Iranian Metal Scene
March 27th, 2007I was watching an interesting documentary the other day, which served to emphasis how fucked up the Iranian theocracy is. CuttingEdge: Forbidden Future was a revealing documentary on the subcultures in Iran; three Iranian artists expressing themselves through music, paintings and sport. Out of these, in particular I was interested in the band Scourge, a death metal band who are recording their first album. Although they have been practicing for some time, they have never played in front of an audience, since such music is unsurprisingly strictly forbidden in Iran. In fact, their lead-man (who was being interviewd in the documentary) was imprisoned for two days for having long hair!
Anyway, it is good to see that metal is present even in such repressive and internationally remote places as Iran. I even caught a section where their lead-man was singing the lyrics to a Manowar song and also noticed that he had a poster of Manowar up in his room.
I was also surprised to see that this band has a decent website. Another relevant website I found is an Iranian online music magazine, called Zir Zamin. So check these links out.
Loudest Aircraft of All Time
March 21st, 2007Although this post is not associated with a category typical of this blog, being an aviation enthusiast (particularly the golden age of jet aircraft), I had to post it. With the Avalon Airshow approaching in Melbourne, I recently had a brief discussion with someone about loud aircraft. The loudest plane I have ever heard, which happened to be at Avalon a few years ago, would have to be the B-1B Lancer. After a little Internet research, I have compiled this rough list of some of the loudest aircraft of all time, mainly going by what people have said in forum discussions from their experiences.
Online Trivia Quiz
March 21st, 2007A recent observed lack of free quality online trivia quizzes has prompted me to try out such a thing on this website. I am not sure if this will go ahead or exactly what I will do, but in the meantime you can go here to try out a simple 10-question quiz. Let me know how you go!
Damn Spam!
March 19th, 2007Yesterday I had to get rid of around 40 spam posts from my blog. Sick and tired of the spam plague, I have installed a simple plugin which should stop this problem. The ‘Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin’ asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question. This is intended to prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot. This plugin, along with some more information on spam protection can be found here.
Penguin Guard Dogs
March 17th, 2007Was listening to ABC newsradio yesterday and a radio segment from the NPR US radio station caught my attention. It had to do with a fairy penguin population which annually arrive at Middle Island near Warrnambool to mate and lay their eggs. Problem is, a land bridge that connects the island to the mainland at low tide was discovered by some foxes, who took a liking to the taste of penguin. Efforts to stop the foxes failed, and it wasn’t long before only a few dozen breeding pairs of penguins were left.
So a local chicken farmer decided to deploy some of his guard dogs onto the island in order to deter the foxes and prevent further eradication of the penguin population. Despite skepticism from some experts, who said the dogs would eat the penguins, the idea was very effective. The dogs leave the penguins alone and the foxes stay away from the island.
Check out these articles for more.
I should mention that the guard dogs being used are Maremma dogs, a dog bred in Italy for centuries to guard vulnerable livestock. They are large dogs with an instinct and inherent ability to herd and protect animal groups they are in charge of. I recall having met one of these dog some years back, and thinking they were cool then. This story confirms that attitude. More about the dog can be found at the following links
testing
March 16th, 2007
I am currently learning about trackbacking and other blogging features am creating this post for testing purposes.
Prolog and Web Development
March 14th, 2007I recently set about completing something I have wanted to create for some time, a logic theorem prover in Prolog. At the moment it just deals with classical propositional logic, but it is ready to be easily extended to deal with some basic many-valued non-classical logics. Accompanying this endeavour was an aim to give the Prolog backend a friendly web frontend. These tasks directly contributed to the development of my skills with regard to logic programming for the web, something I am currently interested in working on. So I set about doing this. Although no where near as covered as traditional web programming paradigms such as PHP and ASP, I did find a disparate collection of literature pertaining to methods to and approaches for Prolog programming for the Internet. Much of this was quite impressive. I use SWI Prolog, and it has nice support for HTTP, RDF and the Semantic Web in general. At this link you will find a good summary of the options available with regard to using Prolog for web development. The guy who wrote this page has developed something he calls Prolog Server Pages (PSP), a cool little web based scripting language using Prolog. If you already haven’t and are interested in this idea, I encourage you to visit the page. I made a small attempt to get it working but to no avail, though I will continue to try and get it working. However, since my project is to be hosted on a server on which I can not use Prolog Server Pages, I opted to use CGI. Although there is a very small amount of literature (pretty much very old forum posts with links to pages that no longer exist) over the internet on the topic of using Prolog programs with CGI, I was unable to find a decent, basic tutorial on how to get a web page to call a Prolog program using CGI. So I have written one: Writing CGI Applications with Prolog.
Awesome Part 2
March 2nd, 2007In an earlier post, I posted a link to a real-life remake of The Simpson’s intro. I have just begun watching the fifth episode of season 17 and was surprised to see that this real-life intro was actually used to begin an episode. More information on this intro can be read here.
YouTube annoyances
February 28th, 2007I just signed up for a free YouTube account in order to be able to add a comment to a video. Of course, YouTube is great in that it provides people with the opportunity to share videos on-line. Despite its glory however, I think YouTube largely fosters an on-line community of idiocy. Below the display of a video, users will notice a listing of comments which are added by users who have presumably seen the video. The quality of these comments is generally very poor. Many of them are incoherent and a lot of them consist of almost-sentences sprayed with senseless slang and swearing. As I pressed the submit button to post my comment, I was greeted with a notification which just added to my disdain. My post was over 500 characters (yes characters, not words) long, and to be able to post a comment, it had to be 500 characters or under, including spaces! So it seems that the opportunity to provide and engage in intelligent conversation with regard to a posted video is partly thwarted by restrictions imposed by YouTube themselves. But then I suppose that YouTube, unlike say an on-line bulletin board, has less reason to foster intelligent conversation.
Internet Mind Reading. Freaky.
February 22nd, 2007Check out this perception and reality experiment, which involves a so-called ‘Mind Reading Program’. Can it really read your mind over the internet, or is some clever trick behind it?
