Stackoverflow grapples with the many spellings of "Gaddafi." Thank God programmers are on the case, because everyone else is confused by the 112 possibilities (even with this chart)! Even Dr. Demento weighed in.
posted by grumblebee on Sep 21, 2011 - 54 comments

Videogames reach the uncanny valley with the facial animations (yt video) in Rockstar's L.A. Noir, their 1940s Los Angeles set detective game.
posted by Artw on Dec 18, 2010 - 77 comments

Russel Cox, one of the people behind Google's new programming language Go, has written a three part series on regular expressions. It's a nice mix of computer science theory, programming, and history: Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast, Regular Expression Matching: the Virtual Machine Approach, and Regular Expression Matching in the Wild.
posted by chunking express on Mar 17, 2010 - 57 comments

Why Real Men Don't Cry [YouTube] [more inside]
posted by hadjiboy on Feb 9, 2008 - 81 comments

Microsoft is giving away a nifty piece of software. It's the beta of Expressions 3 by Creature House, something I used to use back in my Mac days but hadn't heard anything about in a long time. Apparently MS bought Creature House last year. I downloaded it (after filling out a somewhat arduous survey/profile thingy) and think it a nice drawing program. Both Mac and Win versions are posted.
posted by bz on Jun 9, 2004 - 30 comments

Shut Up! Due to a linguistic phenomenon called amelioration, we're losing a lot of those nice, bad words that are so useful for expressing anger. Nice once meant stupid and bad's good today. "Shut up!" increasingly means an affectionate "Get outta here!"; No is becoming Yes and even "Fuck off!", with the right intonation can mean something like "I don't believe it! How very interesting, Carruthers!" Where will it end? And it's not as if any good words are making the opposite journey, except perhaps "You can kiss my ass", which is easily imagined as a term of endearment back in old Babylon. What really bad words and expressions will survive the nicification onslaught? And what unnecessary good words could be put to better use as insults?
posted by MiguelCardoso on May 8, 2003 - 54 comments