Its torture. People are being tortured. I don’t care what heinous crimes these people are guilty of (but remember: many people under detention by the US have been charged with no crimes). Civil individuals do not pretend that there is a debate to be had. It is illegal, dehumanising, and those who do it and order it are criminals.

So I grabbed a profanity filter script and made a couple of modifications. At least your browser can be honest. Requires Greasemonkey and Firefox.

Download the script here.

If you have configured Apache and PHP5 on Windows XP using the outstanding howto Core PHP Apache 2, PHP 4 & PHP 5 on Windows XP, and can’t load the MySQL module, copy libmysql.dll to either your windows or windows/system32 directory, and copy both libmysql.dll and php5ts.dll to your /ext directory (off your PHP install).

The sentence is bound to generate demands from conservatives for George Bush to issue a politically controversial presidential pardon to a leading architect of the Iraq war.

Libby’s punishment, which also includes a $250,000 fine, was at the upper end of expectations. He is the most senior official of any administration in two decades to face a prison term, and – albeit indirectly – the first senior Bush policymaker to be convicted of charges stemming from the war.

… versus …

WIRED: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has proposed legislation that would make the DMCA look almost just. Among other things, the law would make attempted infringement a crime, and send some infringers to jail for life.

I was reading some blog postings on the Google Desktop Gadgets API, and came across this gem of a comment:

11 boat anchor….

It seemed like a great idea

when seeing it listed on a white board

but seeing it on my pc, it is worthless

I played with it the day it was installed, but never bothered with it again :-( Then I even had it startup each timeI rebooted, and still it gathers dust.

The google toolbar and homepage, I use all the time…..

Somehow the line breaks made this comment read a bit like poetry to me. Maybe I’m nuts.

Bullet Hell Shmups: I like classic arcade games. Growing up in Orangeville, I wasn’t often exposed to really great arcade games. We had one arcade in the mall; it was filthy and stank of smoke. Mum wouldn’t let us go in there, so I’d hover by the door watching the attract mode on the frantic shoot-em-ups. The rare time I’d get a quarter or two, I wouldn’t want to waste it on a game like this, when I knew it would be gone in seconds. The games in the arcade were always set to a higher-than-normal difficulty, and a quarter would get you two guys, not the normal three.

It was this lack of early gaming that hooked me on MAME, the “Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator” when I discovered it. Finally, I could dump virtual quarter after quarter into these games, and not go broke. I played emulated games on my Mac very heavily all through university. After school the interest dropped way off, and I ended up burning all my emulated games to DVD and clearing them off my computer.

My interest was renewed recently, however, when I saw that some real gems of the bullet hell genre had been successfully added to the list of games MAME could run. I was most excited about Radiant Silvergun, one of the best video games of all time, of any genre. RSG is likely the hardest game you’ll ever face (watch this video of some of the gameplay, and note the engrish catch-phrase “BE ATTITUDE FOR GAINS!“; I’ve never made it past the second boss. It came out in my last year of university, and there was a machine over at University of Waterloo. I would play while waiting for friends.

It turns out that Radiant Silvergun isn’t quite playable, but some other classics are: DonPachi, DoDonPachi, Gigawing, and best of all? Mars Matrix. Mars Matrix is one of those games where you don’t necessarily dodge bullets, you deal with them. Which is good, since even with your ships tiny hitbox (the area where it counts if you take a bullet), there’s just too much going on to dodge.

I’ve found a profound pleasure in busting out these straight forward, twitch-and-shoot games from days of yore. Something happens when you hit 30, and you just don’t seem to be able to find those big chunks of gaming time. Every so often I’ll be able to finish a longer PC or console game in maybe two, three weeks. But generally I need to find something I can do for 10 minutes while I wait for some other task to finish. Its very satisfying to start up one of these games, get seriously pummelled for $10 worth of quarters, see pink and blue dots when you close your eyes, all in a shorter period of time than shows up in your daytimer.

Inspired, and struck with the desire to get a bit more serious about this, I put together a template for icon editing. Its not as fancy as the DSIcons template, but it has the benefit of being properly pixel sized. The template is a Photoshop CS PSD. The palette, grid and blue checkerboards are all on seperate layers. If you want to work on an image you’ve shrunk down, you can position it between whatever layers you want, and draw on a new layer you create. The palette matches the Mario Kart palette.

One caveat: in order to drop lines in the middle of the drawing box, I had to make the box one pixel wider than 32 pixels each way. If you don’t like it, you can resize the boxes.

This template is in the public domain, but I’d love it if you could point me to your creations if you use it!

(PS – Buy the classic icon pack from the DSIcon site. I did, I love it. Its worth the few bucks to support something this out of the ordinary.)

Google Spreadsheet Painfully slow to open, easily a minute. PositiveNegative shows NaN in the negative space if there is a positive value. You can fix that by opening any negative field, editing it, and resaving. Dots doesn’t work; spaces are treated as regular HTML white space. This would likely carry over to the Gantt chart, but after a few worksheet changes, G Spreadsheets stops displaying content.

Thinkfree Online The Quick Edit view displays most spreadsheets correctly. Anything using spaces for layout (eg Dots, Gantt), will crap out, since this view is rendered as HTML. The spreadsheet works beautifully in the Java app. Overall, very fast and responsive.

Zoho Sheet Same HTML-related space problems as mentioned above. Column widths came in all screwy, but that wouldn’t be an issue if you were creating your own worksheets.