Pacman ghost
I am a Pacman Ghost.
I like to hang around with friends, chatting, dancing, all that sort of thing. We don't appreciate outsiders, and do our best to discourage others approaching us. I enjoy occasionally wandering around randomly, and often find that when I do so, I get to where I wanted to be. What Video Game Character Are You?
Jan 13, 2002 @ 12:34 » no comments » General
Dripping
Being human is a messy proposition IMHO, especially if you factor in those two-week flu's that every day manage to cause a new sort of inflamation of every cavity and orifice of your head and respiratory tract and leave you aching, miserable, coughing and dripping into a towel because a hanky won't last more three seconds.
Jan 14, 2002 @ 10:40 » no comments » General
Gamespot's History of Videogames
Gamespot features a very interesting History of Videogames. It's basically a somewhat illustrated timeline of videogames. It starts in 1889 with the establishment of a Japanese playing cards manufacturer that will later change its name to Nintendo. They then move from the very beginnings of videogames through different stages of videogame history, noting the arrival and demise of Atari, coin-op games, the rise of Nintendo and other manufacturers, some historical tidbits like the establishment of the ESRB (The Entertainment Software Rating Board) in 1994, to end up in the present day.
While it's great to have all this info neatly packed into this article, it's too bad that the authors don't spend some time analysing and commenting various technological and social developments. It's a great source though to put next to Raph Koster's Online World Timeline. While this timeline also is a listing of historical events, by virtue of the remarks and analyses of people involved in the various events, Koster's timeline gives the reader more insight into the context and consequences of the developments.
Jan 20, 2002 @ 18:49 » no comments » Research
quote of the day: Anthropology
"The drive home was uneventful. I left the car in Stover's driveway. The rear seat was covered with blood. There was blood on the steering wheel, more blood on the dashboard and door handles. The scientific study of the cultural behavior and development of man. Anthropology." - Don DeLillo, White Noise
Jan 20, 2002 @ 23:38 » no comments » General
Better passwords
The Simplest Security: A Guide To Better Password Practices over at SecurityFocus. This should have been one of your New Year's resolutions... recommended.
Jan 21, 2002 @ 00:03 » no comments » General
Bootdisk
If you ever desperately need to boot your computer and do some diagnoses or repairs because it crashed (and it will, sooner or later, so better take care of those backups), then check out Bootdisk.com. If your crash is recoverable, Bootdisk.com offers the tools to do it.
Jan 21, 2002 @ 16:44 » no comments » General
Spooked
Gawd... this really spooked me! News.com has these 'interactive' flash ads for a while now, but today's the first time that one of those things made a sound. Not just any sound, it was a male voice asking: "How do I integrate new datacenters, when the ones I already have are so hard to manage?" And I wasn't the least prepared to hear some HP advertisement talk to me... sitting in my room all alone, just having finished my coffee, I wasn't prepared to hear anyone talking at all. I hope they don't continue this kind of 'talking ads' because it's enough for me to go hunt down some ad-blocker software and block _all_ ads. Ick!
Jan 28, 2002 @ 10:46 » no comments » General
Virtual world, real economy
This is a pretty amazing article. An economist studied the economy of EverQuest by looking at EverQuest related sales on Ebay and found that the GNP per capita is $2,266, putting the EverQuest economy on the 77th place of real world economies, just behind Russia. That's pretty mindboggling. A quote from the article:
Castronova also found that Norrath's virtual currency is more valuable in the US than the Yen. And his research shows that EverQuest players earn an average of $3.42 for every hour spent playing the game. "It's a robust, free-market economy filled with wealthy, hardworking people," Castronova told the online news service CNet. "What you see with EverQuest is that economies happen by themselves. If you get a bunch of people together and they have things they can produce and opportunities to exchange them, you've got the makings of an economic system."
Jan 29, 2002 @ 10:53 » no comments » Research
ADSL vs cable
Whee! I just picked up my new ADSL modem. They installed a new phoneline last week and next week that line should get switched to my ADSL provider so that I can start using it. From that point on the ADSL provider will route my connection to my university and the university is offering me a very nice price for internet access over their first class networks. I'm looking forward to seeing the difference between that connection and my current cable-modem internet access.
For a long time there was no alternative to a trusty dial-up modem, unless you either paid for a leased line or you had access at work. If you have flat-rate local calls, like they have in large parts of the US, logging in for extended periods of time is not that costly. But if you, like me, live in a country where you are charged per minute, even for local calls, logging in for extended periods of time can become rather costly, rather quickly. During 1996-1997 I usually had phone bills hovering around 200 euro (that's something like $175 US) _per month_.
Since the first half of 1998 (I forgot when exactly) I've been blessed with flat-fee, high-speed cable-modem internet access. It was a rather mixed blessing though, because the cablecom was and is pretty much clueless about all this newfangled technology they're suddenly dealing with. As long as it worked, it pretty much worked alright, but if you had a problem, there just was no way of getting them to understand what the problem was. This comes down to a really horrible management, hiring the absolute worst helpdesk people ever, who didn't even get a chance to get better at their job because they just didn't have a place or person in the organisation to turn to. So these helpdesk people were about as frustrated as you were and would actually call you names and hang up on you if you called in, trying to report problems... of which they had their fair share. Anyway, the cablecom was the only company offering flat-fee internet access and how crappy the service got, it still beat paying 5-6 times as much for dial-up access. During the past 2 years most of the serious problems have slowly disappeared, leaving me a fast connection at home during the daytime, but during the late afternoon and especially in the evenings the connection slows considerably.
It's a strange phenomenon, because if you download a big file you can still achieve high download speeds, but 'real-time' connections like watching a streamed video or even a telnet connection (which is _really_ low bandwidth) is a rather choppy/halting experience. The video is really jerky and low grade, because the computer just can't seem to pull a steady stream down and even when telnetting to a remote UNIX box, you get to type 5-12 characters, and then you're waiting for a damn long time for the echo of that box to resume again. During daytime no problems with either application. I moved house about 6 months ago within the same city and taking the cable-modem connection with me to the new place. My current local loop is a different one than the one I was hooked up to before, but they both have the same problems, so I can't say for sure it's a problem with congestion of the local loop or whether the problems lie somewhat further down the ISP's line.
Anyway, next week I'll see what the quality of the ADSL hookup is, and having experienced the university network from behind my desk at work for over a year now, I'm hoping for the best. I'm actually downgrading with regard to the maximum advertised throughput. Cable offered me a maximum download speed of 150 kilobytes/second and 12.8 kilobytes/second upstream. I chose the cheapest ADSL version, which is 50 kilobytes/second downstream and 12.8 kilobytes/second upstream. I don't need that download speed anyways. I need a reliable, low-latency, always-on connection and the cable connection especially failed in the low-latency department, especially during the evenings. I just don't want to sit around, waiting for minutes on end before a DNS lookup will resolve, only to get a crappy, unusable telnet connection to a UNIX box that's physically not even halfway across town.
Next project... when everything's up and running: find an old box, put it on my LAN as a fileserver with VPN capability, rig my computer at work so that I can securely and encrypted mount a directory on my box at home, and that way I should be able to finally keep all my work in one location. I'm just fed up with putting stuff on floppies or e-mail attachments to myself.
Jan 31, 2002 @ 15:47 » no comments » General
quote of the day: Conformist
"I am 97% conformist, and seeking to exaggerate the remaining 3% to make for a better paper." -- Hans Reiser, Name Spaces As Tools for Integrating the Operating System Rather Than As Ends in Themselves
Jan 31, 2002 @ 22:15 » no comments » Research
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