Used to be, people would fool around writing programs to generate random text, prose or poetry.
These days, you can sample the state-of-the-art in this field by going through the spam in your inbox.
Author: Dotan Dimet
Categories
Spartan Heat
My computer is a hot and slow laptop propped up on a desk with the sound system, TV and a USB Disk hooked up to it, in a sweltering enclosed balcony stuffed to the brim full of mildew-scented comics in plastic bags.
All this isn’t very conductive to spending time on it, let alone writing inspired blog entries. Or even posting the usual linkage.
I thought of a campaign idea yesterday, while watching The Bourne Supremacy. The image of Karl Urban as a Russian hitman on his day off, sitting in a bar surrounded by chicks, made me think of footballers. Virile and young and in a glamourous profession where you’re all used up by the time you hit thirty. Maybe thats why they bond so easily with models. Anyway, hitmen as footballers. And (since this is my brain drawing the analogies), Supermen as footballers.
So, the idea is a campaign called Spartans: people with superhuman strength and speed and toughness, who can fly (the classic Superman package, in other words). Mostly young (because you don’t last in that line of work), mostly male (because supermen are proportionally stronger than superwomen? Or superpowers are more common among men?), a campaign about action and power and testosterone unleashed, a campaign about dying young and with style.
Sort of like our games, before Israel brought a feminine touch to it.
Maybe I should run this to myself, like a Shiffer.
Online Etymology Dictionary:
This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they’re explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.
I just had to share a news item titled Scientists locate sarcasm in the brain (via Peter Watts). Not surprisingly, Israelis are at the forefront of this research, labouring in the sarcasm-rich environment of the University of Haifa and the Rambam Medical Center.
Peter Watts comments: So sarcasm and irony are more advanced traits than religion and morality. No surprise there, but it’s nice to get empirical confirmation.
I got pointed back to Watts’ site by a link to a presentation he put up about Vampire Domestication, a sort of promo for his new book.
Categories
IO::All to rule them all
I just wrote my first perl script using IO::All. I think I have to sit down and breath.
The job? change every link in a directory tree of HTML files to use the name of the new server instead of the old one.
The script:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use IO::All;
my ($datadir) = shift;
for my $file (io($datadir)->All) {
my $text < $file;
$text =~ s|fred[^\:]*?\:1337|bert|g;
$text > $file;
}(The regular expression made use of the fact that the original server, call it fred, was running a web server on a non-standard port, say 1337).
This. Is. Very. Cool.