mumbo y jumbo

The Illiad
Complete with cheesy music!

Super Nintendo MIDI sequences

This is a complete listing of all the files in the Super Nintendo directory, as of 03/14/2002 01:23:34 CDT.
There are 3040 midi files in the Super Nintendo directory.

How to increase your intranet usage 98 percent


Brian Livingston writing a piece in InfoWorld about the top ten intranets as decided by Jakob Neilson

Brand USA



Naomi Klein, AlterNet
March 13, 2002

TORONTO -- When the White House decided it was time to address the rising tides of anti-Americanism around the world, it didn't look to a career diplomat for help. Instead, in keeping with the Bush administration's philosophy that anything the public sector can do the private sector can do better, it hired one of Madison Avenue's top brand managers.


As undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, Charlotte Beers' assignment was not to improve relations with other countries but rather to perform an overhaul of the U.S. image abroad. Beers had no previous State Department experience, but she had held the top job at both the J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather ad agencies, and she has built brands for everything from dog food to power drills.


Now she was being asked to work her magic on the greatest branding challenge of all: to sell the United States and its war on terrorism to an increasingly hostile world. The appointment of an ad woman to this post understandably raised some criticism, but Secretary of State Colin L. Powell shrugged it off. "There is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something. We are selling a product. We need someone who can re-brand American foreign policy, re-brand diplomacy." Besides, he said, "She got me to buy Uncle Ben's rice." So why, only five months in, does the campaign for a new and improved Brand USA seem in disarray? Several of its public service announcements have been exposed for playing fast and loose with the facts. And when Beers went on a mission to Egypt in January to improve the image of the U.S. among Arab "opinion-makers," it didn't go well. Muhammad Abdel Hadi, an editor at the newspaper Al Ahram, left his meeting with Beers frustrated that she seemed more interested in talking about vague American values than about specific U.S. policies. "No matter how hard you try to make them understand," he said, "they don't."

MacPerl 5.6.1 Released





It's been over four years since a new MacPerl has been released, and it has been at least five years since MacPerl has been updated to the latest perl source (at the time, perl 5.004).

So today, we reset the counter with MacPerl 5.6.1r1.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Panopticon




by Cory Doctorow
03/08/2002

How much ass does Google kick? All of it.

Remember when searching the Internet was hard? The dark days when we relied on dumb-as-sand machine intelligences, like those on the back-ends of AltaVista and Lycos, to rank the documents that matched our keywords? The grim era before Google, when searching was a spew of boolean mumbo-jumbo, NEAR this, NOT that, AND the other?

God, that sucked.

Lucky for the Internet, Google figured out the One True Way to make sense of the Internet, to defeat gamers of the system and send info-free brochureware plummeting to number n - 1 out of n results.

Callbacks

One of the most vexing problems facing C++ programmers is the that of passing a function to a function. In computer science lingo, the function passed as an argument is called a callback, since it is "called back" by the other function. For example, suppose you have a function that finds the minimum of another function:


void Minimize( double (*f)( double), double initial_x,
double &x_at_minimum, double &minimum_f);

Here, the function to be minimized is f, the initial guess of the independent variable is initial_x, while the answers are given in x_at_minimum and minimum_f. This works fine so far, but what if the function that you want to minimize is a member function of a class? In that case, you cannot use the minimizer described above. So, now, you might write another minimizer that does the same thing but to a different type of function; you can even use templates to make it generic to all classes.


template< class Class, class Sub_Class>
void Minimize( Sub_Class &object, double (Class::*f)( double), double initial_x,
double &x_at_minimum, double &minimum_f);

Since we are dealing with a function that is now bound to a particular object object, we must let the minimizer function know about that object. Also, object may belong to a sub-class of the class Class, so we allow for that in the template arguments. But that isn't all. We also must allow for const member functions, so we need a third function:


template< class Class, class Sub_Class>
void Minimize( const Sub_Class &object, double (Class::*f)( double) const, double initial_x,
double &x_at_minimum, double &minimum_f);

We now have all of our possibilities covered, but we have to write three minimizer functions instead of one. Most vexing of all, if we use only function pointers, the functions all must be written from scratch; it isn't possible to have all three functions call one common function containing the guts of the minimizer. But thanks to a very nice class library by Rich Hickey, it is now possible to wrap these different types of functions into one common object called a functor, and then use the functor as an argument to one minimizer function.

Midi In Flash Controlling Midi Files In Flash
For Flash 3 or 4

A javascript implimentation that uses the browser to play midi files with a flash movie.

Flash performance optimizing tips and tricks

A good list of various flash improvements.

Historica - A Web Site dedicated to Canadian History

Historica is a new foundation whose mandate is to provide Canadians with a deeper understanding of their history and its importance in shaping their future.

Giving Our Past A Future
At the turn of the millennium, one thing is evident: history matters. A proper recognition of the contemporary challenges facing a community requires an understanding both of past events - how we got to where we are - and of what is going on in the world around us. Education in the history of Canada is essential preparation for responsible citizenship and is the basis on which to build understanding among this country's diverse cultures and backgrounds. Canada's history - with all its passions and complexities - echoes in the evolving dynamics of our present and will resonate in our future...