Futility Closet, ever edifying, notes that the word “ravine” is reversed when rot13 is applied. Are there other words that have the same property? We can easily find out with a bit of code:

> import qualified Data.ByteString.Char8 as B
> 
> rot13 = B.map (toEnum . r . fromEnum)
>    where r c | (65 <= c) && (c <= 90)  = (c - 65 + 13) `mod` 26 + 65
>              | (97 <= c) && (c <= 122) = (c - 97 + 13) `mod` 26 + 97
>              | otherwise = c
> 
> main = B.interact (B.unlines . filter (\x -> rot13 x == B.reverse x) . B.lines)

The answer: not many. Running this on /usr/share/dict/words yields a paltry 12 words; all of which, “ravine” excepted, are four letters or less. We get slightly better results running it on the 390,583-word british-english-huge file from 12dicts (which I keep installed for exactly this sort of tomfoolery). On the other hand, some of the extra words are quite obscure. The full list:

an anan cherup fans fobs fs gant gnat grivet na nana ravine re rebore rive robe serf tang thug uh

(This post can be compiled by saving it as a .lhs file and running ghc --make on it.)

crosswords

I enjoy crosswords very much, and for a while I've been loading the free Houston Chronicle crosswords in Xword. Although they indulge in sports references (which I'm useless at) and tend to be a little repetitive, they have nice puns and they have a good variety of difficulties (they follow the US convention of easiest ones on Mondays and hardest ones on Sundays). Incidentally, the repetitiveness seems common to US crosswords — perhaps a side-effect of the US grid style?

However, I like the Guardian's crosswords a lot too. Unlike the Chronicle, they have cryptics, which I like to try my hand at from time to time. The problem is that the Guardian crosswords are only available online via an annoying Java applet or as PDFs. I managed to work around this using the fact that the input to the Java applet is encoded on a screen-scrapable HTML page, and wrote a tool to convert the HTML to the AcrossLite .puz format. To get the reulsting files to work in Xword, I had to write some patches to support British-style grids.

gtrans

A crude command-line client for translate.google.com.

debri

Like debi, but installs packages to a remote host over SSH. Useful when cross-compilating for Debian-based embedded systems.

This is my new favourite depiction of the Internet, courtesy of RFC 908:

Given that the Internet is a bit like a game of Robot Finds Kitten, it only makes sense that it look like one. Alternatively, it's reminiscent of the swearing in Asterix, which is also appropriate.