Oliver Steele

What is a “hexangle”?

See the face?! Ooh, see the cute little baby face, and the other face on top of it?!

Why babies like electrical outlets.

pneu·mo·co·coa (‘nū.mə’koʊ.koʊ): A condition wherein the presence of the patient in a room vacuums all the chocolate out of it.

Uh oh! I overthought fizzbuzz:

For years now, I’ve been a great fan of TinyURL.com. That web site allows you to create a short representation of a longer URL, for use in email.

One of the problems with those URLs, though, and with URLs in general, is that they’re misleadingly short. A particular web page may have a lot of significance, but if it doesn’t take up much of your message, there’s just no way for the recipient to see this at a glance.

WideURL.com fixes this. It creates an URL with more visual impact.

For example, here’s the WideURL for this post: http://wideurl.com/aitch-tee-tee-pea-colon-double-slash-oh-ess-tee-double-ee-ell-ee-dot-see-oh-em-slash-aye-are-see-aitch-eye-vee-ee-ess-slash-two-double-zero-six-slash-zero-four-slash-doubleyou-eye-dee-ee-you-are-ell.

Even my friends who aren’t into functional programming find something curously relaxing about this. (And the companion site here.)

I bought foldr.com a year ago when I thought I might do something like Flickr for other types of information. I didn’t realize until last week what I was sitting on.

Update: The use of the infinity symbol sparked a lively discussion on LtU.

Jim Grandy wrote:

From: jgrandy

Subject: stupid Google game

Date: January 7, 2006 6:17:58 PM EST

Google for "unfortunately, yournamehere":

Lots of fun hits for "unfortunately, jim":

• unfortunately Jim’s orange dry suit made him look like a carrot
  
• Unfortunately Jim is no longer with us as he died of a brain tumor in 1993.
  
• Unfortunately, Jim did not respond. He disbelieved that it was an angel.
  
• Unfortunately, Jim is only one person with a limited amount of time available to

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“Aargh!” But how do you spell it?

(Click here to skip straight to the visualization.)

In the late nineties, I tried using internet search as a spelling corrector. (I think I was using AltaVista at the time. It was the latest and greatest search engine, supplanting — was it Lycos?)

At the time, for the words I tried, there were about two orders of magnitude between a misspelling and the correct word. A spelling variant, such as “color” and “colour”, were typically less than one order of magnitude.

If everyone in America makes an extra-large Thanksgiving dinner so that they can feed guests the next day, isn’t this a pyramid scheme?