guttervomit

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Profanity Filters

23 Jan 2006

*** WARNING: This entry contains multiple swear-words (i.e., more than the usual amount) and should be considered for ADULTS ONLY. Please do not read this if you are easily offended, or are legally prohibited from watching R-Rated Movies. ***

I’m currently in the middle of building a profanity-filter for gibbity. It’s no secret that gamers are pretty prone to cussing so having a filter that turns words like "shit" into "s**t" seems to make a lot of sense. My problem is that I keep running into these silly little moral dilemmas about various words, and cannot seem to finalize my list definitively.

My list of 40 or so cusswords contains all of the stuff you’d ordinarily come up with off the top of your head (the aforementioned "shit" and its variations, "fuck" and its variations, "cunt," "asshole" and "cock" round out the usual suspects), but there are also several words which are border-line cases and are (quite honestly) open to debate.

I decided early on that I was going to allow "damn" (and its variations, e.g., "goddamn", "hot-damn", "dammit," etc) but have been unable to make up my mind about words that are more colloquial than straight-up cusswords. For example: "bastard" and "bitch" seem to be finding their way into the socially-acceptable lexicon of late. ("Sonuvabitch" is still off-limits though.)

And what about words like "fellatio" and "cunnilingus"? I know that forums with profanity-filters usually censor words like these out, simply because there aren’t many situations where these words would be uttered that weren’t lewd.

Racial slurs like "nigger" and "kike" would also be out, but there are so many of them that I’d have to keep updating the list regularly to keep it current, something which I have no desire to do. (Asian slurs alone –"slopes," "chinks," "gooks," etc — would fill a wiki.) Drawing the line when it comes to these types of insults is hard because context plays such a huge part in how offensive a particular word is.

And what about sexually-associated expressions like "gangbang," "ejaculate," "blowjob" or "rimjob"? The problem with "gangbang" (in particular) is that gamers use it sometimes when they talk strategy … although even then, the meaning is fairly offensive.

Lastly, what about rude insults like "faggot" or "dyke" or even "prick"? Will Gibbity users have to resort to calling annoying people "big fat doodyheads"?

Posted in Randomness | No Comments »
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Disney > Pixar ?

22 Jan 2006

A couple of weeks ago I commented on the fact that Disney has little choice left but to try to acquire Pixar outright, if they want to stay in the business of making animated features. The two companies were in a partnership for nearly a decade until Pixar decided to strike out on its own, leaving Disney to fend for itself in the relatively new 3D-animation arena. Disney has released exactly one CG feature since then, Chicken Little, which sustained some fairly bad reviews during its theatrial run late last year.

So it turns out that the LA Times prediction of an impending takeover was right after all, although they did overshoot their valuation by about US$3bn:

The board of Pixar Animation Studios, the digital animations company, is set to meet tomorrow to approve the company’s $7bn (£3.9bn) takeover by Disney.

The all-share deal will make Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, around $3.5bn and the single largest shareholder in Disney. Jobs created Pixar in 1986 when he paid $10m for the computer animations division of Lucasfilm, owned by Stars Wars creator George Lucas.

Read the rest of the news item here.

Posted in Acquisitions | No Comments »
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Death and Taxes

19 Jan 2006

It’s tax-return season, apparently. Our staff assistant has been quizzing me over the past couple of days about our little company’s cashflow over the last quarter of 2005 (we’ve been declaring "no income" until now), and boy, is that ever a complicated proposition.

I actually wasn’t aware that net income was subject to 32% tax until now, which is, I suppose, why many freelancers choose to operate under the radar. "Net income" essentially means Everything You Earned minus Everything You Spent for a given period of time (in this case, October to December of 2005). The weird thing is that you can list just about anything under "Everything You Spent" and no one double-checks if those expenses are fictitious until year-end. Notice that I didn’t say "invalid;" as I said, you can list pretty much anything for this purpose, including various year-end party expenses at ISO-certified motels. The BIR website acknowledges "entertainment, amusement and recreation expenses" as being legitimate deductibles, and I can’t think of anything more satisfyingly amusing than 8 hours in an Egyptian-themed motel.

There is one interesting exception listed though:

No deduction from gross income shall be allowed [ ... ] for any payment made, directly or indirectly, to an official or employee of the national government [ ... ] if the payment constitutes a bribe or kickback.

Niiice.

============

ADDENDUM (11:55pm, 19 Jan): It occured to me, while re-reading this entry, that the whole point of this post was the BIR excerpt at the end, and I had somehow neglected to say anything about it … other than that very astute "Niiice" at the end.

It’s certainly quite a bizarre ruling though, isn’t it? I mean, who in their right mind would declare bribes or kickbacks in the first place? Of course, the very presence of this policy implies that idiots do abound, so I suppose that question answers itself. It also implies just how … er, morally-challenged our government is, that instead of trying to put a stop to bribery, they instead choose to legislate around it.

There. Now I can say it.

Niiice.

Posted in Goin' Legit | 1 Comment »
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Some Thoughts on the MacBook Pro

18 Jan 2006

I’m having mixed reactions about Apple’s new MacBook Pro, which was announced formally at last week’s MacWorld Expo. I’ve been waiting for a long time to get a proper Mac machine (ever since I first heard about the Intel rumors middle of last year), and now that it’s finally out … I don’t know if I actually want to buy it.

It’s undeniably a sexy machine, and when February comes around, people will be hitting Apple stores in droves to get one, but there are a couple of gaping flaws on this thing that may or may not be dealbreakers, depending on how you plan to use it.

The first obvious one is that there’s no PCMCIA and no modem on this thing. No PCMCIA means practically no way to get on the GPRS/EDGE/3G networks for now, and no modem means dialup will be a bit of a hassle to pull off as well. (There’s also no Firewire 800 on this thing, although Firewire 400 should probably be ok for most people. No S-video or Composite either, blah.)

The big deal for me is that the current transition to Intel means that Photoshop and other applications that were previously written for Motorola’s PowerPC platform will now have to run in emulation mode. The additional layer of processing will probably mean a significant performance hit if you’re actually planning to use this laptop in a professional setting (you know, like a "Pro"). The same goes for any application that was developed for the PowerPC platform and has not yet been recompiled (and yes, that includes Final Cut Pro).

Lastly, I’m a bit irked by the fact that it’s not gotten any lighter and the battery life has not gotten any longer which, to me, was kind of the point of switching to Intel in the first place, you know?

So it seems that the proper strategy is to wait yet again, for either the second generation versions of these MacBooks, or for all of the big software companies to release MacBook-compatible builds of their applications. That might be as far as a year down the road still, so I guess I’ll be sticking with Windows a while longer.

Posted in Hardware | No Comments »
4

My Metal Cock

17 Jan 2006

Chinese New Year’s coming up in the next two weeks so this small vanity-search on my birthyear is appropriately "ahead of the curve":

Metal Roosters can come off as arrogant and stuck up at times. They need a cushion for that overextended ego and someone to make sure it stays inflated. They are reasonable people who seem to analyze every decision they make and every situation they find themselves in. They are standoffish at times and can let their aggression get in the way of a blossoming friendship or romance.

Horoscopes are amazing things. Lots of people say that they’re vague to the point of being applicable to just anyone, but I really have to disagree. The snippet above is pretty much my lifestory, for example.

The coming year is Fire Dog, btw. (More stuff here.)

Posted in Randomness | 4 Comments »
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Hey, It’s a Beta

16 Jan 2006

So Gibbity is finally up, in all its bug-ridden glory. I’m gonna be spending the next week or so fine-tuning everything, and hope to move the whole thing to its own server right before the month is up. My primary concern for now is to make sure the user-experience is of the highest possible quality, and that usually means asking lots of questions. Of course, given that patience has never been one of my virtues, this is the part I always dread.

So far I’ve gotten:

1 request for better smarter searching
2 complaints about registration and login
2 complaints about navigation
3 genuine bug reports (1 about image uploading and the other 2 about my misbehaving profanity-filter)
1 request for a tweak to the Help Guide
… and 1 actual complaint about the "Quote of the Day" (!)

It’s gonna be a looong week.

Posted in Randomness | No Comments »
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A New Idea Update

16 Jan 2006
Hi everyone. I’ve been hard at work over the past 10 days on my Next Big Idea, and I wanted to ask for your help weeding out bugs and giving general feedback over the next week. The site is at http://www.gibbity.com, and is similar to oKs.ph in that it’s a people-powered recommendation engine.

The difference is that oKs is for general links and gibbity is focused exclusively on electronic games. And by electronic games, I mean, everything from Ragnarok to Quake IV to PartyPoker to Burnout 3 to Bejeweled.

If you could answer the following questions, it would also be quite useful to me:
1. Are you familiar with the concept of tagging?
2. How long did it take you to become "comfortable" using gibbity?
3. Did you create a user account?
4. Which part of the site did you find to be confusing or not properly explained?
5. Did you find the "Stuff Online About This Game" section useful?
Check it out and let me know what you think. Send comments and feedback as always to luis AT highfiber DOT org.
Posted in Randomness | No Comments »
0

Pandora

13 Jan 2006

I was finally able to access Pandora today, after the site being practically unusable over the past week (due in most part, I believe, to their founder being interviewed on Inside the Net some time ago).

If you’re not familiar with Pandora, it’s a music-recommendation site like no other. The idea behind it is fairly simple: you enter the name of an artist or a song, and the site will dynamically create a playlist featuring songs that "sound like" that artist or song. As you listen, you can fine-tune the recommendations further by giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to the songs it serves up. In theory, it’s a great way for you to expand your musical horizons to include other artists without straying too far away from the stuff you like listening to.

How Pandora accomplishes this feat is a story in itself, because all the magic is done by real live humans, instead of some Google-sized monster of a server. 40 humans, in fact: all of them with degrees in music and all of them specially-trained to categorize songs using any of 400 different attributes. You’ll have to listen to the interview to get all the details, but that’s the basic concept anyway.

So naturally I was pretty excited to try it out, particularly since Inside the Net’s host, Amber MacArthur, specifically mentioned having great fun listening to songs based on the band Wilco. (Meaning: it doesn’t just work with mainstream crap.)

To really put the site through its paces, I entered "Wolf Parade" as my base artist. Wolf Parade is this Canadian alternative band with a crazy kind of vocals and a penchant for noisy jangling rock, which just happens to be my favorite band of 2005. The first result I got, Blur’s "Stereotypes," wasn’t what I was looking for at all, so I thumbed that down immediately. The next few songs were slightly better, but still a bit off (not to mention that they were all stuff I’d already heard): The Delays’ "Hey Girl," Black Mountain’s "Buffalo Swan," Guided By Voices’ "I’ll Replace You With Machines," Cake’s "No Phone," Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s "US Government," etc.

I thumbed down quite a few of them, which made me feel bad. I did eventually start getting some stuff I’d never heard before (Volcano I’m Still Excited’s "2nd Gun" and Ulysses’ "Glacier" were two good tracks), but I never actually got anything that really sounded like Wolf Parade. I was expecting Arcade Fire, or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, or maybe Xiu Xiu, but instead got Snow Patrol and The Fall and Kenny Wayne Shepard. (Granted, there were some small similarities if you listened closely enough, but the overall mood of the songs seemed … disconnected.)

Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy listening to Pandora when I just want background noise though. I figure, if I discover just one good band for every 30 or 40 songs I listen to, it’s still better than blindly downloading from music sites (which is what I’d otherwise be doing). Check it out and let me know if you have a better experience than I did; the service is completely free (in its de facto, ad-supported state).

Posted in Music | No Comments »
3

The Great 1-ty

13 Jan 2006

A large portion of my college life was spent playing games like Counter-strike and Quake 3: Arena for hours and hours each day. I actually got decent enough in Q3A to win a video-card at a local tournament, and it was largely because I spent so much time studying how this guy played. 5 years later, he’s still at it, and has become, according to Fox Sports, "the second most-feared athlete in the world, next to ear-biting Mike Tyson." Last year alone, he won over $200,000 playing Painkiller, which is apparently what all the FPS kids are playing these days. He’s good and he knows it:

"No one’s ever taken it as far as I’ve taken it," [ Fatal1ty ] says. "I’m the one who created the possibility that you could make a living gaming. I was the first full-time pro gamer. I was the first one, and now I’m still on top." And he’ll be the first to see how long it lasts.

Read the rest of this finely-written feature article here.

Posted in Games | 3 Comments »
0

A New Idea

10 Jan 2006

This blog has been pretty quiet over the past week or so, owing to my having hit upon A New Idea recently (courtesy of Sacha Chua). Hopefully by next week I’ll be able to be more forthcoming with exactly what that New Idea entails, but for now all I can say is that I’ve been working almost exclusively on it for the past 6 days and am very close to a working beta.

In the process I’ve been learning how to access Amazon’s Web Services over SOAP/REST and how to write my own modest XML parser. (Yeah, the Idea involves connecting to Amazon and retrieving info about various products … but no, it’s not an ecommerce site.)

I’ve also been learning how to implement tagging systems akin to Flickr and Del.icio.us, and how to properly design an application with AJAX in mind. (This "AJAX approach to web-design" has been slowly germinating since the Red Ribbon project, but only started to make sense the third time I attempted it. The tricky part about it is that you have to remember that your page layout needs to be liquid, because various portions of it shift and reload on-demand. I’m still cautious about where I use it, but my comfort zone is significantly larger than when I first tried it last year.)

More news as I build it, or whatever.

Posted in Goin' Legit | No Comments »

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Profanity Filters

Disney > Pixar ?

Death and Taxes

Some Thoughts on the MacBook Pro

My Metal Cock

Hey, It’s a Beta

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A New Idea

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