Amphigouri: varnished nonsense

Gak. Have 5 years passed already since I was boggling at Smiley turning 20? Sheesh.

Happy 25th to the first emoticon. (arrr!)

Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes - a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis - as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message.

[snip]

Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in e-mail and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect.

Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly.

[from Wired]

According to a MacWorld UK post:

[Toshiba revealed] revealing plans to boost maximum capacity in its 1.8-inch drives to 120GB; two such drives could be combined to offer iPods with 240GB capacity.

The company has developed a prototype 120GB drive which improved on the perpendicular magnetic recording technology used in the current generation of drives.

Nice. The mind boggles, really — I still haven’t filled up my old b&w 40gig iPod with music/audio books, and I was kinda drooling over the new 160gig iPod classics that were recently announced.

The mention of perpendicular magnetic recording, though, reminded me of the animation that Hitachi did to describe what the heck that tech is all about, in the style of the SchoolHouse Rock:

And if that makes you jones for the SHR version (”How a Bill Becomes a Law”), yes, that’s on YouTube, too:

Back when Bloglines was suffering some significant technical difficulties, I switched to Google Reader for tracking the feeds from a goodly number of websites. I had a number of minor gripes about GR (a post describing these has been languishing in draft status for months), two of which (ones I actually found to be my bigger complaints) have now been resolved:

• Google has now added search to the feed reader!
  I mean, srsly, how could a Google app not have search capabilities in the first place?? At long last, they’ve added search, which allows filtering by folder/tag as well as by individual subscription. Now I can finally do a feed search to see which blogs in my subscriptions are talking about certain technologies or breaking news items w/o scanning through post title after post title, and can easily recall that post-i-read-somewhere-with-the great-craft-tip-but-who-knows-where-the-heck-that-was-now. More about their search in their blog post.
• The threshold for unread posts is now 1000+ instead of 100+
  While not as annoying to me as lack-of-search, I found it frustrating that GR wouldn’t tell me how many unread items I had in my entire feed collection (or in individual subscriptions) if there were more than 100 unread. Now it proudly informs me that I’ve got 1000+ unread items altogether (yeah, I’m a bit behind in my reading), and sites like BoingBoing have 250+ unread (alas!).

Thanks, Google!

update: Bah. Annoying bit, though: they appear to have changed the javascript snippet used to display my Google Reader Shared Feed on this site. Had to recreate (difference between “publisher.js” and “publisher-en.js” and a couple url parameters, it seems). That’s irritating, though easy enough to fix, at least.

Ok, perhaps that’s being a wee bit unfair, as I’m still what I’d consider both an AJAX n00b and ColdFusion beginner. I’m currently frobbing with the CFAjax implementation which, I will admit, beats the pants off having to write the whole bloody mess myself. However, I’m simply not adept at getting the various parts to spit out proper debugging messages. After finally getting the pieces to at least play nicely together, I’m seeing an error our group has seen before in various CF database (Informix) calls:

found a quote for which there is no matching quote

This is followed by the regurgitation of the SQL my code was trying to execute, which was suspiciously lacking in extra quotes of either the single or double variety. Sigh. For a straightforward-sounding error message, this one is sometimes just NOT. For grins, I Googled the phrase

“found a quote for which there is no matching quote” coldfusion

The humor is not lost on me that for this particular search phrase/quote, Google returns 0 results (at least at the time of query; rerunning the string a week or three later does yield a result. And yes, I know that removing the coldfusion keyword makes a difference, but that’s not nearly so amusing to my admittedly warped sense of humor) .

From the EDUCAUSE “7 things you should know” series, which “provides concise information on emerging learning technologies and related practices.”

This brief(pdf) covers:

• What is it?
• Who’s doing it?
• How does it work?
• Why is it significant?
• What are the downsides?
• Where is it going?
• What are the implications for teaching and learning?

(via The Kept-up Academic Librarian] )

I read today about MyCyberTwin, “a website that allows you to create virtual personalities that can chat for you online.” At first blush, it looks like it’s a system where you can set up what makes me think of a personalized Eliza (tho not necessarily with the therapist angle)…. an IM ‘bot of sorts that you can train to give canned answers to questions. From LifeHacker:

Web site MyCyberTwin lets you create your own personal IM chatbot that you can customize and teach to mimic your personality.

[snip]

After you create your CyberTwin, you can answer a series of questions to make it more like you through the MyClassroom section … A tool like this could come in really handy if it filtered the important questions to you and took care of the rest itself. I know, it’d be weird-ish, but as a site somewhat obsessed with chatbots, this idea has potential!

And from TechCrunch:

The company, which is based in Australia, creates an online “clone” of users based on a 79 question personality quiz and hundreds of additional training questions. Once it’s complete, a chat bot is created for that user, which has it’s own web page, can be embedded into MySpace or another website, or can log into Microsoft Messenger on your behalf and pretend to be you.

I wonder if this could be an option (and fun one) for libraries that want to offer IM services but don’t have staffing to cover all hours (how do they handle that sort of thing now?)….