Bare Naked Larry

Friday, May 20, 2005

Coming Attractions

I went and told Helena, my new girlfriend, where to find my blog, so I may be in hot water already (sigh). Nothing too severe I assure you.

I have put an improved version of StarshipTrek on the web. It now shows past moves for the Klingon ships you have battled when the game is over and also shows your own shots as play progresses (previously it only showed the Klingon shots).

I have begun work on my next Toy for this blog. Coming Soon the Shakespeare-O-Meter. The hardest parts are already coded. You type or paste text into it and it will return the percentage of Shakespeare likeness the text has. To do this I have downloaded two lists from the web. One a list of English word use frequency and the other a list of Shakespeare word use frequency. It will then scan your text word by word comparing it to the frequencies listed. The less common a word is in English and more common it is in Shakespeare the higher its score will be. Finally all the word scores are totaled for a final score. But to make it a little more fun, the words will be reprinted and color-coded to show which words got higher scores. So words like “Methinks” would be in bright green, while words like “Internet” would be in bright red. It will not be so sophisticated as to actually analyze the syntax of the text, and cutting and pasting snippets of Shakespeare might not always guarantee a 100% score. It will probably even have above 100% possibilities if you just string a bunch of Shakespearean words together.

Another Toy coming soon will be Monkey Typewriter, but I’ll leave you to guess how this toy will work for now.

I’m still contemplating how to implement MEME Image which will be a visual enhancement to MEME watch. Also to do, add VANITY Watch which would be nearly identical to MEME watch, but rely on Technorati to track the number of links to your website. This last idea comes from a suggestion by FGL.

I tripled the number of pictures in Zen Image so hopefully repeats will show far less often. I will still be on the look out for good Zen Images (still getting very few Zen Comments… except for FGL… so he doesn’t count anymore. Well he does, but you know what I mean). One last word about Zen Image, the images are often times just items that I thought looked like real unscripted moments of life, and aren’t supposed to have a deep meaning. Sometimes you can just imagine being where these people are, doing the things these people are doing, or you just feel like you could know these people because they seem so similar to people you know. I find something very Zen about that.