Burrowowl

You can put me on the list of people that are wary of what the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition is going to look like, but admittedly I’m rather middle-of-the-road about it. After 2nd Edition AD&D and the Skills & Powers expansions (which I think of as AD&D 2.5th Edition) had been out for a few years, I was rather burned out on Dungeons & Dragons. I’d done my time playing with power-gaming, rules-lawyering, munchkin half-elven psionicist/ranger dual-classed super-monkeys and spent some quality time playing Call of Cthulhu, 3rd Edition Earthdawn, and some Cyberpunk 2020 every now and then.
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So I just upgraded to WordPress 2.3 and POW, my site stops working, dead. Did they change the instructions? It used to be that you just make sure you don’t overwrite your wp-content or config.php files. Nope, that’s still the same. Quick, to the Apache logs!

[client 64.142.72.114] PHP Fatal error: Cannot redeclare get_terms() (previously declared in /var/www/html/burrowowl.net/wordpress/wp-includes/taxonomy.php:447) in /var/www/html/burrowowl.net/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/Similar_Posts/similar-posts.php on line 848, referer: http://burrowowl.net/wordpress/wp-admin/options-permalink.php

ah-ha! One quick find-and-replace later, we’re back in business.

Why does Simon’s drill, the metaphor for his determination, strength, and courage, exist? Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is a kid’s show, aired on Sunday mornings in Japan. Clearly Simon’s purpose is to be brave, honest, and strong without being mean, foolish, or petty, all qualities that we hope to cultivate in ourselves and in our children. Kamina’s reappearance, the Obi-Wan to Simon’s Luke, reminding us of what Simon (and hence, by proxy, the audience) admires and finds value in.

I can easily call this my favorite show on television these days, what with Battlestar Galactica and Heroes both between seasons, and not counting C-SPAN (which is hilarious). Gainax, however, has a well-deserved reputation for winding up a otherwise-excellent shows with severely disappointing endings. FLCL, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Mahoromatic are felt by many to suffer from this bad-ending affliction, and over the past couple of weeks I’ve been dreading every symptom of backslide in Simon and the Dai Gurren Dan’s story.

This week saw the airing of episode 26: Let’s Go, My Friends. With but a single episode remaining, I’m cautiously optimistic that the fine folks at Gainax are actually going to pull this one off. This week we saw that the writers and producers can refocus their attention to the core theme of the show. There’s a suitably overwhelmingly powerful antagonist, a damsel in distress, burning manly spirit, and the fate of the universe at stake, all of which will potentially add up to a suitable climax and fitting denouement. Are they done killing off protagonists? Will Simon prevail? Have the heavens been satisfactorily pierced (as promised back in episode 1)? We’ll find out next Sunday.

Edward Tufte described a sparkline, a term he coined, as “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics.” They have been embraced by a number of information visualization buffs, and now a sparkline graph showing the weekly activity of Burrowowl.net appears next to the search tool. With two axes and shading, the following is all conveyed in a glance:

• Each bar’s height represents the quantity of article written to this site.
• Each bar’s color indicates the quantity of comments, darker bars representing more discussion, lighter bars representing less. The most recent week is set in red to draw attention to it.
• Each bar represents one week of posts.

No explicit scale is shown; all heights and colors are relative to the other data. Graphs of this sort are meant to be read and understood immediately, much like a natural word is more quickly-absorbed, understood, and put into context than an acronym or unfamiliar jargon. If you see a row of tall bars followed by a dip, it means that I was slow in posting during that period of time compared to normal. If you see a dark splot of bars amongst very light ones, those were times of more frequent discussion.

Hat tip to Information Aesthetics for calling my attention to this form of informational graphic and putting a name to them so I could look around for the proper tools, and hat tip to Sean McBride for writing the PHP that actually generates the graphic.

Currently I’m showing 26 weeks, half a year, though that may change. Sean McBride’s WordPress plugin can operate out of the box at daily, weekly, or monthly granularity, and is quite configurable.

Today I read an interesting commentary on The Register that proposed to tell me “Why Microsoft vs. Mankind Still Matters.” Before wading in too deeply, I’d like to point out that I’m aware that most writers for proper periodicals have to pass their work through editors, and have little influence on the titles and headlines that are slapped atop their words. Having been a computer geek long since before there was any hope of being perceived as both “cool” and “owning a computer,” I’m familiar with the concept of Microsoft-as-evil-empire, and have been exposed to a long, droning litany of the crimes that Microsoft has committed against the market, freedom, justice, and small woodland creatures. Was somebody proposing that Microsoft’s eternal struggle to subjugate us all was no longer important?

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