Photographer, software developer, sysadmin, startup-founder, atheist Buddhist, vegan and Green. Wears a hat.
This blog reflects my personal opinions only, although most posts are so old they might not even do that anymore.
HENTAI Dictionary - A fascinating list of odd Japanese sexual fetish jargon.
How Mills and Boon turned to manga comics - The Japanese reinvention of the Mills and Boon format - more sex, huge eyes and strange colours.
Fix for Japan Pop-Culture Addicts - J-List’s Peter Payne implies that by censoring ‘normal’ pornography, the post-WWII authorities helped create the Hentai weirdness.
We were hoping that George Lucas would release the original Star Wars films on DVD (maybe in a special-special edition, maybe as part of the DVD menu, maybe just in a separate box).
But no - he won’t sell his “rough cuts” again, so the DVD is Special Edition versions only. Rather then keep my VCR for the sake of my three remaining video tapes, I think I’ll copy them on to DVD or harddisk, keep the tapes and sell the VCR.
Geo-location services are going to be very important soon - all sorts of data will be linked to locations, and accessed in many ways. For this to work, we’ll need a good way to precisely and concisely refer to particular locations.
Postal addresses don’t really relate the the real world, only a postal route. Postcodes are too vague and unstandardised. Latitude and Longitude aren’t very friendly: try 54.9724565159566, -1.59792521092372, for example.
The Universal Address system seems to be a great solution: “An eight character Universal Address can uniquely specify every building in the world. A ten-character Universal Address can uniquely specify any square meter in the world. They are easily remembered, can be pinpointed on all maps and navigated with GPS receivers.”
There’s a demo page where you can try it out. The coordinates above became a Universal Address of GV04N S4TV1, much neater.
Sadly the format is very restrictivelycopyrighted and licensed, so I can’t use it, and I wouldn’t recommend anyone uses it at all for this reason - the idea of a company owning the format of address data is silly and a little scary. Hopefully we won’t have to wait long for a nice open ISO standard instead.
If you want value for money, skip ‘The Passion of The Christ’ and see ‘Shawn of the Dead’ instead: it’s probably less offensive, funnier, more realisticly cast, and has many more coming-back-from-the-dead scenes per hour, which is what Easter is all about, apparently.
The resurrection of Jesus seems like a wasted opportunity - the Christian Messiah returned from the dead and then did nothing much for a few days before going off to heaven, which we have to assume is where he was going anyway when he died. True, he passed on extra instructions to his disciples, but if he’d planned ahead he could have just written them a note beforehand. The resurrection seems to a sort of Holy Columbo-like “Oh, just one more thing…”. Jesus didn’t even make a big thing of it - popping in to visit the Roman authorities and a few priests would have been quite effective, but instead he grumbled a bit and left. Church of England leaders often stress that belief in the resurrection is the keystone of Christianity, yet it’s one of the least impressive feats of Jesus.
On a more positive note, the disciples were lucky he didn’t try to eat their brains.
I’m building a fictional company directory for use with my LDAP projects. I need to test software with directories containing tens of thousands of user accounts rather than two, and take screenshots without breaking the Data Protection Act, so I can’t use my home LDAP or my employer’s.
I’ve not managed to find any large LDIF files for testing LDAP on the ‘net, which is a pity. LDAP systems frequently get rather big: large companies and universities seem to love LDAP, and a system with tens of thousands of records is typical. Testing with 40 records isn’t good enough. It also isn’t a good idea to test software for editing LDAP trees on a live system.
The staff for this business will be generated by a rather crude script that munges the USA 2000 Census data to create simple but superficially realistic records. I’ll gradually make it more realistic, but I’m just looking for quantity at the moment. Babs Jensen will be there somewhere, of course.
I gave up trying to give this company an interesting name, so example.com it is. I hadn’t realised that Example.com is an officially reserved domain name - no real business can use it.
Once I get a useful dataset I’ll release it with a Creative Commons License.
After a month of considerable expense, stress and frustration we’ve now “moved in”, to somewhere smaller and less well placed than before, but somewhere we can actually get our stuff into. We went from a roomy flat with nothing in it to a ‘cosy’ flat stuffed with cardboard boxes. It’s taken a while to sort and repack our stuff, but at last it feels like we’re emerging from the mess.
Not Dimoxinil, it’s those zany stem cells again.
I’m not sure if I’d want my hair back, as it’s quite convenient to be bald. My clippers were in a box at a depot somewhere last month, so I was forced to go get my hair cut. I got a £4 reduction for being bald.
Don’t put your arm up a cow’s bottom without proper training. As with flying an F16 fighter, I think most people would prefer the simulator to the real thing.
We’ve moved, but 99.9% of our possessions haven’t: the lift at our new address isn’t working, and (rather understandably) the removal company can’t carry our things up 12 flights of stairs.
So right now we’re in Week 3 of living in an almost empty flat. It’s a strange experience, and hopefully it will be over soon. Sorry if you’ve sent us emails recently we will get round to answering them eventually. Hopefully.
Yes, it has been raining.
