Repost, because there’s a new really awesome version: the xkcd comic animated by Noam Raby and sung by Olga Nunes.

Discovery Channel loves the world (and for the video-challenged, here is the whole thing in text).

ETA: Here’s a Star Wars version. The galaxy is awesome!

ETA: And a Harry Potter version, too.

xkcd loves the Discovery Channel.

These people love xkcd.

It’s been around for some time, but I rediscovered it by accident and thought I’d share it in case you haven’t seen it yet. I love the blogosphere, too.

I have an embryonic business web page at irinarempt.eu. It has a standard footer as a server-side include, to be expanded with more relevant information later. For now it contains a small blurb and the last-modified date as <!--#echo var="LAST_MODIFIED" --> .

It works perfectly one level down (on both of my mail-form pages) where it reads

Optimised for Konqueror and Firefox | Last updated: October 12, 2009

but not on the main page, where the timefmt directive doesn’t seem to work, so it reads

Optimised for Konqueror and Firefox | Last updated: Monday, 12-Oct-2009 20:39:05 CEST

WTF? I copied the relevant line (<!--#include virtual="/include/footer.html" -->) from one file to another, so it can’t be a typo in the text; it can’t be a typo in the footer itself either, because it appears as it should in the mail forms. It’s reading the file, because the “Optimised” part does appear, and when I add something arbitrary to the include that appears on the offending main page as well. It’s only this directive that works in the subdirectory but not in the root:

<!--#config timefmt="%B %e, %Y" -->

This should give “October 12, 2009” and indeed does in the subdirectory.

Is there anything about timefmt that makes it not work in the document root? Am I missing something glaringly obvious? Should I give the main page a different footer and dispense with the server-side include there?

No, I don’t have it, but my website does: I registered irinarempt.eu for corporate purposes and I’ve convinced our Apache server that it’s called that and to find it where in fact it is, at http://rempt.xs4all.nl/irina/zaak. And also at http://www.valdyas.org/irina/zaak, because valdyas.org is an alias for rempt.xs4all.nl (but the server has nothing to do with that, it’s administered elsewhere, in a place I haven’t gone yet). The web site isn’t much yet, slightly more than a placeholder, but at least it’s there.

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Finally, I fully realise what a “cult classic” is, because now I’ve found some of my own. Warning: most of the links are to German-language pages and video clips. I’ll mark the language with a mouseover title.

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No paper this morning. Trying to tell the paper that on their Improved Service Page (which needed re-registration, a bit of a hassle with my cold-clogged sinuses) had this result:

I was about to mail them the screenshot instead when it occurred to me to try with Firefox instead of Konqueror, which worked perfectly. Now who do I send a bug report— the Konqueror maintainers, or the paper because they ought to make it work in all browsers, or both?

Or: biology is easy, physics is crunchy

(Blosxom doesn’t do tagging, at least not without a plugin that would destroy other things. Faking it:)

Tags: AdaLovelaceDay09, #ALD09

The school is in a sad state of rebuilding, not only renovation but also much structural work. There is hardly a classroom, hallway or common-room that doesn’t sport boarded-up bits or is covered in plastic. All except the new science wing with combined theory-and-lab classrooms.

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Over there —> you can see my new Twitter feed. I don’t know whether I’m actually going to use it much; I’m trying it out now so I’m probably a bit more voluble than I’ll eventually end up.

What made me decide to get a Twitter account after much wavering was the sudden realisation that it’s not meant to let people know what I’m doing at every moment —for instance, I’m not still making bliny— but to throw offhand remarks to the world too small to actually blog. I thought I’d use it to announce blog posts, too, but that’s before I found the widget to put on my blog.

On grounds of principle I ought perhaps to do my microblogging on identi.ca because that runs on free software (and some people I’d like to follow are there, too) but I’ll be a sheep for a bit to start with.

Clearing my backlog of links: most of these were sitting around waiting for an opportunity, none was big enough to warrant a post of its own.

Convert any number from any base into any other base up to 36. I’ll be 110011 years old next week— or 1220, 303, 123, 28 or 1F, take your pick. I think that was google-fu because of something we talked about on the #rasfc IRC channel.

Romanian Orthodox chant of Psalm 50. The neighbourhood is also worth a look. I think I got this from the Orthodox Women’s list, or the coveredorthodox list, both of which I’ve unsubscribed from because they were getting on my nerves, and that’s not something I need in Lent. I’m not one of these people who give up the Internet for Lent and announce it loudly all over the place; it’s not for that, but there was a bit too much angst on the OW list, and the coveredorthodox list seemed to be full of (a) women who were tentatively starting to put something unobtrusive on their head in church and (b) women who felt called to “move towards” full-time headcovering, and I don’t fall in either category, so it felt pointless. If you’re reading this and you’re on either list, do comment; I may come back after Easter and see if it’s changed.

Palace Design and Court Structure in (mostly) the late fourteenth century. It would be perfect for Valdyas if the House Velain wasn’t so oblivious of decorum and hierarchy, confound it. I think Boudewijn pointed me to this one.

Not quite my period, but too pretty not to share: 18th century blog, “fashion and culture from the 1700s” by Johanna Öst (via Woest en Vredig).

Ah, Horseradish! by Dale Dougherty on Boing Boing. Amusingly, there were horseradish roots under a “Parsnips” sign at one local supermarket until I alerted them to it (actual parsnips never materialised, worse luck, but the horseradish is now correctly labelled “Mierikswortel”).

The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe by Don Ringe on Language Log. It’s long and involved —I keep rereading it and finding new things to think about— and it’s got 163 comments at the moment of writing this. I like the message in the last sentence: “You are the product of diversity because Europe has always been diverse.”

Finally —I’m in two minds about whether it’s fascinating or squicky— Creative Food Sculptures. The orange carrying itself to the food processor does squick me a bit.

March 24, 2009 is the first Ada Lovelace Day, a day to “highlight the women in technology that we look up to.” As I’m writing this, 1,179 people have already pledged to blog on that day about a woman in technology they admire: if you scroll down a bit you’ll see my pledge in the sidebar (when I signed up there were only 300 people on the list, but it seems to have gone very fast after that). Even though the goal of 1,000 has been met, you can still join! And you don’t have to be a woman to do it: Cory Doctorov is on the list, too.

Until now, I never thought that I’d want to do something like this, being a non-feminist (which is not the same as an anti-feminist). But I have daughters. Not that I have the ambition for my girls to end up in technology, specifically —all of them seem to have different leanings— but I don’t want my girls or any other girls to be scared off from technology because of their gender only.

I’m going to interview the girls’ science teacher, if she’ll let herself be interviewed of course, and ask how she got to take that career path, who her role models were, whether any of them were women, and whether she thinks girls (still) need female role models. I wasn’t sure that I thought they do, but what brought me round was the thought that the United States now have a black president: if [this person in a high position] can be X, nobody can claim legitimacy for discriminating against X any more.

It will be a bit unquiet around here as I try to get comments (and captcha, preferably ReCaptcha) working properly again. I’ve had up to ninety-three spam comments on one entry.