According to PC World, AOL must recall AIM 6.0 because of claims that it illegally bundles AMP technology.
Thanks to the amazing Richard Carter for bringing this to my attention.

From SlashDot I learned that AOL has released a new browser called Netscape 6.2.

The doldrums have set in today:

• I need a new computer.
• I must redesign my web site.
• I want a pony.

Looking at some of the new games available or soon to be available:

• Dark Age of Camelot
• EverQuest: Shadows of Luclin
• Neverwinter Nights
• Star Wars Galaxies

It's now becoming quite clear to me that my old machine and video card just aren't going to cut it anymore.
I really have a love-hate relationship the endless march of technology.

Well, we suffered a two hour outage this morning.
The firewall that rests between morman.com and the rest of the world folded at 07:30 CST this morning.
But we're back online, thanks to a quick rebuild of the system.
Thank you Dennis, nyetwerk god!

In NTN trivia news, Tom Egan reports that our bar team Fabulous Ferns is now ranked 3rd in the gold league:

Rank	Points	Name	City
1	165509	National S	Torrence Ca.
2	160930	Skys Billi	Evansville, Ind
3	158087	FABULOUS FERNS	St. Paul, Min.
4	157849	BW-3	Chapel Hill NC
5	157729	Barney's	San Antonio

Go team go!

I've been looking for an instant messenger client that uses Unicode for a while.
It drives me crazy that I can't make an ð or an € in AIM.

Today I think I've found one that's Jabber compliant.
JabberCentral recommends Psi for Windows, so I'm going to give it a try.
I'll let you know if it's good, bad, or borderline.

This is the first-ever weekend update for morman.com, which is especially ironic given how often I've worked weekends in the past, yet I've never updated my web site.

Anyway, I've just spent the better part of the afternoon trying to rationalize the differences between weather image meta-data maintained in our traditional RDBMS stored in our Microsoft SQL Server, and the weather image meta-data maintained in our XML repository stored in Oracle.

Blah; it's hell.

Remember all you hackers out there, if you have data, convert it all into XML.
Do not, for a moment, believe that you can keep your legacy data storage separate from your XML.
The two data stores will intermingle, and all hell will break loose, I guarantee it.

Meanwhile, back at the application layer, there are still problems, but most queries of either system seem to work now.
Yay.

IBM has updated their AlphaWorks site, according to the treet they sent me.
One of the groovy widgets they're hyping is the XFC, which may even make typesetting via XSL FO easier. Haven't downloaded it yet, so I dunno.

My workstation seems to be having a bad hair day.
I think there's something wrong with the file system or the network.
Every once and a while, it just sort of goes away for a while.
I can relate.

Well, damn... I used the word "anthrax" in the title of yesterday's journal, and now my page view logs are full of hits from the DOJ and the DOD.
Sorry, guys, I did not intentionally tweak your filters.
I really should not be flip when national security is at stake.

Anyway, in lighter news, the folks a IGN's Vault Network have written a jargon page that serves as a lexicon for the strange terms used in Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, or MMORPGs, like Dark Age of Camelot.
Thanks to Blues News for highlighting this article.

But I still am uncomfortable with the widespread use of these terms. In my opinion, if you're actually playing a role, you should use some sort of emotes or speech macros that add flavor to the game.
However, the semi-primitive IRC chat-based text interfaces used by these games still favor abbreviated language with as few text characters as possible. LOL. OMG. WTF?

Mining from the IBS network, I have to show off the cool Fall Photo Gallery that John Conway assembled from images submitted to our local affiliates by loyal viewers.
I want a digital camera too!

Finally, DNFI reports that there was a fire at the Reykjavík paintball field.
I rode the bus past the field this Monday, but now it's gone.
This is a serious problem. Last week I wanted to dine at a restaurant, only to find that it had burned down.

It's kinda' ironic: I worked at a paintball field for years.
And despite the fact that I enjoyed the game, these days I tend to agree with Jen McCormack: "just too Jean Claude Van Damme for words."

I've returned from a wonderful vacation with AEB in Iceland.
We saw Sigur Rós play at the Rekyjavík Harbor House Gallery, and we bought woolens, and we went to the Blue Lagoon and we ran around like the crazy tourists we were.

But today it's back to work. Fortunately, my mailbox had some gems in addition to all the spam.
The amazing Beck Finley has edited the Fall issue of the Mississippi Review, and the focus is on weather stories.
I love this collection; it captures our human responses to the indifference of weather.
While it's so easy to rely on the pathetic fallacy when making the atmosphere part of the narrative, for me it's more interesting to describe weather as an inhuman, elemental phenomenon, instead of trying to give the weather its voice.

In science news, I recently read that the Icelanders at deCODE genetics have isolated the gene that transmits familial essential tremor. Love 'em or hate 'em for their proprietary genetic database, hopefully deCODE's research will lead to a cure for this humiliating disability that affects so many elderly people.

Finally, in pure silliness, I think everyone should visit Gaul Land in France. Euro Disney be damned!

Tomorrow I head to Iceland for the Airwaves festival, so the web site will be static for a week.

If you've arrived at this site looking for MORMON.ORG, please make sure you use "o" instead of "a" and ".org" instead of ".com" in the URL.
Looking at the page view logs, I see that this site is getting disproportionate traffic from Utah, so let's be careful.

However, on the remote chance you've arrived here to read my various and sundry pontifications, then I encourage you to check back on Tuesday, October 23rd.
Or browse the archive, although most of it will be dated and irrelevant. Hopefully I'll do some kind of site overhaul in November.

In game design, vehicles are difficult.
The programmers and designers spend so much time on the characters and maps, they have little time for complex automated objects.
This was especially true for FPS games until Tribes came along, bugs and all.
For MUDS and MMORPGs, vehicles are some of the most unpredictable objects online.
Boats especially are often clumsy and fragile.

I remember the subway code Ken Thomases wrote for the PostApoc zones on The End of the Line MUD at Stanford.
Ken got around the unstable nature of the system by having the external car object spawn its inside compartment, and having the inside compartment spawn the external car, in the event that either object was destroyed.

But my character still ended up swimming the The Void sometimes, floating in a behind-the-scenes room for broken objects.
It was the virtual equivalent of when I was on the Small World ride, and it crashed, and we were shuffled through the bowels of Disneyworld on our way back to the surface. It was eerie.

Anyway, after reading BluesNews, I learned that the EverQuest folks have added ponies to their game.
And they're also adding kitties.
Can puppies be far behind?

In cryptology news, Pariah sent me a Wired story about a new book out of the UK called Action This Day which examines the history of Bletchley Park, and the people there who broke the Enigma code during World War II.

One of the more interesting details is the revelation of the codebreaker aliased "Mrs. BB" who first suggested the identity association of the machine's keys to its rotors.
Her theory was dismissed by her supervisors, as it seemed too facile for the Nazis.
Not to get all feminist-revisionist, but seriously considering this woman's theory could have advanced the war effort.

Finally, from the BBC I learned that the center of the galaxy is filled with booze.

Okay, it's not really booze, which is ethyl alcohol, but vinyl alcohol instead.
Also called acetaldehyde, it's part of the C₂H₄O group of organic molecules.

This is probably already old news in Internet terms, but I would be remiss if I didn't post links to the Bert and bin Laden Conspiracy:

Fox News
Wired
Slashdot
Lindqvist

Thanks to Ed for bringing this to my attention.

I almost pity Dino Ignacio, the guy who runs the Bert is Evil site.
He's pretty freaked out about all of this.

But the folks at Sesame Workshop (formerly Childrens Television Workshop) should be used to this by now.
Sesame Street has been culturally re-appropriated for decades now.

Still, you have to ask yourself, why is Bert in the bin Laden poster?
I think the theory proposed that some poster vendor in Bangladesh just randomly grabbed a bunch of bin Laden photos from the Internet, not knowing the significance of the Bert parody, is the closest to the truth.

This whole thing is like something William Gibson would use in a cyberpunk short story:

the street finds its own uses for technology

But in this case, we can take it one step forward. The street finds its own uses for media.

Chilly Willee is not a seal.

Yes, I'm doing the IBS network clearing house thing again...

I wonder how many pumpkin pies you could make with a 1,016 pound pumpkin and $5,100?

As I've mentioned before, one of the more interesting perquisites of my job is the viewer mail.
Dave Hoch of Watertown, MA sent several fire tornado images to one of our affiliates:

These pictures were taken at the most recent Burning Man festival in Nevada.
In Dave's own words:

I witnessed one of the most spectacular phenomenons when the 200 ft flames created real "Fire Tornados".

The conditions that night were perfect (very still, about 60 degrees F) that supported the formation of these tornadoes that consisted of red-hot plasma, and dust.

About 20 of these 400 ft + tornadoes were formed. I think they were formed much like real tornadoes are in the real world.

What is a fire tornado anyway?
Satoko Komurasaki of The Institute of Computational Fluid Dynamics in Japan has a fascinating image that simulates the formation.

The Magna Science and Adventure Centre near Rotherham, UK has an exhibit.
The tornado itself is five meters high, powered by kerosene, and stretches from floor to ceiling. Wow.

This just in:

According to our good friends at Icelandair, there is a tornado in Reykjavík:

Thanks to Tom Egan for finding this today.

This is almost certainly a software error, so let's look at the source.
Here is the coded METAR for the BIRK station:

BIRK 041800Z 12005KT 9999 FEW028 BKN036 BKN060 08/05 Q0999>>

How you get "tornado" out of that I do not know.
But maybe Icelandair isn't to blame. They do get their weather from Veðurstofa Íslands, so perhaps that is where the problem lies.

Ah, the plot thickens. We are seeing similar reports in our datafeed. Janesville, WI is reporting wind speeds of 3002 miles per hour!
What's going on here?
It looks like the pressure data is being reintepreted as wind speed data. 3002 inches of Hg becomes 3002 mph. Ouch.
Time to recode our software...

Previously:

I'm a little slow on the uptake here, but Larry Wall, author of Perl, has published the third installment of his language design series.

There's almost always several different ways to do any operation in Perl. This is good and bad. Larry gives us his opinion on simplicity versus complexity:

My overriding design principle has always been that the complexity of the solution space should map well onto the complexity of the problem space. Simplification good! Oversimplification bad! Placing artificial constraints on the solution space produces an impedance mismatch with the problem space, with the result that using a language that is artificially simple induces artificial complexity in all solutions written in that language.

Larry does a good job of addressing the RFCs, or "Request For Comments" from other developers.
I think a lot of people are concerned that Perl 6 may behave significantly different than Perl 5.

Well this is a relief. I was worried that it might have been a human organ in that drink bottle.
Time to call Ecolab!
Thanks to AEB for sending me this grotesque story.

I just discovered Google's new Image Search, and it's cool.
This is one of those obvious ideas that more people should have implemented.

Of course, in order for it to actually work, it requires semi-logical lexical image names, which can be difficult, especially for some designers.
Google has also made their Usenet Search (formerly DejaNews) and Directory Service available as navigation tabs. Not elegant, but effective.

Now I know exactly where to go when I need to find a picture of a wombat.

Back on the site, I've archived the September stuff and cleaned up a bit.
I've added the obligatory robots.txt and favicon.ico files, if only to keep the error log free of bad robot requests.

Tonight, like so many Tuesdays, is "Trivia Night" -- we play NTN Showdown, which is like Jeopardy, but with alcohol.
Captained by the amazing Tom Egan, our team Toast (and our various aliases: Crust, Crumbs, Bread, etc.) has been playing since January 1995, and we're approaching 5000 games. Sick, I know.