It’s 11PM on a Saturday night. Where am I: out-drinking, watching a film, or having a quiet night with my girlfriend? None of the above. I’m fecking studying.
Exams: I hate you with a passion so intense it could make Julia Roberts good looking.
According to Microsoft, IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation of Internet Explorer. The reason? “Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1. Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS” (emphasis is mine).
Now call me crazy, but Mozilla and Opera have managed to create vastly superior browsers to IE on the same OS (transparent PNG support, support for a slew of standards, faster rendering, etc). So obviously that reason is bullshit.
So what could the real reason be? Perhaps they want to push their next OS (Longhorn) on the back of, in part at least, the new version of IE that will be included. At the moment, I sure as hell don’t want it. The freedom-crippling components, sorry, DRM software are off-putting enough.
The truth is that there are vastly superior browsers to Internet Explorer already available, it’s (slowly) losing market share, and Microsoft are getting desperate. Good luck to them, but I hope the general public wake up and get a decent browser first.
Today, it started. Exams: the scourge of any self-respecting student. My first exam was today and it did not go well. So I’m going to get my head into the books for the next few exams (I have 9 in total). Ah, the joys of studying until your eyes twitch.
This, of course, means that I’ll have less time to devote to this corner of my life. Updates will be sporadic to non-existant until the 13th or so. I have a little gap in between exams that I’ll try to make some serious updates in. However, I’ve been prepared for a dry spell for quite some time. Living on my desktop is file full of quick ideas for posts, should the need arise to fill some space. Expect quite a few entries from that over the next few weeks.
Anyway, I have to get some sleep now. Another exam tomorrow: Information Management, AKA databases, web design, professional issues and HCI. Hooray for the hideous mish-mash that is computing!
So, you’ve listened to all your music enough to be able to reproduce every word, identify every instrument (make and model) used and wonder if there’s anything left for you? Well, of course. Try some new music from the BBC live sessions. it’s basically tonnes of new bands playing songs, live. I especially recommend JetPlane Landing, Biffy Clyro and Bis.
Now, while they’re all real media files only available for streaming, I’m sure certain elements among you can figure out how to download them using a program like StreamBox. Actually, forget I said anything about that program. Dodgy stuff. Yep, forget.
I’ve finally gotten around to updating the Archives code. Now when you look at a specific month (for example, March 2003), you’ll get a list of entries and descriptions, rather than a list of days.
This makes it a million times easier to find old items, since you don’t have to trawl through every single day in the archives to find something. It used to take roughly 30N/2 to find entry N. It now takes N/2. Just a slight improvement, then.
From Philipp Lenssen, the same guy who made the MemoMarker I mentioned a few days ago, is a brand new new toy: The EgoBot.
Ask it a question and it will query Google and make up an appropriate answer. For example, I asked it “What is your quest?”, and got back “My quest is and has always been: to create music, dreams and words that dance through sound”. Very impressive stuff for a chatBot-style script. Like most scripts of this nature, it’s fun for a while.
Tying in with what I’ve already mentioned about abstractions, Joel has written up The Law Of Leaky Abstractions; something that I’ve known for a while, but have never managed to consolidate in my head. This is why too many layers of abstraction are dangerous: if something leaks (and they do), it takes an age to track the problem through the layers and then figure out why it leaked.
I don’t really want to say too much about The Matrix Reloaded (that’s got to be the millionth time I’ve linked to that site in the past week or two - I really should automate it). I’ve now seen it and it didn’t live up to the (admittedly ridiculous) hype I created in my head. I’ll try to avoid spoilers, but if you absolutely don’t want to read anything that might ruin the film for you then do not read ahead.
Now, don’t get me wrong - it was a good film: full of great action sequences, interesting insights into the workings of The Matrix world, and pseudo-philosophical conversation. But I’m sure there are a hundred other sites (rightly) extolling the virtues of the film. Go find them. For me the bad points were:
Now, like I said, these things did annoy me, but I did enjoy it. It’s certainly worth going to see. If you do, sit through the 8 or so minutes of credits for the trailer of The Matrix Revolutions. It looks sweet, but I won’t be getting my hopes up as much.
Taking a lead from Steal These Buttons and the new online button maker, I’ve added a buttons page to this site.
For the most part, it’s utterly useless. But maybe you’ll find something remotely interesting in there. I doubt it though.
Philipp Lenssen gives us an interesting way to bookmark information: the MemoMarker. It tries to get around the fact that URIs do change (despite the W3C saying that Cool URIs Don’t Change).
It does this by looking at a page and determining what the longest words are. The logic is that these are generally the most unique words on a page, when taken as a whole. It then creates a Google search string using those words. In the end, when your site gets indexed by the googlebot, you can use the search string (or memomark) to find moving content in the google cache.
The only problem is that the googlebot takes roughly a month to update its index, so the links are absolutely useless until then.