Things n' Stuff | Thoughts about the universe in general

I don’t remember the exact context that this came up (was probably something along the lines of “Google can answer any question”), but yesterday we had some friends over and the question arose, so a quick google got me to this page:

The Swallow Question.

Except for linking to a very interesting article that actually tries to tackle the problem scientifically, John DuBois (the author of the above page) tackled the question more empirically by adding the question as part of the registration process for a new account on the service that he is running. Some of the responses are very amusing.

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אני בד”כ לא כותב פוסט של קישורים טיפשיים, אבל בזמן שעשיתי קצת סדר בסופ”ש בקורא הרסס שלי, ראיתי כמה דברים שכדאי לשתף:

(אזהרה – מדובר בדברים טיפשיים במיוחד, כך שאם אין לכם כמה דקות לבזבז, חבל על הזמן)

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(I’m not sure if the first such rant was on this blog, or it was just on a comment in another blog, but it was about the incredibly navel-contemplating project “god“).

I like Ruby and I think its a neat little language. Although it still suffers from some childhood maladies (such as very bad performance), it has a very nice syntax and uses a lot of common development paradigms mixed-in in a very interesting and useful way. I’ve wrote a few programs (small and large) in Ruby and I keep it in my arsenal of programming tools on the same shelf as Perl (and not on the same shelf with Python which is stored in some box somewhere).

But I keep noticing the same problem – it used to be that we would joke about C programmers saying “when you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail”, but its becoming more and more apparent that Ruby programmers fall into the same category. Everywhere I turn theres someone who is trying to use Ruby (or misuse it as the case may be) in a situation where it is clearly the wrong tool for the job.

The above mentioned “god” is a good example, but here’s another one:
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(at the bottom of the sidebar to the right) that I found in Firefox’s affiliate button section. Kawaii!!

While I’m on the subject of Firefox, Firefox 3 beta 3 is scheduled to be released soon, so I took the liberty of checking the Mozilla beta “splash page”⁽¹⁾ , and while last time I checked it was 404ed – now it shows something, but not what I expected. If you’d click the link after the beta 3 was released, then you’d get the real page and not what I saw, so here it is for posterity:

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1. The page that will be displayed when the browser starts. [↩]

לא ראיתי את אח שלי כותב על זה, אז אני צריך:

האם יתכן ש-Duke Nukem Forever אכן ישוחרר מתישהו ?

לא האמנתי שהפרוייקט הזה עדיין בפיתוח אבל הנה:

עדכון – 9.5.2009

נראה שאזלו הסיכויים לראות את דיוק חוזר לסיבוב רביעי: 3D Realms סוגרים את הבסטה באופן סופי מוחלט ואולי חוזר (אחרי ש-Apogee חזרו לסיבוב נוסף, מי יודע? (שזה ממש מצחיק כי 3D Realms הם בעצם Apogee) ).

As reviewed in the Compiz Fusion blog, there’s a new Compiz⁽¹⁾ plugin that uses the accelerometer sensor available in some modern laptop (like some Lenovo, Apple, Toshiba and Dell models) to control the virtual desktop feature: smack the laptop screen and the display shifts to the the required workspace.

1. the 3D effects window manager for Linux [↩]

This is about phones of course – the difference is that with Apple, you have rumors then they announce that the rumors are true and there is a phone, but it won’t be available for 6 more months, then you get a closed box that you can’t even get more applications for, then 6 month later they announce that there will be an SDK, some time. With Google you have rumors then they announce that the rumors are false and there is no phone, but there is an SDK.

Yea, lame, I know. Well, sucks – this is the place that I write anything that comes to my mind .

למה הסרט הארי פוטר ומסדר עוף החול עם כתוביות באנגלית מסווג בקטגוריה “מתח/פעולה”, בעוד שאותו סרט עם דיבוב עברי מסווג כ”אנימציה/ילדים” ?

אם אנחנו כבר בקטע, למה אנימציה היא לא קטגוריה משל עצמה ולמה אין קטגוריה “פנטזיה” ?

אגב – שימו לב שאותו אתר מסווג את האריה המכשפה וארון הבגדים כ”אנימציה/ילדים”, אבל את ההמשך שלו – הנסיך כספיאן כ”מדע בדיוני” (???).

AOL has upgraded many of its services in the last year – they have a youtube-like video service (which interestingly broadcasts video clips from all other major video sites), Music service (that doesn’t work unless you have MS-Windows), iGoogle like personal page, and new web mail.

The AOL mail team add a lot of new features to their mail system and have not neglected to upgrade their backend servers as well, even the error messages:

This is a bounce I got from AOL’s mail server:

SMTP error from remote mailer after RCPT TO:<username @aol.com>:
host mailin-03.mx.aol.com [205.188.157.217]: 550 We would love to have gotten this email to username@aim.com. But, your recipient never logged onto their free AIM Mail account. Please contact them and let them know that they're missing out on all the super features offered by AIM Mail. And by the way, they're also missing out on your email. Thanks.


נמצא פה: – אם זה לא הולך לשנות את האינטרנט, אז לפחות את הדרך שבו אנחנו מדברים עליו כשאתם לא מסתכלים.

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