The Oxford English Dictionary's Word of the Day feature has once again improved my vocabulary. Today's word is "motorkhana", a portmanteau from Australia and New Zealand for a driving competition testing various skills. It's combined from "motor-" plus the back half of "gymkhana". I thought to myself, "Isn't gymkhana some kind of fusion martial arts technique that they made a movie about in the 80s?" Turns out my memory was mistaken; that's Gymkata ("The skill of gymnastics, the kill of karate"), which apparently hits some people's lists as one of the worst movies ever. A "gymkhana", on the other hand, in India and Pakistan is a general gymnasium or sports club; in British English it is an equestrian event that tests various riding skills. Aha! Thus the equivalence with "motorkhana". Thanks again, Oxford English Dictionary!
tags: oed wotd gymkhana motorkhana gymkata
Research links
While researching gymkhana and gymkata today, I discovered Amazon's "Bottom 100 Films" list (to complement its Top 250 Films, I guess).
Reading the trades
So, after several days of work, I rolled out a modification to the Wikitravel skin to move tables of contents to the left nav bar (rather than having them take up big chunks of area in the content part of the page). You can see the handiwork on some of the bigger country and city pages; the difference is quite noticeable.
The new feature came out to mixed reviews. There were some complaints about the usability that were quite justified; I've tried to modify as many as I can. I think probably moving the ToC to the right side of the page will deal with other issues, but I'm not sure that's going to appease everyone. Oh, consensus user interface design and its discontents...
tags: wikitravel toc skin mediawiki ui
Circle of life
Reading over Greg London's Impatient Perl, I note this quote: If you use a $foo variable in your code, you deserve to maintain it.
And I had a flash of the fact that for every line of somebody else's kludgy, last-minute code that I've had to maintain, read, modify or update, there's probably 2 or 3 people behind me somewhere who're cursing me for the bits of last-minute "just for now" hackery that I've embedded into umpteen different proprietary and Open Source products.
Being part of the problem sucks.