Month: March 2004

Every year, nearly all the major car companies issue “concept cars” – Basically the company takes a bunch of their designers and has them go buck-wild. These cars tour various car shows for the rest of the year.

The concept car is a model- it is one of a kind and is not supported by mass manufacturing resources of the producing company. Sometimes the concept car isn’t even drivable, but rather a big mockup made from plastic or wax.

Very few concept cars make it to market; generally they are just a showcase of innovative design from the company. However, some of the features from the concept cars make it into general production. The Prowler closely followed the design of a concept car.

So… what happens to the concept cars after the season is over? Do they get sold to collectors? Or is there a crazy warehouse owned by each company, housing fifty crazy science fiction cars?

• (2001) Tokyo Motor Show
• Concept Carz

Andrew Hamilton’s page has VERY simple GIF animations of what it would look like to approach a black hole.

And of course, he tells you exactly why. Very cool.
Web link of note: Black hole animations
(At http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/)

The source of the Quizno’s “We like our subs!” commercials with the mutant monkeys (sometimes seen as rats).

That commercial is amazingly annoying, but really entertaining in its ghetto animation style.

I’m pretty sure it’s the same guy; since the characters are identical to the ones in his clip “The Moon Song” aka “We Like The Moon”.
Web link of note: Rather Good
(At http://www.rathergood.com)

Basically for copying games… even the ones that come on cartridges.

Amazing. I had no idea this many even existed.

And here I’ve been buying all my games like a chump!
Web link of note: List of game “backup” devices
(At http://www.robwebb.clara.co.uk/backup/#menu)

Pretty interesting; it’s sort of a central web location for visual art.

I first saw this as linked from a commenter on my blog, Nanja
Web link of note: deviantART
(At http://about.deviantart.com/)

We had some problems with comment spam recently so we wanted to see more comments at the same time…

We could have just made a new plugin, or found one already written, and used it in a new index, but then we’d have to rebuild the thing every time we needed to find spam.

So, I went into our MT installation and changed it directly to show the last 25 comments instead of the last 5.

• MT_HOME/tmpl/cms (for example /usr/local/apache/cgi-bin/mt/tmpl/cms )
  is where the templates are.

• The one which we want is menu.tmpl which defines COMMENT_LOOP.

• They use a templating language defined by Template.pm which lives at
  MT_HOME/extlib/HTML (for example /usr/local/apache/cgi-bin/mt/extlib/HTML ). This module is very well commented, type

  perldoc Template

  to read it.

• now we want to change the number of times the COMMENT_LOOP iterates-
  kind of a pain in the ass, since it iterates over an array, and so it will be the length of the array and not defined in our template at all!

• the library that builds this is called
  MT_HOME/lib/MT/App/CMS.pm
  ( for example
  /usr/local/apache/cgi-bin/mt/lib/MT/App/CMS.pm ).

• the array in question is called @c_data and somewhat disturbingly has a hard coded length:

  $iter = MT::Comment->load_iter({ blog_id => $blog_id },
          { 'sort' => 'created_on',
            direction => 'descend',
            limit => 5 });
      my @c_data;

  See that 5? that’s our puppy!
  

non stick cookware
Web link of note: Calphalon cookware
(At http://calphalon.com/)

MAX: basically drunken dog sled racing but the dogs are costumed people and the
sled is a shopping cart. looks like 35 teams participated last year.
insane. if anyone wants to chase them through town from SOMA to Fort Mason,
stopping at all the mandatory pitstops (read: bars), I’ll be there and we
can be fanboys together.

Web link of note: Urban Iditarod
(At http://www.urbaniditarod.com/)

Endorsing a clue-ful view of markets and an end to stupid business.
Web link of note: Clue Train
(At http://www.cluetrain.com/)

British site about Japanese 1970’s TV show “Monkey” ( 西遊記 = さいゆうき = saiyuuki) which I would bet spawned some of the flying-monkey imagery in Dragon Ball Z.

Monkey was based on the Chinese story Hsi Yu Chi (= Journey to the West), which not coincidentally is spelled with the same characters ( 西遊記 ). I’m sure you could trace the monkey character back to the Hindu god Hanuman.
Web link of note: Monkey Magic (UK)
(At http://www.monkeymania.co.uk/monkeymagic/)