Dear Santa, thank you for the dolls and pencils and the fish. It's Easter now, so I hope I didn't wake you but... honest, it is an emergency. There's a crack in my wall. Aunt Sharon says it's just an ordinary crack, but I know its not cause at night there's voices so... please please can you send someone to fix it? Or a policeman, or...
Back in a moment.
Thank you Santa.

Podomatic

I'll be adding podcasting features to Minx sometime in the next month; I even have the mee.fm domain for podcasters and internet radio (and a couple of dedicated servers for that purpose).

In the meantime, I'm listening to podcasts as I code. It's a great surrogate for actual human contact, because I can turn it off or change the channel without getting slapped. It helps a lot during the long hours of bug-squishing.

My favourites - and you may detect a theme here - are:

• Anime World Order Daryl, Gerald and Clarissa mainly review classic anime... and porn. The episodes tend to run long, but the AWO team are both entertaining and knowledgeable¹, so this is a plus as far as I'm concerned.
• Anime Pulse Ichigo, Batou, Chigo² and the occasional co-host mostly cover recent anime, including Bleach (which was very good for the first 12 episodes) and Naruto (which wasn't).
• Electric Sista Hood The best³ girl gaming, gadgets, and anime podcast, brought to you by Ninjah Sista, Pandalicious, Magic Mystic Girl, and the mic of a thousand truths. Ninjah and Panda's father sadly passed away recently (they really are sisters), but the girls are back and as good as ever.
  
• Dave and Joel's Fast Karate for the Gentleman⁴ David Riley and Joel White review video games and anime - often extremely bad video games and anime - and whatever else bubbles up to the surfaces of their fermenting consciousnesses.
• Penn Radio Penn Jillette and Michael Goudeau were a daily listen until they went off the air after only a year of broadcasts. Fortunately, the entire history of the show has been preserved and can be downloaded as a torrent.
  

¹ For example, they all love Dirty Pair.

² The name is confusing given that we already have an Ichigo, but it's a contraction of "Chibi Godzilla".

³ The fucking best.

⁴ I can't be the only person who thinks that sounds vaguely obscene.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:54 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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More New Toys

Pullquotes

The pullquote tag makes for easy and attractive magazine-style pullquotes. You can place the pullquote to the left or right of the text, set your own colour schemes, control the line breaks yourself or let the system handle it for you, and select different text for the quote and the main body.

Code: [pullquote left strip scheme=orange]The pullquote tag|makes for|easy and attractive|magazine-style|pullquotes.[/pullquote]

Usage: [pullquote {left|right} {strip} {nobody} {scheme=scheme_name}]

• The quote can be placed either left or right (the default) of the body text.
• This text appears only in the pullquote.
  When needed, the pullquote text can be different to the body text. To specify that the contents are to appear in the pullquote only, specify the nobody option.
• Markup in the body text may cause problems in the pullquote. The strip option removes any markup from the pullquote, leaving it in the body.
• Schemes can be user-defined in your CSS. The standard schemes include
  red, orange, green, blue, and purple
  red, orange, green, blue, and purple. The default scheme (if no scheme is specified) is black and grey. The CSS code for the blue scheme, for example, is simply:
  

  .pullquote-blue-1,.pullquote-blue-5  { color: #55D; }
  .pullquote-blue-2,.pullquote-blue-4  { color: #339; }
  .pullquote-blue-3  { color: #004; }

• Pullquotes are automatically split into five sections, unless you specify the break points using pipes | as shown in this example.
  

more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:33 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Yahoo! Video, Fix! Your! Embedding!

I'm back on the easy video embedding tags for Minx.  I've done, let's see, ten different sites so far.  They're all a little different, but in each case, there's a unique video ID, and you can unpack that from the provided URL and repack it into their embedding code and it works.  For most of the sites this was easy.  For one, eyespot, it's a bit of a pain (and the page URLs are useless).

And then there's Yahoo! Video, who give you this:

<embed src='http://us.i1.yimg.com/cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/
player/media/swf/FLVVideoSolo.swf' flashvars='id=1020374
&emailUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.yahoo.com
%2Futil%2Fmail%3Fei%3DUTF-8%26vid%3D136897
&imUrl=http%253A%252F%252Fvideo.yahoo.com
%252Fvideo%252Fplay%253Fei%253DUTF-8%2526vid%253D136897
&imTitle=Kitten%2Band%2Bhis%2Bbox
&searchUrl=http://video.yahoo.com/video/search?p=
&profileUrl=http://video.yahoo.com/video/profile?yid=
&creatorValue=Y2FiYWxsYXZlcmRl&vid=136897' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' width='425' height='350'></embed>

Gah.

Update: Right. In less than an hour I've added BBCode tags for iFilm, Eyespot, Veoh and Guba.  Just don't ask me about Yahoo! Video.
more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:55 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 147 words, total size 2 kb.

Heresy!

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is too the best series of 2006. Shakugan no Shana is the only really close runner-up, and that first aired in 2005.  Magipoka is fun, but too episodic to quite make the grade.  Ouran... Well, I can see why some people might like it, but it's not the real Haruhi.

And Kanon is a pile of poo.  Uguu my ass.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:20 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 66 words, total size 1 kb.

Hey Hey!

I went ahead and implemented a first pass of the performance enhancing technique I spoke about earlier.  The template parser still handles data tags purely using lookup tables - this is not the full smart-parser version - so it requires some extra setup effort that may be wasted in the end.

The first cut of it was somewhat disappointing - 10%, maybe 15% faster.  I decided to experiment further to see if I could do better than that.  The first version was creating custom objects with formatting codes and dropping them into the lookup table; I decided to try just using raw tuples (a Python built-in structure, essentially a fixed list). 

That did the job: Gains jumped to over 40%.  Object creation seems to be about as expensive as a function call, so I was eating up most of my potential improvement right there.

I'll bash on it for a couple of days, then put the new engine into this Sunday's update.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:22 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 164 words, total size 1 kb.

An Odd Feeling Of Something Or Other

One of the cool things about Minx is the way that the functions interact with each other, so that the feature set scales superlinearly with the code size.  A lot of it is table-driven, and a lot of the tables are dynamically generated, so that a 2000-line template engine can process many thousands of template tags.  (A quick estimate: Counting variants and subfields, there are currently 12,000 data tags defined for entry objects alone.)

There are two downsides to this.  The first is documentation... Though if I get an automatic document generator going, the user manual will be impressive.

The second is that the bzipped code archive is 53kb.  Though that's not bad so much as merely somewhat depressing.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:15 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Random Taggery

Examples Of The New BBCode Tags

[technorati=wii] wii
[google=wii] wii
[googlegroups=wii] wii
[wiktionary=rhythm] rhythm
[tvtropes="genki girl"] genki girl
[theppn="hayashibara megumi"] hayashibara megumi
[sourceforge=psyco] psyco

[gvideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8922875251875301807]


[gvideo=8922875251875301807]


[liveleak=http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=0d9_1175649699]


[liveleak=0d9_1175649699]


[revver=http://one.revver.com/watch/212112/flv]


[revver=212112]


[vimeo=http://www.vimeo.com/clip:137991]


[vimeo=137991]


(Couldn't find anything actually worth watching on Vimeo.)

[jumpcut=http://jumpcut.com/view/?id=1C478BCAE71811DB856B000423CF382E]


[jumpcut=1C478BCAE71811DB856B000423CF382E]

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:47 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Blup

I think smaller, more frequent updates might be the way to go...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:28 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Abandonment

The PC abandonware scene is vibrant and full of life, with sites like Abandonia and Home of the Underdogs providing a huge range of old games for download (albeit incredibly slow download).  For the Amiga, though, there's almost nothing.  There's a number of sites that offer up catalogues of their libraries of disk images which they will not give you.

But Cinemaware, maker of such classics as Defender of the Crown and King of Chicago, has all of their old games available for download - in all formats, including Amiga and PC. Including Lords of the Rising Sun, the disk of which died on me before I could finish the game.  Now, finally, I get my chance to conquer all of Japan!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:02 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Hitting The Books

Starting to write some real documentation for Minx.  It's not a trivial task.  That's one block tag; there are hundreds of those.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:08 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 25 words, total size 1 kb.