Comet McNaught is a non-periodic comet (i.e we won't see it near us again for thousands of years, if ever) that passed by the Sun on January 12th - 14th and has since been visible to the Southern Hemisphere (and will remain visible for a while longer). The beautiful photo to the left was taken by photographer Jamie Newman in Auckland, New Zealand on January 18th. For the full-size version of this photo and a lot more from various photographers throughout the World, check SpaceWeather's Comet McNaught gallery.

Saw this on Boing Boing and it cracked me up. The Engrish I can understand but who thought that the demon face would be a good idea on the packaging for a kid's toy?!

The Children's Railway…FROM HELL

Earlier this week I found this interesting list of esoteric programming languages someone had created. Piet in particular really appealed to me, the programs are images that look like abstract paintings. The language is named after Piet Mondrian, a Dutch artist who painted geometric abstract pieces of art. The image at the top of this post is a valid Piet program, it solves the Towers of Hanoi problem. If you want to play with Piet you can download an interpreter such as npiet.

The xenocoder website has now been upgraded to WordPress 2.0.6, everything seems to be working okay but if you do find any problems feel free to let me know.

Oh, and if you're planning on upgrading your own WordPress blog to 2.0.6, and happen to use FeedBurner to manage your RSS feeds, you should check out this blog post.

I noticed yesterday that the EU CoH servers have an RSS feed for their server status (as well as on the website) but the US servers only have a page on the website, no RSS feed. I thought an RSS feed would be handy so I spent some time yesterday and today writing a PHP script to generate one from the site data already available. :)

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My site is finally going again?! Well, I (almost) did this last year. Back then I got the site mostly going and then failed to finish things off and it kind of stalled. This time I'm going to keep things going. I've spent quite a bit of time this Christmas coming up with a new design for the site (my first entirely CSS based design!) and, even with all the wordpress templating/plugins stuff added to it I've somehow managed to keep it XHTML and CSS2 compliant! o.o

There's still pages for me to fill in (about, downloads, etc.) and links to add but the blog system is working and I can post to it in the meantime.

Hopefully you'll see an update in under a year this time! ;)