Transvestite crime gangs pester Magazine Street owners
Gender bending crime spree unstoppable, say local merchants. From the article:

Davis said it wasn’t supposed to be like this. They survived Hurricane Katrina’s Category 3 winds and the ensuing looters. They reopened despite the long odds of doing business in a devastated city. The last thing the Magazine Street shop owners expected to threaten their survival was a crime ring of transvestites.

Thanks Issa!
- posted by frank crist @ 12:49 PM 0 comments

 
The end of Google's usefulness
I'm attempting to develop an application for a Nokia 3660 cell phone, but there's one problem: the phone has a fairly notorious memory leak. Some sites reference the problem but say little about how I should fix it (e.g. "Don't load the same resource more than once and hope it all fits into the memory.")

I'm about more than just "hope", so I set about searching high and low for some other developer's fix for this problem. Lots of memory-intensive games work fine on the 3660: SoCom, DoomRPG, Tetris. Surely, somewhere out there, there would be a posted solution to this fairly common problem, right? I mean, according to the marketing meat at EA the 3660 is one of Europe's most popular phones.

So off to Google, (formerly) trusted companion of developer types everywhere. I can't tell you how many times I've fixed some development issue just by Googling the problem. I type "Nokia 3660 memory leak" into the box, click the button, and...

95% of the first 100 results are for places trying to sell me a Nokia 3660 phone. Or they're on review forums that do nothing to address the problem. I cannot find a single, worthwhile bit of information in the first 100 returned results.

What is the problem here? Is it unclear what I am searching for? I want to find pages which address the content of a memory leak in the context of the Nokia 3660. Instead, Google has sent me shopping.

And therein lies the crux of the problem: Google (nor any other search engine) can not be faithful to the context of the search because they're too busy selling off keywords to the highest bidder. When I search for "Nokia 3660" anything, I get chopped up and sold to advertisers instead of locating meaningful results.

Google, I'm sick and fucking tired of it. Where you were once an ally you have now become an impedance. Sure, I'll continue to use you, but know now that it is simply because I have no other choice. I'll use Google just like I used Microsoft--until something better came along.
- posted by frank crist @ 3:58 PM 0 comments

 
Quotable Quotes
No, not endorsed by Readers' Digest, just a bunch of collected quotes that I've been reading for the past hour.
- posted by frank crist @ 4:56 PM 0 comments

 
Vim documentation: fold
Folding code is a way of collapsing certain sections so you don't have to look at them all the time. For instance, the code that I'm working in has tons of case statements, so it's often helpful to bury the code under some statements so I can see how cases far apart compare to each other. The command for folding from a { to a } is: v%zf

v - visual mode
% - mark to matching { or }
zf - fold, baby, fold

How to preserve folds? That's the challenge. It's supposed to be incorporated into the vim syntax file, but I have only found a few syntax files that have them (python being one of them). I think I'd have to write a macro to do it right. The problem, of course, is that it's metadata, so you have to store it somewhere. You could, possibly, store it in the file under some kind of comment header, but that leads to obvious problems of integrity. The other way is to designate a place (%vimdir%/meta) to store it for each file.

I will not be embarking upon writing anything like this anytime soon. I'm convinced that someone out there already has it set up.
- posted by frank crist @ 1:31 PM 1 comments

 
Pitchfork Feature: 100 Awesome Music Videos
The good part about what is usually an annoying process of going through someone else's "best of" list: Every video on this list is linked to YouTube. Yes, you can watch them.
- posted by frank crist @ 6:57 PM 0 comments

 
The Rise and Fall of Infocom
A 52-page report written by a bunch of MIT nerds on why Infocom failed after being so popular. Anyone who is anyone will know Infocom for creating one of the greatest and most influential computer games ever: Zork, and its many progeny.
- posted by frank crist @ 6:53 PM 0 comments

 
::simple-iq.com:: The simple intelligence test !
A fast and fun IQ test. According to this flash-based test, I have an IQ of 140 ("136-145 - Exceptional! Most people see you as genius"), and finished the 13 minute test with 3:27 to spare.
- posted by frank crist @ 6:23 PM 0 comments

 
The Genographic Project
Dang, I wish I had $100 in disposable income laying around. From the article:

Once you have completed the cheek scraping process, you will secure the scrapers inside the transport tubes, sign the informed consent form and mail the tubes and form off to the lab.

That's it! In about eight weeks—the time necessary for the laboratory to correctly analyze your DNA—your results will be ready. Note that in some cases inconclusive results require us to do additional testing to determine your haplogroup. This may add several weeks to the process. In the meantime, visit the Web site to see where your sample is in the analysis process.

- posted by frank crist @ 4:52 PM 0 comments

 
The Book of Were-Wolfes, by Sabine Baring-Gould
All sorts of information about werewolves--especially regarding antiquity--by the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, written in 1865. Great source material.
- posted by frank crist @ 4:46 PM 0 comments

 
A sedated predator blows up the car of the wife of a baby.
A starship captain searches for treasure up in the attic.
A telekinetic intern, a singer, and a square bug-eyed monster struggle for survival.
A snobby captain of a cruise ship goes swimming with the ex-husband of a cult leader in a bar.

(my next 3 novels)
- posted by frank crist @ 4:37 PM 1 comments

 
Worldwide Cost of Living Survey 2006–city rankings
The big flap this week is about the most expensive city in the world to live in--Moscow? Read the full press release from Mercer HR Consulting in the link above, or view the rankings for the top 50 cities directly. You can also view the quality of living list.

(btw: jhtml, eeeeww)
- posted by frank crist @ 12:15 PM 0 comments

 
BIRLE
Run-Level Encoding.. now here's something I can work with. Stripping down the UNRLE class, it looks like the whole thing will add about 2.5K of overhead to the process--plenty little to justify its inclusion.

Now for the test: RLE compression of two files, both 7980 bytes, with MANY runs:

- mildly complicated file compression: 3263 Bytes (59.11%)
- extremely simple file compression: 1159 Bytes (85.47%)

Yes, it looks like I'll declare myself an RLE man today.
- posted by frank crist @ 1:58 PM 0 comments

 
DataCompression.info - Run Length Encoding/RLE
Just in case you needed to look up something about RLE, this page, in addition to possessing a love for Bats Maru (or h/e you spell it), is an authoritative source on the subject. Includes whitepapers and code examples of various RLE schemes in various languages. Go get 'em, tiger.
- posted by frank crist @ 1:52 PM 0 comments

 
Understanding the Huffman Data Compression Algorithm in Java
Well, if you want to compress something for java, you can load this 25K library to maybe work. I have no idea if it works for J2ME, which is what I wanted it for, but the cure is worse than the disease--compressing a handful of 8K datafiles with a 25K compression engine is, perhaps, not so slick.

Back to the drawing board.
- posted by frank crist @ 1:28 PM 0 comments

 
The World As Best As I Remember It : Broken Windows Theory
A great article on Windows Vista, the Microsoft Way, and the nature of such a massive undertaking. Having worked at New Blue some years ago, I can say that this article is spot-on without being mean-spirited.
- posted by frank crist @ 2:24 PM 0 comments

 
All Headline News - Idaho Man Driving With Wife's Head Crashes, Kills 2 - June 16, 2006
Beautiful. From the article:

Boise, ID (AHN) - In a bizarre incident, the severed head of a man's wife flew from his pickup truck Thursday when he crashed into an oncoming car. The accident also killed the driver and her child.

- posted by frank crist @ 5:19 PM 0 comments

 
Vim documentation: pi_expl
And look! You can split into a file explorer! Oh joy! And you just have to love a command like :Sexplore. Rawr!
- posted by frank crist @ 3:04 PM 0 comments

 
Vim documentation: tabpage
I also enjoy editing multiple files at once using more than just :split or :vsp. :tabe opens a file in a new tab (or just :tab newfilename for a new file). You can switch between the two using gf (girlfriend).
- posted by frank crist @ 3:02 PM 0 comments

 
Diffs using VIM
I kind of suspected that VIM could do diffs, but I'd never seen it done before. This chapter in the highly-convoluted VIM documentation will show you how it's done.

Essentially, from the console:
:vertical vimdiff file_to_diff

Horay!
- posted by frank crist @ 2:57 PM 3 comments

 
My Bluetooth Device
This is the device that runs bluetooth in my Asus W5A laptop. It is currently giving me grief. Rather, Windows Update is giving me grief because it installed something that slaughtered the driver that was working perfectly fine.

Let me talk about the evils of Windows Update for a moment: avoid it. I avoided it for about a year, then I did some updates a few weeks ago, after which my bluetooth and my embedded webcam ceased to work. In fact, if I push the little button that turns my camera on, I get a BSOD, and the laptop reboots. I am most displeased by this turn of events.
- posted by frank crist @ 2:15 PM 0 comments

 
The Fantastic in Art and Fiction
A bunch of old, spooky images. Many woodcuts and lithographs, as well as modern works. Categories such as "Angels & Demons" (I love how these two are always confused), "Danse Macabre" (for all of your dancing skeleton needs), "Fantastic Space", and so on.
- posted by frank crist @ 12:34 PM 0 comments

 
1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose - Project Gutenberg
Just in case you need a curse word that's 200 years old.
- posted by frank crist @ 12:31 PM 0 comments

 
How to Make Zombies
Found via Newsvine, but I linked to the original article since you have to join Newsvine to see anything there, and I think they're still in invite stage.

Anyhoo, How to Make Zombies
- posted by VikiBabbles @ 3:15 PM 1 comments