psyche

It looks like graphics is well and truly useless now. I’ve been reading through the Mozilla Developer Center’s Canvas Tutorial and it’s clear that it’s quite powerful (e.g. automatic bezier and quadratic curves and all that). It’s quite a cool new element and I’ll have to check it out at some point.

Unrelatedly, Vivan suggested that I make a last minute application for the Imperial College IC125 Future Computing Taster Course, which I did and - surprisingly - got a place at. So we’ll be there, wrecking Art and Evolution, Enigma - the cryptographer’s battle, Lunch will be provided*, Gestures and artificial intelligence and Image manipulation in Java. Sounds good. Artificial intelligence and quantum computing, ha ha! Ha ha ha! And I actually know where the Huxley Building is now. We’ll have some stuff to talk about at university interviews. Lulz.

Also, I’m going to take back Ealing Broadway. I’m going to make it more fun! Preparing for Arizona by buying lots of reflective clothing (yes). Trying to make main site more coherent. Failing.

Trying to get Wikipedia SEL people to accept that the Knights guy was running HotSauce, and that lambda calculus is quite important.

Trying to think of massive hack for Lain’s tenth anniversary. Have a few ideas.

*may not be a lecture, not sure

Pax

m35 of jpsxdec and #lain just found out why my site hadn’t been rendering in IE or Firefox: you can’t end script tags with “/>”, even though it’s valid XHTML. Oh well.

What a hero!

Also, this renders graphics obsolete… although I knew about the canvas element when I was writing it.

I finished lain.

Pax

Adam Zethraeus provided useful linkage which helped me upgrade my WordPress thingy. I wholly recommend the WPAU; it’s totally awesome.

Storrs Kegel (case of fractured virtual identity, hence Googlage) put me onto Coda which is possibly the greatest app I have ever used. It’s also the first thing I’ve used my debit card on. Yeah, I’m a real man (…I also think wtf at this).

I spoke to Elliott Katz about computer science at Cambridge (he’s been offered a place there to do that) and he seemed very modest and repeatedly claimed that he had simply “got lucky” (regrettably, I’m getting Americanised, I think: I kept trying to type “gotten” for “got” back there). In any case, awesome. I need to know more stuff.

Everybody loves subnet masks. The internet is serious business.

I’ve attempted another rather weak redesign of the main site but it’s ultra-clean, so, you know…

In CompSoc today, I realised just how retarded some of the things in Mac OS X really are. The ability to remotely control the GUI (not just background processes and stuff) via the shell and stuff… urgh… it’s like… whatever. And then being able to (re)set the root password by having the install disc: this makes me nervous.

However, it was entertaining to use the following sequence I devised to annoy family, which caught on pretty quickly at school too:


user$ ssh loggedinuser@x.x.x.x
Password: ******
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ osascript -e "set Volume 10"
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ say -v Zarvox
I AM WATCHING YOU
YOU ARE UGLY
^Z
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ ps -x
[A bunch of processes and their numbers are displayed; too lazy to type them out properly]
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ kill [pid of something like web browser]
[actual loggedinuser now tries to open System Preferences to disable remote login]
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ ps -x
[pid of System Prefs displayed]
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ kill [pid of System Prefs]
loggedinuser@x.x.x.x$ sudo shutdown -h now
Password: ******
SYSTEM GOING DOWN NOW or something to that effect


And then I win!

Pax

My to-do list for this web stuff:

• Update WordPress
• Do a proper WordPress theme

The front page of disinformatics is the only bit where there’s markup that serves no semantic purpose (the glider). Adam2z is the ultimate fusion of form and content, while Blue Eye Labs is mostly form and disinformatics is mostly content - a shame that there isn’t even really much content.

Anyway, I don’t know where these thoughts belong so I’ll leave them here.

Pax