2010-04-15

Der Untergang, Bizarro-style

Posted in General, Web Wandering & Opinion at 1:26

You may be familiar with the “Hitler rants” meme which produced such parodies as “Hitler gets banned from Xbox Live“.  However, what you probably haven’t noticed is that, thanks to a user named hitlerrantsparodies, a continuity has started to coalesce in which Hitler’s greatest enemy is apparently not the Allies, but his prankster brother-in-law Fegelein who continually talks Günsche into informing Hitler of stupid, pointless things until finally Fegelein steals Hitler’s pizza takeout and the others decide to make Fegelein leader.

Here’s my interpretation of said Bizarro world’s timeline:

  1. Hitler is asked “Why so serious?” (where we see that Fegelein hasn’t yet distracted Hitler to the point where he essentially forgets about the Allies)
  2. Hitler is informed he is Fegelein (which apparently takes place before Hitler catches on to the source of Günsche’s stupid reports)
  3. Hitler is informed Fegelein has locked him into his room (where Hitler starts to realize that Fegelein is the source of all his problems)
  4. Hitler is informed he is Hitler (…but he still hasn’t realized that Günsche is in on it)
  5. Hitler is informed he is sitting down (…and now he has)
  6. Hitler’s glued to his chair (Fegelein’s twisted sense of humor responds to the previous incident,  we see how typical this kind of thing is, and Hitler’s patience wears thin)
  7. – Fegelein leaks the parodies which arrived on the web first –
  8. Hitler is informed Fegelein is missing (when Günsche tells Hitler that Fegelein’s ass-kicking for leaking the early parodies will have to wait)
  9. Various Pranks: Helium, Fegelein’s Death, Mass Cloning, etc.
  10. Hitler is losing his voice (from ranting about Fegelein’s antics all the time)
  11. Hitler is informed his pizza will arrive late
  12. Hitler Phones Fegelein
  13. Hitler is informed Fegelein is now the leader

All I can say is that it made my day evening.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUEYOcQYeg4

2010-02-24

Scribblenauts and /b/-tards

Posted in Web Wandering & Opinion at 12:08

Well, I was wandering around YouTube (no clue why) when I found evidence that the Scribblenauts developers may be /b/-tards. At the very least, they’re pretty good at catching all the noteworthy memes.

Here are just some of the noteworthy objects I’d never thought to try:

I also ran across some interesting ways to combine items (some of which exploit flaws in the engine):

Commenters also recommended these terms:

  • Ninja Shark
  • Chinese Dragon (Unlike European dragons, these guys are friendly)
  • Edison (A bandana-wearing T-Rex)
  • Blob
  • Chupacabra
  • Maxwell (a copy of your character) and a Black Hole
  • Urn (disturb it and you get a ghost)
  • Corpse + Chain + Car Battery (or Lightning)
  • Scribblenaut

Finally, just in case you want it, a complete list of all the terms the English version of Scribblenauts will recognize. Enjoy. :)

2010-01-28

Our Sick Society

Posted in Web Wandering & Opinion at 6:29

A few months ago, my mother sent me an interesting TED talk about motivation. It turns out that the carrot-and/or-stick model for encouraging rewards stifles creativity. We need more businesses like Atlassian and Google which employ “intrinsic motivation” (you do the work because it’s inherently a desirable thing to do) techniques like “20% time” and research commissioned by people like the US Federal Reserve agrees. Fair enough.

More recently, I was reminded of an interesting article titled Against School by John Taylor Gatto that originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine. More controversial, but also well-referenced and my personal experience generally agrees. Force kids to be surrounded by other kids, doing boring work and you’ll get mostly emotionally-driven, easily-manipulated adults with the less controllable being outcasts.

It wasn’t until today, though, that I realized how it all tied together. I discovered a long but very interesting article named “Roadmap to a New Economics: Beyond Capitalism and Socialism” by Riane Eisler. The central point of said article being that rather than thinking of capitalism vs. socialism, we should be thinking of domination systems vs. partnership systems.

It seems fairly obvious in retrospect that the real root of all these problems is this “Dominate first, co-operate only if that fails” mentality that our chimpanzee instincts encourage and society strengthens, and as my mother puts it, “bullying is endemic in our society”, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

I’ll leave this on a related note. I don’t have a URL handy, but I remember reading an article a few months ago about how, all around the world, there’s a direct inverse correlation between the size of the gap between rich and poor in a society and the life expectancy of everyone, rich and poor alike. (In other words, for whatever reason, the more unequal your society, the more years lost off your life… no matter how rich you are. Personally, I suspect stress as the culprit.)

Update: Since writing this, I received another TED talk about the necessity and lack of true liberal arts education in modern western society and an article about how kids teach themselves to read… and how could I have forgotten Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness?

2009-12-23

SQL Pagination Without OFFSET

Posted in Web Wandering & Opinion at 8:19

Just thought I’d look up how people paginate efficiently in SQLite since, apparently, OFFSET is just an alias for “discard N first results”. The recommended solution is to use a WHERE clause to mimic offset using the same column index you use for sorting… but that’s only really possible for “Next” or “More…” links.

I ended up discovering that MS SQL, Firebird, Oracle, and DB2 also lack OFFSET and the solution (MS SQL version) is to grab a list of primary keys which should be skipped using a subquery. (because retrieving just primary keys is faster than retrieving and discarding all the columns you don’t need)

To make sure I didn’t forget, I threw up an SQLite version on GitHub Gists.

While doing that, I also ran across jPaginate (demo), a jQuery pagination plugin that, as long as you provide a gracefully-degrading fallback, is probably my new favorite design for a page selector.

Update: This site is also useful.

2009-11-28

My First Impression of Google Wave

Posted in Web Wandering & Opinion at 4:18

Well, I finally got an invite to Google Wave. I haven’t had much time to play around with it yet, but my first impression is that it could potentially be just the thing I need for collaborative story planning… once they add an export feature.

From most to least bothersome, here are the problems I’ve found so far which aren’t on Google’s list of known issues:

  1. Google seems to have no plans to open-source the web-based client.
  2. There is no export functionality.
  3. As with Google Docs, the design will eventually allow someone else to un-invite me from a Wave I forgot to save a local copy of.
  4. No end-to-end, public-key crypto offering.

Problems 1, 2, and 3 can probably be solved together by writing a custom, open-source client which treats the Wave server the same way git-svn treats a Subversion server. (Ideal, since I consider DVCS-like behaviour to be the ideal data replication model for most things)

Knowing Google, problem 4 will probably have to be solved using something along the lines of OffTheRecord which grafts crypto onto the existing system. The main issue I see being that it’ll be up to the endpoints to “induct” new clients into a wave by translating the existing encrypted history for the newly-added public key.

My overall opinion is that, until export functionality of some kind is available, Wave is a toy at best and, even with export functionality, it won’t replace e-mail or IM for me unless they offer end-to-end crypto. However, if a client-developer (Google or third-party) does offer some sort of export functionality, then it’ll be an ideal successor to Google Docs for me. (I use it only for collaboration since I deeply distrust cloud computing.)

2008-07-22

Carnival of Elitist Bastards

Posted in Web Wandering & Opinion at 17:37

Introducing the Carnival of Elitist Bastards @ Café Philos

Probably best to read the link above, since I definitely don’t have time to write something anywhere near as good, but in short, it’s an introduction to Dana Hunter’s Carnival of Elitist Bastards which attempts to combat (or at least provide some resistance to) the apparent American tendency towards anti-intellectualism and a tendency to disregard what the experts say if it contradicts what people want to be true.

As I mentioned, the above introduction is much better than this little blurb and I highly recommend that you read it.

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