While on a string of Zazz - related posts , we now have Miss Zoe, a new deal-a-day site that is a sister of Zazz. While Zazz caters to the tech geeky products (usually), Miss Zoe is planning to serve up a variety of products, many of which will suit the non-geeky woman (and man). They hope to launch the site with their first product at 8am EDT (Eastern Daylight Time) on Monday 21st January.

On a side note, I won the competition to locate the new site, run in the Zazz forums. The following clues were dropped:

• It's a something.com.au
• It is a Miss
• It starts with Z
• It looks a lot like zazz

It only took me three minutes (according the forum post time stamps) to find it :S. After giving misszazz.com.au a try, and finding it didn't work, I found a list of girl's names starting with Z. Zoe jumped out because it was about the only name on there that I recognised, and Voila! (got to keep up the french connection): misszoe.com.au . Sofia (from zazz) and Christelle (from the coffee shop next door) are going to give the site their best shot, so here's best wishes for their success!!

Cheers,

Matt

Some discussion (and competitions) in the Zazz forumz lately lead me to look back at some AA (Ascii Art) bits and pieces I've looked at in the past. AA is, essentially, producing pictures using no more than the 256 ASCII characters (hence the name). Below is my Zazz avatar, rendered in AA.

            ttttjj::  ;;..

          ;;tt    LLtt;;iitt

          ii;;    ..ii    ..ff

          ii;;      ..      tt,,

        ,,LLtt  ..        ....LL

    ..ffii  tt  tt        ttLLttii

  ..LL..    tt  ii..      ttttLL;;

  ff..      tt                  ff

;;tt        tt    ::ii    ;;..  ;;ii

ff          tt..;;GGtt;;..iiGGii  jj..

ffff          ttii    ffttii  ..ff;;tt

KKii..                tt          ffiiff

tt;;ii                tt            iiLL

    tt    ii  ;;..    tt

    ff    ffttfftt    tt

    ff....ff    jj....tt

    GGDDDDii    ffGGGGii

To get the desired effect in HTML, the AA must be enclosed in <pre> tags to tell the browser that the text is preformatted, and so spaces etc. will be preserved.

One of my personal favourite demonstrations is the well put together BB (AA -> BB, get it? ). BB showcases what AA art can do, and although now 10 years old, it is no less exciting. Below are some highlights:

As you can see, the possibilities are (almost) endless! If you so desire, you can watch all your movies in AA too, using aaxine:

Recognise dear Smeagol?

So, if you really want to amaze your friends, render them in AA! (not Alcoholics Anonymous, ASCII ART!)

One program I'm using more often now is Elisa Media Center. There are a few media centers for Linux - most notably MythTV and Freevo, but Elisa is the easiest to install by a long shot. It is also entirely built on Python and OpenGL, so this brings some beautiful effects.

Currently, development effort is being channeled towards this new version (the screenshot above is from the development code (svn)). In my opinion, Elisa is fast shaping up to be something exciting .

So I was bored this morning... what better thing to do than to do that wordpress theme I've been putting off for days?

Actually there are plenty of better things to do, but I finally threw together this theme. There's still problems with it, since I threw it out so quickly, but it looks better than the previous theme, imho. It is by no means complete, and some pages in it are based quite heavily on the default Kubrick theme that comes with wordpress. I also had to upgrade wordpress to get it to support a tag I borrowed from this theme :S .

I think thats all the news for now - if anyone wants a copy of this theme just let me know...

Cheers,

Matt

Just returned from a great two weeks camping on Friday. Had a great time, and while camping, suffering from techno-isolation, I came up with some great ideas on what to write on my blog next. There's only one problem...

I Can't Remember Them

So, while I'm sure I would have cranked out some great pieces on this little-viewed site, I can no longer remember what I was going to write, nor even what provided me with this inspiration .

Oh and I need to rework a blog theme one day too... (and find a job)