The return of Flash Gordon

Posted on by Nimgimli

So tonight, Flash Gordon returns to TV (on the SciFi Channel). The chances of it sucking are reasonably high, but I still have to see for myself. The fact that it seems to be using the old Queen ‘anthem’ alone makes its prospects quite grim.

But SciFi does have a knack of making mediocre tv shows that I still enjoy watching. I’m thinking of Eureka and Stargate:Atlantis. I can’t call either of them great TV, but I still get a kick out of them, and in both cases I think its about casting and the ‘family of character’ aspects.

And of course, SciFi has Battlestar. I was *extremely* dubious about BSG before it started to air, and look how amazing that turned out.

So we’ll see.

.hack// Another Birth Vol. 3

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.hack// Another Birth Vol. 3It got unbearably hot in the office today so I sought shelter in a much cooler part of the apartment and finished off .hack// Another Birth Vol. 3. These things read like the wind…you pick them up and suddenly you’re half-way through the book.

Things are starting to heat up for the (presumably) grand finale in Vol 4. An uneasy coalition between hackers, admins and players has formed in order to find out exactly what is happening in The World. BlackRose is finally starting to open up to her friends a bit. There’s this common theme I’ve noticed in anime, and now in this manga-ish novel, where characters are always very closed to each other. I’m wondering if that is a typical Japanese behavior. No one wants to burden their friends by letting on that not everything is wonderful in their world. So while Akira/BlackRose is playing in The World in an attempt to save her little brother from a coma, she carries on (well, until now) as if she hasn’t a care in the world. It seemed that even if keeping quiet meant putting friends at risk, she would hold her tongue. It’s good to see her finally opening up; it was getting a bit dull watching her constantly stop a conversation for fear of giving something away.

It’ll be good to get past this series. I have so much else I should be reading and I keep picking these up. Life has been rather a bit stressful lately and I think these silly novels are my way of escaping. I suppose it beats swillin’ beers and Jameson, eh?

MRI tale from Jason Slater

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I’ve never had an MRI, and neither had The IT Manager’s Journal blogger Jason Slater before today.

After reading his tale, I hope I never have to have one!

MRI Scan

I wasn’t ready for the face clamp as it shall henceforth be known nor was I ready for the tiny hole they were rather optimistically hoping to stuff me through. To get an idea of my plight imagine trying to push a plucked, but rather fat and juicy, chicken with an american football helmet on through the holes of a series of polo mints.

Read the whole entry.

Silverlight

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Microsoft’s Silverlight has hit their 1.0 RC milestone. In case this one has slipped under your radar, here’s how MS describes the technology:

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

From what I gather, it’s essentially an alternative to Flash. Surprisingly for a product from MS, it’s available for Mac OS X and eventually for Linux as well as Windows.

I’m not going to claim the slightest expertise here. This is a case of a technology floating around and me hearing about it without paying much attention until suddenly it gets in my face. I hope to dig into it a bit more and if/when I do I’ll report my findings.

Mushroom Life

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When I was back in high school, I remember looking forward to geometry. Why? Because we used graph paper in geometry, and that meant I could spend the entire period doodling out generate after generation of Life (as in John Conway, not as in Parker Brothers, or something deep and philosophical). I was fascinated by it then, and I guess I still am, because when I Stumbled Upon Mushroom Life* I was immediately drawn back into the whole wonder of it all.

In this version Conway’s simple cells are replaced by Mushrooms that grow, or die, depending on the rules that have been around since the 70’s. But as the mushrooms age, they mature, which is just a visual thing but it adds another layer of satisfaction to the game.

It was interesting to run into this at the same time I’m slowly churning through Darwin Among the Machines since in some ways the topics are related. But that’s for another day. Right now I need to go grow some more mushrooms.

 

*Editor’s note: This URL is shady. Go there at your own risk. [5 Dec 2018]

Another day, another widget…

Posted on by Nimgimli

Today I’m testing out Lijit. It’s kind of a personal search engine that gathers content from your blog, all kinds of social networking sites you might be a part of, bookmarking sites, etc.

At least, that’s my understanding. I generally sign up for stuff like this first, then go back and understand it later.

Of course, I’ve got all kinds of links on here to places I signed up for then never used… for instance my del.icio.us bookmarks haven’t been updated in years.

Lijit Search

Well, it’s interesting but certainly not perfect. I tried searching on “Skellig” which is the name of a book I reviewed here some time ago. Search came up empty. Going to google and searching on site: dragonchasers.com skellig does return results so Google has spidered me.

Ah well, what do you want for nothin, right?

Med.ium Widget

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I just signed up for Me.dium, which is kind of part social network, part cyber-stalker-tool. I jest, of course, but what it does is let you see where on the web your friends are, and let’s you chat with them.

Honestly I’m not sure what the experience is going to be like, so I won’t talk a lot about it yet. But I got a “Widget” centered around this site and I wanted to try it out, so here it is:

OK, so there it is. But what does it mean? What is the relationship that Med.ium is finding between this site and the ones that ‘surround’ it?

More research required…

Blueprint CSS

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Warning: Incoming Geek Post

Blueprint is a CSS Framework that’s supposed to help you jump-start the design of a web page. As I’ve spent most of my web development years doing back-end code and not much worrying about display issues, it looks to be a good tool for me to use. Haven’t tried it yet, though.

Darren from gamemakker.co.uk has a post about his initial experiences with Blueprint that is well worth reading.

Captchas again

Posted on by Nimgimli

A while back I wrote about an article on using CAPTCHAs to digitize books.

Well it looks like the technology has been launched!. I just encountered it when signing up (last one into the pool as always) for a Facebook account.

Anyway in my original post I speculated on how this would work. Well, this new post is just to pat myself on the back, because this is from the ReCaptcha site, and it’s pretty close to what I’d guessed.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

There’s a lot of smart people in the world but I’m generally not one of them, so when I get something right its cause for celebration! 🙂