Polyatomic.org :: desperately seeking content

Spammers. 12/30/04 @ 04:50 PM

Spammers armed with auto-commenting scripts have been attacking my site lately. I installed a blacklist plugin for Nucleus that hopefully will take care of most of the spam.

Technobabble Generator. 12/14/04 @ 11:14 PM

I made a pretty simple generative grammar based technobabble generator using python. It gives some amusing results though. Check it out here.

Google tests out new "Search Harder" feature. 11/07/04 @ 12:13 PM

I came upon this suprise while using Google last night:

I tried it, and it said something about not being able to find any more results than it had found originally. My guess is that it's some kind of new heuristic that generates more but less accurate results. Unfortunately, it doesn't show up for me this morning, so I can't do any more tests. They must be rotating access to it through IP ranges or something like that: testing to analyse results before they roll out the feature.

Bank error in your favor. 10/20/04 @ 10:22 PM

I just finished reading a great story about a guy who deposited a fake check recieved as junk mail into an ATM on a whim. He was suprised to find out that the bank credited his account with the amount on the check: nearly $100,000. Check out the whole story at Man 1, Bank 0. It's eleven pages long, but worth it.

NES on the Dreamcast 08/02/04 @ 10:34 PM

Investigating a post on Slashdot, I found NesterDC. It's a full emulator of NES games for the Dreamcast. You just make a disk image of the emulator and the game roms, burn it to a regular CDR and pop it in the Dreamcast. I got up and running very quickly thanks to burnerO's excellent "Best Damned" NesterDC Tutorial and am now playing old NES games on my roommate's dreamcast. Some games don't work so well (or at all), which is not uncommon for a emulator. Most of the games that I've tried have worked well, and at full speed and full sound emulation. I've got to hand it to the developers of NesterDC and all the hackers that figured out how to run code on the Dreamcast, it makes the emulation scene a lot more fun when I can play these games on a tv with friends.

Free downloads! 07/29/04 @ 07:02 PM

I added a download page to the site. I put some old papers of mine and some other stuff that was linked on the site before and collected it in one place. I'll keep adding stuff there if I find anything else that might be useful to anyone.

Fleep: The Comic. 07/25/04 @ 12:01 PM

Fleep is a comic strip that takes place almost entirely in a phone booth covered with concrete. You can read the whole 44 strip run free on the creator's site. I thought the story was very engaging. The comic medium can be used to tell very good short stories: the illustrations add a lot to the reader's identification with the subject.

Limerick o' the day. 07/04/04 @ 08:43 PM

There once was a techie named Sam,
He was smart and had lots of RAM,

His Macintosh froze
Right under his nose,

Was it because of the spam?

— Irene

Some quick puzzle games. 06/21/04 @ 08:44 PM

Check out these puzzles from the (defunct) NewMedia online magazine. I especially liked Just My Type where you have to match up letters with zoomed in pictures of the characters.

Frozen french fries now fresh vegetables. 06/15/04 @ 08:41 PM

Now, thanks to the USDA, you can get your daily recommended vegetables by microwaving some packaged french fries.

The Frozen Potato Products Institute appealed to the USDA in 2000 to change its definition of fresh produce under PACA to include batter-coated, frozen French fries, arguing that rolling potato slices in a starch coating, frying them and freezing them is the equivalent of waxing a cucumber or sweetening a strawberry.

The USDA agreed and, on June 2, 2003, the agency amended its PACA rules to include what is described in court documents as the "Batter-Coating Rule."