Indistinguishable from Jesse

I went to ComedySportz for the first time last night. I loved it.

Six players in two teams played 8 improv comedy games. In "185", an audience member suggests something that might walk into a bar, such as a penguin. Players race to come up with bar jokes involving 185 penguins:

185 penguins walk into a bar.
The bartender says "I don't like you, please leave."
A penguin asks "Why?"
The bartender says "You smell fishy."

or

185 penguins walk into a bar.
The bartender says "Sorry, this is a Microsoft shop."

In a comment on my previous blog post, Simon Willison writes: "I'm not too keen on popping up a new window with an external validation service. How about an alternative bookmarklet that just validates XML well-formedness (essential for those of us who use XHTML)?"

Try the new blogidate well-formedness bookmarklet. If this bookmarklet finds an error, it turns the textarea red, selects the part of the textarea where the error is, and puts the error message in the status bar (not in a dialog). If it doesn't find an error, it turns the textarea green.

Update Jan 21, 2005: added a normalize() call so the bookmarklet won't fail when the XML is more than a few kilobytes.

Update Sept 2, 2005: the Valid XHTML user script, which is based on this bookmarklet, is even more cool.

"Blogidate" is a new bookmarklet that lets you validate the HTML in a blog post before posting it. It works in Mozilla but not in IE or Opera. To use it, choose the version that matches your blog's doctype and drag it to your bookmarks toolbar.

• blogidate html4.01 transitional
• blogidate html4.01 strict
• blogidate xhtml1 transitional
• blogidate xhtml1 strict

Here's a textarea so you can test the bookmarklet on this page:

I edited Google's home page to make it as small as I could without changing how it looks. The result is 30% smaller and works slightly better.

Most of the changes that weren't simple deletions involved the code for the tabs above the search box.

Filk began as the music of the fantasy and science fiction fan community. It has expanded to cover other geeky topics such as space exploration and computer programming.

• Eternal Flame (God Wrote in Lisp) by Bob Kanefsky and Julia Ecklar (download, lyrics)
• I want my music on napster by Tom Smith (download, lyrics)
• The Word of God by Cat Faber and Kathy Mar (download and lyrics)
• Asteroid Named Rest Stop by Leslie Fish and Julia Ecklar
• God Lives on Terra by Julia Ecklar (lyrics)
• The Phoenix by Julia Ecklar

• The Virtual Filksing
• Samples from an upcoming space-filk CD, "To Touch the Stars"
• mp3.com: Bob Kanefsky (songs from Roundworm)
• mp3.com: Kathy Mar

I was introduced to filk music at a small concert the night before the 2001 Mars Society convention. After the concert, which I enjoyed, Eli Goldberg gave me one of the copies Roundworm with defective cases he was trying to get rid of. Since Roundworm is all parodies of other filk songs, it was a great starting place for finding out about other filk writers and singers.

I built Mozilla Firebird for the first time yesterday! It took me 3 days to convert my Mozilla build setup to build Mozilla Firebird. I started with a working MSVC.Net Mozilla build and used Gemal's guide to building Mozilla Firebird [with gcc], thinking I would be able to skip the gcc-related steps since I already had a working build environment for Mozilla.

I switched from msvc.net to gcc twice (once accidentally, once intentionally), but ended up using msvc.net. Read more for a boring list of the problems I ran into, and a much shorter list of suggestions for changes to Gemal's page.

General suggestions

• Stay within unit systems. If I search for rod= or acre, give the answer in feet or square feet, not meters or square meters. If I search for 1 acre / 1 mile, say 8.25 feet instead of 2.5146 meters.
• Output in km/h rather than m/s if the inputs are in terms of kilometers and hours or days. 800 km / 8 hours should be 100 km/h (rather than 27.77777778 m/s), but 3/5 c and 10 m / 3 s should be in m/s.
• Parse 8 h as "8 hours", not "8 times Planck's constant". Not everyone knows what Planck's constant is or that it is represented by "h". I noticed this problem while searching for 800 km / 8 h. Strangely, 800 km / 100 km/h works as I would expect.
• Never round aggressively. Round without explanation once (one baker's dozen in dozens), and you lose my trust whenever you output an integer (1 acre in square feet) unless I figure out your rule for when to round.

Error-handling

• Floating-point arithmetic errors (1 / 0, 2 ^ 2000) should be displayed by default. Currently, they cause the calculator line to not appear, as if the calculator hadn't feature been triggered at all.
• Unit errors should be displayed by default. Examples: 1 acre in feet, 1 meter + 2 seconds, cube root of a square mile.
• There should be a way to see syntax errors so I'm not left in the dark when I make an error in my input and only get search results. It would make sense to use = at the end of a search for this, since = already causes questionable calculations like 1 feet= or 8 mile= and useless calculations like 6 cm= to be displayed.

New features

• Add support for multiple-unit output: 100 minutes in hours and minutes.

This Google search, in addition to finding my blog entry called Chrome URLs in Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird, displays the following ad (affiliate identifier removed):

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