Sun, 17 Apr 2005
MegaTokyo Books: 3vil L33T!
I'm a fan of MegaTokyo, it has an
interesting (but deathly slow) story, great art, a lot of oddities and
some really neat jokes for gamers. In the interest of giving some support
back I decided to spend a couple of days roaming through the comic shops of
London looking for the three published volumes of strips; it was such a
chore :)
While I've actually read my way from start to current using the online archives the quality of the art is even more visible in the books, while the quality has risen over the years (from a pretty high starting position to be honest) some the drawings are just staggeringly good. At around £7 a book it's well worth picking a volume or two (or three) up and having a read. You won't regret it!
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Posted: 2005/04/17 16:52 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Google Search Phrase Highlighting
I've added another blosxom plugin to
the site, this one is called google_highlight
and does what you'd expect. It highlights any Google search terms that lead
you here. I've had a play and it seems to work fine so I've added it to the
live site. If you have any problems with it please let me know.
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Posted: 2005/04/17 13:40 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Code Brew: The Second Attempt
Back in November I read a post by describing the idea of Code Brews. After writing up my own Initial
thoughts on Code Brews I got distracted and forgot all about it.
Christmas has that effect on me...
After spending some time clearing out some old half-written documents I stumbled on the blog entry and decided to try and kick it off again. I've sent an email to six London based techs asking if they are interested in doing a sort of show-and-tell and I'm waiting for responses.
I'm eager to kick-start one of these meets and see what goes wrong and what can be done better. I'm not sure how focused the topics should be, should they all present on one language? How about a security night? Should developers and sysadmins have their own nights etc? By holding the first one with a group of people I'm pretty comfortable with it should make getting some feedback a lot easier. It'll be interesting to try and gauge how many people make a good group. I assume it's going to be like D&D and be four-eight. Assuming it happens I'll post some notes up afterwards.
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Posted: 2005/04/17 13:36 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Seven-Second Marketing -- Short Review.
Ivan Misner has a remarkable reputation in business referral circles as a
master networker and a talented author. Unfortunately Seven-Second
Marketing: How to Use Memory Hooks to Make You Instantly Stand Out in a
Crowd doesn't seem to reflect this.
This slender volume explains the value of a memory hook (or tag-line as some of us know them) before delving in to the different types, such as playing on your name, the nature of your work or using humour and rhyme. Unfortunately after the very brief intro as to the why the bulk of the already small book is spent showing examples and little personal anecdotes from the people that created them.
If you have NO imagination then the samples provided here maybe enough to kick-start your own ideas but they give nothing a couple of hours searching on the web won't match. All in all a great disappointment. 2/10.
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Posted: 2005/04/17 13:10 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Short Film Reviews: April 2005
I've spent the last couple of days catching up on some reading and
nothing helps the concentration more than having some large CGI
explosions in the background :) Over the last couple of days I've read
three books (short reviews coming soon) and watched a small pile of
films.
First up is The Chronicles of Riddick, a very dull Sci-Fi film that has a couple of neat Matrix- esque fight scenes, a rubbish plot that you really have to dig to find and seriously under uses both Thandie Newton and Alexa Davalos (Gwen from Angel). 5/10 for the fight scenes.
Next we have Cube, a much more interesting film. "7 complete strangers of widely varying personality characteristics are involuntarily placed in an endless kafkaesque maze containing deadly traps." Featuring a young Nicole de Boer (Deep Space Nine and The Dead Zone) and the almost always (I've seen Darklight) excellent David Hewlett this film has a lot of interesting ideas and a very strange (yet engaging plot). Not for everyone but 8/10 for fans of less obvious films.
Enemy at the Gates is billed as two snipers hunting each other among the ruins of the Battle of Stalingrad. While the idea itself isn't great (don't watch films about snipers with people that play Counterstrike :)) the execution is actually a lot better than I was expecting. The characters have a bit of depth and the sheer pointlessness comes across quite well. 7/10
Lastly in this batch we have Lashou shentan, or Hard-Boiled as it was called in Western markets. This film is pure John Woo. Very basic story, unimpressive plot and excellent action. If you want to turn your brain off (don't even bother counting how many shots they get out of hand guns) and watch some heavy firepower action then this is a top choice. If not go get Cube. 8/10.
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Posted: 2005/04/17 12:00 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
jMemorize Doesn't Store Cards as Binary Data.
Back at the end of March I made a comment about jMemorize
Cards being stored as binary. Well I was completely wrong and it's time
to retract my statement.
Riad Djemili, the author of jMemorize, was kind enough to send me an email pointing out that I was completely wrong (and he was very polite about it!) and that the cards are actually just gzipped XML. Which addresses pretty much the only problem I had with this otherwise very nice piece of software. Since being told this I've had another play with jMemorize and it should be perfect for the simple card decks I need to create.
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Posted: 2005/04/17 11:20 | /tools/gui | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Startup.com: The Movie
I worked at three very different startups (two of which are still doing
well) and I have a lot of fond memories of the challenges, environments and
people I was fortunate to work with. While I was in the trenches it was
very hard to not know about, and to a limited degree get involved in, the
other aspects of the business. From gearing up for a week of
presentations (in a different time-zone) in an attempt to get more
funding that would be hitting the system quite hard to the moments of
desperation when almost a dozen people were laid off simultaneously (a
sysadmins life is not always a pleasant one).
I've given this hint of my background to explain why I'm not the most impartial of people when it comes to films like Startup.com. Startup.com follows the rise and fall of govworks.com, a startup that aims to make dealing with municipal governments a lot easier. The film itself covers a lot of the things most startups had in common, strong founders that were never fully aware of how big were going to get, the ever present threat of losing mind-share and the constant need to get bigger and more expensive.
Now as most people who survived the bout of insanity that was the dotcom bubble can tell you, a lot of common-sense was ignored by people that should have known better and this film shows some of it in action. The destruction of personal relationships, both friends and partners. The staggering growth in such a short time and the constant land grabbing attempts are all represented here and bring back a number of fond, and not so fond, memories. As for the film itself if you've never worked at a startup it'll give you a glimpse of what most of them seemed to be like. If you are one of the survivors then it'll be a reminder of what the bad times involved as nostalgia kicks in and you forget exactly why you wanted out. 6/10.
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Posted: 2005/04/17 11:05 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Saving Mail in Mutt -- Readline Rocks!
I get a lot of email, personal, mailing-lists and other, odder, sources
(CVS commits for example) and the only mail client I've ever felt
productive in is mutt. It's a very simple, easy to use, client that hides a
staggering amount of power behind a few key-presses; the fact it lets me use
vim as my editor is also a killer feature.
What makes mutt a joy to use is that every now and then I'll stumble on to something new that I've never noticed before; today that was tab-completion when saving mail. I have my mutt configured to save emails to the local disk using mbox format. Once you've pressed 's' to save you get prompted like this: "Save to mailbox ('?' for list): =savedestination" but rather than typing the destination in by hand you can just remove the bit you don't need and press tab twice to see all the places you've already saved mail.
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Posted: 2005/04/17 10:35 | /tools/commandline | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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