Two Future of Gaming articles
Two interesting articles at the GameSpy Future of Gaming section: Engines And Engineering: What to expect in the future of PC games and an Interview with Peter Molyneux (via Slashdot).
Nov 1, 2002 @ 15:12 » no comments » Games
More blogger archetypes
With regard to yesterday's post on blogger typology, here's another Blogger Bestiary (via distant.sun), that does have an entry for academic bloggers:
Academic Blogger (AcaBlogger)
Level: 57
Str: 12
Int: 18
Wis: 4
Dex: 12
Con: 16
Cha: 10
Alignment: Lawful Evil
Armor Class: -100 (With tenure)/+50 (w/out tenure)
Hit points: 45
Special Abilities: Suggestion 3x/day, Change Self 3x/day, Fascinate 1/week
EQ: +1 Umbrella of water protection, Library card of stealth, +4 parking pass (sentient).
Typical post: Day 12, second semester, 4:45 p.m. - I found an interesting assertation that the iambic pentameter found in certain poems by (can you guess who?) is in reality meant to not be iambic pentameter, but a new form of ABABACCD, whereas before most of my colleages have claimed it to be ABABACCA. Tricky, but if you do some research on the type of lettuce sold in markets when the poem was written, it should surely make sense. Tomorrow back to Jabberwocky.
Nov 1, 2002 @ 18:04 » 2 comments » General
RIP Router
This morning I woke up to find that my almost ancient IBM PC-330 had died. This little Pentium I @ 75 MHz desktop faithfully served me as a FreeSCO router/firewall for a long time. I'm pretty sure that I won't be able to resurrect it anymore, I fear the motherboard gave out and it won't even POST anymore. (Mine didn't look quite as good as the one in the picture though... she had a big hole where this one has a cd-rom drive, but the thickish panel you see on the left in the picture can slide to the right and that hid the hole very effectively, plus on mine the little lock on top had been knocked out, but she ran just fine.)
The symptoms are as follows: when I power up the computer the PSU fan spins, the power LED comes on as well, but the harddrive doesn't spin up and there is not even a beep, let alone POST info on the screen. This system has passive CPU cooling, so no CPU fans to spin up. When I take out all the cards, the memory and the CPU, and power up, it will beep once, spin up the harddisk and stay dead just the same. If I plug in the CPU (and I've tested with another CPU I had lying around as well) it doesn't even beep anymore and the same happens if I try adding memory (2 pairs, tried different combinations and different banks, but no ball).
If you have an idea about what I still could try, let me know... otherwise I will make sure she gets a decent burial after I've harvested most of her organs.
Nov 3, 2002 @ 16:29 » 2 comments » General
Cute
The Cutie Bunch Friendly Pal Pack (Thanks Tamara!).
Nov 4, 2002 @ 13:41 » no comments » General
PhD
More comics... PhD: Piled Higher and Deeper. Some excellent episodes like the one based on the the Matrix, there's one on Indiana Jones, procrastination and the webcam episode is really good. Much more there... I bet you could write a PhD on it ;-)
Nov 5, 2002 @ 22:53 » no comments » General
Opera fix
I just tried visiting Tech Central Station with Opera and got a server error, which amongst other things said:
If you are using Opera 6.0 (or later) for your browser, the error may be related to your browser's configuration. Click here for a description of an Opera browser configuration parameter that may correct the misconfiguration.
On that page Opera users are offered a working fix (add a line to the opera.ini file) for getting access to the site. Of course, it would have been much better if the server didn't stumble over Opera in the first place, but it's really nice to see someone cares enough about the accessibility of their site to write this up.
Nov 5, 2002 @ 23:06 » no comments » Webdesign
Laser cannon
Yahoo News reports that the US army succesfully shot down an artillery shell in midflight using a high-power laser cannon (via Slashdot). Seems now we just need to build some X-Wing fighters around them and we can 'play' Star Wars for real.
Nov 6, 2002 @ 09:39 » no comments » Tech
Some links
Cleaning up again, some links that really aren't much related, but should go somewhere:
Excellent basic article at Ars Technica: Security Practicum: Essential Home Wireless Security Practices and a more industry strength black paper on the same matter: Wireless Security Blackpaper.
A humongous list of CSS Tableless Web Sites. It's not really a resource for standard (weblog) templates, but if you're one step up and doing your own HTML and CSS layouting, there's a lot of neat tricks and layouts to be found on the different sites. Also see Meyerweb's CSS/Edge, for instance the pure CSS menus demo.
Popfile is a mail-proxy that will run locally, fetch mail and use Bayesian filtering to sort your mail into different 'baskets' (by adding an X-header line) and would with some training probably be rather good at stopping spam, as first outlined by Paul Graham. I should try that out sometime...
Teaching Yourself Social Theory, heh.
Postmodern Computer Science on Slashdot points to an article titled Notes on Postmodern Programming and Perl, the first postmodern computer language.
Another paper by Edward Castranova: On Virtual Economies.
The Guardian on South Korea's broadband future and a recent sensationalist report of a South Korean guy who died while excessively gaming.
Business2.0 on game modding and a related article at CNN.
GuruMeditation.net for info and reminiscing.
Nov 6, 2002 @ 11:21 » no comments » General
Real virtual economies
Online Game Economies Get Real at Wired and Lisbeth points to a BBC story: Everquest Fantasy Offers Real Rewards. The BBC story begins like this:
They look like ordinary people. By day they are citizens of the world - office workers, school teachers, bricklayers and doctors. But at night they transform into heroes, battling the scourge of the universe to bring peace and tranquillity to the magical lands of Norrath.
If it weren't for the reference to Norrath, this paragraph could have been lifted from just about any article on role-playing, from the pen-and-paper kind in the 1970s, to MUDs in the 1980s and 1990s, and now MMORPGs (since the late 1990s).
Wouldn't it be fascinating to do a content analysis of newspaper and magazine articles (and maybe televised reports) on role-playing to see what the main themes reported are (an educated guess: moral-ethical-religious corruption, addiction, the wonders of online interaction/virtual reality, sex and death) and if anything at all has changed in the reporting over the years?
Nov 7, 2002 @ 11:00 » no comments » Games
Redesign and request
I'm working on a new layout for the site and doing some behind-the-scenes work, because as you may have noticed, the category system doesn't quite work yet. I also want to a couple of things about the accessibility and readability of the site.
I'm pretty horrible with colors and Photoshop, but if you aren't, maybe you feel like spending a couple of minutes on putting together a new logo for the site and a color-scheme to go with it. What's in it for you? Well, my eternal gratitude and credits on this site :-) I'm going to need a 'banner-type' logo like the one above and a smaller one to go on top of a navigation bar with a maximum width of 200px.
Nov 11, 2002 @ 10:31 » 1 comment » Sitestuff
Ugh
Pretty close to how I felt this morning. (Image from here.)
Nov 12, 2002 @ 14:29 » no comments » General
Ninjai
You really want to check out Ninjai: The Little Ninja. It's a movie made in flash and they currently have 10 chapters of the story of the little ninja online. The production value of the movies is simply amazing: animation, backgrounds and a full-blown soundtrack. The quality of the movies is even more amazing because this is a spare-time/volunteer effort; gives you some hope for original and accessible content in times when meganationalconglomerates are messing up standards so badly that you can't even play new cd's in your portable cd-player because they've got some copy protection in them. The individual chapters are pretty huge flash files (think 10 megabytes and over). You can choose to watch a smaller and lower bandwidth version... but really, you don't want to. Just watch it on as big a screen as you can and enjoy. Go to the chapters index to start watching.
Nov 12, 2002 @ 23:27 » 1 comment » General
Opera 7 first beta
Sweet! The first beta of the new Opera 7 browser has been released. I'm downloading right now and it seems the servers are being hit hard. Let's see what the (completely?) new engine of my favorite browser can do!
Update: oh... I think I'm in love! This new beta is amazing. Yes, it is faster: it's now easy to scroll while a really heavy page is downloading, and other small niggles have been solved: no more silly borders on CSS defined text boxes, buttons light up in a very cool manner, and most incompatibilities with other browsers seem to have been solved. It now supports different text colors in text boxes, positioning of for instance the drop-down menus on Ninjai.com works just fine and the site navigation that Mozilla also supports works. Some small niggles: I'm not too thrilled with the XP-look interface, but skinning will solve that problem eventually; and uhm... I know it really only works in IE, but I would have loved to have my text-box editing tools in MT (like the bold, italics and URL buttons). Meyerweb's Pure CSS Menu's however still don't work... even seem to be worse off. Well, it's a beta :-)
Update, the morning after: Life's always a little bleaker the morning after, right? Anyway, as Owen Briggs also notes, there are still some issues with O7's CSS rendering (check out the above mentioned Meyerweb examples, or compare Dive Into Mark and Wired with how Mozilla renders them... something funny happening with title sizes and in Mark's case, with the font size as well). Another thing that potentially is a problem, is that O7 renders drop-down lists as seen on this page quite large (due to the XP-style widget) which might mess up some more tightly spaced designs, as I haven't yet seen how this behavior could be controlled by HTML or CSS. Also the backspace key doesn't work and I can't sort the bookmarks according to my preferred order, but this is a beta we should remember.
Nov 13, 2002 @ 14:01 » no comments » Software
Absolutely relative positioning
Doing CSS based layouting yourself? Then you should have a look at A List Apart's latest article: Flexible Layouts. Very insightful for an autodicatic webdesigner, especially the Absolute v. Relative Positioning section:
Where a lot of people get this wrong is that the CSS Box Model defines a position:absolute block as absolute relative to its containing block, and not relative to the page or window. In our example, this means that a set of four absolutely positioned DIVs can line up inside a container DIV defined as relative, and still float up and down on the page in response to font-size changes — all the while retaining their position in relation to each other. Not only that, the layout holds together regardless of the number of columns.
Now that's going to save me quite a few headaches... let's hope that the browsers play ball and work according to the Box Model definitions. Fingers crossed.
Nov 18, 2002 @ 10:57 » no comments » Webdesign
Xmas resistance
Nov 18, 2002 @ 13:16 » 1 comment » General
Technobabble
The Inquirer (like The Register) regularly question (or debunk) the hyperbolic marketing speak of big technology companies through a clever use of puns. The continuing evolution (or revolution as the tech companies would have it) of chip architectures for instance becomes 'marchitecture'. Today The Inquirer though, commenting on the launch of the new Nvidia graphics chip described the performance gains in particular cases and remarked that apart from these cases of course most of the performance figures were 'benchmarketing'. Hadn't heard that one before and I thought it was pretty funny.
Nov 21, 2002 @ 09:22 » no comments » General
Article by Baudrillard
"Terrorism Is Society's Condemnation of Itself" by Jean Baudrillard (via Lokman). A short quote from the article:
Violence revenges all the varied cultures that disappeared to prepare for the investiture of a single global power. This is not really a clash of civilisations. Instead, this anthropological conflict pits a monolithic universal culture against all manifestations of otherness, wherever they may be found.
In totally unrelated news about what I'm doing at the moment and the sparse updates around here: too much!
Nov 21, 2002 @ 11:46 » no comments » General
Bookmark
There's a one dollar bill in my copy of Cyberspace: First Steps as a bookmark.
Nov 21, 2002 @ 15:02 » no comments » Reading
Ellen Feiss interview
On Slashdot it is written that:
"The Wait is over! Ellen Feiss's interview is up! And she really was on drugs, (well, allergy meds.)" She's, like, going to be traumatized about this forever, like.
Well, the server carrying the interview immediately went down in flames when it got linked up on Slashdot, but the text of the article was posted in the Slashdot comments.
Update: Wired also reports and you've got to wonder if now that some of the mystery around the 'mystery girl' has been removed the whole thing will fizzle out. Hasn't it already? Nethypes are short, but have a tendency to linger, like you occasionally hear about Mahir, All your base belong to us or Bonzai kittens again.
Nov 22, 2002 @ 16:53 » no comments » General
Massive attack
No, to the band, but a fascinating article on Popular Science how the massive computer-generated battle scenes for the Two Towers episode of the Lord of the Rings were made. Details about the nifty software and AI routines, and the article features some comments by an artificial life researcher called Karl Sims... what's in a name ;-)
Nov 26, 2002 @ 13:07 » no comments » General
How to cite a video stream
Academics are used to citing eachother's work, quoting their interviewees, and in general referencing a wide variety of sources. As long as you attribute the material you cite correctly and as long as you don't use unnecessary large portions of the original work, then the fair use clauses of copyright law make citing the original work perfectly accepted and legal.
What happens though, if you want to cite a protected Real video stream? This video stream opens your Real player, you can watch it as it is being streamed to your computer, but it is (as far as I have been able to ascertain) not saved to your harddisk, nor is it possible to "Save As", exactly because the stream is protected. However, if I feel the material contained in the stream is important for my academic research, I would like to keep a personal copy of the video stream for future reference, so I can cite from it in visual form (as a screenshot), and I think that under fair use I should be able to. The technical solution to capturing and saving a Real video stream however doesn't seem all that legal, so there will be no links in this post, but remember, Google is your friend!
A bit of searching learned that there is an application called StreamBox VCR that will record various types of streamed media. It is however no longer available from the website of the company that made it, because the software was discontinued after a long legal battle with Real Networks. The program however keeps floating around cyberspace, so you should be able to track it down. To get Streambox VCR working on your computer, you will need the Flying Raichu patch to get rid of the registration and phone home features of the program. Next you need to apply the Stealth Mulder Fix to get the software to identify itself not as Streambox, but spoof the Real Player identification string. And last, you need to apply the SMF+ patch to be able to also capture the new Helix video streams.
If everything is installed, you need to find the link to the actual video stream, usually a link to a .rm file (which launches the Real Player) and it is usually preceded by the Real Time Streaming Protocol prefix: rtsp://. This link may be hidden behind some Javascript, in which case the included Intercept program will help you discover it. If, however, the link to the video stream is indirect and opens a new window in which the player is embedded, you will have look at the source of the pop-up window to find the link. Instead of finding the rtsp:// link, you may find a http:// link to a .rpm file. Copy-paste that link into the address bar and instead of choosing to open it, save it to the desktop. Next open that .rpm file with a text editor and viola, there is your rtsp:// link. Now copy that link and in Streambox choose Edit > Paste Link. Before clicking okay, go to the Connection tab and set the connection speed as high as possible. You're not viewing the stream, just downloading, so you want the best possible quality. Now click okay and the stream is being saved to your harddisk.
If you're happy with just having the Real media file, then you're done. However, if you want to convert it to another format, you will need a converter that takes the Real media file and encodes it to another format. A little program called Real7ime Converter (currently V1.1) does a nice job of that (but there are many others). One of the nice things of the Real7ime Converter is that it will even take a rtsp:// link and encode the stream direct from the internet. This is a much quicker way to capture the stream, as it doesn't involve all the installing that you have to do for StreamBox, but it doesn't (appear?) to allow you to save the stream in Real media format. For Real7ime Converter to be able to decode the Real video stream you will either have to install the Real Player or the I420 codecs.
As stated above, the legal status of this procedure is somewhat unclear, although personally I feel that it should be just fine under fair use. The above mentioned procedure then is strictly for educational purposes.
Nov 27, 2002 @ 11:52 » 2 comments » Research
Neighbors
Yikes... Leuschke discovered the other day that his upstairs neighbor is reading his blog. Check the comments for that post, hilarious and creepy, just like Leuschke says...
I wonder who is reading my blog... any neighbors who feel they need to leave a comment?
Nov 27, 2002 @ 17:06 » no comments » Blogosphere
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