This is hilariously good, and it’s kicking up a bit of a fuss. So, in case it gets taken down, I’ll be hosting a copy of it here, too… Click here to watch "My Land", starring Bush & Kerry. I can’t help but sing along…
Here’s a thought: a way to try to get unsolicited (treeware) junk mail banned -
Every time you recieve a bit of junk mail, just go and put it back in the post box: it’s almost all franked mail, and so the post office will re-sort it and deliver it back to you. Put a tally on the reverse side, and add one to it each time you forward it to yourself. If enough people did it, I wonder how many recursions you’d need to put through the post office before the postal workers union petitioned the government to disallow the sending of unsolicited treeware junk mail.
Not sure if it’d work, but I think I’ll do it anyway, just out of curiosity about how high a tally I can get before the post office start refusing to re-deliver them. Heh.
Got my Dad’s web site done. Just waiting for the domain name registration to go through so I can deploy it.
Claire’s at work this Saturday morning, so I’m taking advantage of the oppertunity to finish the web site I’m developing for my dad - almost got a deployable version ready, which is nice, because I could do with getting his feedback on it and (assuming all’s well with design and whatnot) deploying it “live” on Monday morning. Which is all good, because I need the money!
The folks who now own the cafe below us - our new landlords - have made great strides in getting it ready for use. It’s now got tables, and chairs, and a chiller unit, and some stock, and a coffee maker, and all kinds of stuff. It’s been entirely repainted and refloored and redecorated. It’s pretty much ‘there’. They’ve even put up the new sign. The new sign advertises the cafe’s web site, mgees.com. I’ve taken a look… and… it would appear that they tried to make a web page in Microsoft Word (bad start), then ran the source code through a copy of Dadadodo to ensure that it was completely mangled, before they uploaded it. Jeez. Still, they’ve asked me to quote them for a new one, so once I’m done with this site for my dad I’ll see what I can do for them.
Speaking of Dadadodo, Claire’s been playing with it recently. You should see what happens when you put the book of Genesis through it… oh; we laughed.
Back to the code…
I’m making progress with the people I work with. I’ve now got six of the eight folks in our office using Opera (they were formerly using Microsoft Internet Explorer, and some of them have tried Mozilla Firefox. Perhaps my recent spate of ‘blog posts criticising Microsoft’s browser - combined with the various hacks I’ve been showing them that I can use to exploit an IE terminal - has had some part in this.
Just Phil and Sarah left who still use IE as thier primary browser. Think I’ll install Firefox on the sly and see how long it takes them to notice.
Win. R.
Warning: the picture you are about to see is seriously cute. You have been warned. Brace yourself:
Decided to have Dadadodo, which I used yesterday, to generate some poetry based on my vanity pages from the old version of AvAngel.com, my perpetually-under-redevelopment web site. Take a look at this:
My body, of the religion,
That of seeing myself in a moment,
Stares ahead.
Always been an existential touch,
And I banish this.
My life, without a link, is in my writing,
To her I’m water,
At the rain comes ecstasy:
It’s gone.
Not bad for an algorithm with no pre-programmed understanding of language, I thought. Meaningless… but in a good way…
Whoops! As a result of some buggy code I’d written, my recent ‘blog entries didn’t get cross-posted to LiveJournal, as they usually do - it turns out that the cross-posting code I wrote only works if I write my entire blog entry at once… and my recent entries have been quite long and so I’ve written them in ‘installments’, which didn’t work. Hmm. I’ll write a fix for that soon.
In any case; here’s a summary of my recent posts, with links so that you can go read them:
Rearing Of The Ugly Head, And Apache’s Dirty Secrets - 26th July: Reb, my ex-girlfriend, reads my blog and places a comment… so I have a bitch about it.
Something Cheery - 26th July: A pick-me-up after my grotty post about Reb.
Things I Don’t Have Time For At Work - 27th July: Rant about an indecisive co-worker.
Dreams Within Dreams Within Dreams - 28th July: Description of a wierd, convoluted, recursive and self-referencial dream I had. Odd.
Dadadodo: Exterminate All Rational Thought - 28th July: I download a clever word disassociation program and let it loose on Scatmania, with bizarre - yet funny - results.
Downloaded a copy of Dadadodo, a syntax-capable word disassociator. Simply put, word disassociation programs tend to work by taking a body of text and randomly shuffling chunks of it around. Dadadodo instead builds a probability tree based on the frequency at which words occur in sequencial relationships with one another, and uses this as it’s basis for deciding where to transplant words to. As a result, it is able to exhibit behaviour that can appear to demonstrate an understanding of the grammar rules of a language, even though it’s output is (when a large enough input source is used) semantically meaningless.
For example, I ran the front page of Scatmania.org through Dadadodo. Here’s some highlights, with a few minor punctuation corrections (the program seems to mangle apostrophes):
More indication of the next five years: a very odd dream, with appearances from Scatmania. NatWest keep telling me comes better yet, the last three shades of child bearing age. I terrified her own risk.
Parallel parking for a network Bryn and uses vibration to investigate these graduate, I think I sat on the other a server my boss about me I had the BBC. Don’t have far better News. I’ve scared been possible to for that generates them. Following up a militarist feminist group. Within the demo of it I’ll run by profession if for larger. A Japanese inventor has been partially damaged during A backup.
When I sat on a man talks to have a stunning. It off in a survey of your own speakers. Not using Internet Fun News I see the browser market, instead: saved pages from Yorkshire backups, I’m in a plant pot and uses vibration to get a militarist feminist group, Within the Context you’ve offered Me.
Umm… do they e-mail them, Thank you to for the opinions of my boss about me. Promised you lot a very odd dream, with a very Good you sat down today! Do they should be on online chat with appearances from Amazon: dual processor board designed for playing the parallel Parking for Dummies. read Scatmania Filed under a partner?
Sadly, I could pay them.
The rest of my co-worker’s quite horrifying come the top with Direct Legal Collections one! Money, I thought I saw Faye for at work with which Scatmania. Lots of schoolchildren that I liked share. It has been partially damaged during a part minigun.
Last night I had a very odd dream, with references to previous (recurring) dreams, interspersed with appearances from people I’ve met since:
(more…)
No, contrary to my co-worker’s assumptions, I don’t really have time to re-draw a set of web buttons in a different shade of green just because he’s indecisive about the last three shades of green were ‘wrong’, but he didn’t know by which direction and wasn’t able to give any indication of what colour they should be…
…perhaps I’d be faster to write a program that generates them on the fly to a template, and call it from the site code… but I don’t have time for that either.
Ho hum.