I'm in a full swing of updating Noah. Last three days
are
marked by addiction to download count at PalmGear.
Ah, vanity. As one could expect the number
skyrocked (around
1300 d/l) during the first two days when it was still listed
as "new" software on the first page. Now it's down to 150
d/l per day. I wonder what will be the long-term average. So
far the biggest complaint was that the database is too big.
It is (5 MB is a lot in the little PalmPilot world) but I
find such arguments kind of silly. After all in case of a
dictionary size translates into quality: better definitions,
more entries take more space. But who am I to tell users
what they really want? My task is to code and make them
happy. So I did. I was lucky enough to have a quite
reasonable list of popular english words and I've used it to
produce a 3 abridged versions of the original database.
Maybe this will make those people give me more that 2 stars
in reviews (all 3 reviews I got so
far are almost the same: great idea, too big). I'll release
it tomorrow. This will be 4th release during 4 days.
The next step will be converting Webster. This is going to
make my head hurt. The markup is a stupid html instead of a
markup that actually means something. I think it will evolve
into some kind of AI. I'll have to use perl (which I hate)
to do the first pass over the data. So far I've written the
converter in LISP but its syntax for regular expressions is
too cumbersome for the job and the job will mostly consist
of regex'ing.
I went to to video store today. Found "Pi" which was nice
since I've read that this is a good movie but couldn't find
it. Then I had a moment of doubt. There is a category of
movies, you know, those independent ones, that always get
rave reviews but do badly in box office (there is, of
course, an counter-category, excellent box office and
completely flamed). I tend to watch such movies a lot
(that's after I'm done with the "box office" ones) and it
happens too often that those movies are real crap. At least
as far as I'm concerned. That made me rent Go too - it's
less risky choice. I figured out that if Pi is a piece
of
thing that likes to hit the fan I'll immediately console
myself. I stayed for a while instead of going straight to
the check-out line. And that, let me quote Jet-Li here, was
a mistake. How can you resist renting Scarface when
you've
been wanting to see it for a month now? (well, the clerk
said he didn't like it, but is there a chance in hell that a
movie written by Oliver Stone, directed by De Palma and
featuring Al Pacino and young Michelle Pfeiffer can be bad?)
And what about
Fallen Angels
that you missed when it was being played in
a small theatre two months ago?
The end result is that I now have 4 DVD's to see and only
one weekend. This is going to be an overdose even for me.
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