Lucifer’s Friend – Ride in the Sky
Uriah Heep – Sunrise
Deep Purple – Fireball
Budgie – Breadfan
Led Zeppelin – Communication Breakdown
Scorpions – I’m Going Mad
Black Sabbath – Children of the Grave

You can try calling, but our new answering machine has been eating messages. (I suppose if you know where we live, you can stop by.) I will be monitoring the comments so the blog doesn’t get overrun by spam but that’s about it. In the meantime, check out Peggy’s weblog, Zatera Ul.

So, thanks City Pages! This explains the comments I started getting from people I’ve never seen before!

(Oh, for you southerners, the City Pages is the local free “alternative” press mag.)

(UPDATE: To any of my children reading this in twenty years, nosy googling co-workers, future employers, etc, I feel I should point out that I’ve never taken nitrous recreationally. It’s really quite dangerous and not a good idea. I have too many good friends and family members who have ruined their lives by taking drugs to ever be terribly tempted by them myself.)

The (0) displays the number of comments each link has, but I’m open to any formatting suggestions. Ideally I’d like a way of differentiating mini-posts by author but I haven’t thought of a formatting style that I like yet.

Please bear with us as we play around with the new version.

Thanks!

The next few installments on video game AI will be a bit more interactive, and will require a lot of graphs, figures, and support materials, which I’m working on. If I can’t get the first part done by early next week, I might take a brief tangent and take a quick look at natural language processing.

Expect posting to be light for quite a while as I’m fairly certain that the two computers died in such a way as to make it extremely difficult to make one working computer out of the pile of pieces. (Of course.)

(Note for people who care about gory details: The motherboard refuses to boot on the computer with the failing 6.4 gig hard drive. And the formerly good hard drive on the other computer is refusing to boot and giving dma hard drive errors on the machine with the working motherboard.)

But hey, what’s the use of a programming degree if you never get to use it, right? So I went ahead and disabled the display of all trackbacks. My “fix”, such as it is, is to add the following bit to the query on or near line 87 of wp-comments.php:

and not match(b2comments.comment_content) against ('<trackback />')

Okay, so that’s not much of a fix; all I’m doing is supressing the display of any comments which have “<trackback />” in them (that’s the magic foofy tag the WordPress guys use to tell that a comment is really a trackback. Why they didn’t just use a flag in the database, Lord only knows.) Also it sucks because I still have to go in and delete all of the bad trackbacks from the comments database; once there are more trackbacks than real comments this fix will stop working.

I’ll enable trackbacks when spam karma gets effective at blocking trackback spams. Until then, no way. Oh, and if you link to me, you can still do the trackback, it just won’t show up until I reenable them. It’s not like I did anything useful, like, block new trackbacks entirely or anything like that.