Hey! Long time no blog!

I don't know if anyone regularly watches LOLCODE news any more, but I will be hanging out at South by Southwest Interactive between now and March 16, 2011. If you've heard of LOLCODE, say hi. If you want to find me (or follow me), then ping me on teh twitterz: @atl.

Parry Gripp is a brilliant, mad genius. Anyone who rocked to Buffy the Vampire Slayer's theme tune at any time in the past twelve years already knows this. Lately, he has been building his reputation as the Mayor of the Internet by creating such musical hits as ”Hamster on a Piano,” ”Fuzzy Fuzzy Cute Cute,” and the below “Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom” song:

I came across the above video, and knew I had to remix the music using my latest project: a script that created automatic, parameterized random re-edits of a song. It lead to a potentially limitless number of variations, most of which are actually less annoying than the original:

I wrote up a full explanation of how I did it on my personal site. It tries to get across some tricky computer and music concepts in a non-technical manner.

But why do I bother posting it to this site? I mean, other than the fact that it's a mashup of a cute, popular internet meme?

LOLCODE helped me create it. No, I didn't code it in our favorite esolang, but the process of designing LOLCODE got me thinking about fluent interfaces: code that when you read it, just makes sense.While the below code might not have the same enduring qualities as CAN HAS STDIO?, it's definitely motivated by the same desire to create code that anyone can read:

  beats = song.analysis.beats  first_beats = beats.that(fall_on_the(1))

I didn't create the open-sourced Echo Nest Remix API, but I have contributed parts that might make it more fun to code. If you want to learn more about Remix, I have also written a semi-technical overviewof the API, as well.

And if you want to share the remixes, you can get the embed codes at the bottom of my explanation of the remixes, or point people to an OpenTape of the songs.

More LOLCODE-related news soon…

You doubtless know that our older, far more accomplished cousin, the Cheezburger network, is serious business. What you may not know is that they now make several APIs available.

Naturally, the way for checking in with the API, the “Hello World” call, is at api.cheezburger.com/xml/hai.

Most of the other API elements are for hooking into the user- and submission-oriented features of the various sites on the network, but the Content CaptionAPI is fairly nifty on its own, with a quite complete interface for placing text on images. I'd recommend checking it out.

I just had this brought to my attention. lolbash.sh:

# LOL!!1

alias wtf='dmesg'
alias onoz='cat /var/log/errors.log'
alias rtfm='man'

alias visible='echo'
alias invisible='cat'
alias moar='more'

alias icanhas='mkdir'
alias donotwant='rm'
alias dowant='cp'
alias gtfo='mv'

alias hai='cd'
alias plz='pwd'

alias inur='locate'

alias nomz='ps -aux'
alias nomnom='killall'

alias cya='reboot'
alias kthxbai='halt'

Well, that pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

(via @natevw)

Well played, Pragmatic Programmers, well played.

The inaugural issue of PragPub, an electronic magazine for programmers edited by Michael Swaine, former editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal, has a cameo appearance for LOLCODE.

(originally via Gruber)

Reddit has been infected by this meme of “A Reddit clone in X lines of Y programming language.” I suppose, then, that it was inevitable that someone would pull it off with LOLCODE. Naturally, as with any high performance web programming needs, they turned to PHP, and Tetraboy's LOLCODE implementation, which was one of the very first out there (and why it might not look like other dialects of LOLCODE found elsewhere).

CAN HAS SQL?DBASE IZ GETDB('db/lcsn.db')FUNNAHS IZ DBUCKET(&DBASE&,"CAN I PLZ GET * ALL UP IN lollit")IM IN UR FUNNAHS ITZA TITLE	VOTEZ IZ &TITLE#ups& - &TITLE#downs&...

Well played, keyz182, well played.

Raised as possibly relevant to your interests:

Inception, a repository on github by A R Karthick that's the “Inception movie explained programmatically.” From the README:

My tribute to [Director Christopher] Nolan in “C” Language and a bit of assembly (x86) as the inception is done using x86 code morphing so that Fischer wakes up thinking that the thought was originated from his mind. Running the program would unravel the entire sequence in the movie. Reading the code would explain the movie Programmatically.

Nicely done. I'm always sympathetic to efforts like this. The commit log in itself is a nice artifact.

(H/T: @ericflo)

Just minutes into April 2nd, I discover that Google has introduced LOLCODE language search. Nice.

(via NetworkWorld)

Paul Lamere, a blogger for whom I have long had much respect, has outdone himself with a long look at the recent 4chan hack of a time.com poll.

At the core of the hack is the work of a dozen or so, backed by an army of a thousand who downloaded and ran the autovoters and also backed by an untold number of others that unwittingly fell prey to the spam url autovoters. So why do they do it? Why do they write code, build complex applications, publish graphs - why do they organize a team that is more effective than most startup companies? Says Zombocom: “For the lulz”.

Amen, brother.

For those of you who are still clicking around the 'net looking for funny things while avoiding worldwide football (soccer) fever, I offer a preview of a newly designed LOLCODE website. Click for the beta. I hope this is something that will generate a real buzz about the language.

Pass it on!

I just heard about the goings on at YAPC (yet another Perl conference) Europe, 2008, in Copenhagen earlier this month. Patrick Michaud gave a lightning talk on LOLCODE in Perl 6's Parrot. Not only did he give a great overview of LOLCODE (v. 1.2), he gave a live demo of code translation from Perl (and, potentially, other languages) to LOLCODE via Parrot.

I've embedded the video here, and unlike previous offerings, it's short and sweet, at under seven minutes. Alternatively, download it and check it out at your leisure.

Wow. Thank you, Patrick (and Simon and Will and everyone in the Perl 6 community)!

A couple months ago I learned about an up-and-coming company with the intriguing and inviting name of LOLapps. They've fleshed out their web site a little bit since then. More to the point, they're trying to recruit while while being obliged to tell next to nothing about their company. In any case, I suspect what they do is Seeryous Bizniss, at least more serious than some previous job postings.

They're looking for a project manager, a community manager, and software and network engineers, so if you're looking for a new opportunity and want to increase the LOL quotient in your life, I suggest taking a look at lolapps.com. I have my theories about some things they might do, but it would be irresponsible to speculate here. I do note they keep a presence on Facebook….

Godspeed, LOLapps. We need more lulz in the world.

I've long held a strong fascination for Twitter in conjunction with LOLCODE. Twitter was pretty much the first vector for people to hear about LOLCODE on its first day, before Reddit and Digg struck. I also thought that LOLCODE would make a good language for a bot running on Twitter: if people could access it via SMS, and it looks close to TXT SPEEK anyway, it could be a compelling combination. That never materialized, but the idea stuck around.

My latest project has been a music recommendation agent for Twitter. Yes, Twitter bots are so 2007, but I'd like to think that recom.me brings something new to the table by giving user queries some persistence. Not only does the bot react on Twitter, but it creates a permanent URL on its own website.

If you like music and have some tolerance for Twitter, please check the user @recomme out, and send it a band name or solo artist. It should respond within a couple minutes with a list of other, similar musicians worth checking out. Respond again with “more” (or, if you prefer, “MOAR”), it'll send a few more artists to consider. I designed it to be easy to use via SMS at, say, the record store.

If you're not on Twitter, you can still explore a sample query, or read more at the about page.

This is just an early preview version of the site. Thanks to the awesome guys at The Echo Nest, whose APIs are behind the uncanny recommendations, recomme should soon be able to learn about your tastes and customize its recommendations for you.

P.S.: We're in the final hours of the LOLCODE Back-to-School sale. I have no idea when Spreadshirt will offer such a good discount again.

Photographer Michael Woodward caught a snapshot of a great vanity license plate this weekend. I know it's light on news, but I had to share.

(Yes, I know about the discrepancy in spelling. Too AWSUM to pass up.)

OBTW: Only a few days left in the 25% off back to school sale!

Photographer Michael Woodward caught a snapshot of a great vanity license plate this weekend. I know it's light on news, but I had to share.

(Yes, I know about the discrepancy in spelling. Too AWSUM to pass up.)

OBTW: Only a few days left in the 25% off back to school sale!