My blog has been through a lot. At some point I may try and make a coherent timeline, if only for my own benefit.

Content has been migrated from platform to platform, and format to format. Some of it got broken along the way. This resulted in some of the posts just being blank. I finally went back and found them all and manually reinstated the content.

I doubt this will be of any interest to anyone except me or people who know me, but it may be nostalgic for anyone else who was doing web development in 2005.

Personally, my writing style from back then makes me uncomfortable, and it is not helped by the fact I’ve left some of my spelling errors intact.

After realising that I’ve been blogging for nearly 19 years, and that I have lot of old content with many broken links, I decided to add support for Wayback Machine links.

The Wayback Machine (part of the Internet Archive) archives web pages for posterity, and importantly, tries to archive many versions over time.

At the bottom of each my posts is now a section that links to the archived version of the page, as of the date of the post. This will attempt to show the latest archived version of the page before that date.

In practice many pages did not get archived, or the archived version may not contain the exact content on the day I wrote the post, but it is better than nothing.

To keep this service alive (along with other activities of the Internet Archive), please consider donating.

Some time ago I migrated my blog from WordPress (hosted on WordPress.com) to Hugo (hosted on Azure Static Web Apps). Over the past week I did the same for my wife’s blog.

The process went well. The Hugo site has pretty good docs for migrating to Hugo from various other platforms. The exact steps I took were:

1. Export content from Wordpress.
2. Generate Hugo content from the export using blog2md.
3. Upload to GitHub.
4. Create an Azure Static Web app (which as detailed before creates a build pipeline and deploys to an autogenerated Azure domain).
5. Browse the site and fix any broken content.
6. Add any custom functionality desired to the theme files.
7. Update the domain to point at the Azure instance.

The new blog is available at www.luliriisi.me.uk (the original is still available at luliriisi.wordpress.com).

Sharing themes

That “custom functionality” is of course optional, and a potential rabbit hole depending on your exact needs. In the case of my wife’s blog, because she is a hand-knitting pattern designer I added some templating for sharing her patterns easily.

And, because the core theme is shared with this blog (and Games with Gravitas), that functionality is also available here - which is why I can easily add one of her patterns to this post.

The phrase “GNU Terry Pratchett” originates from one of the Discworld novels, “Going Postal,” where it is used as a code or message passed between characters to remember the deceased.

Specifically, there is a communication system known as “the clacks”, and there part of the way that system works involves additional metadata messages being sent (known as “the overhead”).

I only recently discovered that people have been embedding that message in all sorts of things as a way to memorialize Terry. One of the places they do this in the headers of websites.

So, you will now see an additional header in all the HTTP responses on this site:

X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett

After investigating Star Trek episode titles with interesting characters, lets look at ones with interesting words.

Numbers

I already included this as a side note in the previous post, but many episodes have numbers as words, with each series having at least one.

Ordinals

Non-English words

This is probably the collection that caused me the most difficulty in deciding what should be included.

I settled on:

• Actual words (no 11:59 or E²)
• Real word languages
• Not proper nouns (especially names of characters)

Considering all that, there are in fact only two non-English languages used in the titles of Star Trek episodes:

French

Latin

Honorable mentions

One Klingon word, and one Vulcan word that is only probably a proper noun.

Character names

Who has the privilege of being named in an episode title? Again, there are surprising edge cases so I’ve split it up into several groups.

• Q appears in the most titles.
• Two titles mention two characters: Datalore and Ménage à Troi (which I assumed, in the spirit of the episode, is a reference to both Deanna Troi and Lwaxana Troi).

Direct character references

Definite direct references to characters in Star Trek.

Other characters

References to people, either fictional or real that were not actually characters in Star Trek.

Indirect

Indirect references to characters that are awkward in some way.

Accidental

Character names that are not intended to be references to Star Trek characters. Mainly The Doctor from Voyager, but also Q2 which was the script name for the member of the Q Continuum in the TNG episode Deja Q.

One

There is one special character name that is clearly not intended to be a reference, but comes up a lot - One from Voyager.

Q

And finally, the letter Q appears a few times while clearly not being a reference to Q.

Just the character

One bonus list considering all the above - titles that are just a character name.

New audio versions of all* of the Discworld books are being produced. I’ve made a few posts tracking the release dates. Since then I’ve updated the blog to support nice sortable tables.

So here are the the books listed on Audible as of 21st May, 2023 in a single table (now with primary narrator). All columns should be usefully sortable.

If you don’t already have an Audible membership, you can get a 30-day free trial (UK).

New Discworld audiobook release dates

* There are 41 Discworld books. The website says “40 magnificent new recordings”. The one that seems to be missing is “The Last Hero”.

While doing other more systematic investigations of Star Trek episode titles, I made notes of interesting things I spotted.

Here are some collections of episode titles with interesting characters.

Q puns

Most episodes featuring Q had a pun in the title:

Digits

Punctuation and other interesting characters

Containing '

There are so many titles with apostrophes I decided to break it down by use:

Possessive

Part of an alien word

Contraction

Clarifying a plural

Containing -

Several episode titles contain a hyphen. One episode contains two. The producers and/or writers probably intended an em dash or similar but were likely limited to hyphens for technical reasons.

Containing ,

Several episode titles contain commas. One had the option to include two with an Oxford comma.

Containing ?

Containing …

Containing :

Containing !

Containing à (and é)

There are a pair of episodes with accented characters (which have recently been joined by Võx from Picard).

Containing ²

Star Trek Picard season three has just completed. It was not perfect but was probably the best live action Star Trek since Enterprise.

In honor of this, here is a quick analysis of the episode titles.

I’m not including Picard in the main analysis for consistency for now. There is also a small chance there may be more episodes (or possibly something else #StarTrekLegacy).

Title length

Picard does not challenge for overall shortest or longest title.

Shortest

Like other series, it has several single word titles:

Longest

Single word titles

The overall single word title stats are very similar to Enterprise.

When split by season there is a lot variation though. I expect this to be true of most Star Trek series after Enterprise - the seasons are generally shorter and the serial nature means there are more likely to be patterns within seasons that don’t hold between them.

Ionic episodes

Two new “ion” titles (but no “ions”):

Image copyright © Paramount Global and used under fair use.

With nearly 700 episodes, there were bound to be some that are similar to each other. But which are most similar? And what do we mean by similar?

Summary

Before I go into the more technical analysis, I shall begin with some headlines.

Not technically part of this analysis but there are two Star Trek movies that share a title with an episode (if you ignore the “Star Trek” part of the title):

There are three pairs of titles that differ by only one character. Two of them are just a final “s” as part of a plural:

There are three pairs of titles that differ only by a leading “the”:

One of the more significant lines in Star Trek has both its variations appear as titles:

There is also a TNG episode that is specifically a sequel of sorts to an earlier episode with a similar title:

A pair of episodes with weirdly similar titles, but in a way that isn’t easy to define:

There is an interesting prefix that appears three times in TNG, and only in TNG:

Four incidents worthy of naming:

Technical details

Below I present the top 10 pairs of similar episodes, with four different measures of similarity:

• Levenshtein distance - Informally, the number of single character edits needed to change one title into another.
• Prefix - The number of characters at the start of the titles that are in common (ignoring case).
• Suffix - The number of characters at the end of the titles that are in common (ignoring case).
• Contains - If one title is contained entirely within another (possibly at the start or end), then the length of the contained title (0 otherwise).

Additionally each one is presented with an absolute version, and another normalized to the length of the longest title.

Most similar titles

Levenshtein (absolute)

Levenshtein (normalized)

Prefix (absolute)

Prefix (normalized)

Suffix (absolute)

Suffix (normalized)

Contains (absolute)

Contains (normalized)

Most similar titles without leading “the”

Levenshtein (absolute)

Levenshtein (normalized)

Prefix (absolute)

Prefix (normalized)

Suffix (absolute)

Suffix (normalized)

Contains (absolute)

Contains (normalized)

In my previous post, I described an extension to Elo that could handle multiple players. The next restriction to overcome is that Elo assumed players of equal skill have an equal chance of winning.

In most games, players don’t actually have an equal chance of winning a single game. Chess overcomes this by having a match consist of several individual games with players switching who goes first. This is a good solution for two player games but gets awkward for multiplayer games. It is also inconvenient if having a multi-game match is undesirable for any reason.

Adjusted rating

Elo is fundamentally designed to handle players of different skill levels and produce a probability of them winning. The approach is therefore to determine an adjusted rating for someone such that the probability of winning is as desired.

The formula to work out an Elo expected score is:

In our case we have an expected score (the win probability) and want to work out a rating difference, so we can just rearrange to get:

We then subtract this adjustment from the player’s actual rating to get their effective rating to use in the rest of the Elo calculations.

The reason we subtract it is that for players A and B, the rating difference is calculated as R_B - R_A which is the opposite way round to what we want.

Here are the rating adjustments for some sample win probabilities:

If you try to calculate the adjustment for a win probability of 0 or 1, you get -∞ and +∞ respectively.

This means, for example, if you beat someone of an equal rating at a game you only have a 10% chance of winning, it’s the same as beating someone rated 382 points higher at a fair game.

Putting it all together

After explaining the theory of how to expand an Elo rating to support all the variations in Tic-tac-toe Collection, it’s time to put it into practice.

While writing this I’ve also been working on an implementation.

As well as adding it to Tic-tac-toe Collection, I’m planning on creating some kind of site and/or app just to work out Elo ratings for various results (and hopefully even to maintain ratings for players in any kind of competition you might want to run).