Thursday, 6th September, 2007

Ebay : CHILDS DRUM KIT

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*la la la*

LeftLion Radio — Show #5

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Twats with ponytails [...] using one of them Fisher-Price things to teach your nephew to swear.

I'm very drunk BTW

Internet Commenter Business Meeting

link funny

What meetings would be like if everyone¹ behaved like they do in blog comments — it's the spammers that cracked me up, personally (via Tom )

¹ Not yous, obviously. Yous are all lovely.

PuTTY on a USB drive

Aye, that would make perfect sense Although perhaps I should write some little backend things to make life easier in future.

Also, I should probably put my anti-spam software on Erin rather than my clients...

Nice pic on Ms Drayton's site

Thanks Carolyn When I saw it, I was all "OMG, a snapshot of me that I actually like" — usually I look really weird and dorky in other people's photographs.

Want

lingerie

I am, I like to believe, known for my love of nighties. Many's the day I will potter round the house all morning, doing little bits of work, drinking coffee and smoking fags, wearing my little pink one with, or without, jeans underneath.

(Like I am right now, come to think of it)

I've had a checkered history with nighties though. My lovely little blue one fell foul of a drunken night when I went to bed without taking the tit-glue off my chest, and woke up in the morning with it stuck to me.

(Took me all morning to detach the thing)

I did have a fantastic long blue one that my Ex gave me, but I got rid of it soon after she left, in one of my 'moving on' moments.

I do love my little pink one, but sometimes I really miss the rather sumptuous feeling of lounging around in bed in a very long swooshy nightie¹. The thing is though, all of my usual online shopping haunts don't seem to do long ones — all they have are little chemises, or boring cotton ones.

But, Ebay to the resuce

Definately tempted. Shame it's not a "Buy it now" one though.

¹ Guys, honestly, even if you're not a tranny, you so have to try it. It's bloody wonderful.

Interpolated Building

Something that someone must have already made, but I'm going to close my ears and pretend that I'm inventing it...

These past few days, I've been struggling with a Very Last Minute™ build for a certain group of people who control the internets. I find it very hard, you see, to be spontaneously creative without some form of core concept to, well, anything really. Anything that I've ever done that's been even vaguely successful has — at the very start — some central cohesive nugget of inspiration¹.

I knocked up a few big spheres — based in part on the logo of the project who is funding the island — primarily to Put Stuff Into™ ... but it wasn't really working for me.

Today though, it struck me that one of the most fundamental themes of the project is a certain working model for rapid prototyping — a funny-looking 'figure of eight' thing, supposedly representing a cyclical developemtn/production approach.

"Cool", I though. "I'll base the whole island around a massive version of that logo, with illustrative 'displays' and examples and stuff throughout it".

For some reason, it took me ages to get the positioning and sizes of those loops right. (For the curious, they take up an entire sim — each of them is 128 metres across)

But the issue became how to connect them together so that one overlaps the other. Should I just make them cross? Should I make a series of ramps? Or, should I try and twist them round a bit so they smoothly cross over each other?

I tilted them in opposing directions, just enough so that when connected, they passed over and below each other, then I set about trying to join them up.

...

This is the tricky bit though — to get a smooth transition from one to the other requires two twisted sections, sections that look like youve taken both ends of a half-box girder and twited them in opposing directions.

(If you get my drift)

I bodged up a quick pair of links by eye, but naturally they are really rough and look bloody awful. The thing I was thinking though was that there has to be a programmable way of doing it.

Which of course there is

My little idea for a script then ("idea" because I've had enough for today, and really can't face flinging myself at a script editor tonight), is to take all of the relevant measurements from two prims, and calculate the interpolated steps in between.

So, for example, say you had two prims — A at 64,10,50 and B at 76,16,50 — and you wanted to join them up with five prims, you subtract each of the B values from the A ones, divide by six, then negatively increment each of the values five times, giving you:

64,10,50 -> 66,11,50 -> 68,12,50 -> 70,13,50 -> 72,14,50 -> 74,15,50 -> 76,16,50

I've probably explained that really badly, but hopefully you get what I mean

It doesn't just have to be the position of course, it can be the rotation, the colour, the 'hollowness' — anything really, apart from the actual prim-type itself. What I'm envisioning then, is an object you can rez, tell it (somehow) which two objects you want to interpolate between, and it fires out a series of prims that 'join up the gap'.

Obviously, being as this is a Half-Formed Wotsit In My Head™, there are loads of problems I reckon. For example:

1. The size of the rezzed prims is slightly tricky. They would have to be worked out as the distance between the two objects, minus half the size of each of them (which'll take some trig I think), divided by the number of 'steps'.

   Maybe

2. This will only draw straight lines. Which is OK for what I want to do with it, but it would be rather nice to make something that automagically worked out a 'best fit' curve.

   Lacking the patience for that sort of thing though, I might delegate it to Father.

3. I bet someone's already made this.

...which is kinda the point of writing this — to ask if anyone's seen a prim-interpolation building-type script²?

¹ For example, this blog. It's primarily a cnversation, and everything about it — right down to the CSS — is centred around conveying that.

² She said, about to Google for just such a thing.

a process called, not unsurprisingly, 'tweening'

Oh trust me, having wrangled with AfterEffects for more years than I'd like to mention, I'm well aware of tweening

I'm just not sure if anyone's done it with prims though

ANd no — not a Mobius strip. I tried to do one by eye a few weeks ago, and got very frustrated. I think I'll leave those to folks like Seifert Surface

working out the precise sizes and shapes is a bit more complex

And hence, a challenge. And there's nothing I like more that a challenge

A Small Spam Diversion

I have, you might have noticed, recently been getting some rather odd, and — quite frankly — embarassing pieces of comment spam. What's particularly odd about them is that they seem to know when I'm not anywhere near an internet connection — or, at least, one I can do anything worthwhile on.

In as much as it pains me to admit that I'm on the losing team, I'm very well aware that part of the self-enforced admin duties of Someone Beligerently Stubborn Enough Not To Use Anything Except Her Own Code™ involves playing a constant catch-up game with the spammers, always trying to spot weaknesses after the event rather than pre-emptively shooting them in the gonads.

There are two distinguishing features of the recent random-text spambots:

1. They always post garbage in all the name fields, meaning I could probably run some kind of Flickr username check: if the username doesnt exist, it's probably spam.

2. Looking though my logs, they invariably read one page before posting a comment, without getting any of the 'detritus' (the images, Javascripts, CSS etc.)

Far be it from me to start banning comments from people who don't look at the images, of course. But the interesting thing about them is that they all have a referrer of "http://www.google.com"...

adsl-75-43-210-82.dsl.lsan03.sbcglobal.net — - \
[06/Sep/2007:21:52:46 +0100] \
"HEAD /2007/07/09/totally-the-wrong-place.html HTTP/1.0" 200 0 \
"http://www.google.com" \
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

adsl-75-43-210-82.dsl.lsan03.sbcglobal.net — - \
[06/Sep/2007:21:52:56 +0100] 
"POST /index.php?y=2007&m=07&d=09&newcomment=yes HTTP/1.0" 200 28430 \ 
"www.tranniefesto.co.uk/2007/07/09/totally-the-wrong-place.html" \
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

Now, I doubt very much that I'd ever appear on the front page of Google, without any search terms being entered. So I think I might have found a way to weed those ones out

Well, yes — hence my "I'm on the losing team" admission. But you think their bots actually read this?

(If you post a comment and Erin decides it's spam, you see it as normal. She just doesn't write it to the file. You'd have to re-read the page, and check it against a cached version to find out if she'd let it through or not)

That's just a little too Existential for my liking

Stunningly dramatic irony

Why would you add something to wine? It tastes wonderful as it is

(Unless it's a really bad bottle of course. The guys I was staying with a few weeks ago had this habit of adding orange juice to the cheapest plonk they could get from the cornershop. I didn't join them in that)

Like, do you just pour it from the bottle to a cup then drink?

Actually, I've been known to just drink it straight from the bottle.