Linkstew

Sometime before classes ended, I had a discussion with a friend about nicknaming people we'd never met. "That girl with red hair?" she said. "Yeah, I call her Tori in my head." And so on. This all struck me as perfectly natural, because after all, I've got My Evil Twin, among others.

But today, I realized that I've actually also got nicknames for certain unknown repeat visitors to my sites based sometimes on their IP, sometimes on their browser, sometimes on their referrer... And that. Well, that just struck me as a lot more weird.

So how about it folks -- please tell me that I'm not the only webmaster who nicknames his anonymous visitors?

I really don't like html. There are a lot of things not to like, but the thing that most frequently drives me up a wall is trying to have multiple submit buttons for a single form that do different things. Because a form action is associated with the FORM tag, and not a SUBMIT input, you can't have one form that submits to two different scripts. Having two forms isn't really an option, because then you'd have to have a ton of redundant information on the page. So what you end up having to do is check the value of the submit variable that comes into your cgi, and dispatch based on that. This works, but I hate it, because it makes for big messy if blocks. Also, it becomes a maintenance issue, because you have to make sure the name is the same in both the html printer and in the if cases, so then you have to go define a bunch of constants for your submit names, and it's all just very ridiculous.

Basically, I wish the form action were associated with the SUBMIT instead of with the FORM.

But while I was lying around delirious last night, it occurred to me that you could probably use a javascript onClick to dynamically alter the action of the form. I'm not sure that that works...

But then I realized that the potential "solution" was worse than the problem, and put it out of my mind. For that matter, I realized that I didn't actually want to know if it would work, because if it did work it would only make me dislike html even more.

Do you miss that fantastically shiny finish your iPod had when you first removed it from it's little cube shaped box? Sure, you could mess with trying to keep ahold of that little guy while trying to use some sort of cleaner to clean it. But a simpler tactic is to simply take a piece of scotch tape and put it down and then peel it back up. Repeat for the rest of the iPod. Keep ahold of one end, of course, so that you don't have to mess with picking at corners.

The same tactic works pretty well for cleaning a Palm (Visor, whatever) screen, as well.

My bank account is so manic depressive. And I think it suffers from seasonal affective disorder, too.

This isn't helped by the fact that my roommate lost his checkbook and so paid rent last month in fifties... Which just means I haven't deposited it yet, because I don't want to use the ATM to deposit that much cash.

And worse, he paid this month's rent in twenties, and of course, Berkeley rent being what it is... Damn my wallet is fat now.

Um... Forget I said that. Please don't mug me.

This morning when I was sitting around waiting to leave for the train, I ended up watching an episode of 'Alias' that had been sitting on my TiVo since December 2nd. And at one point, the main character was typing on a laptop, and initially just the top corner of the back of screen was visible. "Hey, that looks kind of silvery like a TiBook," I thought to myself.

Now, I really enjoy spotting Apple computers on TV -- it just gives me this kind of disturbing warm fuzzy feeling.

So when the shot panned out and the Apple logo had been removed from what was now clearly a Titanium PowerBook G4... Well, hrmph, I say.

And yet when, later in the episode, they drove up in that Hummer, they didn't bother to remove the Hummer name on the back of the vehicle. And really, the TiBook is the Hummer of laptops. They're both wide, powerful, and pretty equally distinctive and hard to disguise.

Hrmph Hrmph.

(You know, it's possibly just a little not healthy that I feel personally slighted by the removal of an Apple logo, but that I've got issues isn't news.)

So I played about an hour of FFX last night before collapsing from exhaustion...

And honestly, so far, I'm a little underwhelmed.

Word of advice number 1: When you fire up the game, do not watch the credits/intro that start playing, not because they spoil anything, but because they're long and they're repeated when you select "New Game." And the second time, you don't have any way to skip them.

The graphics aren't nearly as fantastic as I was expecting. The environments are great, but the character movements are sometimes jerky, and very unrealistic. And some models are still very blocky in places that I wasn't expecting.

The main character (Tidus) has a chubby face! Every time I really watched him I noticed it. I'm not going to be able to get over this. Chubby Cheeks!

The voices are acceptable, but some of them are definitely much lower quality than others. Pity there's no option to turn them off should I decide to give up on them halfway through.

The control and dynamic camera is going to take me a little while to get used to. It's very strange to be holding left, then have the camera switch such that I'm still holding left but the character is moving up on the screen... But then if I let go, and press left again, the character goes left, in a different direction than he was before despite pressing the same direction. It's meant to make sure you keep going in the same direction when the camera goes nuts, which will probably work out okay once I get used to it... But so far, my first instinct upon seeing the camera change is to let go, and then when I press the same direction as I was going before I go off in some other direction, and I have to struggle to reorient myself.

The camera feels a lot like Devil May Cry, for those who have played it and are wondering. (Or vice versa)

And finally, despite having played an hour into the game, I have no fucking clue what's going on. I mean, I understand that it's meant to put you in the same state of mind as Tidus, who, certainly has no clue what's going on either, but it had the wrong effect and kind of put me off... Instead of making me fight my exhaustion to stay up and play the game and find out what was going on, I just found myself saying "Fuck it, I don't know what the hell is going on, I'm going to bed, I'll find out later."

And I think that's a bad sign. It doesn't draw you right in in quite the way that the first hour of FFIX did, with its festival and dual and kidnapping and airship escape and subsequent crash.

It's not enough to stop me from enjoying the game, and now that I'm awake again I want to go shake some answers out of it... But I fear that the casual gamer is going to be put off by this, and that's not so good.

So iTunes 2.0.3 was recently quietly released, but on the surface it doesn't look like a very major update. It added one more (moderately useful, mind you) checkbox to the iPod preference box, and it added some languages that I don't care about...

But under the hood, they added AppleScript hooks. This was probably intended for the 2.0 release, but must not have been quite finished in time, so we're getting it now. Check out these sample scripts demonstrating some of what's capable...

But the big deal is this means that I can finally write some AppleScript CGIs to interface with iTunes over the web! Yay! This will probably keep me amused me for quite awhile.

So I've been using some some shell scripts I hacked up to act like an ssh agent, but they were really kind of stupid, and would frequently force me to manually reset things after a reboot. But I've been alerted to a proper ssh agent login process someone a friend of a friend wrote. So if you use ssh on OS X at all, SSHAgentServices is for you.

This article is rather ridiculously long, but it's a very very good and thorough comparison between OS X and BeOS. I followed the BeOS practically from its beginning, and I've always admired it from a distance. It's a little depressing to see even its supporters bailing out.

This quote from the article sums it up very nicely: "This is all very simple. I'm going to jump up and down and whoop about OS X, and then I'm going to bitch and moan like nobody's business."

It just occurred to me that when I say out FFX as "Eff Eff Ecks," it sounds like I'm saying SSX with a lisp. I guess I'm going to have to find some other way to refer to the game.

I called FFVIII "fate," and FFIX "fix," so... Fecks? Feck?

Eh. Anyway, the game is in my hand, and it actually was a nice surprise when I got back to the office and found it waiting for me, because that final put me absolutely out of my mind, and I'd completely forgetten it was coming.

Yaroze, my copy of Final Fantasy X is in FedEx's sometimes capable hands! I'll be getting it tomorrow, with superb timing, after my final final, and with only a few other commitments, I'll be able to go home and immerse myself.

To Zanarkand!

(On a related note, here is IGN PS2's review of the game. It's long and kind of poorly edited (in my opinion), but it's very informative without spoiling anything important.)

(This post brought to you by the letters, F, X, and the number 10.)

While I was taking my final tonight, I noticed my shirt was a little wet. I looked down, and saw a tear, and a red stain forming, and realized that the test had "ripped me a new one" when I wasn't looking. I touched the stain and then tasted my finger, and I wondered to myself, "Why does blood taste so sweet?"

It's irony.

Well, it didn't quite go like that, and the final wasn't actually that bad. But you see, I tend to take breaks to amuse myself during long tests, and during my final tonight, I ended up coming up with this jokeless punchline that I'm absolutely in love with: "It's irony." As in, employ some nice freestyle english footwork to arrive at the adjective irony, meaning "Of or pertaining to iron."

The best joke I've got for it so far (which, to give credit where credit is due, was offered up by Jan) is the above referenced "Why does blood taste so sweet?," which hopefully explains that whole little story above. But the problem with that joke is that it's just not... ironic enough for the punchline.

So, I'm still mulling over other possible jokes for the punch-line, and enjoyably, by the nature of folklore, a punch-line can have as many jokes as it wants. So, offer up suggestions! Try them out on your friends, family and co-workers! And most importantly, um... I can't think of a most importantly.

Oh, well, finally, it's perfectly possible that this punch line already exists in the wild (Hm, are punch-lines a form of joke parasites?), and that I just happened to have coincidentally bred a related strain during my final. And if that's the case, and I am just ripping off some clever person, please grind my ego down to a stump, and crush the filings into my foot. And then, when I ask if you can see anything stuck in my foot, you, can tell me "It's irony."