Planet Skyron

The word blancmange derives from Old French blanc mangier. The name “whitedish” is a modern term used by some historians, though the name historically was either a direct translation from or a calque of the Old French term. Many different local or regional terms were used for the dish in the Middle Ages:

English: blancmanger, blankmanger, blank maunger, blomanger, blamang
Catalan: manjar blanch (Old Catalan; nowadays it would be menjar blanc)
Portuguese: manjar branco
Italian: mangiare bianco, blanmangieri, bramangere
Spanish: manjar blanco
Dutch/Flemish: blanc mengier
German: blamensir
Latin: albus cibus, esus albus

Though it is fairly certain that the etymology is indeed “white dish”, medieval sources are not always consistent as to the actual color of the dish. Food scholar Terence Scully has proposed the alternative etymology of bland mangier, “bland dish”, reflecting its often mild and “dainty” (in this context meaning refined and aristocratic) taste and popularity as a sick dish.

From Wikipedia.

The laptop was ordered configured with Home Vista with the intention, upon receipt, of installing XP Pro. It’s not as simple as reformatting the drive and installing the older more benign OS. The laptop arrives with the system restore data installed on a hidden hdd partition. This seems to have become acceptable practice among the major vendors of Wintel machines.

In any event, the first order of business was to backup the factory installed system. Recovery discs were created along with a Rescue and Recovery Startup disc using the ThinkVantage utility intended for this task. The utility was a bit temperamental, but came through, at the end of the day.

Before installing XP Pro, two things had to be done after the recovery discs were made (for posterity, I suppose). The first was to set the drive to ‘compatibility’ in the system BIOS. The second part was to remove the hdd partitions.

Any attempt to install XP straightaway results in a failure to install owing to an inability of the installer to recognize the hdd. It will report there are no candidate drives. To work around this stumbling block it was necessary to enter BIOS (F1 during boot sequence) and select Config > Drive and change the setting to Compatibility. Having done this, it was finally possible to proceed with the install.

The next step was to remove all partitions, including the hidden partition containing the recovery data and ThinkVantage content. As a result of doing this, a considerable amount of drive capacity was recovered. Vista’s charm was an easy trade-off, at the end of the day. XP’s smaller footprint was pure gravy.

Finally, I installed Thinkpad drivers for this model downloaded from the Lenovo support site. The installation of these drivers followed a particularly thorough and fairly easy to follow discussion of a clean install procedure, more or less. One of the steps involved putting the BIOS change made above back to the original setting. It was quite tedious, but at the end of the day (literally), everything was brought to life, that is to say, re-animated.

The Blancmange function, also called the Takagi fractal curve (Peitgen and Saupe 1988), is a pathological continuous function which is nowhere differentiable. The iterations towards the continuous function are batrachions resembling the Hofstadter-Conway $10,000 sequence. The first six iterations are illustrated below. The dth iteration contains N+1 points, where N=2^d, and can be obtained by setting b(0)=b(N)=0, letting

b(m+2^(n-1))=2^n+1/2[b(m)+b(m+2^n)],

and looping over n=d to 1 by steps of -1 and m=0 to N-1 by steps of 2^n.

So, you have this form object such as the one illustrated below.

<form>
   <select class="button" size="1" id="idname">
      <option>Section I </option>
      <option>Section II </option>
      <option>Section III </option>
      <option>Section IV </option>
      <option>Section V </option>
      <option>Section VI </option>
      <option>Home </option>
   </select>
<input type="button" class="button" 
  onclick="selectOption('idname', URLarray)" value="Go" />
</form>

You could attach a routine written specifically for that object. Or you could initialize an array with the values for each option and call a routine that knows how to handle such an array passed to it. Here is an example of such a function named selectObject():

//generic list item function
 
   function selectOption(ident, listItemURL)
   {
      var selObj = document.getElementById(ident);
      var num = selObj.selectedIndex;
         for (i=0; i<listItemURL.length; i++) {
 
            if (i==num) {
               top.location= baseURL + listItemURL[i];
               break;
            }
        }
   }

Somewhere before that function you’ll need to initialize an array to pass as a listItemURL parameter. Here’s an example:

var somearray1 = new Array(
   '/directory/somefile1.shtml',
   '/directory/somefile2.shtml',
   '/directory/somefile3.shtml',
   '/directory/somefile4.shtml',
   '/directory/somefile5.shtml',
   '/directory/somefile6.shtml',
   '/index.shtml'
);

The form parameter URLarray in this case would be somearray1.

In the function, the optional variable baseURL is also initialized elsewhere, depending on the structure of the files. It is not required in this example as the values of the array in this case are based in the root directory by default. You might, however, want a base url, in which case you would declare it in a header page that would include the head portion of your shtml document. One way to do that would be as follows:

<script>
//Base URL variable is used in .js file as well
 
var urlhost = location.host;
var locpath = location.pathname;
var pathtohome = locpath.substr(0, locpath.indexOf('/somedirectory'));
var baseURL = "http://" + urlhost + pathtohome + "/somedirectory/";
document.write('<base href="' + baseURL + '"></base>');
</script>

This declaration would be placed before the function.

The long and short of it is you need only call one function to make a particular select box object work once you have declared an array of option values and successfully passed that array to the function.

The original creator of BillGatus apparently used an image capture of a video featuring the The Best of Both Worlds sequel to the of Star Trek: Next Generation episode, Q Who?, where Q had unceremoniously flung the Enterprise into a very distance and uncharted sector of the universe populated by the rather ominous borg collective, then unknown to the United Federation of Planets. The sequel sees Capt. Picard dragooned by the borg collective for the purpose of communicating their message to people on earth targeted for assimilation that “resistance is futile.”

At any rate, the size of a teevee image on a computer screen was decidedly smaller than what one normally viewed on the average telly. The result was less than spectacular but the best one could do at the time it was created.

The original version looked like this:

It’s a bit muddy. A high definition video would certainly provide one with the material to create a crisper larger image with more detail. However, that’s not out there to grab off the web, so it seems. And the artistry to get the thing just right with the glasses over the borg implant is a bit of a challenge as well. I was able to locate a decent image of Capt. Picard in process of becoming Locutus of borg. It probably came from an NTSC/PAL dvd transfer rather than videotape. The implant has more definition and the background is clearer, as you can see here:

So, the main challenge here was to effectively perform a face transplant from Billgatus to Locutus. This was performed with few complications or side-effects in the Photoshop 4.x operating theatre and the result was this:

Not terribly dramatic, but there it is, what?

An olde domain that used to be the home of The Memory Hole is now adrift, but not at sea. Not to worry, as olde school ties will be maintained with links, at the side, to the latest material added to TMH

The root directory, for the longest time, simply featured a spectacular dolphin image in homage to Douglas N. Adams and his brilliant Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio play. It’s not entirely disappeared, residing nowadays in the sister floonet.net sphere.

Of course, Planet Skyron is the home of Mr. & Mrs. Samuel L. Brainsample, the very ordinary couple whose unusual passion for blancmange was key to Dunbar menswear shop proprietor, Angus Podgorny, becoming the only Scotsman ever to win Wimbledon. Douglas Adams didn’t have a hand in this, but contributed to the very British programme that documented it. Alas, he is no longer with us.

Here’s a recipe for blancmange for those re-enacters and otherwise anachronistic society types who’ve grown tired of doing Pearl Harbor and would rather try their hand at a pivotal moment in Wimbledon history when chief inspectors could not distinguish cannibalistic blancmange impersonators from the real article.

Blancmange

From:
Blancmange (blawnh-MAHNZH), a French favorite, is a cooked pudding that’s poured into individual ramekins and chilled. Unmolded puddings are often served with a fruit sauce or compote.

2 envelopes unflavored gelatin
4 1/2 cups 1% low-fat milk, divided
1 1/3 cups sliced almonds, toasted
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
8 ounces frozen fat-free whipped topping, thawed
Cooking spray

Sprinkle gelatin over 1/2 cup milk in a small bowl; set aside.
Place 4 cups milk and almonds in a blender, and process until smooth. Strain through a sieve into a medium saucepan; discard solids. Stir in sugar, salt, and extract, and bring to a boil. Add the gelatin mixture, stirring until gelatin dissolves; remove from heat.

Place pan in a large ice-filled bowl for 30 minutes or until milk mixture comes to room temperature; stir occasionally. Gently stir one-fourth of whipped topping into milk mixture; gently fold in remaining topping.

Spoon 2/3 cup milk mixture into each of 9 (6-ounce) custard cups coated with cooking spray. Cover and chill at least 4 hours or overnight. Loosen edges of blancmange with a knife or rubber spatula. Place a dessert plate upside down on top of each cup, and invert onto plates.

Yield: 9 servings

Bon appétit!