Well, it’s official: I am financially prostitute, and I need to come up with some revenue generating ideas, stat!

With that in mind, I’ve posted that UTF-8 t-shirt design to Cafepress, on the off-chance that the idea will seem cleverly amusing rather than tragically esoteric— although truth be told it was a plug from Joel [on Software] for the similarly themed shirt that prompted me… Now all I need is for every visitor to buy a few hundred items and I’m set!

The very real pressure to find a source of income will most likely cause my procrastizone levels to spike dangerously over the next few days, possibly resulting in the commencement of [more] totally unrealistic new projects, in a desperate attempt to avoid dealing with the situation at hand. Even as I type this, I’m thinking about that 500-page graphic novel I’ve been meaning to write since earlier this evening— Something dark, with lots of gothic vampire action, but totally fresh and original at the same time…

I find myself suddenly clobbered by spam again, via email and comments.

The email spam is the most upsetting, since I’ve been doing such a great job of keeping my primary address off the lists… until now. And I wonder if it’s a coincidence that it started shortly after someone’s crappy comment engine published my email address in public/spiderable view…? Bastards!

Also getting classic poker/gambling comment spam rolling in at about twenty per day, but at least those are never making it past the moderation filters [so they’re only annoying the hell out of me; not my visitors].

The thing that I was depressed about just got more depressing— I am heading north again to try to be of some assistance. Basically, my mother is in after a complication from a car accident she had about a month ago, and it’s a complication that [almost certainly] never needed to happen. I am trying not to get really really angry about this. I hate feeling so fucking powerless! And I end up hating myself because if I were financially solvent I could be of a lot more assistance— my frivolous do-what-you-like lifestyle suddenly feels stupid and reckless, because it means I have no reserves to call on when unexpected needs arise.

I do at least have my time, so at least I can give some of that.

Aaaaanyway… in less crappy news, I saw a crappy movie today, Bewitched, and particularly enjoyed this piece of dialogue from an uptight young AD dancing around under the influence of magic: “I feel so alive! … I feel like one of those people I make fun of! … I believe in unicorns!” — maybe you had to be there.

Also, I made gravatars work here again using a raw IP (64.124.231.223) since Tom [Mr Gravatar] forgot to renew the domain name on time. Please Tom, decentralize Gravatar just a bit by providing scripts so that people can cache images locally. For outages like this, and to reduce your own bandwidth requirements.

PS why the fuck do airlines always mail my itinerary to me as a PDF attachment? I hate PDF! All I want is the details of my flight, why can’t they just stick it in the body text of the email? PDF is heavy on form and light on content. HTML is in my mind the perfect balance between the two, and is already supported by 99% of email clients, so why add this extra step?

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UPDATE: gravatar is back up, and I now note that there is at least one cacheing plugin which has been endorsed by Tom. Also there is a forum for discussion of the next version of gravatars, so I might drop in there…

The previous post has got me thinking about images built out of tiles, and I need some cheering up, so I made this little block sliding puzzle. Enjoy!

Feel free to copy the source to make your own version. All you need to do is replace rocket.jpg with your own 300 x 300 image.

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UPDATE: Note that I had originally overlooked the issue of parity when randomizing the puzzle squares— This meant a 50% chance of getting an impossible puzzle! Apologies to anyone who might have been a victim of this temporary oversight ;)

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UPDATE2: how to solve ( one animated solution)

I’ve been playing around with the marvellous and , and just noticed how elegant the system for addressing image tiles is [specifically from Google Maps].

Google Maps now offers a satellite view as well as a map view, and does so using the former Keyhole database. The view is built using tiles— 256 pixel square JPEGs fetched from the the kh.google.com server.

As of this writing, the image URLs take the form:

http://kh.google.com/kh?v=projection&t=address

projection is either 2 or 3. Selecting 2 gives a plate carrée projection, while 3 provides a Mercator projection, ensuring that local features are uniformly scaled. [Update: projection type 2 is no longer supported]

address is a short string of letters encoding the location of a particular map square. The addressing mode is quite elegant, with the world recursively quartered until the desired detail level is reached. This simple heirarchical structure is known as a quadtree, and is commonly used in computer graphics. For whatever reason, Google labels the four quadrants q, r, s & t.

The topmost tile contains the entire world map, and is referenced with an address of t. Adding an s to this selects the lower-right quadrant of the map, and adding a further r selects the upper-right of that map, resulting in a tile containing most of Australasia. Each time an extra letter is added, we descend into a new quadrant, and this continues until the maximum detail is reached. So, for example, the hospital where I was born can be uniquely addressed [to within a hundred metres or so] using the URL:

Click here to see the sequence of all tiles containing that particular location, with each yellow quadrant marking the region occupied by the subsequent map.

The page uses the following Javascript code to convert longitude and latitude into a quadtree address. The first part of the code is based on equations from Wikipedia’s entry on the Mercator Projection.

Today my Google Pagerank [as indicated by the Google toolbar in Internet Explorer] is 5/10. I think that’s as high as it’s ever been, but since I hardly use IE anymore it’s hard to know for sure. Although 5 is not particularly high, I have relatively few incoming links [for a blog] so I’m actually pretty pleased.

Also, I’ve finally added a Recent Comments section in the sidebar, so that the casual visitor can more easily see what people are talking about [and more easily see whether a response to their own comment has been posted]. Also changed the font to help pack it all in a little neater, since it’s starting to get a bit crowded over there. Still hanging on to the serifs in the body text for now, but will probably do a CSS update to spruce things up around here sometime.

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UPDATE: And now it’s back to 4/10. Well that’s just fabulous.

Google Earth [formerly Keyhole] now has high resolution imagery of my home town:

Murwillumbah High School, which I attended from 1985 to 1990. Not sure when this photo was taken.

It’s astounding how much of an improvement this is over the imagery available just seven months ago, when even Sydney was visible as only a few blurry pixels. Now I really can see my house:

Sydney, taken sometime within the last year, so I am probably under that white dot.

Of course, you could also use Google Earth to look at a place where you haven’t lived. Checking out Tokyo it’s amazing how much it looks like a screen shot from SimCity 3000 … and it’s also fascinating looking for the seams between photo sets, where images are collected from totally different angles, making buildings suddenly appear to lean in the wrong direction— See the top right of this image.

is free, so if you’ve got a PC, go download it! Then try to resist the urge to email everyone you know with pictures of their houses…

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UPDATE: For some reason I thought that Google Maps and Google Earth were still using different databases, but checking again I realize that they are using the same imagery [Google Maps references kh.google.com for its images, so it’s almost certainly using the KeyHole database]. is a link to a Google Maps view of that first image, and is a satellite view of that strange elevated shed I posted about earlier.

I have to post this animated gif I created yesterday, since suddenly I have Daleks on the brain again. It’s from the same model I rendered in chrome ages ago. [ click for larger version ]

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finally gets an official update, so here’s hoping it’s as robust as it seems. I am still a software provider!

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Temptation is an Australian quiz show [the new Sale of the Century ] on which I would like to win lots of money, but unfortunately in a recent audition I didn’t even make the first level cutoff— Very disheartening! Basically about 150 of us squeezed into a room and wrote the answers to 50 spoken questions on a sheet of paper, and when the questions were finished we swapped papers and tallied the correct answers. The cutoff was 27/50, and I only scored 23, so it was a bit of a blow to the old ego…

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Half-Life 2 is still the best game ever… I was reminded of it after becoming frustrated with the rather uninspired Doom 3 [on our slightly disfunctional xbox], and before I knew it I was playing through it all over again! I eagerly await the sequel, Aftermath …