The Musings of Harry

Over the last few months I’ve been working on a site to index government consultations and present them centrally, so that you can search them, subscribe to email alerts for new consultations, and get juicy feeds for your reader.

The site went live a couple of weeks ago and has been attracting an unexpected, but entirely welcome, amount of attention!

If you’re interested in consultations — or if you think you could be — have a peep at TellThemWhatYouThink.org, and let me know your thoughts.

This is so cool.

Google blog describes the uses for wildcard searches:

Sometimes one wants to use a search engine to find a very specific piece of information rather than to learn about a topic. If search engines were truly intelligent, you could just pose a question the same way you would ask a person. An alternative is to get the search engine to ‘fill in the blank.’ So instead of asking [who invented the parachute?], you can enter the query [the parachute was invented by *]. (The blank, or wildcard, search is marked by * - an asterisk.)

This is really cool. I’m sure it’ll come in useful for digging up little facts, and the answers to obscure questions.

If Google supported proper regular expressions, that would be even cooler - I wonder if it ever will?

Not that there’s anything wrong with copying a good idea, but when it’s Microsoft copying Google, you’ve got to ask: why don’t Microsoft come up with their own ideas?

They’ve already copied Google Maps in the form of Virtual Earth, and now they’ve ripped off Google’s start page too, in the form of Start.com.

I must say though: start.com is nice. Nicer than Google’s original. I think Virtual Earth is pretty crappy, and doesn’t even come close to the niceness of Google Maps - its imagery is horribly out of date, and it just felt clunky. The scroll wheel zoom thing was a good idea, but in practice, it was jerky and thus not at all satisfying.

Start.com, on the other hand, is really nice: you can change the colour scheme clientside, the boxes show their contents when you drag them, you can add and remove columns, and there’s a nice pop-up box thing - click “why preview?” at the bottom of the page. A good showcase for the niceness of DHTML.

I guess if Microsoft actually improve on Google’s ideas, then I’m all for them being horribly unoriginal: a little competition could generate some really cool stuff.

Stunning new screenshots for Project Gotham Racing have been released. They really do look photo-realistic.

I wonder how good they’ll look at 150Mph, but still - impressive.

Canada has a real-life Mr Hanky!

The seven-foot turd is the mascott of the People Opposed to Outfall Pollution , or — you guessed it — POOP. He has a song and everything!

The organisation is campaigning for proper sewage treatment for their city, which — somewhat surprisingly — dumps 120 million litres of raw sewage into the sea every year. Isn’t sewage treatment a pretty basic need? Even in Canada?

Unfortunately:

While POOP and the Alliance say Mr. Floatie has people interested in the issue, Blackwell, a Langford councillor and chairwoman of the Capital Region District’s environmental and liquid waste committees, said the mascot is a waste of time.”It’s so juvenile that he draws attention to himself, not the issue,” she said.

Well, there’s a shock. Still — here’s to giant poo mascots.

Firefox is so cool!

I tried this as an offhand experiment, not really expecting it to work — but it does. So, behold: the iconified select.

It was originally a bit buggy, with icons not displaying properly when the page loaded, or when the selected option was changed with the cursor keys rather than the mouse - these were not hard to fix, however: a bit of javascript and some DHTML reading later, it was working fine. Just not in IE! Perhaps it will in IE 7. Not sure about other browsers, but if anyone out there would care to test in Safari/Mozilla/Whatever, I’d be interested to hear how it behaves.

…because I’ve been playing GTA San Andreas all day. It’s really good. Standard GTA, but bigger, and more interactive, and just cooler generally. Go buy it!

But then, just as I was about to post, I read this on Slashdot… zombies! Real zombies! Seriously though, this really is amazing. They drained a dog’s blood and replaced it with cold saline at a few degrees C. Then they waited a few hours, replaced the saline with blood, and used pure oxygen and electric shocks to restart the heart. Apparently, tests showed no brain damage, and the dog appears to have suffered no damage as a result of the procedure.

That is until the next full moon, when the dogs develop superhuman strength and stamina, escape from their cages, and wreak havoc upon the local community, until a hermit living in a shed up a mountain turns up to save the day with a frosty disposition and a box of silver bullets. Muahaha!

According to Forbes, all of Batman’s gear and training would cost $3,365,449 in the real world.

Cool! Speaks for itself really — now all I need is a shedload of money and a mild psychological breakdown…

Click here for the slideshow.

Now this is splendid news! Someone has created a Klingon translation of the Bible (sort of).

The only verse I can ever name from the Bible is John 3:16, which was quoted at me ad nauseum while I was travelling a few years back. It is… *drumroll*…

For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

Ok. Standard stuff. Now, witness the Klingon!

vaD joH’a’ vaj loved the qo’, vetlh ghaH nobta’ Daj wa’ je neH puqloD, vetlh ‘Iv HartaH Daq ghaH should ghobe’ perish, ‘ach ghaj eternal

Amazing!

This is good on so many levels. This geeky work of scholarly genius means that I can now laugh at Bible passages without feeling that niggling little bit of guilt for mocking someone’s religion. Not that the Bible is all bad, there are some good bits, but let’s face it: lots of it is boring (family trees expressed in tortuously linear fasion) or just plain amoral (vast swathes of Leviticus).

Anyway, now all is well. No one can complain at me for laughing about this. I, in common with most of the world, can’t take a language named after toilet remnants seriously.

I just read this stunning gem. As well as being hilarious, it’s totally on the button, such that I have nothing meaningful to add - just read it!

Teaser:

The fact allegation is that industrial and automotive emissions are putting our planet in peril, and the entire world recognizes the need to reduce idle speculation about so-called greenhouse gases. Not only is the US the biggest culprit guardian of freedom and justice, it’s the biggest denier of lies and will bear reap the biggest responsibility rewards when the environmental shit hits the fan Jesus returns.

Definitely gets into my bookmarks.