A sad accident, but definitely something for The Fortean Times: one of the hikers who discovered the body of the bronze-age hunter (Oetzi) in the Alps has been found dead, in the Alps, by a hunter.

Iceman discoverer dead in Alps

Destroy your cat’s dignity completely, now in English too.

Link: Tailor for Cats

As Woody Allen almost said: “Tragedy plus time equals inflatable fun”

Expect a World Trade Centre Disaster inflatable slide to “capture the heart of both young and old” in a few years.

Link: Titanic Slide with Iceburg Adventure

Also (and originally) known as the ’Second System Effect’:

when one is designing the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful system, there is a tendency to become grandiose in one’s success and design an elephantine feature-laden monstrosity.

This post might relate to Fljud and BAXL, which just happen to be growing ever larger, and are almost a month late for their first alpha release. But there are some great features in there. If only I can wrap this data up in another class, I can-

Link: Second System Effect

Well, not quite, but very close. And very good.

Link: Pirates & Emperors

I had no idea until recently that “Freedom Is On The March” was a real Republican Party slogan, I thought it was satire…

I’ve upgraded from an old version of Movable Type to WordPress. Installing Wordpress was very easy, importing my old MT data was easy, but I’ve added hundreds of mod_rewrite lines to stop broken links, and that wasn’t easy. Most of them should only apply for connections to the old archive, and as they are permanent redirects, search engines etc should hopefully adjust themselves and make the redirections rarely used.

Next I’ll update the site style, and then rebuild the other parts of www.binary-ape.org. More changes soon. Now I’m off back to BAXL/FLJUD work.

A good site for me to remember, as I’m always forgetting the syntax for fiddling shell scripting features like Case. Perl is so much better, but not always suitable. This is a good cookbook style guide.

Link: Shell scripts in 20 pages

I’ve skipped paying into a pension this year due to a shortage of cash, but I have a small amount frozen in a quite decent pension scheme from a previous job. They’re now renaming this to “The ITV Pension”. Aaargh. The idea of a pension linked to this chamber of horrors really doesn’t inspire feelings of confidence and security. It’s disturbing enough to link a pension to the letters “TV”, an industry flickering and buzzing like an almost dead lightbulb, without prepending the “I”. Time for something else.

But lots of us will anyway.

I’m betting on The Empire, but A. is putting her money on The Federation. I obviously sympathise with a lot of socialist vegans* flying around trying to solve problems by having a sensible chat, but you really shouldn’t underestimate the power of fully armed and operational Death Star.

Star Wars vs Star Trek in Five Minutes (Almost dangerously nerdy)

• No money, anti-capitalist and regard real meat as barbaric… how did evil propaganda like this get past the censors? ;-)

In case I forget:

Link: Jabberd2 Patches

Since Jabberd2 is paused for a while, this will be useful.