One of the technologies we’re fooling around with at work is microgames, which (in our case) are very small games, usually implemented in Adobe Flash, that take a couple of minutes to play. They often involve logic puzzles, and “training you without you knowing it”.
I just found this really fun one called Light-Bot. The goal is to give a robot a series of instructions to traverse a path of blocks to light up the blue ones. You write the program visually by dragging action icons onto program slots and then running the program. Read on…
TechCrunch, a blog I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet, has an exellent post listing a bunch of ways to follow next week’s US presidential elections. It seems there are quite a few websites throwing their hat into this ring.
Gepostet von Stani is a very cool person. He created an open source IDE for Python called SPE (Stani’s Python Editor). He really outdid himself now, though. He designed a new comemorative coinve for the Dutch government. Read on…
At the Software Development Best Practices conference yesterday, I went to a session on Human-Centered Risk Management. It was totally fascinating! One topic that was discussed was Rhetorical fallacies.
Rhetorical fallacies, or fallacies of argument, don’t allow for the open, two-way exchange of ideas upon which meaningful conversations depend. Instead, they distract the reader with various appeals instead of using sound reasoning. They can be divided into three categories:
- Emotional fallacies unfairly appeal to the audience’s emotions.
- Ethical fallacies unreasonably advance the writer’s own authority or character (personal attack).
- Logical fallacies depend upon faulty logic.
Here’s a pretty good article on the subject.
“I must study politics and war that
my sons may have liberty to study
mathematics and philosophy. ”
John Adams
Here it is. http://www.sitorsquat.com/ is a website that helps you find a public restroom, or help add to the database of public toilets. They could have picked a different name, though.
Ok, this is embarrassing. I have a watchdog app monitoring my server from another box, which sends sms messages to my cellphone. One of the test is for the words “Welcome to my eWorld” to appear on the front page, which my old site didn’t have.
I don’t know why the watchdog’s alert emails weren’t being sent out, but now they are. Hundreds of them. The fun part? I’m away at a conference, and the box running the watchdog requires a certificate to SSH to it, which I don’t have on my work laptop (for good reason). So the best solution I could come up with was to put “Welcome to my eWorld” on my front page. I’ll fix it when I get home. It’s either that or turn off my phone.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy
enough people to make it worth the effort.
- Herm Albrigh
I do not know why. It is beyond me. However, it is mildly entertaining in a “Uh, there’s something I’ve never seen that before!” This guy went around China taking pictures of people sleeping in public. Over 700 of them.
Witness the splendor yourself.
So I was looking at my server’s various temperature measurements today, because I added a fourth hard drive a few days ago (this server is, among other things, a MythTV box, so I need lots of video storage capacity). I hadn’t looked at the temperature measurements in a while, because my Antec case has done an admiral job of keeping things cool enough in the summer. My case has a separate lower section for up to 4 hard drives with a dedicated fan, in addition to a fan in the back and one on top, all with three-position speed switches (and of course the CPU fan, which is variable speed too). An additional 4 hard drives can go in the upper front, but I have all four hard drives in that lower section. Read on…