News You Can Bruise for 2003 September 21

I wanted to get rid of the Nutella I had left over from when I made Nutellamisu. I figured it would be very good mixed into chocolate ice cream. I knew that Mondo Gelato had a Nutella-flavored gelato, so it should be possible.

I assumed that if I put the Nutella in the ice cream maker after the ice cream had taken form, it would be formed into nice swirls like you find in the Ben and Jerry's that the kids like so much. But what actually happened was it stuck into a huge blob on the mixer blade and I had to sort of scrape it off and use it as a topping. Clearly there is some trick for getting swirls into ice cream that I don't know about (what is it? I don't want to have to buy a book).

What I should have done was melted the Nutella in the microwave and added it to the chocolate before pouring in the hot cream. If I'd let it sit in the cream/milk mixture as it cooled, it probably would have bonded with the chocolate and the dairy, or something.

OK, here we go. This catches me up about halfway, not counting the inevitable Game Roundup.

• JavaScriptGraphics uses Javascript to render interactive images. Despite combining multiple things I find aggravating, this is neat. Product of Russia.
• You know what was really cool? The old-school Norton Utilities hex editor. I stopped using a hex editor around the same time I stopped using DOS, because for the stuff I did, having source code priced having a hex editor out of the market. But bdump gives a Norton-esque ASCII and hex rendition of a file. It can't simulate the cool raw-disk view that Norton did, but maybe there's something you can run as root which does. Anyone?
• If your weblog entries are scribbled into dated HTML files, like Seth's, then the Advogato poster will post all those files to your Advogato account. Will probably also work with NewsBruiser!
• spamtest is a web interface to SpamAssassin which lets you probe SpamAssassin for weaknesses. I mean, it lets you make sure that your legitimate, non-spam newsletter won't trigger SpamAssassin. Sorry, but maybe you should consider the possibility that your newsletter actually is spam.
• SQL Profiler tries to find places where you could add SQL indexes to your database tables. Requires that you be using JDBC.
• I've heard good things about Jext as a source code editor/light IDE. Unlike other source code editors, Jext lets you put hot chicks in the background of your code windows, possibly as some sort of motivational tool.
• Principia Mathematica II is a predicate logic proof system and a hyperlink-aware way of representing such proofs. The goal is to build a large distributed archive of mathematical knowledge, each proof being reducible to the basic axioms. Unfortunately, Godel proved that due to limitations of HTTP, there will always exist URLs containing true statements that PMII will not be able to access.
• TEAPOT is a prim, three-dimensional ncurses spreadsheet. A three-dimensional spreadsheet?! Why not? I'll quote from the web page:

  In traditional flat spread sheets, you have to have the ability of hiding columns or rows to hide intermediate results. This indicates that two dimensions are not enough...

  But why stop there? I'd like a spreadsheet of n, nay, even n+1 dimensions!

• Eurobill calculates the checksums on Euro bills. This is pretty cool, but I gave all my Euros to Rachel.
• The Hunting of the Snark Project is what Project Gutenberg should have been called. Instead, it is a hackable Java BitTorrent client. Nice version numbering system.
• ft is a template engine for PHP. You may know PHP as a popular template language.
• Rnews is a server-side aggregator like, but not as good as Feed On Feeds. I don't like the way the interface only displays the titles. However, it's another server-side aggregator, so take a look at it.
• For every successful X, someone is undergoing a quixotic quest to redesign X. The author of NewSQL noticed that "Nobody is trying to clean up the SQL grammar" and sprung into action, creating a language that will either look like a bunch of methods on table objects, or will look like SQL without the "FROM" and "ON" and "INTO" that look friendly until you can't remember which one of them to use to list a table's indexes.
• Satellitarium displays the locations of satellites you have in orbit. If you're not a supervillain, a space agency, or a communications company, it lets you track the satellites other people have in orbit. Ported from OS/2!
• The HP Labs Semantic Web Research page links to Semantic Web toolkits like Jena2 and Joseki, while inadvertently demonstrating that the only people who really use the Semantic Web right now are the people who think acronyms like "HP" should be provided with mouseover expansions.
• ReadySET is Jason Robbins' latest project; a set of HTML templates for documenting development over the lifetime of a piece of software.
• I am still a sucker for map software. Thuban is a GIS map viewer which lets you do TIGER-like things to any GIS data. Thuban links to freegis.org, a bunch of links to map software which deserves a roundup all to itself. I know there's a science fiction story in here somewhere, but do I look like Cory Doctorow to you? Hm, I guess I have to think of another excuse. PS: another pirate joke to complete Seth's "pirate Constitution" series of jokes, two days late and two dollars short for TLAPD:

  Q: What was the precursor to the pirate Constitution?
  A: The Arrrrticles of Confederation.

• memaid is a memorization aid that works with question/answer pairs you provide, using a neural network to predict how best to get you to memorize them.
• HiveConf claims to be a configuration framework, but loyal readers of my paper on configuration frameworks will note that in terms of the terminology of that paper, it is a configuration store capable of supporting multiple formats.
• You know how sometimes in science fiction stories, person A has to do exposition to person B with respect to scientific phenomenon C because at the spaceman academy, person B spent too much time in the class about C thinking about cute classmate D? Well, that's why I don't understand error-correcting codes very well. But David MacKay has a cool site, sponsored by the Gatsby foundation, containing software for generating and analyzing error-correcting and error-detecting codes. According to the website, there are some codes discovered in 1962 which are much better than the ones you learn in class, so maybe I was just engaging in a form of unconscious protest.
• With Read It To Me, you can turn your RSS feed into MP3s for your iPod and achieve ultimate post-dot-com crash hipsterdom. Only works on texts that may be read aloud.

  If you do not have UnicodeChecker, you will likely have some unicode characters read to you. For example, it will say "and number eight thousand two hundred and seventeen" instead of "'".

  Pretty cool that it can say "'".

• doclite is a simple HTML preprocessor for adding just enough structure to a document that you can keep multiple related documents in one file and add sections to the documents which are linked and grouped into a table of contents. The multiple-document thing is something I'd like to see introduced into reST.
• Abeni makes it easier to create Gentoo ebuilds. Sounds really useful.