Newspeak

September 30, 2005

Banned Books Week

Filed under: meme — Stephen Paulger @ 3:55 pm

Apparantly today marks the end of Banned Books Week. Some people have been listing the banned books that they’ve read all or part of. Here’s my lists.

Banned books I’ve read all of:-

#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

Banned books I’ve read part of:-

#1 The Bible
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys

September 7, 2005

My GreaseMonkey scripts

Filed under: code — Stephen Paulger @ 11:05 pm

I have been getting quite into making GreaseMonkey scripts. If you don’t know what GreaseMonkey is it’s a firefox extension that allows you to use javascript to modify any website you like. I have been reading an excellent online book ‘Dive Into Greasemonkey‘ by Mark Pilgrim in order to learn how to make decent scripts. I have since been uploading the scripts to my userscripts.org profile.

So far I have only put two scripts on, but I think they’re pretty nifty for a beginner :). First is ‘Google Media Search‘ which adds links to google that quickly add the search terms neccesary for finding media directories online.

The other is a modification to an existing script that adds text links to The Pirate Bay and Torrent Reactor from Last.fm to allow single clicking to search for an artist. I changed it to use icons instead of text links and to open the links in a new firefox tab.

September 4, 2005

My Favourite Firefox Extensions

Filed under: tech — Stephen Paulger @ 10:15 pm

Having recently upgraded to Ubuntu’s latest offering “breezy badger” from “hoary hedgehog”. (If you want to do this open your sources.list in vi and :%s/hoary/breezy/ then apt-get update & apt-get dist-upgrade. If you don’t follow that, ignore it) I now finally have firefox 1.0.6 so I thought I’d have a look through my extensions, removing the ones I don’t use and make sure the rest are up to date. I was left with 9 extensions that I have come to rely upon.

  • Mouse Gestures. Almost indisposable for it’s one feature of being able to expand images.
  • StumbleUpon. Gives you an extra toolbar for “stumbling” around the web, which is a suprisingly good way of finding content that’ll interest you.
  • del.icio.us. I don’t rely on this one hugely, but it makes posting bookmarks to del.icio.us much easier.
  • Bloglines toolkit. Notifies me when there are new articles that I have to read on bloglines.
  • Adblock. I barely notice this one it does such a good job.
  • Linkification. Turns URLs in web documents into clickable links, suprisingly useful, again you forget it’s working in the background.
  • SessionSaver. When firefox crashes you don’t lose all those tabs.
  • User Agent Switcher. Luckily not many sites exclude non-IE visitors any more, but if they do, a few quick clicks sorts that all out.
  • BugMeNot. When you don’t want to have to sign up to use every site on-line this tool makes life much easier

I have also just come across a new extension which has a lot of potential to become my favourite extension of all time. That’s GreaseMonkey it allows you to modify the way websites work, which means you can do all sorts of things a lot of great examples can be found here. So far I’ve used only one script which allows you to modify google image search so it links directly to the image.

September 2, 2005

Online DVD Rental: Love Film after a month or so.

Filed under: film — Stephen Paulger @ 9:37 am

I joined LoveFilm on the 27th of July, after my 14 free days I started paying on the 11th of August and it seems now I will pay on the 11th of every month. I am paying £12.99 per month which allows me to have 2 DVDs at home at once.

I have been watching the DVDs on the day I recieve them and posting them the nexst day. This means that I should roughly be getting through 2 films every 3 days. It doesn’t quite work like that though as Love Film and the post office don’t work on Sundays. So, about 4 films a week or 16 films a month, in theory.

I’ve actually received 13 films and I’ve been a member for over a month. So, how did I lose out? Well partly through once or twice forgetting to post it the next morning. However most of the loss was from Love Film not receiving a film I posted the day after receiving it for nearly a week, it was overtaken in the post by one posted 3 days afterwards. Their policy for processing DVDs that has gone missing in the post is quite good, but they are quite threatening in the way that they say the Post Office will contact you and that if you don’t respond to the Post Office you will be charged. Furthermore they don’t contact the post office until 5 days after you post it.

LoveFilm and indeed all postal based DVD rental services need to sort this issue out because the customer is definitly getting a bum deal, granted it’s not entirely Love Film’s fault however they will end up losing customers if they feel they are missing out and I don’t feel I lost out, I know I lost out.

So roughly 13 DVDs for roughly £13, it’s been â…“ and ½ of the price of your average walk-in video rental shop. The big difference between walk-in and postal DVD rental is the way they are chosen, instead of choosing 1 film on each visit you choose a list of films (over 30 is what Love Film reccomend) and then they select what is available to send to you. Obviously this means they can reduce their stock of certain films. The problem is you won’t get to see the new DVD releases for months after they come out.

The list of DVDs is prioritised, however the priority doesn’t seem to affect the choices that are made for you very much. In fact none of the films I have been sent were in the top 10 priority. It’s not like the films in my list are popular films or especially recent, I wish they’d send me the ones at the top rather than always the ones from the middle.

  1. The Terrorist (1999)
  2. La Nina Santa (2004)
  3. Das Boot (Director’s Cut) (Superbit) (Disc 1) (1981) (IMDB rank: 45th)
  4. Amelie (Disc 1) (2001) (IMDB rank: 26th)
  5. Raging Bull (1980) (IMDB rank: 63rd)
  6. Mississippi Burning (1988)
  7. Ocean’s Twelve (2004)
  8. Brazil (1985) (IMDB rank: 200th)
  9. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) (IMDB rank: 123rd)
  10. Man With A Movie Camera (1929)

So, only 3 of the films were made in the last 5 years, so the new-release-rush should have died down. Of the 5 that do appear in IMDB’s top 250 movies (which they should have higher stocks of anyway) only 2 are in the top 50. I really don’t see why after a month none of my 10 highest priority movies haven’t been sent.

Pull you socks up LoveFilm. I’m going to use it for the next month at least, after that I will have to review the situation again.

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