not the purple dinosaur

your tax dollars at work

turn the main side topwise! no, TOPWISE!

Back when I was studying Prolog in college, I started writing a self-playing game of Tetris. Seems like I wasn't the only one who thought it'd be interesting. (I seem to recall reading elsewhere that Tetris is actually pretty hard AI.

so this is how the other 92.75394% lives

my laptop spent most of this evening in Windows land, partly so that I could update the virus scanner that lives there and partly for some other reason that escapes me. While I was there I played with Firefox and Thunderbird for a bit and installed some extensions to the former. Things that I am noticing as a result of this toolery:

• Thunderbird's RSS reader is pretty damned rough. You can't seem to drag and drop RSS URLs into it or do something like thunderbird <url to rss file>
• Thunderbird needs at least two more display layouts: folder list + message list, and message list. I don't care if this is a "if you want Outlook/Evolution you know where to get them" statement.
• Firebird extensions: good. Restarting to activate them: bad. Inconsistently placed configuration screens: very bad.
• Deepest Sender is nice, but missed the one basic thing I thought was totally the point of browser-embedded web log clients: writing an entry based around the current page. Like, BLOG THIS ALREADY or something.
• The del.icio.us plugin was okayish but needs to be two-way, i.e. rather than just grabbing my stuff off del.icio.us, it should be possible for me to locally frob the del.icio.us folder and have the results mirrored on the site.
• WeatherFox (check the firefox extensions site as I couldn't be bothered digging up the URL again) is neat.

And that is all.