Here is a lightning talk by Partick Michaud at YAPC::Europe 2008 in Copenhagen, demonstrating the Parrot Compiler Toolkit. Live demo: a LOLCODE compiler. wut?

It would be really nice if we can take all these languages, pass them through Parrot, and translate them to other languages. I decided that wasn’t good enough. Let’s just translate them to LOLCODE.

video:

Filed under: code code | 0 Comments
Tagged: lolcode , parrot , perl , wtf???

You can see what you’d look like too (if you were graduating from high school sometime between 1950 to 2000 on Yearbook Yourself). Sadly, i do not look so good with what I imagine is the female version of the mullet.

Filed under: bobslobster | 0 Comments
Tagged: redonk

Several scraper sites rip off posts from tikirobot.net in order to generate AdSense revenue. Nothing new about this, and it’s never really bothered me.

But this morning, Sam and I were searching for a TR post and found that a scraper site showed up in search results ahead of TR. Obviously, something should be done. We could block the scraper, but that is Too Easy. We could redirect to goatse, but is Too Boring. We need something even more shocking.

Lulzlunch is exactly that.. a redirecting service for /b/ that allows hotlinking! We can infuse the scraper with the very worst of the Internet, and since it’s not goatse, I bet they won’t even notice.

Now we just need some RewriteEngine rules to perpetrate lulz based on referer:

You can test it out by going here. Hit shift-refresh to clear your cache. You should get a new random (probably horrible) image from /b/ on every refresh! Lemme know if it breaks something on TR.

Filed under: meta | 0 Comments
Tagged: lulz

somewhere in boulder colorado…, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

jupiter is malfunctioning…

Filed under: Uncategorized | 9 Comments

A few weeks ago, we hosted wine tasting at our house.
50 bottles of wine were consumed.
This is the only picture I took:

Filed under: food, san francisco | 1 Comment
Tagged: bernal , BernalingMan , wine

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled that the Artistic License is enforceable! Happy day! The 16-page opinion is a good read.

From Lawrence Lessig:

So for non-lawgeeks, this won’t seem important. But trust me, this is huge.
[snip]
In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.

Important clarity and certainty by a critically important US Court.

via reddit

Update:

orig photo by Sam Ogden

Filed under: all talk, no code | 1 Comment
Tagged: lessig , opensource

The Perseids Meteor Shower, which happens every year, is set to peak tonight (between midnight and dawn). The best way to see the showers is to find someplace dark (away from city lights) and lie on your back with your feet pointing northeast. I did this one year somewhere in Marin and saw lots of shooting stars!

Filed under: upcoming | 2 Comments
Tagged: meteors , stargazing

• Lonesome George is the last known Pinta Island Tortoise. There may never be another tortoise of his subspeices after George. However, George has recently mated with a female of a similar species of Galápagos Tortoise. If the eggs hatch, the offspring would be ‘intergrades’. (via mefi)
• Certain forms of cancer are contagious and can be transmitted from animal to animal:
  

  Cancer is not an infectious disease. And the axiom is (usually) correct. But there are exceptions. Those exceptions point toward a broader reality that scientists have begun to explore: Cancers, like species, evolve. And one way they can evolve is toward the capacity to be transmitted between individuals.

  (via bb)

• The Berkeley Pit, one of the largest Superfund sites, is an abandoned copper mine in Montana that has flooded and become extremely acidic. No plants or animals were thought to be able to live in it, but single-celled algae was found living in the pit in 1995. Since then, more than 160 species of extremophiles have been discovered in the pit. From the wiki:
  

  New fungal and bacterial species have been found to have adapted to the harsh conditions inside the pit. Intense competition for the limited resources caused these species to evolve the production of highly toxic compounds to improve survivability; natural products such as Berkeleydione, berkeleytrione and Berkeley acid have been isolated from these organisms which show selective activity against cancer cell lines.

• Fraternal twins can have multiple fathers. This is known as heteropaternal superfecundation and is rare in humans, but more common in other animals. Dogs and cats can have ‘multiple-sired litters’. (via Jess)
• Viruses can infect other viruses. This supports the idea that viruses are alive. (via ./)
• Bonus random thing: A wholphin is a hybrid between a bottlenose dolphin and a ‘false killer whale’, which is also a species of dolphin. Wholphin is also the name of McSweeney’s DVD Magazine of Unseen Films. We’ve been watching these on KenFlix, and they are awesome. I love the ’secret’ films hidden in the DVD title animations.
  

Filed under: bobslobster, science | 2 Comments
Tagged: 5randomthings , cancer , LonsomeGeorge , tortoise , virus , wholphin

We made some FAIL mugs:

You might be able to order your own here.

Filed under: food | 1 Comment
Tagged: coffee , fail , mug

mang sends this video of blinky lights on the Olympic promenade:

Filed under: tronix | 0 Comments
Tagged: blinkylights

Ralf sent this video of moose playing in a sprinkler:

Rob sent this to a mailing list:

Ridiculous!

Filed under: cuuuuute | 0 Comments
Tagged: moose , pigeon

• Graham Crackers were invented by Sylvester Graham as part of a vegetarian diet designed to keep people from masturbating. lol wut?
• There is a species of freshwater dolphin that lives in the Ganges River.
• California uses more gasoline than all of China. Also, the US uses more gas per day than the rest of the world combined.
• In 1954, the United States organized a coup d’état that overthrew the democratically-elected government of Guatemala. The reason for the coup: the United Fruit Company, now known as Chiquita Brands International, lobbied the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in response to his land redistribution program.
• In the 2004 presidential election, it is believed that ballot boxes in rural counties in Ohio were tampered with. Evidence that points to this tampering in known as the Connally Anomaly. Robert F. Kennedy wrote about it in this Rolling Stone article:
  

Take the case of Ellen Connally, a Democrat who lost her race for chief justice of the state Supreme Court. When the ballots were counted, Kerry should have drawn far more votes than Connally — a liberal black judge who supports gay rights and campaigned on a shoestring budget. And that’s exactly what happened statewide: Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than Connally did for chief justice, outpolling her by a margin of thirty-two percent. Yet in these twelve off-the-radar counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes — a margin of ten percent.(181) The Conyers report — recognizing that thousands of rural Bush voters were unlikely to have backed a gay-friendly black judge roundly rejected in Democratic precincts — suggests that ”thousands of votes for Senator Kerry were lost.”(182)

Kucinich, a veteran of elections in the state, puts it even more bluntly. ”Down-ticket candidates shouldn’t outperform presidential candidates like that,” he says. ”That just doesn’t happen. The question is: Where did the votes for Kerry go?”

Filed under: all talk | 0 Comments
Tagged: 5randomthings

We saw this via reddit a few days ago and haven’t stopped laughing since.

At first, you see a highway, with lanes painted on it, and drivers are even attempting to stay in the lanes! Pretty tame for India you think.. no animals in the road, no randomly stopped vehicles, no one going the wrong way… and then….

Filed under: transportation, video | 3 Comments
Tagged: india , motorcycle

Filed under: photos | 1 Comment
Tagged: exploratorium , toilet

Dosa envy, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

Erin at udupi palace, Valencia st., sf

Filed under: Uncategorized | 0 Comments

This is a dumb one but totally sucks me in because I suffer from OCD. (hehe, it’s embedded below so you can play right now…in fact, I’m gonna play *just one* game right now…*just one* and then I’m closing the browser, I promise :)

Filed under: no code | 2 Comments
Tagged: bejeweled , games

I’ve been totally hooked on Chromatron, a set of four freeware games for Mac and Windows. This game has everything: lasers, reflectors, beam splitters, prisms, frequency pumps, and all kinds of other nerdy gadgets that you can use to bend photons to your will. Yay lasers!

Filed under: science | 1 Comment
Tagged: chromatron , lasers , software

Ulrich Schnauss at the Fox Theatre in Boulder, Colorado on July 8, 2008, with A Shoreline Dream, Cacheflowe, and Ian Cooke.  A remarkable show, one of the best.  Music was great, crowd was appreciative, and the musicians had much love for each other. Multiple encores.

Audio sample one; audio sample two.

If anyone happened to record this show, please post a comment below, I’d love to get a copy. Same lineup is playing July 9 evening in Denver at the Falcon.

Filed under: beats, inspiration, photos, via phone | 0 Comments

4th, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 0 Comments

We’ve been subscribing to KenFlix for 23 days and loving it! Here’s what we watched:

• Juno - better than I expected.
• Saawariya - the first ten minutes were so bad we turned it off.
• Once - we saw it in the theater and liked it. still good, but this movie is best watched once.
• Sopranos - Season 5 disc 4. They all blur together. I can’t watch any more of these for a while.
• No Country For Old Men - Good, but far too violent to watch with Jess and the parents.
• Someone to Eat Cheese With - Much better than I was expecting.
• Planet Earth on Bluray - We got this to test Bob’s sweet new home theater system. The encoding quality was disappointing. The places where you can usually hide quantization noise (foliage, high-freq areas) were encoded very poorly. It was sad to see panning shots across the forest exhibit so many compression artifacts. These guys need to use an encoder tuned to such scenes. Note: don’t ask a video codec engineer to review encoding quality of Bluray discs unless you want to get an earful..
• Be Kind Rewind - Slowish, neat plot but could have been much better.
• Congorama - Whoa. Unexpectedly, my favorite KenFlix so far!
• War - dunno. Only Bob watched it.
• Wave Twisters - Great, but Bob hadn’t seen it, and the DVD wouldn’t play. Oh well.
• Futurama: Beast with a Billion Backs - Disappointing. We had such high hopes!
• Eastern Promises - Very intense. Good, but good thing Jess didn’t see this one.
• Stray Dog - Japanese noir. Kurosawa is always good.
  

Bob & Jess, anything to add? Did I forget any?

Filed under: video, why are we here? | 2 Comments
Tagged: 4star , bernal , kenflix

Zara is a mad hatter!, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

-bob and raj

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Shag and I were collaboratively hacking on a new radio station for the archive, and we needed a collaborative text editor. SubEthaEdit is great, but Mac-only. Shag found Gobby, which is a like an open-source SubEtha that works great on Linux.

If you haven’t used a collaborative editor before, multiple authors can work on the same files, and everyone sees each others edits in real time, differentiated by background color. Gobby has syntax highlighting, integrated chat, over-the-wire encryption, and is a pretty solid text editor too. We love it! Here are some ideas we had for future patches:

• indent-region
• sound cue upon message receipt
• auto-indent
• birds-eye view of the file to watch changes go in
• function dropdown
  

Filed under: all talk, no code | 11 Comments
Tagged: gobby , opensource , texteditor

Beaker is one of my favorite muppets. Just watch this video, and you’ll agree!

Filed under: video | 3 Comments
Tagged: beaker , muppets

Suppose you could design your own moleskine-esque notebook, where every page and the cover is fully customizable. What kind of pages and images would you include? Please leave your ideas in the comments!

Filed under: books | 11 Comments
Tagged: diy notebook

Wildfires visible from bernal hill, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

- bob

Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments