Things n' Stuff | Thoughts about the universe in general

Please go to Google’s Home page right now to look at the Google Doodle for Robert Moog‘s⁽¹⁾ 78th Birthday – its a fully functional synthesizer that you can play on and record yourself!

It works slightly better in Chrome although the latest Firefoxes can also handle the moogdoodle. I wouldn’t count on anything else being able to play this demo that uses the experimental Web Audio API for HTML 5 that looks to aiming to bring to the web, all the capabilities of a Commodore 64 SID .

Things you can do (The knobs are unfortunately unmarked, so I had to guess what each knob does):

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1. Inventor of the analog synthesizer [↩]

ולפי המסורת היישראלית ארוכת השנים של שמות מטופשים לסרטים מטופשים, אז איך נתרגם את השם של הסרט Battleship המבוסס על המשחק ה”מרתק” ורב העלילה ”צוללות” (באנגלית Battleship) ?

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Its called ldapvi, and its just about what you’d expect with that name . The author would like you to think about it as vipw for your LDAP based authentication, and in addition to a few command line option it really isn’t much more then that (UI-wise):

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יצא לא להסתכל לאחרונה ב-Google Analytics של הבלוג, ודי חשכו עיני – החודש התעבורה על האתר ירדה בצורה משמעותית ביותר מהחודש שעבר. בירור יותר מדודק הראה שבמאי היה לי שיא תנועה באתר ומאז היתה ירידה:

הדבר הבא לעשות היה לבדוק למה, ומסתבר שרוב התנועה באתר שלי בחודשים האחרונים היתה מחיפושי גוגל שהובילו למאמרים על Ubuntu⁽¹⁾⁽²⁾, ובהחלט נראה שהתנועה על המאמרים האלה יבשה: בכל יולי היו פחות מ-500 כניסות לכל מאמר.

זה בהחלט סביר, מכיוון שהמאמרים האלה היו על בעיות די זמניות במערכת ההפעלה, אבל בכל זאת – חבל: לקצת זמן היה נראה שלי שהבלוג שלי אינו זוטה

1. MySQL 5.5 on Ubuntu 10.10 [↩]
2. VirtualBox on Ubuntu 11.04 [↩]

While writing up a silly personality questionnaire (you know the annoying type: If you’d have been X, what type of X would you be?), I figure out the most computer geek personality question ever!

It was obviously way to geeky for the task at hand, so here it is now for you to answer – or better yet: invent your a worst geeky personality question:

If you’d have been a design pattern (or an anti-pattern), which design pattern you’d be and why?

I, for laughs, I’d say I would have been a Duff’s device – complicated and impossible to debug

Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right

Its the first annual catholic conference on “Geocentrism”⁽¹⁾, where you’d find interesting lectures such as “Scientific experiments showing the earth motionless in space” and “Geocentrism: they know it by they’re hiding it”.

Brilliant, and just when you though its safe to walk outside.

Thanks to Skepticality, some brave fools are going to go there, possibly armed with t-shirts proclaiming their heliocentric beliefs. I probably would have put out something like “Galileo was right but all I got was this lousy t-shirt”. Or something.

1. The second worst thing after “flat earth” – those heliocentric, Copernicus worshiping fools are wrong and the earth is the center of the universe [↩]

Sometimes, when you try to develop things that work in Internet Explorer, you get to a point where you can just scratch your head and wonder “what the he*$ where they thinking of?!?”. This is one of those cases:

This is in Internet Explorer 8 when set to IE7 mode, but this is very faithful to the original as I’ve tested it on a real IE7 and it behaves the same. What happens here is that when you scroll the page down, all absolutely positioned elements (the two “combo boxes” which are a custom UI widget and the text “Dimensions:… at the top right corner”) get pulled down a few pixels. When you scroll up, they get put back in the correct place.

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Yep, that sounds about right.

In case you missed it, starting yesterday, Google‘s home screen doodle is a full fledged PacMan game:

What is interesting (to me anyway), is that the game is full encoded using HTML and Javascript – each ghost or pacman and also all the dots are graphics assigned using CSS to HTML DIV elements, which are moved on the screen using Javascript (source code is here at the moment – it is minified but its not hard to figure out what is going on).

[Update:]

As per the schedule, the pac-man game was removed after about 48 hours.

Those funny Chinese are at it again: An acquaintance got a new netbook device from a brandless Chinese manufacturer (the brand label on the device is “Excel”, which is anyone’s guess what its supposed to represent) and the device comes with a bright sticker on the base, in front of the keyboard, with the list of features this devices offers: CPU, memory and support for operating systems:

Yes, this device runs better with all kinds of logo MS-Windows operating systems: you can choose either XP, 7 or Linux