Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Sunday Aug 6, 2006

Filed under: Projects 3 comments

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I’m fiddling around with my WordPress plugin and I added a feature to show posts sorted by what hour of the day they were posted, just because I wanted to see what that would look like. Of course, I already had an idea of what it would look like before I wrote it, and I was quite confused when what I made didn’t match my expectations. Geeks are funny that way.

I most often post either during lunch, or when I knock off work between 5pm and 6pm. So, what I expected to see was a mostly flat grid, with a spike in the noon hour, and then another spike at 5pm. What I got was…

Posts by Hour

This shows how many of the blog’s posts are published by hour of the day. This can be useful to see what time of day sees the most posting activity.

Midnight:

(1%)

1:00:

(0%)

2:00:

(0%)

3:00:

(0%)

4:00:

(0%)

5:00:

(0%)

6:00:

(1%)

7:00:

(2%)

8:00:

(2%)

9:00:

(1%)

10:00:

(4%)

11:00:

(12%)

Noon:

(11%)

13:00:

(4%)

14:00:

(4%)

15:00:

(2%)

16:00:

(12%)

17:00:

(9%)

18:00:

(6%)

19:00:

(6%)

20:00:

(4%)

21:00:

(2%)

22:00:

(4%)

23:00:

(2%)

Have I been taking long lunches? Quitting early? Why are half of my lunch posts at 11am and the other half at noon? I could understand if they were all shifted forwards or backwards in time, depending on what time zone the server is in but…

<forehead slap>

Daylight savings time. Obviously the server is not taking part in the great American temporal hallucination that is DST.

I work from home, and my wife homeschools our children, so DST doesn’t really affect our lives except to annoy me twice a year.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Mel Gibson’s RAGE?

By Shamus Posted Saturday Aug 5, 2006

Filed under: Pictures 3 comments

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Just spotted this ad on Fox News:

First: I realize this story has been beaten into the ground. Days after the story was over and normal people had moved on they were still trying to milk it: “What do our readers think about what Mel’s therapist said about the Jewish reaction to the Catholic Statement responding to the press release from Gibson’s publicist on the police report of Mel’s original drunken tirade?”

But just what is going on there? Look at that picture. Mel’s Rage? In that picture he looks thoroughly baked, man. His body language suggests he’s describing the size of the bag of Cheetos he wants to eat right now. If they describe this photo as a rage then I can’t imagine what they would think of one taken while he was wide awake. Are photographs of Mel Gibson so rare that this is the best they could find to go with the “rage” headline? They couldn’t even get their hands on one of him mildly peeved?

My caption would be: “Mel Gibson mellows out using herbal remedy and could totally go for a huge pizza right now.”

Guess that’s why I’m not a journalist.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Link to someone new

By Shamus Posted Saturday Aug 5, 2006

Filed under: Nerd Culture 1 comments

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Despite the success portrayed in this instance, I still maintain that if you are going to attack someone you should not use your face to do so.
Here is a cool meme that got a bit out of hand: A Blog Tour of Homes. Like all the best memes, it might seem a bit obvious and pointless at first, but then turns out to be quite interesting. People run around their house and take pictures, post them on their blog with some (hopefully) brief descriptions, and then you get to have a look around the place. It’s fun to see these different homes and the different ways people live. I found it strangely compelling. Unless you’re some sort of salesman or peeping tom, you usually don’t geet to see inside of a lot of different houses, so this was interesting. My wife has our house in the list somewhere.
Scott Morris at SUSE Blog has made his book “The Easiest Linux Guide You'll Ever Read – an introduction to Linux for Windows users” available for download. It’s aimed at the total newbie. Brilliant. My wife used Linux for a while and it has a lot to offer the tired Windows user, but those first few steps are brutal. Any move in this direction is a good thing in my book. (Although I do hope the book is more pithy than the title!)

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Site Pal

By Shamus Posted Saturday Aug 5, 2006

Filed under: Links 4 comments

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I’m sure some of you have noticed this ad on Technorati:

It’s a very gimmicky talking ad. The problem is, it starts talking when the ad is loaded. I thought we learned this lesson back in the dot-com dark ages: Nothing will send visitors fleeing from your site faster than having ads yammering at them while they are trying to read. It’s infuriating. LATER: I reloaded the ad a few times since then and it now stays quiet until the user provokes it. Looks like it was either a fluke or they wised up and make the ad quiet by default.

Anyway…

I bring this up because I find voice synthesis facinating. Like flying cars, this was one of those technologies we were supposed to have by now. And yet, for almost twenty years the technology stalled. It wasn’t until the last couple of years that I’ve started to hear voices that were notably better than the ones from the late 70’s. Voice technology progressed to the point where you could understand the computer if you listened carefully, but didn’t get much better after that. I’m not sure what has got the technology moving again. Is it the availability of faster computers and more memory, or simply renewed interest in the subject?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Site Pal”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Windows Update

By Shamus Posted Friday Aug 4, 2006

Filed under: Rants 8 comments

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This isn’t what the dialog says verbatim, but if you read between the lines this is what they are really telling you.

Note to Microsoft: My computer is a tool, which I use for many things. Running Windows is simply means to that end, not an end in itself.

Clowns.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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That bites

By Shamus Posted Thursday Aug 3, 2006

Filed under: Links 2 comments

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Back in 2001 I wrote:

I (heart) technology. Last Thursday, I was eating a hard pretzel when I broke off the front of one of my back teeth and was left with a giant bleeding hole in my tooth. This was terrible. However, four hours later, I walked out of the dentist's office with a totally rebuilt tooth. A few hours after that, the novocaine wore off and I enjoyed a meal as if nothing had ever gone wrong. In the thousands of years of human history, only in the last few decades has this sort of thing been possible. In centuries past, I would either have had to have it pulled (if I had access to a dentist) or wait for the tooth to become infected, die, and fall out on its own. Either way, that one mishap would have meant weeks of pain and discomfort. Technology is cool.

Sadly, things don’t always go this well. Fuzzygeek has a different sort of story about a tooth gone bad.

Ouch.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Verbally Illiterate

By Shamus Posted Thursday Aug 3, 2006

Filed under: Personal 23 comments

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I read far more than I converse, and so I may see a word in print years before I hear it spoken. More to the point: I may end up saying it before I hear it pronounced correctly. This means if my first guess at the proper pronunciation is wrong I will read it many, many times and that improper pronunciation will be deeply ingrained before I realize my error. The risk here is that if I drop my incorrect usage into conversation I risk making a fool of myself.

This happens alarmingly often.

I saw the word “meme” years ago and have typed it and read it many times since then, always pronouncing it “mem” in my head. Yesterday I saw a Wiki on memes and found out it’s pronounced “meem”. Now I wonder: How many times did I use this word incorrectly in conversation and the other person was too polite to let me know I’m an idiot?

I spent most of the early 90’s thinking “cache” was pronounced “catch”. As in, “This system has 8kb of catch memory, that’s huge!” If I had guessed that I was saying it wrong, my next guess would have been “cashay”, to rhyme with “sashay”. Saying “cash” was not obvious to me at all.

Same goes for “Chasam”. I once earned a bit of riddicule when someone caught me pronouncing it the way it looks, instead of saying “kasam”.

Some people don’t have this problem, and I don’t know how they avoid it. Are they better at intuiting words? Do they run to the dictionary every tme they see a new word?

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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