Archive for July 17th, 2008

Picture yourself in this

Grandad July 17th, 2008

I am an inveterate meddler.  I like tweaking things.

This week, I have been tweaking this site, and this morning I added a new thingy to the site.

There is no reason for it.  It was just an experiment to see if I could.  And it worked.  Maybe I’ll take it off again sometime, but I’ll leave it for now to see if it locks up the site.

So what did I do?

I added little pictures onto the comments.  I believe they are called Avatars or some such silly name.

So how do they work?  Where do the pictures come from?  How come some people had pictures as soon as I installed the code?

The pictures are associated with your email address, so if you have an email address you can have a picture.  The service I used is one called Globally Recognised Avatars, or Gravatars.

I registered my Gravatar a while ago, and it’s appearing in a lot of places now.  My Woopra software uses it, for example.

If you want a Gravatar, just nip over to the Gravatar site.   You just enter your email address and you can then upload your image.  It can be any image.  That’s all there is to it.  And it’s free.

So nip over and try it.  Then come back here and leave a comment.  That’ll show whether it has worked. 

Or not.

And if you want to install ‘em on your own site, then fuck off and don’t bother me.  It involves writing bits of code, and I’m not going down that road.

Avatar2

Open Source body design

Grandad July 17th, 2008

Suppose the human body were like a bit of software?

Suppose for a moment, it is not ready for final release?  Changes are still being made to the design, and anyone can suggest a modification.

vitruvian

What changes would you recommend?

Personally, I think that while it is adequate, there are some glaring errors in the basic concept.

For a start, what genius decided that we only need one heart?  Heart failure is one of the greatest causes of system crashes death, yet there is no built in redundancy?

And legs?  Two?  Fucking daft.  Anyone will tell you that after fifteen pints, two aren’t enough.  Any scientist will tell you that the tripod is the simplest stable structure.  A third leg is essential.

Teeth are fairly important too, but what happens?  A tooth rots, falls out and that’s it.  What a crap design.  Why the hell can’t teeth be like fingernails, constantly renewing and regenerating?

Wouldn’t it be great if the body were plug and play?  Unplug your arms, and slot in a pair of wings?  Nah! Too fanciful.

An eye of two on the back of the head would be a nice safety feature too.  No more stabbing in the back?

Think about it.

What improvements would you make?