Alden Bates' Weblog

TFWiki.net passes 10,000 articles!

Today the Transformers Wiki passed 10,000 articles. There are many Transformers Wikis on the web, but only one dares to have more than 10,000 articles!

Of course, to put this in perspective, Wookieepedia currently has 72,759 articles (Fair warning, they are hosted on Wikia, so you will probably see many pictures of almost-naked fat people if you go there) but TFWiki.net may catch up yet!

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Doctor Who: Waters of Mars, in a nutshell

Helpfully under the cut, in case you're one of the few people left who hasn't seen it. Spoilers included, obviously.

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Chrome beta release unbetter

Google rolled out a beta release of Chrome the other day, and unfortunately it's introduced a rendering problem when viewing the Transformers Wiki:

The left-hand column is inexplicably pushed down under the content area, making it virtually useless. I've seen it happen on a few other sites as well, and I've submitted a bug report via the reporting mechanism built into Chrome, so hopefully it'll be fixed in the next release.

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And once again, Doctor Who as an anime

This time, with UNIT fighting Cybermen. Seriously the BBC should give this guy a job!

previously: Doctor Who Anime - yes, I realise it's still halfway down my main page. I am so terribly slack of late.

Hypothetical question

So the NZ government has made a right hash of things supporting various bids for the screening rights for the rugby world cup. After toing and froing between various people, it's decided that TVNZ, TV3 and Maori TV will essentially share the rights and games will be broadcast on all three channels. After all this, hypothetically, the All Blacks are knocked out in a shock result in the first round by Tonga.

How funny would this be on a scale of 1 to 10?

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More webcomic links

I discovered these links after the webcomics in question advertised on the Transformers Wiki:

The Dreamland Chronicles - Not a gag-a-day comic, but one ongoing story, all rendered in movie-quality CGI. The Dreamland Chronicles tells the story of Alex, who suddenly finds himself dreaming of the same fantasy world he dreamed of as a young child and has to deal with encountering the same characters he knew long ago, only grown up.

Weesh - and at the other end of the spectrum, Weesh, which is a gag-a-day strip (or at least every few days) and with a clean, simple drawing style. Three kids have a strange animal named Weesh, who has the power to grant wishes, so long as he gets enough licorice.

Both comics are family-friendly.

Adding a peanut gallery

AKA jumping on the topic du jour.

Google's latest release is "Sidewiki", essentially a new feature on their toolbar which allows you to open up a sidebar and add a note about the page you're currently viewing. Other users can then rate your comment, and all the comments on a particular page are ordered by how useful other users found them. So essentially it's a commenting system with ratings. I'm not sure why they chose to have "wiki" in the name; Wiki implies modifiable content, but so far as I can tell you can't modify notes anyone else has added.

What does this give us? Well, in practical terms, it means every page on the Internet has a Google-controlled comment forum which the site owner has little control over, but which is displayed alongside their content. These can be displayed in any browser, even if it doesn't have Google toolbar installed - observe this Sidewiki comment on Wikipedia's main page. Now, Wikipedia's main page already has a talk page to comment on, which is modifiable by anyone, so the Sidewiki is providing a second redundant comment forum albeit, as the comment points out, one not under the control of anyone at Wikipedia. As a side note, this also means that blogs with the comments disabled now have comments again.

This post, too, has a section at the bottom for visitors to leave their comments, but it also has a Sidewiki. When someone posts a comment here, I get an email alerting me, so I know to come and reply to it. If someone posts a comment to the Sidewiki, I don't. Perhaps this is something Google ought to look at as an enhancement to their Webmaster Tools service? By verifying my site on sitemaps, I ought to be able to access a page showing all of the Sidewiki comments.

I'll be interested to see how long it takes before the first libel case results from something someone said on Sidewiki. I went to check the Scientology site to see if anything had been added there yet, but their site crashes IE on my computer, and I can't get Sidewiki to install on Firefox, so...

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District 9

I was going to go and see G.I. Joe, but after reading the bad reviews it was getting, I decided to skip it and go see District 9 instead. District 9 is an action film wrapped in social commentary, with aliens. It's filmed handheld style, like Cloverfield, which did make me a bit queasy at times (or maybe it was the splatter-gore). Thing is, it's filmed handheld style even when it doesn't make sense in the context of the story. Half the time they're pretending the handheld cameras are actual cameras, but then the cameras appear to follow characters where you wouldn't expect them to go, such as into a top-secret lab.

Good fun though! The main character was likable, and the special effects were great (but you'd expect no less from Weta Workshop). While I'm not generally a fan of splatter-gore, that was just window dressing, and the movie didn't depend on it.

As usual, plot spoilering point goes under the cut to avoid spoiling anyone.

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Result of "Anti-Smacking referendum"

The results of the "Anti-Smacking referendum" were published in the paper this morning. Summed up, they are:

1. Sue Bradford thinks New Zealanders are stupid and were confused by the question.


2. Jonkey is going to have another coffee and let a committee consider the ramifications.


3. Oh, and one bunch of idiots wrote abuse on the ballots, which would have only been read by the electoral counters who had nothing to do with the referendum in the first place.

Another triumph for democracy!

I'm not saying it was a total waste of time, as it does prove once again that politicians only care what the public thinks if it's an election year.

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Vanity edits

Because the Transformer Wiki has a lot of articles on real people, not all of them complimentary, so occasionally the people turn up and try to edit their articles, as Frank Milkovich apparently did today.

Hilarity ensued!

I wonder how often that happens on Wikipedia.

Doctor Who Anime

Making a Doctor Who anime, part 2:

Smashing work!

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Behold BURGERTRON!

So Burger King, though they have the Revenge of the Fallen toys here, haven't introduced the BBQ Double Stackticon. Luckily my favourite burger chain Burgerfuel have come to the rescue with BURGERTRON.

The primary ingredients are a 1/3 pound Optimus Prime beef patty, Philadelphia cream cheese, mango, and prosciutto. I'm... not quite sure what those ingredients in particular have to do with Transformers, but what the hey. They're tasty.

Odd Firefox 3.5 problem

I noticed that ever since I upgraded Firefox to 3.5, it would refuse to shut down properly. The Firefox window would disappear, but when I went to shut down my PC, it would report that Firefox was still running and "not responding".

So I tried a bit of an experiment — I started Firefox up, and then tried to shut it down again. Watching the process in XP's process manager, I could see that it had jumped from using 40MB of memory to 160MB, and hadn't shut down.

I then tried turning off extensions one-by-one. The problem persisted until I disabled Google toolbar. With that disabled, suddenly Firefox began shutting down properly again. "AHA!" said I.

So then I re-enabled Google toolbar, expecting the problem to return. It didn't. I re-enabled my other extensions. No problem, and now Firefox 3.5 seems to be behaving itself. That's mighty strange. Mighty mighty strange. I guess I'll keep an eye on it and see if the problem comes back.

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1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica

I have found something awesome.

The 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Already I have learned:

In New Zealand "The Public Health Department has exerted itself to improve the sanitation of native villages and combat the mischievous trickery of Maori wizards and "doctors"."

Of Maori: "That they were not indigenous, but had displaced an earlier Melanesian or Papuan race, the true aborigines, is certain."

London is: "the capital of England and of, the British Empire, and the greatest city in the world"

Obviously this is all true, because it was in an encyclopaedia.

It was the best of animation, it was the worst of animation

I have a strange fascination with the season 3 Transformers episode Fight or Flee, not because it's a well written episode, even though it is well written, but because the variations in animation are so extreme. You'll go from a dynamic heroic shot of Rodimus Prime standing in front of explosions to a shot of a bunch of generic block robots all in the same colour. It appears as though an animation studio, possibly Toei started animating it, got about half of it done, and then ran out of either time or money. It's hard to say if the lower-quality animation that crops up in a couple of shots was done by another company, or it was just temporary animation intended to be replaced later when the proper stuff was done.

But I've found what I believe to be the worst shot in all of the original Transformers cartoon. Here we see Cyclonus welcoming his leader, Galvatron, to a newly conquered planet:

Unfortunately it appears it's not Galvatron at all, but merely a cardboard cut out.

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