There is a tool we use on our game engine called a "transformer", which does exactly what claims to do.
Also, there is a book on the shelf in the toilet here which is called "Turning Points" and not "Turing Points"
These two things cause me constant disappointment.

I just got this:

"This is an email I hoped I would never have to send.

As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee. After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible. Both the PPL (which represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US.

( continued )

Pandora will stop streaming to the UK as of January 15th, 2008.

Again, on behalf of all of us at Pandora, I'm very, very sorry.

-Tim Westergren
(Pandora founder)"

Off to my Dad's for Christmas - I'm sure I'll see some of you at new year, some of you next year, and so on.

Have a great holiday!

While reading this post on LifeHacker, I checked out http://www.iandavis.org/ <-- clicky

Hee!

I also had a look at http://www.iandavis.com which isn't me either.

wererogue.com, wererogue.org, ianddavis.com and ianddavis.org are all available (not even squatters!) :V Now if only I had some spare cash...

Has anyone on this feed ever received spam that came from somebody they know?
I don't mean the incessant forwarded "funnies" or chain letters - I'm wondering if any of the full-on crazy-text c14lis or v1agr4 emails have ever reached somebody who happens to know "Haten McRumford" or whatever random name has been attached to it.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=570212

Amazon shorts is a new service where users can buy short, previously unpublished works (2,000 - 10,000 words, fiction or nonfiction) to read immediately from authors.

I don't know how useful this is to all of you, but I suspect it could be a nice vehicle for selling all the wonderful short pieces of work you write to keep in practice - so long as they aren't published elsewhere.

[EDIT]
Found by humourcide:
"We are accepting work from a diverse group of authors. In order to be eligible for participation you must be a published author with at least one book currently for sale on Amazon.com."

So I guess that's less helpful than I thought, although elanya at least should qualify.

After I spent a while tweaking my userChrome.css firefox configuration file to give me more real-estate in my browser, Mozilla in their infinite wisdom have decided to add features to a button I never used (and so removed). Not only that, but they've doubled its size to accommodate a clickable area for the feature (the bookmarks star, for those who've read up on Firefox 3.0 beta 1).

Why would you not give the star its own object?

EDIT: A little digging with the DOM inspector and I've now added the below css to userChrome.css to take out the go button but leave the star:

#go-button{display: none !important;}

Mostly a reminder to myself - I'm intending to write posts on:
My new PC - setup and ongoing fixes
Web 2.0 - what it can offer for you
General life and work update

http://community.livejournal.com/roflcl/1597636.html

Three videos from FOX news on gay matters which show completely unbiased, fair reporting.
Nah, I'm joshing you - they're all ridiculous. Almost hilarious, except I find it hard to laugh when I'm angry.

I'm making headway through Jon Rosenberg's Goats in the moments between writing functions at work.

I just hit this strip, and it reminded me of me and Hazel when she gets back some evenings.

edit: it makes more sense with the previous story arc, where Megan has had a pretty crap day. Megan=Hazel,Jon=me.

An extremely useful tool pointed out to me by white:
Vector Magic.
Takes a gif/jpeg/png image and turns in into vector graphics. It seems to work using colour regions, which is fine by me.

Ah, now that's something I'd be happy for my kids to be yelling...
Via rainofbastards

In the right circumstances, a song can really kick-start your day.

"Slusho is people!!!"

I was following a train of thought this morning about how the media paints Al Quaeda and Osama Bin Laden a lot like DC villains - Rā's al Ghūl, Red Claw or Vandal Savage, for example. I was wondering whether ol' George W has been reading too many comic books and was trying to set himself up as a hero, or hasn't read enough to know that people like that always get their comeuppance, even with better secrecy than he's employed.

Then I came across the following youtube videogame trailer from apocalinks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Genl242_ZU8

O_o

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-07/ff_hansreiser?currentPage=1 [stolen from Penny Arcade]

A fascinating article about the events leading up to and current state of play of the investigation of Hans Reiser's ex-wife, Nina Reiser. While researched by a journalist commissioned by the defence, the article is anything but biased, and is written in an engaging and, to be frank, fascinating fashion (excerpts from the Reiser4 code aside).

TIMECOCK (spoilers)

(via deathboy, the great big saucy gay cyber-Dad that he is).