Month: February 2004

Adding to WikiPedia is addictive…

I am constantly using my blog as a notebook. I will get obsessed with something and gorge on all the data I can find on the subject. Then, later when I’m looking for something, I’ll remember I scoured the net for something and annotated all the information in a blog entry, so I just run a search on my own blog.

So in that regard Wikipedia is like a blog for stuff you don’t really need on your own site, with entries maintained by other people.

There are no limits to participating. Periodically there are “edit wars” on some topics (e.g. the phrasing in controversial entries like Israel-Palestinian tensions). However the topics I look up / edit are usually so obscure that they are touched only rarely.

Shard of Glass is the name of a fictional company that sells popsicles with broken glass in them.

It was a commercial aired during Superbowl 02004, and showed happy workers making these horrible things with the broken glass jutting out of the sides… The CEO in the commercial cheerfully tells the viewer that they realize broken-glass-related health issues occur a lot more in users of their popsicles, and that’s why they make these public service
announcements.

The tagline is “what if every company sold products like the tobacco companies?”

Web link of note: Shards of Glass
(At http://www.shardsoglass.com/)

True story of a con artist in the 1820s who convinced investors to settle on land they had bought in Central America which didn’t actually exist.

0306813092

A Mockumentary about Bill Gates being assassinated
Web link of note: Nothing So Strange
(At http://www.nothingsostrange.com/)

Like a giant garage sale- list your giveaways on the FreeCycle lists for your area and people will pick up your junk if they want it and save it from the landfills.
Web link of note: FreeCycle
(At http://www.freecycle.org/)

There is a cafe in Tokyo’s Akihabara district (like a giant electronics bazaar) called Little BSD where the waitresses are cosplay girls dressed as the Free BSD Demon.

Web link of note: Little BSD Cafe
(At http://littlebsd.com/)

The most famous Civil Engineering major at Cal.

Would you have the guts to try out for American Idol? What if you can’t really sing? Your audition would be shown to the entire country.

Well, William Hung did. He even made it onto one of the “Best of the Worst” shows, and although he was painful to watch, his confidence and attitude were inspiring. I have a feeling Paula Abdul felt the same way.
Web link of note: William Hung
(At http://www.williamhung.net/)

I need something to help me track my comic book collection. I have mainly trade paperbacks (they are less clutter), but I have a lot of them… it hasn’t gotten to the point where I don’t remember whether I’ve bought something or not, but it’s on the verge of getting there.

Also, since I live with Diane now, and she has many boxes of Wonder Woman, we need to rein it in ASAP.
At this point I’m favoring the following attributes:

• web-based interface
• backed by a database (pref MySQL)
• open-source (I will be hacking on it)
• some kind of support for sorting by artist or writer or both, or a framework that makes it relatively easy to add that support
• the product MUST BE FINISHED, because if I wanted some half-assed program that was mostly broken, I could write it myself

All of these are from SourceForge, ordered by relevancy and potential.

• LibDB is more generally for magazines, movies, and pretty much every medium you might own. They seem to be still active (Feb 4th 02004) and their home page is pretty impressive. The designers seem to be actual librarian/information archivists.

• MangaDB runs in perl/CGI. It has a pretty complete home page and a running demo. As promised, it is very suitable for the front end of a Manga store. Bears future investigation.

• PHPMyComic is one of the most advanced… however the home page for the site is mostly broken, and I couldn’t even leave a comment on the “Forums” section.

• Odin aka “ACSoc Comics Library Management System” has a home page at sourceforge and a demo site up… however, every time I’ve visited the demo site, it’s been broken, and all the links are in Chinese. Cool site alias though- www3.to/cucomic.

• JComics looks like it started as a personal project in 02001, came out with a single release, and then got dropped. The project home page is an empty directory listing.
• CComicCataloging– released once in late 02002. No documentation, no forum comments.
• myComicCollector is listed in the “planning” stage, is written in Italian, and last had activity in Jan 02003. Next!
• phpCM is written for PHP and MySQL… too bad it never had a release, and was last heard from in august 02002.
• I can’t even think of what the concept was for Comic Book Studio. Apparenlty something to do with publishing comics as well as archiving… No releases, no documentation, no posts, last updated Nov 02001.
• PHP Comic Book Collector was just started in Jan 02004.

Web link of note: PantsFactory RSS
(At http://www.pantsfactory.org/?action=rss)