Author: Dotan Dimet

Grendizer!

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date September 17, 2003

An article (in Hebrew) about Grendizer, a giant robot anime that I used to watch on Jordanian TV in the 70s or early 80s, at the site of the Israeli society for Science Fiction & Fantasy. This was a really cool show. Too bad it wasn’t a hit in the US, and so seems to have fallen into obscurity. Except on the Internet: Here’s a page on an Italian site (in English) about the show, called UFO Robot Grendizer and a Canadian site by someone who show the show in French, under the title Goldorak.

Roleplaying

Dude?

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date September 16, 2003

The Automated Online Role-Player – It’s indistinguishable from live humans! [ GameSpy.com – PlanetFargo, via sidesh0w ]

My robot was programmed and ready to go. Hell, if I programmed it to randomly shout “Gimmie buffs!” it would probably pass the turing test. Satisfied, I sat it in front of the keyboard, made sure my character had at least fifty melons in his backpack, and then trudged off to leave it alone for the night.

Software and Programming

Secret Origins of Windows

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date September 14, 2003

Raymond Chen‘s blog has lots of fascinating anecdotes about the Windows GUI – where did the “Start” button come from? Is that thingie really called the “System Tray”? Why is there an internal function in one of the DLLs called “bunny”? Chen explains the origins of these (and other) Windows 95 peculiarities.