Daily Archives: 7/27/2004

Eliza Turns Dirty, Changes Name to Jenny18

Normally I steer this website away from overtly sexual topics, but I’ll make an exception here. Jenny18 is a version of the classic Eliza program which has been tailored to imitate a sort of dumb-blond cyber sex slave. It relies on the fact that many people talk like complete idiots online, which means that even simple programs can seem plausible in that social context. Often it’s hard to tell which side of the transcripts are being acted out by the script and which are real humans. It’s amazing how easily people (well, horny geeks anyway) are drawn in by rather trivial programmed responses, and how absurdly moronic they are.

Oh, by the way, you shouldn’t mix up the Eliza mentioned above with this one.

Aaron Brady, Porno for Pythons – Pixie Weblog Software – Hello & Goodbye

I’m currently using WordPress for this weblog, but I can’t help but feeling that the more that people work on it, the less I’m going to like it. After all, I have rather simple needs, and once those needs are satisfied i don’t really see a huge advantage to adding features that somebody somewhere might think is cool. Because of this, I’m constantly on the lookout for additional bits of weblog software.

Today’s Daily Python URL! brings us Aaron Brady’s Pixie Weblog Software which uses Quixote and Cheetah. I haven’t had the time to review it yet, but it seems to encapsulate some of the ideals which I think are important. Enjoy.

Getting back into the groove

New Life for Old RecordingsThe BBC is reporting that scientists Vitaliy Fadeyev and Carl Haber of Lawrence Berkeley Labs are using non-contact means to reconstruct sound from old records and wax cylinders. They have been funded by the Library of Congress to help in their preservation of the 128 million audio iteems in their inventory.

You can read a bit more about the effort at LBL’s own press release, which includes both audio played with a stylus and reconstructed with their technique. You can go here for even more technical info, including their JAES paper.