The world seems to be amazed with 3d films. Avatar has taken billions and people loved it. It didn’t really float my boat, I kinda like the smaller, less block buster animation thats about at the moment. I also like it when you don’t have to wear silly glasses and get motion sickness. Here are 3 shorts (all Oscar nominated), and 1 trailer to show you what I mean. Enjoy.
Making software changes as you grow up. In the beginning its all about the thrill of making something work. Then its rushing around to find “the next big thing”. Eventually though, you will think of the poor sap who is going to have to maintain the whirlwind you left behind. What happens if its you though? You are going to hate old you. Even worse if its somebody else.
This is really the thing with software testing. Its not about stifling creativity. Its not saying that you are too dumb to understand the system. If you test you are simple admitting to yourself that you are fallible. Any software engineer who thinks they are not are just in denial. All part of growing up I guess.
PS: I would like to apologise to anybody who has had to deal with any of my shit code I have left behind in my formative years. Please forgive me, as I forgive others who left me in a similar mess. We all have to learn.
I do like a good list and the top ten albums of the decade is a really interesting one. Here is mine, I can’t bring myself to put them in a Top 10 style order, just take them all as equal. There is also a spotify playlist if you fancy (although it doesn’t have the Boards of Canada album).
One week ago I was involved in a nasty car crash. Don’t worry, all parties are alive and getting better. As a result of this, unfortunate event, I’m having to spend a bit of time at home to recover.
Now, I’m not good with unexpected time off work, especially when I can’t drive or really move about much. In the upcoming week(s) though, between doctor visits and physio, I think I’ll avoid the internet and get back to some reading.
After far too long I’m starting to realise that the Web is detrimental to my learning. It encourages reading of short and light articles. My eyes seek hyperlinks and my mind is constantly getting distracted. Time for a few cups of tea and a good book.
Just a cool video I found the other night.
Sometimes I get involved in some internet japes that are only there to make me giggle. The latest is the twitter bot, @robot_santa. So on twitter he’s telling anybody that they are very naughty, to much amusement and bemusement. For those who don’t know, he stared in an awesome episode of Futurama and basically blew up everybody on XMAS eve.
God knows what I’ll do with him now…
Using ruby to make a tiny twitter bot is so simple. So in 25 lines I used the twitter and hpricot gems to make a bot that pulls a random quote from the puerile b3ta.com/talk.
# Rakefile
namespace :b3ta do
desc 'find a random quote from b3ta.com/talk and post it to twitter'
task :random_quote do
hdoc = Hpricot(open('http://www.b3ta.com/talk').read)
subs = []
hdoc.search(".post1, .post2") do |post|
username, subject = '', ''
post.search(".username") do |un|
username = un.inner_html
end
post.search("b") do |b|
subject = b.inner_html.to_s.gsub(/<\/?[^>]*>/, "")
end
subs << "\"\" " if subject != ''
end
message = subs[rand(subs.size - 1)]
twitter = Twitter::Base.new('twitter_username','twitter_password')
twitter.post(message)
puts message
end
end
To set it up and running, just put in a real twitter account and use “rake b3ta:random_quote”. Simple. Ok it may lack any error checking what so ever, but its still amazing what you can do with Ruby with such little code. (check out the rather offensive twitter feed here)
I found this scanning around Vimeo HD.
Bye bye mephisto and welcome back Wordpress. I used a little magic to get the old posts from mephisto to this new system as mephisto lacked an export feature.
1) Edit mephisto to give you all your post in one Atom document. Have a look in app/controller/feed/feed_controller.rb and change the limits of 15 to over the amount of posts you have.
2) Wordpress doesn’t like Atom, so convert your to RSS 2.0. I used a cool little webserice for this. With this service we can output something to our computer with curl
curl http://atom2rss.semiologic.com/?atom=http%3A%2F%2Fmibly.com%2Ffeed%2F > old_posts.xml
3) Upload old_posts.xml to you smashing new wordpress blog.
Now this doesn’t import any comments which is a shame.
So here is the first thing I’ve managed to get out of Opencalais. Its not really that interesting but a few people seem to like it.
So what you are looking at is all the programmes on iPlayer whose synopsis contains something that is of geographical importance. Now thanks to Opencalais’ new beta we get the longitutude and latitude of a given point (without it, you would have to use something like GeoNames) hence a point on the map. Simple really.
Whats in the mix?
So its another dumb map mashup. Now the real question is does it add anything new for the user? Well I’m not sure. I’m going to add a few colours to the markers, and output the geolocations in KML if I get the time.