New Super Mario Bros. -
June 30th, 2006
A new 2D Mario game.
I don’t think a 28 year old should be as excited as I am that this is in the shops today.
[video]
Petty Annoyance -
June 28th, 2006
It’s been bugging me for years but for some reason it’s been getting me actively annoyed in the last couple of weeks. It’s even more irritating because I know it’s a bit irrational. But anyway, this is how (in kind of pseudocode) you should define a function…
myFunction(argument1, argument2){
...do some stuff
}
please don’t do it like this
myFunction(argument1, argument2)
{
...do some stuff
}
… for some reason it just looks kind of childish to me.
I’m learning Ruby at the moment and one of the growing list of things I like about it is that it gets rid of the curly brackets so the ‘proper’ way is the default. e.g.
def my_function
...do some stuff
end
Also, slightly less subjectively, compressing if…else statements into a single line and doing multiple assignments on a single line are both idiotic if you expect other people to maintain your code, please could you avoid it? No one thinks it’s clever, I mean it compiles down to the same thing in the end and it’s a classic way to introduce hard to find errors by reducing legibility. There’s something about Perl seems to actively encourage this kind of lunacy.
CD Audit -
June 25th, 2006
Alphabetical distribution histogram, not including compilations. Annotated version at flickr.
I put my CDs in alphabetical order. I have no CDs by artists with X at the start of their name.
I found I have 2 copies of Marvin Gaye - What’s Going On, Underworld - Dubnobasswithmyheadman, Pizzicato 5 - Playboy & Playgirl and Aphex Twin - Come To Daddy Remix. I’m missing Beastie Boys - Ill Communication and possibly some others which I’ve forgotten about. If you’ve lived with me over the last 6 years or so and you’re missing any of these or have an extra copy of that Beastie Boys CD lets swap.
Some films I’ve seen recently including opions -
June 23rd, 2006
Hard Candy
Good, inteligent horror film. Misery and Audition are the obvious refrence points.
36 Quay Des Oufevres
Those french guys love smoking don’t they? This is a bit Internal Affairs, a bit Bullet in the Head, not as good as either. Its OK but kind of rambling and directionless and doesn’t move quick enough to cover the plot holes. Also: Why are these flabby alcoholic 50 fifty year old policemen married to hot 30 year old women?
Enron. The Smartest Guys in The room
If you want to get angry watch this. It’s pretty intelligent and generally solid though if you’re like me you’ll be constantly annoyed at the way some of the participants repeat the misaprehension that Darwinian natural selection leaves no room for altruism or cooperation.
Transporter
Homoerotic.
The Ordeal
Not as good as the films it liberally quotes from (Deliverance, Texas Chainsaw Masacre). The main character is allready too odd to give the film a normal center around whcih the madness takes place. Some funny scenes though.
Boring -
June 22nd, 2006
OK, I can’t pretend to be interested in the World Cup any more, I mean I tried for everyone’s sake but I peaked too soon. I shouldn’t have watched any group games, that’s where I went wrong and now the novelty’s worn off.
Basically when it comes to football I’m a bit of a girl, only really interested in the drama of penalties and I never really understood the off side rule (actually I understand the rule, the notion that it’s in any way a difficult rule as opposed to just a bit of a hack is just bollocks invented by thickos, I just don’t understand why they have it, seems like I’m not alone).
All this doesn’t mean I’m one of those anti-football people who say stupid things like ‘it’s just 22 men chasing a ball around’ or other dumb cliches, I know why football at it’s best can be excellent and I love the fact that it’s ultra simple to learn to play and to set up a quick game (not that I ever do that mind you I’m embarrassingly bad at all aspects of football apart from running (without the ball) and kicking the ball a long way (direction not guaranteed) both of which I’m pretty good at), it’s just that neither the high points or the fact that it’s fun to play (what sport isn’t?) can make up for the fact that I find watching most of it is either really boring or occasionally (that Italy vs USA match the other day) actively bad to the extent that I can’t be bothered to wait for the good bits. It’s a bit like the new series of Dr. Who, last years was OK, enough high points to keep me interested this year the good to bad ratio has dropped below the constant known as the Babylon 5 series 4 number which is the point at which I no longer care*. Should have probably warmed up by playing Go Go Beckham or something to ease myself into the whole thing.
Also: The fact that the whole thing’s basically a big marketing event annoys me too.
*to be fair, I don’t think it’s as bad as Babylon 5 I’m probably just more discerning these days.
Property Ladder -
June 20th, 2006
So we’re buying a flat (very slowly) so I’m obviously looking in estate agent windows all the time and stuff and paying attention to the property market in general, so that’s how I noticed that The US General Services Administration’s Office of Property Disposal has put this fabulous 3 island concrete atol on the market
Johnston Atoll consists of four small man-made islands enclosed in an egg-shaped reef approximately 21 miles in circumference. The wildlife refuge on the Atoll is a habitat for 32 species of coral, 300 species of fish, the endangered sea turtle and Hawaiian monk seal, and 20 species of migratory birds. Johnston, the main island, is 1000 yards long and 200 yards wide.
Anyway, unfortunately Emma burns easily so it’s not really practical given that there’s not much shelter there:
all buildings had been removed, there were no functioning utilities or water supply, the runway was iffy, the golf course disintegrated, the seawall containing the nuclear waste dump was insufficient, and that nearest services of any kind are over 700 miles away.
via The Center For Land Use Interpretation
District 13 Trailer Review -
June 19th, 2006
So basically it’s escape from New York with kungfu/parcour and that super slick Luc Besson look (c.f. Taxi). If the film is only half as good as the trailer it looks like this will be my favourite film of the year.
Comment Spam -
June 19th, 2006
Hi,
I’ve been having quite a lot of comment spam recently, most of it gets caught by a fairly strict set of filters but I’ve just noticed a couple of false positives and it’s possible I may have deleted some of your lovely human comments.
So basically sorry about that.
:(
Open data -
June 19th, 2006
If you put your photos on Flickr (or i expect, whatever the Google version of it is), then according to the terms of service you own them. Unfortunately it seems like this ownership might be the same kind of ownership you get if you buy music from iTunes i.e. you can only use it in ways in which Flickr want you to unless you’re prepared to put in some considerable technical effort…
When Kristopher Tate, the founder of the feature-rich startup photosharing site Zooomr (see prior coverage), asked Flickr earlier this month for access to their Commercial API, Flickr’s response by email was that “we choose not to support use of the API for sites that are a straight alternative to Flickr.” Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield posted to a Flickr forum on Wednesday saying that when it comes to direct competitors like Zooomr, “why should we burn bandwidth and CPU cycles sending stuff directly to their servers?”
What’s at issue is the ability for innovative companies to build server-to-server import interfaces that make it far easier for non-technical users to try out a new service and take what they own with them. There are a number of third party tools available for Flickr users to download all their data to their computers. That data can then be uploaded into another system. Competitor Zooomr wants to make transitions like that easy to do, and Flickr apparently doesn’t want them to.
from here.
To me what it sounds like is that whilst Flickr is happy for the customer to own their data in theory, in practice they’re just as keen to lock you into their system as any oldskool software house. This appears particularly bad as a lot of Flickr’s value as a whole (to their parent company Yahoo! as well as its individual users) is derived from this data that people add and the metadata that people add around it (tags, groups, pools, labels etc.).
Is Flickrs proposed policy on the matter much better?
that we definitely should approve [full API access] requests from direct competitors as long as they do the same.
…
(a) that they need to have a full and complete API and (b) be willing to give us access.
I mean that’s still a pretty high barrier to entry. I can appreciate that Flickr is a business and all but it seems they’ve built their reputation at least partly on customers ownership of data and putting these caveats and controls on how people access things seems a little disingenuous to say the least. It’s a similar problem to Wikipedia which is clearly an excellent resource (for some things at least, for other things it’s a list of things teenagers know) but it’s not something you necessarily want to use as a serious research tool [1] [2*] [3*]
Also: More about data portablility here.
*don’t really agree with these two (esp. Jaron Larnier who’s a bit of a
muddled hippy and has a tendency to ramble on to no good end) but they make some good points esp. about the fact that wikipedia has become a fairly standard bureuacracy.
