What is the point of bon-bons?

I seriously do not understand bon-bons, also known as “Christmas crackers”. To start off with, they are a royal pain to use. I can never quite work out where to hold them so that they crack, because if you do it wrong you just end up ripping the paper. Assuming you do manage to open the thing, you are rewarded with a paper crown, a corny joke and (if you’re lucky) a piece of plastic molded in an unidentifiable shape. Today I saw the results of a few different bon-bons, and the best joke was this: Why is an elephant large, grey and wrinkly? Because if it were small, white and smooth it would be an aspirin. I find this mildly amusing, but 1 minute of googling for dead baby jokes will yield 10 times the laughter and doesn’t require having your hand 10cm away from a mild explosive.

So the current state of the humble Christmas cracker isn’t too great. However, if a country like Japan is willing to produce bon-bons with hi-tech gizmos inside I would be more than happy to give them a try (just as long as they don’t explode more than necessary).

If you have any interesting bon-bon related stories or know of a tactic which gains you the larger half of crackers, feel free to post a comment.

The Lyrical Explorer

I am pleased to announce The Lyrical Explorer, a website which searches for lyrics from around the Internet. It uses the results to expand its own database, which may be edited to improve future searches. All that you need to do is enter a song title and artist. What’s more, the site is very useful for developers as the API is simple and open, allowing programs to easily incorporate lyrics functionality.

My birthday: the year gone by

Today is my birthday,  and I thought that I might take this opportunity to look at what’s happened over the past year.

Galileo’s Physics

Another site that I’ve made for physics:

Galileo’s Physics

Nice one, Microsoft!

I had the extreme misfortune of using Windows XP today, and my experience was not brilliant. Upon startup I was greeted with this dialog:

Sure, it is true that closing Explorer will make your system more secure, but why not shut down Windows all together if Microsoft are going down that road? As it was, explorer.exe wasn’t terminated until the dialog was dismissed, so whichever imaginary security threat that caused this message was probably still running anyway.

Libre music

As an open source enthusiast, all forms of digital media that restrict rights get me upset. In particular I am referring to DRM, the piece of copyright protection which effectively restricts the usage of material which you pay for. Fortunately, there are some artists which see this as a problem and take it upon themselves to release music under free licenses. Many of these can be found on Jamendo, but here’s a list of my favourite Creative Commons and public domain albums:

• The Smashing Pumpkins – Machina II/The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music
• Nine Inch Nails – Ghosts I-IV
• Nine Inch Nails – The Slip
• Brad Sucks – I Don’t Know What I’m Doing
• Brad Sucks – Out of It
• Jonathan Coulton – Thing a Week
• pornophonique – 8-bit lagerfeuer

Javent

I have long been surprised by the fact that it is so difficult to raise events in Java. Adding listeners is easy, but as soon as you want your own event system, you’re out of luck. Through browsing the web I discovered that a commonly used “solution” is to piggy-back on existing Swing and AWT event queues. This isn’t good.

In order to fix this problem, I have started a small project called Javent. The Javent library is tiny (less than 20KiB), and makes event-raising code a lot cleaner. All of you Java developers should give it a try.

Fork

Inkscape source SVG [29.5 KiB]

Good old DOS games

The other day I came across DOS Museum, a website dedicated to the preservation of DOS games. I was instantly reminded of my childhood favourites like Hocus Pocus, Word Rescue, Commander Keen, Jazz Jackrabbit… my eyes are beginning to glaze over already. I still have lots of respect for the old developers who had to optimize the hell out of their games to overcome hardware limitations, unlike modern developers and their GiB large products.

If you are a sad individual that never had the chance to experience pixellated madness, have a look through the catalogues and install a few games in DOSBox, an open source MS-DOS emulator. They are much better than a lot of Flash games!

What happens after death?

This is a review of some of the most popular theories of what happens to a deceased human being. Each is rated according to its probability of happening and the desirability of the result.