Month: July 2005

I think we all know the real reason for making a human-looking "female" robot. If you were in any doubt, there’s a good quote from the article:

Repliee Q1 can interact with people. It can respond to people touching it. It’s very satisfying

I wonder if it’s able to use verbal contractions.

The news of a straight to video Family Guy movie snuck up on me a bit. In fact it has already been made, and is due for release in September. I’m guessing that’s a region one release since Amazon.co.uk doesn’t seem to be carrying it, while its bigger American brother has it for pre-order. Impatient fans might be interested to hear that it’s already available by more illicit means. Let’s hope there are some interesting extras on the DVD to sweeten the deal a little for the conscientious.

For anyone not keeping up with the American broadcasts, they’re up to ten episodes in season four.

From Overheard in New York:

Girl

I’m an atheist.

Guy

What’s an atheist?

Girl

It means I don’t believe in God.

Guy

They have a word for that?

On a related note, the 18^th Carnival of the Godless was published today.

I went to see Wedding Crashers yesterday and I feel the only appropriate response to it is, in the words of Sean William Scott in Old School, "Yes! That is awesome!" Obviously there are those poor souls who are missing that crucial piece of their sense of humour that would allow them to enjoy Frat Pack movies, but for everyone else this is one of the best. Better than Elf, Zoolander, and Anchorman, and at least as good as Old School.

Having used the Frat Pack name to refer to these guys, I want to ask how widespread that name has become. Is it something that I picked up off a lone Empire reviewer trying to coin a new phrase or is it widely used to refer to these guys? And, given that I did pick it up of an Empire reviewer (lone or otherwise), why did he include Jack Black in the list? For the record, everyone I’ve spoken to about this has said they never heard the name before but the members are Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrel, and Vince Vaughan. Snoop Dogg has more claim to being a member than Jack Black does.

Well that was a particularly unpleasant weekend. Either I had the flu or I suffered a ludicrously strong negative reaction to watching The Royal Tenenbaums on Saturday.

One of the side effects of using a news aggregator over the more traditional brute-force approach of checking hundreds of sites every day is that you tend not to notice when someone stops posting. That’s how it was when Dunstan Orchard‘s posting slowed to a trickle earlier this year and then stopped completely in March. I didn’t really notice until he posted his last hello and goodbye today, saying that

I’m going to stop posting to this site. I just don’t find the time to write for it anymore, and it’s rude to keep making people check for updates which never appear.

Dang. On the plus side, this cloud has some sort of shiny lining that, on closer inspection, appears to be silver. He has packaged the entire contents of the site, from the database to the server-side code to the HTML and CSS and all of the images, into a zip file for wannabe-Dunstans to download and pore over in geeky adoration.

I think I said it before, and I may well continue to say it long into the future, but Dunstan’s blog is quite simply the best-designed blog, possibly the best-designed website, I’ve ever seen. No-one I’ve heard of can come close to his combination of visual design, interface design, client-side scripting, and server-side programming. Just look at the site for a few minutes. Aside from the stunning visuals, there’s the colour-coded linking of related comments; the live search box, which shows results as you type; the three selectable sidebars; and, to (literally) top it all off, the scrolling panorama with up-to-date weather, moon, and daylight conditions. Just wow.

I’ve known this day would come for years, but I never quite admitted it to myself. My iPod is full. I bought it two years ago and even then it was the smallest available, at only 10GB.

So now I have to sort through all of these gigabytes of mp3s looking for the ones that I don’t expect to want to listen to all that often. And you know what? Theres an awful lot of stuff on this thing that I just reflexively skip right past. I’ve culled over 200 tracks out of only about 2100, and I think I could lose about a hundred more if I needed more room. I had been allowing music to build up on my computer like a plaque, some of it so bad I just deleted it rather than remove it from my playlist.

I guess in a few months I’m going to have to come up with something more scalable than large-scale deletions. Maybe a way to rotate tracks, swapping my less frequently played music around at every update. Or maybe a new iPod. 60GB would last a while. How has anyone else solved this problem?

Thanks to Jamie for telling me that commenting was broken on SoylentRed for the last week or so. I don’t think I would have noticed too quickly, since I don’t tend to comment until someone else does (obviously). It seems the bug was in some code that I wrote before I knew much about database programming, and it surfaced because I altered the entry database table slightly a little over a week ago.

If anyone would like to draw a lesson from this, it would be that you should not use select queries of the form select * from [...]. Always include the field names in the query, even if you’re requesting every field in the table. That way you can add or re-order fields without changing the code.

Anyway, it’s fixed now. As always, if you find any bugs please email me. There’s a contact link on every page.

Just lost a long-ish post to that stupid Firefox flash crash bug. Here’s the gist of it: Funny. Welcome.

Okay, it may not be fair to be that brief. That first link is a video of some brilliant maths humour. Check it out if you’re in the 0.001% of people who might think it’s funny. The second link is to a new blog by a friend of mine. Joe was one of my (very few) classmates back in the old theoretical physics days.