in the first place - maven:reactor)

rather well known now (from 1997):

“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.”

• Jamie Zawinski, in alt.religion.emacs

I heard about a great use of stitch-assist with digital cameras: If, say, there’s just two of you out somewhere and you want to both be in the photo, take it in turns to take a photo of each other, turning the shot around so that with one person in each half of a then-stitched panorama.

Haven’t done this yet, but of course it’ll work brill. Fun with backgrounds too, whether they’re static, or busy (in which case you get fun repetitions of bypassers).

You could also put the same person in every stage of the panorama, as though the land there was populated with them. Or you could just go home and photoshop.

two great free multiplayer games that everyone should know about: pyschobabble (magnetic poetry) from popcap games, and tangleword (boggle) from playsite also testing from blogbuddy.

just imported all from my blogger db. nice and simple, moveable type manual holds your hand, you thank it, and you thank blogger. auto-title generation didn’t work too well from those title-less posts in blogger; tried to get it to read up to the first period, but mt seems to have defaulted to its five words.

just read “player of games” by iain m banks. this is the first one i’ve read that i wasn’t really into. if we don’t count the fact that i’ve abandoned ~ fearsum injunn ~ somewhere. Well, it was a nice enough read.

first blog with moveabletype.org I have to say, it took FAR to long for a newbie to install.

“spell: boom bip, tktktktkt, glitch” - casperelectronics. Oof, forget bpoem! From same set of links from chaoskitty, check out this amazing hardware speak and spell mod, and the sort of sound it can generate. Main site, including more sounds.

bpoem quirky music gen with a k10k, minifont look, and an autechre/ice-cream-van sound. leave it on auto-compose, go slowly mad in a hurry.

via http://www.chaoskitty.com/webzen/ via boing boing.

Free book - CodeNotes for J2EE (pdf) at JavaLobby. From CodeNotes (a RandomHouse book series).

jivesoft smack api for jabber. Looks simpler than jabberbeans, so perhaps I’ll re-write The Dixie in it, if I ever find where i buried it…