2010 Mar 9, 12:09Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (I know them from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) were in this british comedy in the late 90s Spaced. A decade later its still pretty funny. spacedbritishhumortvhulusimon-pegg
2009 Aug 5, 2:18"Mythbuster Adam Savage attended this year's Con ... he roamed the convention floor in his own costume and egged his Twitter followers to sniff him out." He dressed as The Joker from the opening
scene of The Dark Knight. comic-conhumoradam-savagemyth-busterstv
2009 Jul 14, 8:26"...the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes
in, unstoppable, intractable."humortvzombiehorrorfilmsimon-peggessayculture
I've looked at my web server logs previously to see if anyone had used my Web Frotz Interpreter and until recently didn't realize that awstats (the web server log report generator) was truncating the query from my URL, so I couldn't tell that anyone was actually using
it. But after grepping the logs manually I've pulled out the URLs of visitor's text adventure sessions. If you'll recall, my Web Frotz Interpreter stores the game state in the
URL so its easy to see user's game states in the web server logs.
I've put some of the links up on the Web Frotz Interpreter page. Some of the interesting ones:
2008 Feb 18, 3:05A case study on the origins of a humorous mistranslation. FTA: "The really weird ones are apparently from dictionary look-up errors ... not just taking an unlikely choice from the correct entry, but
actually reading a different (but nearby) entry."humorlanguageblogarticletranslatemistranslationlanguagelog
2007 Jun 7, 5:29The other day I had the best idea for my Wii remote. Clearly I should use it to control the rotation of Tetris pieces in my N-dimensional
Tetris game Polytope Tetris. One of the issues I described with Polytope Tetris is user input. Given a Wii remote the
user could rotate a piece through 3 dimensions in a manner that's much easier to adjust to than particular keys on the keyboard.
Anyway, I did a little research into how this might work. I knew that the Wii remote used infrared for absolute positioning and
Bluetooth for everything else (LEDs, speaker, accels.) I bought a Bluetooth adapter for my PC after realizing that none of my computers had
one already. I used GlovePIE to ensure that my Wii remote could connect and successfully communicate with my computer. GlovePIE is
actually pretty cool -- it provides a simple script layer over the Wii remote to control things like your mouse.
Since Polytope Tetris is in Java I looked for and found a Java library for operating with the Wii remote and a long forum thread discussing its use. I then read up on Bluetooth in Java. Apparently JSR 82 is the name of the standard that describes the API a Bluetooth stack should expose
in Java. That is, to get Bluetooth working in Java one needs an additional package for Java that actually implements the Bluetooth Java API. This package would depend on the system so I suppose I
can't fault Sun for not including it... Where to find such a package? I found a comparison list of implementations and tried the ones
that support javax.bluetooth. Noneofthem worked for me because none can address USB devices it seems or they cost money and I couldn't get the trial version working. I also tried
bluesock (not listed on the previous list) which seemed promising and could produce an address for my Wii remote as a connected device but couldn't use
that address.