Amit Schreiber's Blog | הבלוג של עמית שרייבר
Lately, some of the older links I used to think of as funny spring to mind. The Really Big Button That Doesn’t Do Anything is, as you may have already guessed, a big button that doesn’t do anything. And it’s been not doing anything since 1994!
Try it. It really doesn’t do anything, and I don’t mean in it in the “how to do nothing” sense.
Grid Game is a simple and not a very competative game. It’s just fun to play with. I reached a max score of 1278.
In a response to the latest Slashdot poll, which was “Number of Open WAP Access Points Around You Now”, one user wrote: “Define open. I mean, does WEP count?”
If you don’t get it, then you’re not as geeky as you may think. Here are some links that may help you get the joke:
If you ever wondered where the phrase “all your base are belong to us” comes from, then your search is over. It’s actually a pretty funny story. You can read it in the history page on the official video site, or view the actual video (followed by a hilarious Techno track). You can also read it all on the “all your base” page in Wikipedia.
The Infinite Cat Project is one of those things that can only happen by chance. Here’s the story, as told on the website:
“It all began innocently enough when a user on an Apple help web site posted a picture of his cat, Frankie, contemplating the beauty of a flower. Shortly afterwards another user posted a picture of his cat bristling at the image of Frankie on the monitor. I decided this was too much fun and advanced the concept as The Infinite Cat Project which is, simply, cats regarding cats regarding cats in an electronic milieu. If you like this web site then thank your lucky stars that the world is populated with cats, Macs, and people with wayyyy too much time on their hands.”
Here is a direct link to the first 25 cats, including the original one, Frankie.
(this post is dedicated to Shaul. I hope this clears the 0.22$ I owe you for clicking the Google ads)
This is one of the stories my friends like to tell about me. During 2001 I was in The Netherlands for about 10 days. Mostly I spent my time in Amsterdam with my ever-traveling friend, Katz, who was there already for a few months when I got there.
Katz took me to places that she liked and introduced me to some of the regulars. One of those places was a coffee shop, and one of the regulars there was called Gevin, who was a pretty cool guy. One day, as I was playing chess with Gevin (I repeat, I was playing chess with Gevin!), he pulled out of his bag a huge plastic bag full of Marijuana and put it on the table, right in front of the cameras (which are mandatory by law).
Turns out that it’s pretty common for dwellers of Amsterdam to traffic drugs for profit if the chance falls upon them. What’s very uncommon was showing that to the cameras. I had no idea about this, and kept playing chess. Later on one of the waitresses dragged me outside of the coffee shop and told me that the cameras captured me dealing drugs in the coffee shop. Of course I chose the only logical course of action – I demanded to see the tape (I really wanted a copy of that). But she said we can only do this in the police station, so I gave it up because I didn’t want to waste my vacation time in a police station. Eventually I was warned not to do it again, and that was it.
So my friends think it’s kind of funny that pretty much the only person they know, who never used drugs, got accused of dealing them. Not only that, I got accused of doing that in Amsterdam, where it’s legal to use soft drugs.
Actually, I think it’s pretty funny, too.
By the way, the drug policy of The Netherlands determines that Cannabis is illegal to use, unlike what most people think. However, they do have a non-enforcement policy.
The Prodigy’s “Their Law” album went straight (!) to number 1 in album sales this week in the UK.
Did I mention that PRODIGY ROCKS already? ;-)
If you have never seen this ad before, then you should. As explained here it took 6 million dollars and 606 takes to finally get it right.
Monad Shell (MSH) is Microsoft’s next generation shell for Windows. It’s a new scripting language, which is based on the idea of small commands that can be used together to create powerful scripts.
The shell is very impressive by itself. However, as part of their .NET strategy, Microsoft lets you import .NET libraries and use them from Monad scripts, which gives the programmer a lot of power.
ArsTechnica has a guided tour of Monad. It’s lengthy, but worth the read.
(For the computer language geeks among you, I will say that the new language is mostly procedural but also has functional properties, which makes it even more attractive.)
Open Office 2.0 has been released, in case you didn’t know. I installed it and played with it a little, and I must say I’m very impressed. Unfortunately, I have little use for Office-type applications, so I didn’t test it thoroughly.
Open Office 2.0 has many interesting features, like importing Microsoft Office documents and exporting documents as PDF. In general, Microsoft Office users will feel pretty comfortable using Open Office, as the menus and toolbars are organized pretty much the same.
Hebrew support is very good, although Open Office doesn’t come with a Hebrew dictionary out of the box.
And the best thing, of course, is that Open Office is free.