I'm in a full swing of updating Noah. Last three days are marked by addiction to download count at PalmGear. Ah, vanity. As one could expect the number skyrocked (around 1300 d/l) during the first two days when it was still listed as "new" software on the first page. Now it's down to 150 d/l per day. I wonder what will be the long-term average. So far the biggest complaint was that the database is too big. It is (5 MB is a lot in the little PalmPilot world) but I find such arguments kind of silly. After all in case of a dictionary size translates into quality: better definitions, more entries take more space. But who am I to tell users what they really want? My task is to code and make them happy. So I did. I was lucky enough to have a quite reasonable list of popular english words and I've used it to produce a 3 abridged versions of the original database. Maybe this will make those people give me more that 2 stars in reviews (all 3 reviews I got so far are almost the same: great idea, too big). I'll release it tomorrow. This will be 4th release during 4 days.
The next step will be converting Webster. This is going to make my head hurt. The markup is a stupid html instead of a markup that actually means something. I think it will evolve into some kind of AI. I'll have to use perl (which I hate) to do the first pass over the data. So far I've written the converter in LISP but its syntax for regular expressions is too cumbersome for the job and the job will mostly consist of regex'ing.
I went to to video store today. Found "Pi" which was nice since I've read that this is a good movie but couldn't find it. Then I had a moment of doubt. There is a category of movies, you know, those independent ones, that always get rave reviews but do badly in box office (there is, of course, an counter-category, excellent box office and completely flamed). I tend to watch such movies a lot (that's after I'm done with the "box office" ones) and it happens too often that those movies are real crap. At least as far as I'm concerned. That made me rent Go too - it's less risky choice. I figured out that if Pi is a piece of thing that likes to hit the fan I'll immediately console myself. I stayed for a while instead of going straight to the check-out line. And that, let me quote Jet-Li here, was a mistake. How can you resist renting Scarface when you've been wanting to see it for a month now? (well, the clerk said he didn't like it, but is there a chance in hell that a movie written by Oliver Stone, directed by De Palma and featuring Al Pacino and young Michelle Pfeiffer can be bad?) And what about Fallen Angels that you missed when it was being played in a small theatre two months ago?
The end result is that I now have 4 DVD's to see and only one weekend. This is going to be an overdose even for me.