RentASanta

http://funny.karmark.org/Funny%20pictures/images/csc_jpg.jpg

This is the logical progression from RentACoder.

Ugly Tag Cloud

I too now have an ugly tag cloud (the thing at the right with all the tags).
I suck at styling so I'll keep it ugly for now.

The code for doing it is here.
Ok, here.

Yes, I know the cloud has very little meaning now as most of my tags are one-ofs. Still.

Concept Art

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Wikipedia Infiltrated by spies

It appears one of Wikipedia's admins may have been a secret agent.
I'm not clear on what anybody would accomplish by that, as Wikipedia is transparent - anyone could see the false information that was allegedly planted into Wikipedia, anyone could edit it.

On slashdot.

A good humor day

Don't know, maybe because it's the weekend, but this has turned up to be a good humor day:

1. 20,000 Credit Cards
2. XXX Star Wars
3. Creationist Kit
4. 101 Simpsons Quote
   

Wikipedia > Britannica

As most of you know, I'm a wiki and Wikipedia junkie.
And yet I keep having arguments with people that claim the wikipedia model can't work, it's not reliable, bla bla bla.

This list of places where Wikipedia was right and Britannica wrong just got referenced from SlashDot.

And it's not only minor mistake, one very notable mistake in Britanica is claiming that the size of the real numbers of Aleph 1. Take a look and find your favorite error :)

Spam Already?!

Well, this was quick. I just opened this blog like 3-4 days ago and already I got some spam. I knew this was going to happen, I'm just surprised at how quick. Let's power up the captcha...

A Vaccine for AIDS!

The wet dream of medical researchers has been achieved - the vaccine for AIDS is here (ready for clinical tests, that is).

After being with a biologist for 2 years, I can't help but thinking this is not necessarily a good thing. Sure, the vaccine might work on 99.9% of the people, but there a good chance the rest of the viruses will evolve and mutate into something even more resistant.

Aya here says that it might even become airborne, since the vaccine is now messing with parts of the virus DNA which have been pretty constant now.

And the worst part is that none of this is can be tested in the lab. You can't really predict what the outcome of releasing this "cure" will be by testing in a lab.

Starcraft Cancelled

Sad but predictable.

This always happens with Starcraft, even at lan parties.

1. Everybody has a different starcraft version, some might not play nice with others.
2. We tried playing over the internet with hamachi (lan simulator). I think this failed because Starcraft doesn't let you configure the network interface to listen on, so it probably chose the real NIC and not the fake one hamachi created.
3. While 2 of us have real Battlenet keys, the others could not connect to BN. Spawnning the game didn't help (and why would it, actually?)

At least in lan parties you can give everybody the same copy of the game and this usually works at the end (after an hour of hard labor).

Bummer.

Checkers Solved

I always said the game is not interesting, compared to chess and Go.

This Slashdot post confirms it - someone solved Checkers (שש בש), by creating a big ass database containing all possible positions...

Live Starcraft

I'm planning to play some Starcraft with friends this weekend. This prompted me to look at Starcraft vids on Youtube, and found this amusing one.

Welcome

As I'm finally getting freed from the Pits of Despair, I'll start spending a bit more time on the internet. I believe sending interesting emails to large groups of people is one way to keep in touch, but Yigael wisely commented that a blog might be a better solution instead of just spamming you all.

I agree. So without further bullshit, I too have a blog now.

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Ron