Virtually Vocal

Thursday 1430hrs

Anyone remember by 2 seconds of fame in the national press last week at the hands of Digital Music Maker magazine? Well, an article in there focussed on a new tachnology used for dynamically creating vocals. It’s not an autotuner. It’s not a sampler. It’s a 100% purely synthetic vocalist and by the sounds of it, it has a better set of lungs on it than the entire UK top 40. Not that that’s saying much…

Check out the Vocaloid. It’s kinda creepy.

Visible Stupidity

Thursday 1305hrs

The lengths people go to to “personalise” themselves is approaching ever more ridiculous heights it seems. Browsing the BBC, as I do, I came across this article on eye jewellery.
Can anyone tell me what on earth these people are thinking? I can imagine coming across someone with one, and offering to help them get the swarf out of their eye…

What next? Fashionable amputations?

Debug.

Wednesday 1246hrs

I am trying to debug something. PHP’s lack of support for unsigned int’s is awfully irritating and the workaround, when I am certain it’s working properly, I will put up here.

It’s been driving me insane. In fact, the breadcrumb trail of problems reminds me of a skit I first came across in a book by Arthur C Clarke called Profiles of the Future. Based on a poem by Jonathan Swift the quote is accredited to Augustus De Morgan, and reads as follows:

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

Regarding the book by A.C.Clarke, it’s well worth a read for anyone who is into the exploration of sci-fi ideas brought a little closer to ground.

April Fools!

Friday 0930hrs

As you may or may not have noticed, I didn’t post anything yesterday. April Fool’s Day is a weird one and I don’t know if I like it yet. What I *DO* know is that for about a week, the internet becomes even less reliable than it normally is. I’m not going to post a list of confirmed april 1st windups, but BluesNews has a fairly comprehensive list.
Turns out the worm in one of my earlier posts regarding Internet Explorers critical security flaws was an April Fools. Silly me thinking that the joke was the browser 😉

Quotage

Friday 0850hrs

If you cast your eyes to the right there, good sirs, you’ll notice a little quote. Today’s is by Winston Churchill, but today is the 2nd of April. Tomorrow, it will change. And the day after, and the day after that. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is a random daily quote generator! Coded my by own incompetant fair hand, it will display for you 1 quote per day. I’ve not yet gotten it to have the funky little quote marks seen on the BBC website as I’m not yet sure if that’s worth the effort.

If you’d like a copy to include on your wordpress log, or (given the fact it’ll work on any website and doesn’t require a MySQL database) any other website for that matter, just drop me a line.