dimator | head

OS X (at least mine) doesn’t have a watch (1). Here is a cheap lookalike in bash, because I like bash:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Dimi Shahbaz
#
# A (crude) replacement for the UNIX watch command for
# systems that don't have it.
#
# Options:
#  -n SEC     Delay in seconds between command executions
#
	
DELAY=2
	
while getopts \"n:\" Option
do
	case $Option in
		n)	DELAY=$OPTARG; shift; shift;;
	esac
done
	
CMD=$@;
	
while /usr/bin/true ; do
	clear;
	date;
	sh -c \"$CMD\"
	sleep $DELAY;
done
	

From the Absolutely del.icio.us page, I found Audiolicious, which is a Win32 program that turns RSS feeds into MP3. It uses the Microsft Speech API.

I thought it was going to be similar to what I had envisioned a while back, but I was wrong. Text to speech technology still sucks, and I guess Microsoft’s try at it sucks more than usual, because the samples I listened to where barely intelligible. I still think live people reading feeds and distributing them as podcasts would be a nice idea. I wonder if it would be a successful business though?

This post is not about how IE7 will support alpha channel in PNG. Who cares? After who knows how many years of developers jumping through any number of hoops, and wasting all kinds of time to get images to look right across browsers, it’s hard to be impressed.

I just want to know one thing. What possible reason could have delayed this innovation for so long? Why did a company who claims to “listen to customers” first and foremost wait this long for such a basic feature? It’s obviously not a technical reason, so it must be political. My simple mind cannot comprehend what such a reason could be.

I think I’m an official Wikipedian, now that I’ve made my first edit (albeit a trivial one). I changed the composition element links from the Quarter (U.S. Coin) article to point to the actual elements, instead of disambiguation pages. I’m not even sure if the changes won’t be backed out due to some style rules I haven’t read, but it seemed like a good idea to me at the time.

Now that I’ve done that, I think it would make sense to do the same for the other coin articles’ composition element links. I think maybe this is why Wikipedians are so driven: they are motivated to improving consistency and quality across the site. It’s just like programming, when things that work but are ugly are less satisfying than things that are done tight and right.

EA is posting a screenshot daily, from the next-gen Madden game, presumably for PS3. The stunt culminates with a commercial to be shown during the upcoming draft.

Well, I’m not going to hit their stupid site every day for 5 days, and since I’m a big fan of wasting time, I’ve created an RSS2 feed that will throw the images at you when they are made available.

(I’m assuming they’ll continue to use a very specific URL format for each day’s image, so the feed could potentially blow up, but I suspect not.)

Update: Ya, I guess they did update the URL format. Oh well. Anyway, the full comercial is now available at the first link above. I’m not entirely impressed, as it does not look like in-game footage.