iamcal.com Since May 2000

a guide to legally "being all crazy" in malls. to, err, paraphrase slightly :)

sergeui found ie http headers - an ie plugin which acts as a proxy to display http request and response headers. very very useful. much easier than fireing up ethereal so often.

churning through the email backlog, i came across the frankie big face mailing list update. first one in almost two years. must go check out his new music.

gah. sealab 2021 is awesome, but the theme song by calamine is really really addictive.

more lowbright action: same difference is stunning.

some guy (pun intended) has scanned in the pages from the 1971 and 1979 editions of the 'how it works' computer book from ladybird. i think i have the 1971 edition at home. note the glamourous women in the 1971 edition.

the nintendo ds looks pretty powerfull - now how can we use this power for evil instead of for playing with puppies?

zefrank has some words of advice for writing corporate email

pb posted a link to this frightening anti-islam pro-christianity comic. wow.

am i the only person finding the mozilla/firefox zealots tedious? do people not realise that moz is full of bugs too?

lea adds in to the evolution thread: the gallup poll that spawned the discussion.

berkeley's evolution site is good stuff - pass it around to the 37% of americans who want evolutionism outlawed in schools.

tom linked to a good collection of ways to annoy absent cow-orkers.

12many is a great game. i got 244 - what about you?

damien popped up on p6l to talk about parsing of perl6 and gave this excellent one liner:

$parse_tree = ( $source_text ~~ m:keepall/ <Perl.prog> / );

which is very nice - a full adaptive parse tree including comments, whitespace, etc.

lea knows all - lowbright has some really awesome comics.

lea pointed me at this excellent article on mcsweeny's : the riddler makes an announcement.

salt points out the tetris cosplay photos. awesome. i wish i'd thought of that.

it's conferance season again. our paper for etcon has been accepted (yay! etcon is alot of fun) and hopefully wont be the same mad development dash as last year. i've might also be talking at a vancouver php thingy, possibly along with rasmus, sterling and miss parks. i suspect people overestimate my php-fu ;)

secret santa lives once more! thanks to all the people who helped this year, even if they were late and i told them i hated them.

a good introduction to multicast.

a handy graph of relative port speeds. usb2 is faster than firewire's current implementation, but slower than the firewire original design.

bookmarked for later: dan's explanation of continuations.

i want an octodog! though i suspect using a knife would be just as easy.

striatic pointed me at this love xbox scale graphic - yes, it really is that big.

half life 2 is amazing. i have a feeling i'm going to hear things in real life and think "that's almost as realistic as half life 2". fuck yeah

aim comments looks pretty cool - first step on the ubiquitous interface path perhaps?

i have halo 2. i have half life 2. who wants to touch me?

jason just reminded me about progress quest, probably the best game in existance.

this apache/lamp tuning article has been doing the rounds. nothing new really.

e noticed that somebody has lost their frog in a big way.

lealea points out a nice/serious site about moving to canada.

'it'd be nice if stock Perl 6 ran blazingly with perfectly consistent and flexible semantics, but it's also important to have a knob you can turn up that says "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"'. larry talks about speed vs features for perl 6.

some anonymous coward sent me some feedback about the fuck-the-south site.

sam ruby wonders about the implementation of classes in parrot - specifically how to provide a system which can provide both perl and python class semanics, which are wildly different.

a beautiful piece of flashy 3d work about the us war project

it seems some of the northern states aren't so keen on the US south. very nicely put.

e pointed me to this article in usa today. what the fuck is wrong with american catholics? if there really was a god, he'd hopefully smite those fucking idiots down. ahem.

i can't operate my microwave, but luckily i was saved by the web. now why haven't microsoft made a fast pdf reader for ie? i can only assume it's patent territory.

e points out disturbing auctions which is frightening/great.

my newest solver for roadblocks can handle one-ways and teleporters. seems to be able to cope with advanced levels easily.

ghost in the shell 2 is a great piece of work. slower and more dialog heavy than the original, but with a great meshing of cell animation, really stunning 3d work and hand painted (or perhaps photographed) backgrounds. really worth seeing. also makes me want to see the tv series that came out a couple of years ago. must be available on torrent somewhere,

what we clearly need is more diagrams which don't really show anything, but look really pretty. [via george]

the perry bible fellowship is really good - well worth a trawl through the archives.

[roadblocks](http://www.freeaddictinggames.com/?id=340&req=givegame ) is pretty fun, but trying to [build a solver](http://code.iamcal.com/pl/games/roadblocks-solver_pl.txt) is more fun. patches to support one ways and teleporters are welcomed (you'd need to extend the find_stop_*) functions to return an x,y pair for the teleporters. one ways are easy - just add to the blocks list for each direction). :)

you know what time crisis was missing? yes, kittens.

more election related crap: (wtf? i'm not even american) jeff r's new shirt is super-awesome.

save our liberal american cousins - marry an american! (via tom)

someone's published the actual election results. hardly suprising ;)

someone has produced a wonderfully detailed purple map of america, broken down by county.

tom points out blue coconut on osx (10.3 only) which allows you to copy shared itunes tracks to your local machine. somebody needs to write this for windows very soon.

jeff r is still overcompensating wildly.

sam ruby pointed out microsoft's cli spec on the p6i list - makes interesting reading, especially the language interop sections.

who actually uses these buttons in a way that does suck? mena did. oh, wait

mena has the right idea - canada 2.0

we're hiring.

chown +bush -gne /

distopia is holding a wake for common sense.

bush wins the election. i'm moving to canada. oh, wait.

tom points out the apple typography page on wikipedia. a fascinating read.

morville presents "a radically incomplete and idiosyncratic list of freely accessible research papers worth review before you plunge into your next information architecture project"

matt diephouse and joshua gatcomb have put together an automated benchmark suite for parrot, which is nice to track alongside trunk development.

"caution: it is recommended to use this directive effectively". the squid documentation is lacking a certain something. oh yes, actual documentation.

a new release of lib_filter lets you choose whether or not to strip html comments, and ensures that their contents are escaped to avoid data being mangled.