A list of every episode of The Simpsons containing a monkey reference.

    Link: <a href="http://www.citizenlunchbox.com/monkey/simpsons.html">Monkeys on The Simpsons</a>

I’m very doubtful of some of these “facts” about the history of the fish symbol, but it’s a great thing to show fish-flaunting Christians. Which is why the page exists, of course.

    Link: <a href="http://www.minitru.org/llf/sf.html">Something Fishy</a>

“The second worst performer in the analysis, Granada Media, suffered a 51% fall in total shareholder returns but chief executive Steve Morrison received total compensation worth £911,000. Mr Morrison has since quit, with many believing he paid the price for the failure of the ITV Digital platform.”

    Link: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,804961,00.html">Men only, the club for the millionaire executive</a>

A dog/human translator, as invented by Homer’s brother.

    The dog in this photo looks very strange.

    Link: <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2285509.stm">Japan goes barking mad for dog toy</a>

I’m going to leave Jabber/LDAP integration alone for the rest of today, I’m getting nothing more than LDAP error code 1 (“I/O Error Interrupted system call”) on binds with Net::LDAP. I’m going to work on some backburner projects instead rather than waste the day chasing the cause of this. I don’t think it’s me.

I’ve booked monday off work as holiday, and planned to get down to some intensive Perl hacking this weekend. I wanted to get Fljud updated with some nice extras, Fljauth 0.1 ready for release, and get a vcard server running too. So far, I’ve not done very well.

Spending time messing with Mac OS X “Jaguar” on the iBook was fun. Almost all of the little faults of Mac OS 10.1 are gone. I could use Mac OS X as my only OS now. It’s still a little slow to respond at times, but it’s just so nice. I’m puzzled by the strange printing system. I like CUPS, but Apple seem to have removed most of the drivers. More investigation required. A pleasant way to spend Saturday morning.

    A Bad Stomach and puncturing my foot on a nail was not a nice way to spend Saturday afternoon. It wasn't even the pointed end of nail, it was a flat topped nail that materialised in the carpet like one of the screws in The Street of Crocodiles, (the animation, not the book) just in time to pop a nice hole in my heel.

    And then Sunday's coding was ruined by my computers entering The Twilight Zone. I'd upgraded my PC to Mandrake 9 last weekend, which may have had something to do with it. My freshly transplanted development LDAP server is clearly insane, my dev Jabber server is behaving strangely (I've not even touched it, it's on my server) and I've ended up spending 10 hours trying to track down the causes so far. Computer A can access the LDAP server on computer B just fine. But computer B can only bind to the LDAP server on itself, computer B. Search results are all empty. I shall soon return to this interesting problem.

    I want to get Fljauth and "the vcard component" (I haven't named it yet, "fljcard" maybe) out of the way so I can work on SmartCast. Maybe tomorrow. Luckily I've got a longer weekend next week as well.

Chomsky was right that language is hard-wired into humans, but it seems that non-verbal communication is just as much part of human language as verbal communication. There’s a Simpsons episode where Maggie’s baby noises are translated by a machine into simple speech. This is better: babies as young as six months old can communicate with sign language. The language areas of a baby’s brain are functioning long before the vocal cords develop enough for speech.

    This is very impressive. What sort of impact will this have on a child's mental development? How will this change people's attitudes to non-human signers like <a href="http://www.koko.org/">Koko</a> and the teaching of sign language in general?

    Link: <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/features/2299895.stm">How baby signing aids communication</a>

The greatest low budget actor of all time: Bruce Campbell. When is Bubba Ho-tep going to be released? The world needs to see Old Elvis fighting undead evil, it really does. I do.

    Time to mention <a href="http://www.bruce-campbell.com/gallery/tv/autolycus/men-in-pink.html">Men In Pink</a> too.

    Link: <a href="http://www.bruce-campbell.com/">Bruce Campbell Online</a>

Mochi are rice cakes. Earlier this week Arteth and I tried some Japanese mochi: blocks of almost toffee-like rice that explode into, er, big gooey crispy rice things when heated in an oven. They were sweet despite being just rice. And almost completely unlike the mochi that we buy from Chinese supermarkets. Those are soft and sugary, and beans, oil and coconut feature heavily.

    People in Japan traditionally <a href="http://www.metropolis.co.jp/tokyominifeaturestories/300/tokyomini3featurestoriesinc.htm">eats lots of mochi every New Year</a>, served in different ways to symbolise various things. I just covered mine in maple syrup.

A very entertaining set of reviews on Amazon.com by “Henry Raddick”.

    Link: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/member-reviews/-/AA9IP6AYACFK5/103-3578293-8141466">Henry Raddick</a>