jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
Thanks to Wikipedia, I now have doubled the number of "chocolate teapot" web pages I've read.
  1. An Appraisal of the Utility of a Chocolate Teapot
    (TL/DR: "a chocolate teapot is of no use at all")
  2. How useless is a Chocolate Teapot?
    (TL/DR: "a chocolate teapot is really not very useful, but slightly more so than you would expect")


Also from the Wikipedia teapot article:
Early teapots are small by western standards because they are generally designed for a single drinker, and the Chinese historically drank the tea directly from the spout.
Wow! I've never tried that.
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
I've never thought much about Hungary, but I like it now. In equal second place, UK and France for being consistent.

Top TV

Jun. 15th, 2018 11:34 pm
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
I like quiz shows, but the quiz to end them all is obvs. House of Games. Am I right? Of course I am.
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
You may be familiar with 404 which means "Not Found". There are many others, including 418:
Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error code "418 I'm a teapot". The resulting entity body MAY be short and stout.
In Google's case, it is short and stout.

Manchester

Apr. 28th, 2018 12:12 am
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
I did AirBnB for the first time. We stayed in a flat in central Manchester for quite a lot less than a hotel.

We went to Ziferblat. Imagine a cafe that's more like a big version of someone's living room. You pay for the time you spend there, and you can work, play or just lounge. Everything inside is free. We had tea and cake and sat in some comfy chairs to read the newspapers.

Then we went to a concert in an abandoned TV studio, and heard pieces by six new composers. Someone not entirely unrelated to me was playing a saxophone concerto.
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
We all know how to use the web nowadays, don't we? We follow links to other pages. This isn't news to anyone.

It's well known that you shouldn't say "For info on foo, click here" because it makes more sense to link the description ("foo" or "info on foo") particularly if there's any chance that a visually impaired person will load your page (hint: they will).

So today I was amused to receive an email saying "Please utilize the link below to view the current status or add additional comments" followed by "LINK". Maybe the well known advice isn't so well known after all.

Any way, enough complaining. My favourite web usability fact is that Jakob Neilsen has been inducted into the Scandinavian Interactive Media Hall of Fame because (as far as I can discover) he's the only person in that hall.
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
Sometimes at work when people want to discuss something with someone else, they say they're going to "reach out". Immediately, this song plays in my head.

Sharp suits!
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
As an urban person all my life, don't all people in the countryside live off-grid? This couple are deliberately taking that to an extreme, not even taking their produce to market - you have to go and see them if you want to buy their produce.

Good for you, Jean-Bernard and Laurence
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-43113400

Paint

Jul. 25th, 2017 06:54 pm
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
Two stories on the BBC about Microsoft Paint, both with pleasing images:
Hands up if you remember when it was called "Paintbrush"?

Edit: it started out as Paint, then Paintbrush, then back to Paint. How much more information can you handle?
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
I read that double yellow lines were suggested by George Musgrave in a road safety competition. Googling, I found that he ran a museum, the Musgrave Collection, which looks as mad as can be, but in a good way, but that since his death it's closed and looking for a new home.

Sad really.
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
  1. I wrote some entries for Rosetta Code a few years ago. One was for 3D text output in Java. I found today that someone has translated my code into another language that I'd never heard of, and credited me. I'm flattered and baffled at the same time.
  2. I was looking for a cheap hair cut, and I found a barber that looked promising. At the bottom of their web site it says
    Best viewed in 1028 x 768 with IE5     Last Updated: 21/08/05
    Aww, bless!
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
Still listening to the Bamboos.
  • Happy - mmm, had to play this one through three times in a row
  • King of the Rodeo - strange video where the band plays the audience, and women play the part of the band. Singer is the right person, though.
The singer on that song also has a pretty severe stutter, but only when she talks. She gave a Ted talk about stuttering which is surprisingly entertaining.

Title explanation

Yum

May. 8th, 2017 12:19 pm
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
No time for breakfast this morning, so imagine my delight when I found that I still had some custard creams at work. Healthy and nutritious!
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
I bought a t-shirt in Brighton, and it came with a free CD by The Bamboos. Lots of good funk choons, but Can't Help Myself jumped out.
And I can't help myself
Don't want to funk with no one else
Simple, but done well.
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
I wrote a desktop thing for symmetrical doodling (doodling image, doodling video), but it's not so easy for other (non-techie) people to install, so I tried a web version - decreased usability, increased availability. You can't win.

Hmm - software development is like thermodynamics?

Anyway, here's a doodle I did with the web version.

Click to embiggen
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
I've just spent a while playing A Grain of Truth. It's a simple game but well done. Nicely drawn pictures, music that I could have turned off but I didn't want to, a setting that didn't seem contrived even though it was weird. And finally the game play seemed more like storytelling, which worked for me.

So, recommended.

I got frustrated a couple of times but was saved by googling a walkthrough. The first time I'd just missed something (pale circle on a pale background, plus not thinking enough about how to use the things I'd found). The second time it turned out I wasn't stuck at all, if only I'd realised it. Oh, and finding the ending wasn't nearly as hard as I was making it.

Oh dear - there's another one: Teller of Stories. There goes more time...

Edit: ...and a third: Bell's Heart. Finished them all now - can rest!
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
Most of the time, software issues are about understanding the problem well enough and writing some clean code. It's unusual to have to deal with difficult problems, but there are some well known hard things.

Lots of people would include concurrency because it's so easy to get it wrong, but I don't think that that makes it intrinsically difficult.
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
This is a nice idea, but I'm not sure if it will succeed. Everywhere in the world can be located by three words. Similar addresses are purposely far apart: There are probably several 3m squares that cover where you live, so you get some choice about your three words.

Edit: Not sure why I find this so amusing...

Edit 2:

Edit 3:

Edit 4:

Edit 5:

Edit 6: I found a pumpkin carving party in the Caucasus Mountains nowhere near anywhere, and a scout slumber party in Kazakhstan.

Edit 7: Spend every penny in some road-side bushes in the Chicago suburbs.

Edit 8: Another empty square is found in a field in China.
jbanana: Badly drawn banana (Default)
I downloaded a new version of Semagic today. There hasn't been a new version for years, so while I was downloading, I had a poke around and found a graph of Semagic downloads over time. It's basically tailed off to nothing.

Of course, if anything I wrote was to get the number of downloads I just called "nothing", I'd be astonished.
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