Category: Geek

Categories
Geek It Happened to Me

Signs of Life at the Other Blogs

They’ve been keeping me quite busy here at “Dos Vacas” — so busy, in fact, that I asked ol’ Boss Ross if it would be a problem if I put The Farm and IndieGameDev

on hiatus until, say, April. Ross looked at me if I’d suggested that we

get the department all cross-dressed, liquored up and into a nice

friendly round of Russian Roulette:

Photo: Weird photo featuring three women at dinner with booze, one of whom is holding a gun and suggesting some firearms-based fun.

That’s me, Darryl Green and Ross Rader, all liquored up,

cross-dressed and ready to get our gun on. Or maybe it’s how Dave Winer

imagines the “White Males: Threat or Menace?” panel at Bloghercon would

be like.

So I spent some time this morning following the Getting Things Done

method of looking at upcoming tasks, which is pretty nicely captured in

this infographic from an entry in  MarkTAW.com…

Graphic: 'Cascading Next Actions' chart from marktaw.com.

…and after a little thought decided, yeah, I can do those blogs and these projects reasonably.


The Farm has today’s posts up, and I’ll get to IndieGameDev a little later today.

Categories
Geek

The Best Simpsons "Couch Gag" Ever

Update:

Had to take the file down temporarily as Blogware’s servers were

getting overloaded (we’re getting a bigger, faster one soon). I’ll let

you know as soon as I’ve found a new home for the video.

If you have BitTorrent on your machine, someone’s got a .torrent of the file at

http://chalco.dyndns.org/get/torrents/Simpsons_Couch.torrent.

Charles Eames

has a saying that’s one of my favourites: “Eventually, everything

connects”, a statement that harkens back to an earlier saying by the

Buddhists: “When you slice a blade of grass, you shake the universe”.

One of Charles Eames’ best-known works is the film he created with his wife Ray, Powers of 10,

the classic 1977 film that looks at the relative size of things

from  microscopic to the edges of the known universe. Your

mathematical education is not complete unless you’ve seen this film.

My friend Chris Turner, author of Planet Simpson,

has a philosophy similar to Eames’: eventually, everything connects to

The Simpsons. More proof for this hypothesis appeared recently when the

Simpsons showed its best “couch gag” (the gag at the end of the title

sequence where they gather on the couch), in which they pay homage to Powers of 10.

It’s brilliant and you must watch it [10.3 MB QuickTime movie, enclosure]. I’ll post as soon as I’ve found a new home for the video!

Categories
Geek

Browser Stats

Boss Ross pointed in Tucows’ internal “Research and Innovation” mailing list to this Jason Kottke article on the stats for browsers used to visit his site in February. Jason reports that the breakdown looks like this:

  • Mozilla: 45%
  • Internet Explorer: 31%
  • Everything else: 24%

In an update, Jason noted that he may have accidentally lumped in

Apple’s Safari browser with the Mozilla ones. For those of you who are

familiar with all that hoo-hah about user-agent strings, he forgot to

note that Safari’s user-agent string has “Apple WebKit” and “KHTML”

while Mozilla -based browser strings have “Gecko”.

Jason points to the stats of Boing Boing, one of the 800-pound gorillas of the blogosphere, which break down as follows:

  • Internet Explorer: 36.8%
  • Firefox: 36.7%
  • Safari: 8.4%
  • Unknown: 7.7%
  • Mozilla: 4.3%
  • Netscape: 1.6%

My gut feeling is that the less technically-oriented sites are visited

by less technically-oriented people, who would tend to use the default

browser on the dominant operatin system: Internet Explorer. I also

suspect that more technically-oriented people would tend to visit more

technically-oriented sites and would tend to use a Mozilla-based

browser like Firefox.

Here’s the browser breakdown for The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century for February 2005. These numbers are based on the first page of results reported by the tool I use to create this blog, Blogware.

The majority of my readers use Internet Explorer, which has an over

2-to-1 lead over the next browser, Firefox. I suspect that these stats

may be reversed in The Farm, the programmer weblog that I write for Tucows.

Browser Percentage
Microsoft Internet Explorer

 57%

(678601 hits)
Mozilla Firefox 25%

(303033 hits)
Apple Safari

 5%

(61560 hits)
Yahoo Slurp

(The bot that feeds data to Yahoo’s search engine)

 5%

(58312 hits)
Googlebot

(The bot that feeds data to Google)

 4%

(46665 hits)
Konqueror

(Linux browser)

 3%

(36443 hits)
Pluck

(Web aggregation service)

 1%

(14529 hits)
Categories
Geek

Signs of Life at IndieGameDev

Yup, new articles (finally!) posted to one of the blogs I get paid to

write, IndieGameDev, a blog for independent game developers. There are

three articles today:

Categories
Geek

IKEA Fails the Turing Test, But Aces the Davezilla Test

IKEA has a cute little artifical intelligence program, Anna, who will gladly try to help meet your strangely-named disposable Swedish furniture needs.

Honorary GTABlogger Davezilla had some other Swedish needs (I’ll bet they were strangely-named, too), and he compiled this animation which chronicles his conversation with Anna.

Screen shot: Davezilla's conversation with IKEA's chatbot, Anna.

In case you’re not familiar with the term, here’s the Wikipedia entry for “Turing Test”.

Categories
Geek

Chris Pirillo Wants to Save You Five Bucks!

Chris Pirillo is

offering a $5 coupon for interested purchasers of the FeedDemon

RSS/Atom reader for Windows. Download this FeedDemon from here

and use this promo code to save $5: CPN05GNOME.

Some of FeedDemon’s features:

  • Pre-configured with dozens of popular feeds, so you can start

    using it right away

  • Newspaper displays news items

    from dozens of sites in a single web page for easy reading

  • Watches collect news items containing specific

    words or phrases,

    alerting you to items of interest so you don’t have to look for them

  • News Bins store your favorite news items for

    future reference

  • Integration with Feedster and

    other popular RSS search engines

  • Built-in tabbed

    browser for surfing the web within FeedDemon

  • Supports all versions of RSS and Atom 0.3
  • Imports/exports feed lists from OPML
  • Easy to use for beginners, yet powerful enough to

    please the most sophisticated news junkie

  • FeedDemon is a native Windows application, so it

    runs fast and does NOT require the bulky .NET runtime.

Categories
Geek It Happened to Me

It Just Dawned on Me That Bill Gates is Partially Responsible for My First Kiss (and Now I Need a Drink)

Take a look at this screen shot from an old IBM PC game whose filename

was “DONKEY.BAS” (the “.BAS” filename extension denotes that the

program was written in the BASIC programming language):

I will bet that I am the only human being who feels an old adolescent

twinge whenever I see this screen. The reason is that back in 1983,

when I was just shy of turning 16, I was reverse engineering this game

on my friend’s dad’s IBM PC when a girl interrupted me for my first

alcoholic drink and kiss. Had I not been at that machine, that

experience could potentially have been delayed by years (you must

remember that it was 1983, well before the Internet and geek chic made

nerds cool).

Today, I discovered that Bill Gates himself co-wrote DONKEY.BAS. If

Bill hadn’t written that cheesy little demo program, my personal

history would’ve been far less interesting. The girl, you see, was so

much trouble that the rest of the story, I’m afraid, is unbloggable.

Needless to say, the thought of ol’ Bill’s involvement in my first

kiss, however tangential, is a little irksome. I need to do a

double-shot of Crown Royal now.

Photo: Doctored photo of Bill Gates hugging Joey deVilla.

Thank you, Bill…yeeeeesh.

If you want to play DONKEY.BAS or see its innards, check out this entry on IndieGameDev, where I’ve posted both an executable that’ll run on any Windows box (even XP!) and the BASIC source code.