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.

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

Things started off nicely for me, as I was lucky enough to win Gold in the Australian Informatics Olympiad (I’m third in the intermediate section of the results). This meant that in December I was invited to attend a 10-day informatics course in Canberra, which was a lot of fun. More competitions followed, but when invited to participate in another course I decided not to attend.

School has been good, and the balance of 3 Year 12 subjects and 3 Year 11 subjects has been working out nicely this year. I set up a wiki to record various notes for my classes, and it has gathered quite a bit of content.

As far as music is concerned, I’ve been listening to Radiohead for most of the year, with some Smashing Pumpkins and lately a lot of Nine Inch Nails. My listening information is on Last.fm if you care to look.

Presents presented in my presence include:

• Altec Lansing BXR1121 speakers
• StarCraft
• Nine Inch Nails – Ghosts I-IV
• A dressing gown
• Some money

As far as productivenessness is concerned, here’s a list of stuff that I’ve done:

Sites

• Codaver
• AlgorithmSource

Coding

• Shroom

Anyway, I’ve probably taken enough of your time already. I hope that you have a nice day, and if you see me around give me a big smile.

Another site that I’ve made for physics:

Galileo’s Physics

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.

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!

For Physics at school I put together a website about Russian nuclear history. You may find the use of Ajax interesting…
http://russiannuclear.uuuq.com/