I don’t really know what I’m talking about here but I’m not going to let it slow me down too much. I talked to this guy a few weeks ago who writes software for a living. It’s like the software assistants you can buy to help you play internet poker except his software buys and sells stocks for you.

Makes sense to me, the stock market is kind of like poker. You want whatever edge you can get when making your investments but what happens when everyone is using little stockbots to buy and trade? Does the market become more predictable or less predictable? Does reality matter anymore or will companies just surge and fall as robots pump money in and out of the rolling waves of trade?

When everyone is trading with robots will it be possible to game the system and play the robots to the advantage of a particular business? What if you know what parameters the software looks for when making investments? Can you spin a little robot net and use your startup to capture a huge amount of automatic capital?

I guess I just have a lot of questions about what the robots are going to want from us when they take over the world.

Last night I was reading the Cartoon Brew blog and I came across the Morse Code challenge they posted. I started fiddling with the letters a bit and must must have flipped some sort of implanted hypnotic trigger.

It was a slow rumble at first and then a doughy computer science student lumbered out of the cobwebs of my subconscious with a fist full of stuffed crust pizza. He downloaded some bad techno remixes and started finessing the keyboard with his chubby finger tips. A couple hours later he was gone and in his place there was a slight grease stain and a recursive function for decoding Morse Code without spaces between the letters.

Unfortunately my inner C.S. nerd didn’t write a function that would cross check with a dictionary for real words so I was stuck scrolling through a giant list looking for words or names. So far the only semi realistic sentence I’ve come up with is “Key Sound Talent Amy Nero.” I don’t think this is what it’s supposed to say and actually suspect that there isn’t a message in the image at all but I do like the idea of hiding secret codes in short films. I think I’ll try to make a point of it in my own work.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. I’m messing with the structure of this site and hope to move our commenting system into a bulletin board format. Things might get a little ugly around here as I chew on the project and inevitably get distracted by sunshine and comic books.

Right now I’m looking into phpBB3 RC1 and BBpress.

It has less features and I’ve run into loads of problems but I’m leaning towards BBpress since it was built by the folks who created WordPress, the software powering this Orphan Army project blog. I like that it the software includes RSS feeds and I have a lot of faith in the community behind it.

– Update –

I managed to leave the old comments in tact and experimentation begins with the forum. Currently there isn’t any way to comment on old posts but those mostly just collect dust and spam so I might not worry about it too much.

YouTube has RSS feeds. They don’t make them very accessible but they’re in there.

I’m not sure why these feeds aren’t more accessible or attached to their corresponding pages. It’s probably just a balance between providing useful technology and a fear that they’ll lose advertising revenue if people access the site less directly.

Pidgin, formerly known as GAIM, can be configured to connect to Google Talk.

1)The first time you open Pidgin you will see the welcome window.

2)Click Add.

3)In the Add Account window, add the following:

Protocol: XMPP
Screen name: your Google Talk screen name without @gmail.com
Server: gmail.com
Password: If you want Pidgin to log in automatically, enter your Google Talk password and check the Remember password box. The password is stored unecrypted on your computer, so you may not want Pidgin to remember your password for security reasons.

It should look like this:

4)Click the Advanced tab and add the following:

Connect server: talk.google.com

It should look like this:

5)Click Save and you’re done.

UPDATE: Google now has instructions on how to do this too.