The increasing use of iPods and greater exposure to music generally may lead to an increase in “musical hallucinations”, a psychiatrist has claimed. These are not, explains Victor Aziz of Cardiff’s Whitchurch Hospital in today’s Guardian, simply a case of getting Crazy Frog stuck in your unwilling brain, but the full-blown equivalent of visual hallucinations.
Does this mean we’re all going to end up more like Alley McBeal?
I was trying to talk to someone on MSN again the other day, and I used one of the emoticons I know by heart (there aren’t many). Now generally I have a strong hatred for these little technical blunders of communications technology, as you can see in my last article on the things: Goddamn Smileys! .
The damn things keep becoming necessary though:
[14:51] raggi: hehe, i’ve turned on emoticons for all your and my conversations
[14:51] raggi: finally found i can set it for individuals now \o/
[14:51] Megs: u hate emoticons from peeps then?
[14:51] raggi: no, i hate what emoticons do to text i paste in
[14:51] raggi: :)
[14:52] Megs: ah i see
[14:52] Megs: right. get cuppa tea
[14:52] Megs: and get cracking
[14:52] raggi: like, here’s a quick bit of java: public static void main(string[] args);
[14:52] raggi: oh, that one worked
[14:52] Megs: LMAO
-lol
I’ve been running without smileys for nearly a year - maybe even nearly two years, it’s hard to remember. Essentially I removed smiley support from my chosen IM application due to the intense damage that these things would do to source-code sent over IM apps. Now it is of course considered practical to use files / scratch-pads / cvs servers etc in team code management. In general small groups rarely provide themselves with access to such tools, and the result is simple code maintenance and refactoring over IM. No real problem, to all intensive purposes the development cycle is quicker that way - provided we don’t need a full parser for the insane crap that comes out of some Unicode IM apps when they get lamped with some emoticon parenthesis.
Today I found that my current IM app now has the option to turn them on or off selectively for each user on my over 150 strong list of MSN contacts, not to mention AOL/ICQ/Yahoo/Jabber/IRC. Life is looking up even more for this little app, longevity is something which it seems to be displaying on my desktop. Finally now, we have a return to some kind of practical normality. Whilst I would ideally like a system which makes a judgement about whether or not a smiley should be escaped (surely you can I’d English over code pretty easily, hell I don’t use []{}”"() in my speech that regularly, not to mention this;) >- n.b. this would have broken! Or even more ideally, for the choice of parenthesis to be changed to say ` and ~ which are very unlikely to be used in way that could be mistaken for parenthesis. Hell, anyone with 1/4 of a degree could tell you that this is a design time issue and there are some far more graceful ways of encoding these extensions.