I’ve been thinking about making an image plugin for WordPress.  I want to restart my image of the day process, but the import process has been dreadful, and there’s no programmatic access to the image list, meaning things like random images and images from subgroups aren’t particularly reasonable.  To that end I need to write my own, and since I’d love the rank that comes from having a high-usage plugin, I need a clear idea of what things go into an image plugin, what features are missing from existing plugins, et cetera.

I’m already doing complex efficient randomization, API access, bulk posting, timed bulk posting, base autotagging, auto-categorization, a catalog widget, and I’m going to make sure that my stuff is compatible with the All In One SEO pack.  I’m going to provide integration points, and I’m going to provide an example integration with LightBox, or one of its relatives.  I’m going to provide voting, moderated tag suggestion and home-post permalinking.

I’ll also be writing strict, browser/version portable code without hacks.  Yay!

Please let me know what you’d want to see if there were a new image plugin coming out.

It occurred to me that I have a great way to prove the mighty powers of Nostradumbass.

[SB digg, reddit]ICANN has announced their intent to allow the registration of new gTLDs in a repeated auction process, starting for the princely sum of $100,000 for a handful of letters.  In IRC in debate the question came up how many vanity 1st level domains (hereafter vanity 1ld) would be purchased.

[digg-reddit-me]For the purposes of competition – and there’s no money involved, I just said gambling to whore diggs and such – a vanity 1LD is defined as a gTLD which represents the name of a person, company or organization.  This means that .porn is not a vanity 1tld, even though it’ll certainly be owned by a pornographer, because it’s named for its content.  By contrast, .microsoft is a vanity 1LD, as is .billclinton (which probably won’t get bought; I’m just being thorough in definition and Bill has a good sense of humor.)  If a 1LD is assigned on basis of trademark, it’s pretty much in like Flynn.

So.  Where’s the psychicitudeness?

I predict that approximately 950 vanity 1LDs will be purchased in the first auction.  (This has the startling price tag of ninety five million dollars minimum.)

Anyone want to play The Price is Right with me?  Place your bet in comments (preferably as a trackback; this is a new domain and I could use some rank).  Whoever gives the nearest answer to the number that turns out to be correct wins.  (No price is right rules; going over isn’t different than going under.)

Incidentally, if you guys are worried I’ll edit my post after the fact, just check Internet Archive for the day before the auction.  I can’t cheat; I’m being watched by www.bigbroth.er .

Bring it.  950.

I’m just posting this up here because I always forget how to fix it and because it usually takes me 15 minutes to track down again.  When you enable the CentOS web stack, perl is excluded – which is generally correct – except that dependencies require (currently) 5.8.8 whereas that is not provided by the base repos.  If you hit that, you’ll get a message along these lines:

Error: Missing Dependency: perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_5.8.8) is needed by package perl-DBD-MySQL

So, the way to fix that is to change the priority of CentOS Plus to 1 temporarily, yum clean all, install perl – which will get current, which is 5.8.8, put CentOS Plus back where you had it (presumably 2), and go back to what you were doing.

Our good friends at DevKitPro want help exposing their project to a wider audience through the SourceForge Community Choice awards. DevKitPro is a deployment of GCC meant to facilitate development for console video game systems, including the Nintendo DS, the GameBoy Advance, Playstation Portable, Sega Saturn, GP2X, GP32, Nintendo GameCube and hopefully soon the Wii.

Some of you may know that I write Nintendo games commercially. DevKitPro and its antecedents were how I got my foot in the door. I’d like other people to know these tools are available, in case they have the passion too.

If you’d like to see other people able to make homebrew gaming happen for their consoles, cast your vote here.

Lolhax.

Normally I’d do the rant myself, but io_error did a better job than I’m likely to do. This article contains the single funniest thing I’ve ever seen him say (the line about the governor; you’ll know it when you see it.)

And no, these dots aren’t being agitated.  This is a simple visual/auditory demo with delusions of grandeur, but on the other hand, it is surprisingly pretty; very reminiscent of 80s demoscene stuff, back when (insert obviously false nostalgia here.)  Granted, this is something of an old news moment, but hey, it’s the first time I saw it, and almost everyone I’ve showed it to thinks it’s new to, so good enough.

On with the show.

If the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis is true, then Malaysia may be the first nation which has found a way to turn police against stupidity.  As the guinness guy would say, BRILLIANT.

What I would not give for something like this in America…

It’s been a good year for holy-crap technologies.  This one – an MIT tool called ASSIST - boggles my mind, and it’s given me some seriously woot ideas.  I’m filing it under Nintendo DS because, even though it’s not a game, that’s just the ideal platform for a better-developed such tool.

[youtube]NZNTgglPbUA[/youtube]

The YouTube video is short, but there’s a longer one at the main page. 

That’s right.  Netflix will give you a million bucks if you can write an algorithm which one-ups their existing algorithm by 10% or better on grounds of predicting what their customers will like, based on their prior history.

Now that’s a win.