Damn, I was hoping to get out of the damn topic for a while, but my baldness-induced striking cold precluding most other activities worth narrating here, I might as well, give my two cents about the no follow “anti-spam” tag…
In a nutshell: it’s very cute, but it won’t do much to help major existing platforms (might help smaller ones, but they weren’t really concerned with the spam problem in the first place).
Not been back for a week and they are already announcing snow for tomorrow…
I guess I could launch into my usual bitching about cold temperatures, poor standards of insulation in Japanese architecture and the fact that I can feel the wind blowing from one side of my appartment to the other, through closed windows…
See, that’s what I would have done a month ago.
But today I won’t.
Not only because I’ve just spent two weeks in Montreal, where -15° C is considered a warm day. But also because I have heard of Nunavut.
Yea, me too.
As I mentioned many times before, recent development and support on both Spam Karma and WPPM have taken a serious toll on a schedule that certainly didn’t need the extra excitement.
On an average, I receive over a dozen emails/comments a day regarding SK or WP-related support. A good 90% of which are usually RTFM-related and not in any way due to a bug in SK. Lately, I have spent upward of two hours, every single day, dealing with plugin development issues (mostly SK). Very often to come to the conclusion that the bug I’m going after has been introduced by some changes in WP’s code, user hacks, exotic server configurations or any of the hundred parameters I have little control over.
And this, of course, for the mere glory of it all. Because it is doubtful I will ever make a buck off it (and that’s really not the goal), nor is this type of development ever likely to impress anybody reading my resume (the kind of people who employ me usually, ignore until the very meaning of the word ‘blog’).
But this is quite alright.
The many thank-you notes, sincere props, pitches in the tip jar, as well as the personal benefit from using these tools on my own blog, definitely go a long way toward making it worth my time. And I am certainly not gonna start complaining because a project of mine gets some amount of popularity. User adoption is indeed the greatest form of appreciation for one’s work.
Why am I putting Spam Karma’s development on hold, then?
The Japanese language has no future.
Literally.
It has got a present tense, a past tense, many inflections for each, but absolutely nothing to accentuate a verb in a way that shows it is taking place in the future.
This is not as inconvenient as one might think at first: present tense is used instead, and, when the lack of context calls for it, precisions such as “tomorrow”, “later”, “after” clear up ambiguities.
Sometimes, though, it gives strange results.
in Japanese, “I will miss you” becomes “I miss you”.
In fact, because the closest equivalent in Japanese is 寂しい (samishii: lonely, desolate), instead of saying “I will miss you” or even “I will be lonely”, you say “I am lonely”…
In other news, arguing all day long while walking aimlessly in a city taken over by muddy snow and icy wind chills is about as fun as it sounds.
From my childhood readings I remember this particular chapter off Jules Verne‘s visionary masterpiece From the Earth to the Moon.
The first volume would go over the fabrication of a humongous cannon being built to send a few adventurers on the Moon (yea, this is 19th century science-fiction all right, but not as far off as one would think) and included an historical background of both the main character: Impey Barbicane, founder of shots during the Civil war, and his personal nemesis-turned-ally: Captain Nichols, founder of armored plates. That one chapter described extensively the armament race that opposed the two men through their new inventions on the battlefield.
Every time the cannon grew bigger, the armor became thicker, and vice-versa.
Anyway, spam strongly reminds me of that. Just when everybody started enjoying a deceivingly quiet reprieve in the Spam Wars, the filthy baboons come back and hit again, harder, and nastier. This time using a different angle.
Problem with making your New Year’s Card on homemade pre-alpha software is that, if there’s a bug, all your friends will know it…
Well, two days after I had uploaded that last work of art, I realized I had screwed up monumentally somewhere: despite what I thought, the software hadn’t included all the pictures and nearly half my library was omitted. Meaning that many a friend that should have been there, wasn’t. Turns out the algorithm to do all that mosaic computation was a tiny bit more complicated than I originally thought. Which is great, since it’s always fun solving these problems, but also fell on a rather bad timing, since you are usually not expected to spend your days in front of a computer between Christmas and New Year… I will probably write a separate post full of geekerish about the solution, later on.
But nonetheless, we made it: it’s 5:30pm here, still 6 hours to go with this year, and I am proud to introduce the newer, better, bug-free version of my New Year’s Card… this time, you’re all on it (provided I had your picture in the first place).
Happy New Year Everybody!
Update Jan. 2nd 2005: OK, I lied… it was still buggy and missing half the pics… this time it’s for real, go ahead, check the full-size version (huge file warning), you’re there, I promise…
皆さん開けましておめでとう。今年もよろしくね！
去年にケイタイで撮った写真でこのNew Year’s Cardを作ったから、あなたの写真はあるんでしょう。探して頑張ってね！
こちらもっと大き見て
こちずっと大き見て
Après quelques petites difficultés techniques (et une version jolie mais incomplète), voici enfin la version 2.0 GM de mes voeux pour l’année 2005.
Pratiquement toutes les photos ont été prises avec mon keitai durant l’année 2004 et, si je vous ai rencontré suffisamment longtemps pour prendre une photo, vous pourrez retrouver votre visage de star en cherchant bien.
Bonne Année 2005 à tous!
Top 3 major technical drawbacks of dog-propelled transportation versus motorized vehicles:
In conclusion, and despite the important huggability factor (very low for your average out-of-the-box Aston Martin), I would say that dogsleds are very unlikely to regain a dominant position in the transportation sector.
It would appear they have very different standards for ski level in Japan and Canada (not to mention Europe).
That or E. slightly overestimated her skiing skills when she told me she was an ace and would enjoy humiliating me publicly on the slopes.
I guess I should have mentioned the part about learning to ski before I could walk and spending quite a few winters in mountain schools as a kid.
Hope you’re all enjoying your hangover-nursing time in between holiday celebrations.
Things are still cold around here, thanks for asking. Nut-freezingly so, I may add…
One of the interesting difference between regular snowball fights and snowball fights in a negative double-digit temperature environment, is that the later involves heavy blocks of icy snow, instead of that usual powdery sissy stuff they use elsewhere. Battles haven’t been any less fierce for that. Serious efforts were put into reducing the inheritance pool, but only succeeded so far in a slightly bruised nose and ego. Not mine in both cases, mind you.
All pictures were automatically harvested from the keitai sideblog archives, the huge majority taken with my cellphone during the year 2004.
If I have met you (long enough to take a picture) in the past 12 months or so, then chances are your mug is somewhere in there (full size here if you wanna print your own poster at home).
Hence, the kanji: 友, which means ‘friend’…
For, if a few here are a bit more than friends (and a rare few are, well, complete strangers to me right now), most of these faces are the friends who made that last revolution around the Sun somewhat bearable overall. Enjoyable, even, at times.
So, thanks everybody for being you: You rock.
And have a wonderful holiday season… may you find many a bottle of high quality, triple-filtered vodka in your Christmas stocking.
For those not easily bored: Gory technical details below
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