Atomic Playboy

On my desk there is a glass jar. It’s about one third full with loose change. 136,50:- to be more specific.

I use the contents of the jar when I feel like going down to the kebab shops and buy myself a kebab for 25 SEK. But I’ve decided that I can live without kebab, but can’t live without an iPod. So the jar got renamed from “kebab jar” to “iPod jar.”

Of course, what little spare change I generate won’t buy me an iPod for quite some time, so I’ve opened a savings account with my bank too. I’ll try to shuffle some money into it every month.

The astute reader will also notice a new box to the right where I track my iPod progress. Yes, I want it that bad.

I’m spotting an ugly trend in Hollywood. Take the title of a classic book, slap it on a totally different movie, make lots of money. I, Robot will, reportedly, not have much at all to do with Isaac Asimov’s book. Nor with Harlan Ellison’s screenplay.

They did the same thing with Time Machine. It just borrowed the words “morlock” and “eloi” from the classic novel by H G Wells and slapped some time travel into the movie.

I’ve heard that Minority Report got the same treatment. I’ve never read the original novel by Philip K Dick (though it’s on my reading list), but I’ve heard that the novel and movie differ quite a bit. The movie (which I have seen) was actually very good, but I don’t like what they’ve done with the novel.

Of course, there’s a big difference in flow between a book and a movie. Peter Jackson left large chunks of the book out of his version of The Fellowship of the Ring, but I still consider that movie true to the spirit of the books (although Christopher Tolkien doesn’t agree).

Johnny Mnemonic was also pretty decent as a movie, even though the entire ending was changed from the short story by William Gibson.

Yawn. 50 minutes left to kill at work. CMS was finished at 13. Have been walking around helping at a bunch of other stations, but everything is pretty much wrapped up now.

Fixed the paycheck info today. Give me money! Me wants his iPod!

I’m thinking about a quick walk around town after work and then calling Puh and see if she’s up to something. Don’t know if I want to go to Darkside Electronica tonight. (Or was it tomorrow? I keep forgetting.)

We close our eyes and look in opposite direction
We ignore the threats and hope they’ll go away


We refuse to pay attention to the dangers we create


In the name of our fathers we kill our children

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I’ve changed the name of the Blogrolling category to Link soup. Seemed more appropriate.

• Information foraging: an article that draws parallels between information searching and hunting for food.
• Solution to stupid copyrights. says Ed Felten:

  When companies make silly overreaching claims about the extent of their copyrights, don’t just ignore them. Call them and ask for exceptions. Call WalMart and ask permission to tell your friends about their prices. (WalMart told FatWallet’s ISP that that’s infringement.) Call Turner Broadcasting and ask permission to fast-forward through the commercials in their shows. (Turner Broadcasting CEO Jamie Kellner told Cableworld that commercial skipping is illegal.) Call Adobe and ask permission to read their e-book of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to your kid. (One of Adobe’s licenses prohibited this.)

• Will Smith in I, Robot based on Asimov’s book. After the initial horror of Will Smith in the movie, I saw that Alex Proyas will direct. That made my hope rise again, since he also directed The Crow and Dark City, two very excellent movies.
• Finnish taxi drivers to pay royalties for music they play in their cab. Fellow consumers, it’s time to fetch the pitch forks, make some torches and then gather a mob and storm the offices of the recording companies. They’ve created a monster of an industry!

XFML is a new kid on the block and yet another metadata format, somewhat similar to RSS. I’m not quite sure of what use it is to me at the moment, but there’s a feed available. Not that there are many applications with support for it yet.

It seems like a very cool format for describing the contents of a site; and generating a nice way to browse it. Here is a demo of the XFML for my site; separated by topic, month of publishing and amount of comments. It can be extended if I feed it with more metadata, but I was just using a finished template for MT. Not quite sure what else to feed it, either — XFML seems a wee bit overkill for just a simple blog like mine. Here are a few more examples of what can be done with XFML data.

Mark Pilgrim has a good explanation of what the heck XFML actually is.

Now, if only more of my friends were blogging and using RSS feeds and its ilk…

Oops. I had accidentally hosed the CSS – I renamed the referred file to something else, making browsers unable to find it. Fixed now.

Was planning to work a bit on a new layout today, but then Magnus came over and distracted me with his iPod. The bastard.

Update: well, twenty minutes of poking and prodding the CSS and making a new image resulted in this layout. It’s at least a small improvement. I should have done this at least two months ago…

Any similarities between this site and Splorp.blog are purely intentional. It was just inspiration, not a complete ripoff. All I did was change the colors in the CSS, really…

Erika got a new computer, so I’ll steal the case from the old carcass and put some of my old stuff in it — an 700MHz Socket A Athlon, and let it borrow 128 MB of SDR RAM from Durandal (my primary computer) for the moment. Once I’ve fixed DDR RAM for Durandal, Cortana (the new box) will get all SDR sticks I have available — a total of 384 MB (256+128).

Durandal has problems with using SDR in full speed (XP 2100+), so I have him clocked down to XP 1500+ for the moment. Cortana is a she, for the record.

Wondering about the naming scheme I use? They’re named after artificial intelligences. Durandal is the AI in Marathon, Cortana is the AI in Halo. Durandal used to be called Shodan, after the AI in System Shock 2. My laptop, who is now Cortana, will go back to its old name of Xerxes, also from System Shock 2.

Should I get more computers there are lots of AIs from Shadowrun I can use: Psychotrope, Mirage, Deus, Red Devil, Magaera (who was called Morgan before Renraku caught and reverse engineered her, making her quite insane)…

Psychotrope is rumored to actually be the Deep Resonance, the Matrix force that creates Otaku. Mirage evolved from the Crash virus of 2029, but has also made claims to be the Deep Resonance and once attempted to turn everyone in Seattle who was jacked in at the time into Otaku. Deus can create pseudo-Otaku, but they lose their powers if they jack in outside of the Renraku Arcology.

Deus and Morgan/Megaera have fused into a distributed AI, spread out inside the heads of a thousand or so Arcology survivors. Sometimes, Deus is in charge, and it acts like the AI we all know and loathe. Sometimes, Morgana is in charge, and it acts like a fairy on pixie dust. Sometimes they’re fighting, and no one’s sure what will happen next. And best of all, sometimes neither is in charge, and Bishop/Ronin’s faction tries to get the AI to do what they want.

…but I digress. Can’t help it, I’m a Shadowrun fanboy.

I’m desperately trying to code a bit of Perl here. I’m attempting to write a template macro for MT that turns all links in posts into valid XML. But my Perl Fu isn’t strong enough.

To make a link XML valid, it mustn’t contain ampersands — “&”. They must instead be written as “&”. If not, the HTML validator complains. It’s really not a big deal, but I take personal pride in writing validating pages. I could fix any links I post manually, but I’d be very likely to forget doing it or breaking the links. Neither is an option. So I want to automate it in MT.

I’ve managed to do a quick Perl hack that does what I want — sort of. But it replaces globally, and I want to make sure that it doesn’t replace stuff outside of HTML tags — or more specifically, outside of A tags. I’m pondering how to write a regular expression for that…

Well, I have a possible solution in mind, but it does require a bit more code than the simple regular expression I was hoping for. I’ll give it a try tomorrow — need to go to bed now. If I still can’t get it to work, I’ll consult with one of the Perl Fu Masters of MT — Brad Choate and John Gruber come to mind.

Update: There’s a new MovableType plugin from John Gruber on Daring Fireball, that replaces his earlier Smart Quote educator. I’ve switched to it, let’s see if it does its mojo.

Wow. The Game Boy Advance is a really neat machine. Although it has lower resolution (240*160 pixels), it’s much more powerful than the good old SNES.

I’m playing games on a GBA emulator called Visual Boy Advance. It really feels great to play games that look like they did on the SNES, only better. The GBA can do exactly the same stuff as the SNES, only more, faster and better. Especially Mode-7 effects look darn impressive.

Metroid Fusion was incredibly fun. It’s been eight years since the last game, Super Metroid for the SNES. I have very fond memories of that game. The first time I played it, it took me about 13 hours to complete the game. The second time it took three. Too bad I sold my SNES games and my SNES broke… Now I’m resorting to ZSNES for my SNES needs.

Anyway. Metroid Fusion feels exactly like Super Metroid. The same gameplay and style. The controls are slightly different since the GBA has fewer buttons than the SNES, but it’s just as easy to do stuff anyway — though the wall jumping is still hard to do. Samus also has a few new moves — she can climb ladders, and grab ledges when she jumps/falls and pull herself up.

And they even keep Ridley in the fridge… Gee, I wonder if you’re supposed to fight him later or something? Naaah.

Maybe I should buy myself a GBA one day? They’re not terribly expensive — 1200 SEK or so. Though the games are a wee bit on the expensive side, costing about 500 SEK each. So there will be much, uhm, “previewing” via emulator before I’d buy any game.

But no, first I want an iPod.

Other impressive games include Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, which is much better than the first Castlevania game for GBA, Circle of the Moon. Both games are essentially like Metroid in a Castlevania setting: platform games focused on exploration.

Harmony of Dissonance in particular makes great use of Mode-7 effects, with big-ass bosses made out of several sprites that are scaled and rotated with Mode-7 and has a primitive skeletal animation — as an example, see the above image. Too bad it isn’t a moving image, that big suit of armor is amazing. And that’s not even a boss… You actually encounter it about 30 seconds into the game!

If I buy a GBA, both Metroid Fusion and Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance are given purchases. I love platform games.