September 2002

God has been talkative lately. via andersja

Ian McKellan (Gandalf) shares his views in “The Grey Book”. via LoTR channel

Bullet time. How they did it in ‘The Matrix’. (Answer: with lots of cameras.)

And speaking of glitches, Beflix has a site on the “aesthetics of digital corruption”. He posts screen images of computers that have gone kaput. Some of the animations, especially the ZX Spectrum ones, are a bit familiar.

Rant on HP’s customer service. Long, but interesting. I read it end-to-end. It’s curious, how impersonal a big company can get. via Metafilter

Music helps identify software bugs. I’m sure it can be extended to many other forms of ordered data. DNA sequences, time series, etc.

Speaking of bugs, here are some famous software glitches – right from the Patriot missiles misfiring to the London Millenium bridge wobbling. Some links are broken, though. (More glitches and links)

Man has epilepsy. Woman thinks it’s a heart attack. Gets upset and sues epileptic. via Metafilter

The Oracle of Google is the coolest Google app so far. Ask it a question with 4 choices, and it uses Google to guess the answer. It knows that Abdul Kalam is India’s President, though it did prefer Vajpayee to former Presidents. via Google Weblog

Mahesh is experimenting with a new blog format. Something like this has been on my mind for a while too. Will be watching it with great interest.

11 film-makers make films on 11/9/01. The films will be 11 min, 9 seconds and 1 frame long. via Plastic

I always knew it. If you’re taking an injection, don’t look at the needle.

My current project: transcribing every Calvin and Hobbes into text. Because I’d like to search, using text, for the strip in which Tracer Bullet has “six slugs, one of lead and five of bourbon” or where Dad explains why the Sun rises. Comments The Calvin and Hobbes search Takedown | s-anand.net 21 May 2010 11:55 am (pingback): […] So I set out to build one. I can’t remember when, exactly, but it was before Sep 11, 2002. […]

Rail accidents are nothing new to India.

Is using the Net for schoolwork plagiarism? James McKenzie had some thoughts right in 1998.

Greenspan’s defence. On why he couldn’t have raised interest rates earlier and prevented the bubble.

The next step to globalization. The Columbian President will use video-conferencing. To cut costs and to save time.

ABC News managed to smuggle uranium into the US. Reminds of when George Stalk was talking about the security checks in India being much tighter than in the US. He was body-frisked twice, and barely escaped a third random check.

andersja talked to a spammer. Some insights into the spamming world.

Professional news feeds. A treasure for RSS news junkies.