The Guardian today has an article on Love and Rockets, the wonderful Hernandez Brothers strip about life in Latino LA from the mid 80s. The occasion is the publication of a new collected works. I do however maintain that I am not one of the ageing former goths that the Guardian talks about being its core market. I do however admit to using a picture of Maggie and Hopey on the cover of a Royal Signals book on wireless packet radio!
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Ruth and I went down to iCentrum where Darren had kindly set up Aibo for Ruth (and I) to have a play with. Impressed by the Aibo's independence and autonomous behaviour - although she was in a bad mood and so wasn't responding too well to commands (just like Ruth really!).
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Whilst most of us are happy to browse the highly graphic web pages of the Internet, many people are now turning to an alternative way of surfing the web. One that removes all of the rich graphics, and advertising, which one normally associates with premium web sites.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds have been around for some time – since 1999 in fact. Used initially to syndicate news feeds between sites, they are becoming an increasingly common presence on the web – typically flagged by a small orange button labelled RSS or XML. And they are increasingly being used - 20% of news search engine Topix's story clicks now come from their RSS feeds.
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Finally got round to learning SVG - Standard Vector Graphics - the XML graphics standard. It gives me an easy way to create diagrams from PERL, and more partilcularly to build dynamics diagrams from live data. Unfortunately it doesn't have any inbuilt 3D/VR functions like VRML used too.
Anyway the diagram above is my first decent SVG output. It shows the patterns within Halo's AIML pattern cases. Patterns starting A... are at the 3 o'clock position, each ring represents an extra word in the sentence. Colours are used to represent different things, eg questions, patterns about Halo, star matches etc. If you have an SVG plug-in click on the image to go to the live SVG diagram.
Over time I'll add pan/zoom/flilter functionality, as well as using SVG to represent other live data. - pan/zoom version now available.
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For the last 3 or 4 years November has been a very strange month for me. I got less sleep than usual, I'd hang out at Internet Cafes, and my GPRS bill would through the roof. The cause of this aberrant behaviour was the Nokia Game. This year, though, November will just have to mean Guy Fawkes, because the Nokia Game is no more.
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