More blog, more pictures
JaceHerring.com, who can resist a blog that publishes cat pictures like this one.
Oct 2, 2002 @ 11:16 » no comments » Blogosphere
Pop-up windows
Oct 2, 2002 @ 12:32 » no comments » Webdesign
Two questions
1) Why is it that every organisation or company doesn't simply create the preconditions for you to do the work they hired you to do well, but instead make doing that work as difficult as possible by making you jump through all these bureaucratic hoops, attend utterly useless meetings and in general do completely unnecessary stuff when all you want to do is your job?
2) Why is it that people think it's necessary to ride the subway, playing their guitar, banjo or ukelele for money, while everybody who actually wants to listen to some music that early in the morning already owns a walkman?
Oct 3, 2002 @ 10:44 » no comments » General
Busy
Phew, I've been busy and I think I'm gonna be busy for quite a while: I have a schedule for my research that runs to 2005. It seems that now it's all a matter of execution.
Also, one of the people with an e-mail account on my domain has been bitten by the BugBear virus. I can tell you it's not fun to be a postmaster right now.
Oct 5, 2002 @ 10:58 » no comments » General
Xbox live
A brief but interesting report by Chris Morris, a beta tester of the Xbox Live service. Unfortunately the Europeans will have to wait for it longer (again!) than the Americans and the Japanese, but it's going to be interesting to see the voice communicator in action. It supports 'voice masking', putting yet another spin on online identity. I wonder if you will be able keep your ingame identities properly separated from your 'login identity', which in this pay-for-play arena is most likely your real life identity.
Oct 6, 2002 @ 16:18 » 1 comment » Games
1000 Game heroes
As I'm researching the construction and representation of gender in computer-mediated environments, I bought the Digital Beauties book almost a year ago. For the best part of last week, every time I passed the bookshop on my way to work, I looked at the new Taschen book 1000 Game Heroes in the window, but the shop was always either not yet open or already closed when I passed by. Today however I finally got to go home a bit earlier and I picked up a copy of the book.
It's basically a coffee table book, just like the Digital Beauties book, which means lots of beautifully printed full color images and rather little in terms of text. Unlike the Digital Beauties book which, as I complained about then, is unashamedly about displaying female digital creations and nothing but, this book at least isn't as biased and features a good deal of male game characters. The book presents the game characters in various sections such as Fighting Heroes and Funny Heroes, subdivided by the actual game titles. Most games feature with some ingame shots, mixed with concept art or specially rendered 'publicity' material. For most games this works rather well, but for some of the games like Unreal (just the widely published promo-material and some concept art) and Tomb Raider it is a bit disappointing. Yes, the specially rendered images of Lara are definitely more attractive than the ingame shots, but do you really have to fill four pages and a two-page spread with suggestive images of Lara?
Some games are given much more attention than others that have to be content with one full-page or two half-page shots. I can't help but feel that this was at least in part simply because availability of material. Warcraft for instance gets three pages plus a two-page spread, but it's concept art only and there's only one page with a concept art collage devoted to Phantasy Star Online, as compared to six pages of faux revolutionary/propaganda flyers and hardly a character in sight for a game like Civilization. Ah, but the Commando's section more than makes up with real WWII photographs of soldiers and their digital counterparts side by side. It also must be noted that the selection of games and heroes is very diverse and the editor has chosen to include non-organic gamer heroes such as Mechs, the fast cars from Gran Turismo and some planes from Flight Simulator and Crimson Skies. Kudos also for including a wide range of both 'Western' and Japanese style games and less well-known or less obvious titles Ico, Ecco, Space Harrier (from a long time ago) and Amerzone.
So how about the construction/representation of gender? I really have to think this one through some more, but with so many characters next to eachother it at least becomes clear that gender is constructed differently in the markedly different Western and Japanese styles. Looking at the differences and similarities it's really interesting when the Western game-designers try to incorporate Japanese style elements and vice versa. It's also going to be interesting to figure out how a rather apparant aspect of a character such as "toughness" is exactly being constructed for both the female and the male gender. For the male characters it appears that broad facial features (broad, slightly flattish cheekbones, broad nose and chin and pronounced jaw lines) are even more typical than a bulky chest and thick neck... but that's not all that revoluationary, isn't it?
Oct 7, 2002 @ 21:56 » no comments » Research
Just a couple of days
Getting close to the Association of Internet Researchers 2002 conference. Still loads to do.
Oct 9, 2002 @ 12:23 » no comments » Research
Q-q-q
q-q-q.net, distorted Quake gamemodification art (via milov.nl); a bit hallucinogetic, especially the videos.
Unrelated but pretty funny (via Mark), two silly Microsoft Knowledgebase articles: Earth Rotates in Wrong Direction and Barney Not Found.
Oct 9, 2002 @ 12:29 » no comments » General
MT turns 1
The first World Movable Type Day is celebrated with the release of Movable Type (lovingly abbreviated to MT) Version 2.5.
Oct 9, 2002 @ 12:52 » no comments » MovableType
Archiving websites for research
A short while ago I posted to the Association of Internet Researchers mailinglist (Air-L), asking if those gathered there knew some good programs to archive websites for research. (Most of the messages about this topic can be found in the archives, September 2002 and October 2002.) A good deal of programs were mentioned, some commercial, some freeware. I haven't yet had time to try all of them out, but I will over the next few months and this post will get updated with reports on the different programs. For the moment there's a list with the suggested programs and some preliminary thoughts.
One of the problems with archiving websites is that some webdesigners use JavaScript to control hyperlinks, for instance for roll-over images or pop-up windows. Unfortunately there is a wrong and a right way to use JS to control hyperlinks and most designers only appear to be aware of the wrong way to do it. It is noted for the programs if they can deal with JS hyperlinks or not.
Webcopier
I tried the V3.0 (currently V3.2) trialversion and it seems a fairly capable program, with lots of parameters for what and how to archive. Appears not to support JS links; payware.
SuperBot
Haven't tried it yet. Freeware program, appears simple but decent enough. No apparant JS link support.
SurfSaver
Haven't tried it yet. Browser add-on, creates searchable archive but looks a bit limited from the features. Free version and pay-for Pro version. No mention of JS link support.
Adobe Acrobat
Haven't tried it for archiving websites, but apparently it can do that too, presumably in PDF format. No mention of JS link support; payware.
Site Snagger
Haven't tried it yet. Appears to be abandonware for now, last mention of version 1.2. No apparant support for JS links; freeware?
Teleport Pro
Haven't tried it yet. Looks fairly professional, claims JS link support, payware.
Offline Commander/Internet Researcher
Haven't tried it yet. Internet Researcher is the Pro version of Offline Commander. Looks fairly professional, allows custom plugins for refined parsing and claims JS link support; payware.
GNU wget
Open Source command line app (there is a GUI). Very versatile and powerful, creates perfect mirror copies of websites and offers possibility of not converting hyperlinks, so it will also function to create backups (its original function). Unless you plan to recompile the source, no standard support for JS links.
Offline Explorer
Haven't tried it yet. Looks fairly professional, no mention of JS link support though; payware.
Internet Explorer 5+
You can also archive websites with IE, which works pretty well (but doesn't appear to support JS links), but setting it up is a bit complicated. 1) add URL to favorites, 2) right-click bookmark and select 'Make Available Offline', 3) click through the wizard and don't change any of the settings, 4) click Finish, 5) right-click the bookmark again and select 'Properties', 6) go to the Download tab, 7) select the required linkdepth (only up to 3 levels deep) and uncheck the 'Follow links outsite of this website's domain' option.
Netscape 6+
Haven't looked into it, but should also offer offline browsing.
Net Snippets
Not really for archiving complete websites, but appears an interesting research tool. Allows archiving and annotation of "snippets" or selections of websites and creates 'bibliography' of snippets automatically.
Oct 10, 2002 @ 12:37 » 1 comment » Research
Wired redesign
Ooh! Wired redesigned! Not only that, they did it W3C standards compliant. Well, almost actually... if you run the site through the Validator a couple of unescaped ampersands show up (who cares!) and twice a target=_top shows up without quotes. Nitpicking here of course, but not bad at all! Now they just have to clean up the display in Opera to make it look as good as it does in Mozilla.
Oct 11, 2002 @ 14:17 » no comments » Webdesign
Say what?!
*uncontrollable giggle* (via blurbomat and as an explanation since they appear to have fixed the hack: this specific location of the map had been hacked to display several rather uncouth terms instead of the regular street names.)
Oct 11, 2002 @ 14:39 » no comments » General
Always wanted to know
What Tolkien Officially Said About Elf Sex? (via distantsun)
Oct 11, 2002 @ 16:59 » no comments » General
Borked
Well, I finally managed to bork up Win2k pretty badly.
Yesterday morning I was in a hurry and figured I'd quickly send an email with images attached to my work account so that I would have them there if I needed them. The images were in BMP format, so they were pretty big, the email program choked, I killed the process through the taskmanager, shut down the computer and went to work, figuring I'd deal with the images later.
When I got home, I turned on the computer, logged in and got a message that Windows had run out of virtual memory and asked me to enlarge the swapfile. Huh? This Win2k installation has been humming along for the best part of two years without complaints, so what's the matter? Well, what's the matter I don't know, I just know that Win2k will just completely eat whatever amount of swapfile you throw at it, whether it's 384, 512, 768 or even 1024 Megabytes. Apparently killing the email program caused so much undigestable clutter in the swapfile that Win2k can't deal with it anymore. Even disabling the swapfile, in the hope of clearing it out, doesn't help.
To Win2k's credit, I can still log in, copy files and run some minor programs that don't eat a lot of memory. For the moment I'm saved by the fact that this odd behavior is limited to my main user account on this box, so I created another user and I'm able to use my box pretty much as I should be able to, but I've of course lost all the personal settings that have gone into the system for over two years. Scrap that... the new user account fills up the swapfile just as badly after a while. Something really broke this time. That means I'm going to have to do a reinstall *sigh*mutter*grumble* unless someone who reads this has a solution and is kind enough to drop it in the comments :-)
Nice timing... with just one day left before the AoIR conference. Grr!
Oct 12, 2002 @ 11:03 » no comments » General
Back
Back from the AoIR conference in Maastricht. It was a great conference, good seeing everyone again, and many smart and stimulating presentations. One niggle though: the food. Too bad that in a city famous for good food the several conference center's inhouse cafeteria managed to serve completely uninspired and drab food.
Oct 17, 2002 @ 12:50 » 1 comment » Research
Book: The Movie
I think that at some point in my life I'd like to make a movie about a book. Literally.
Oct 17, 2002 @ 17:06 » no comments » General
Pivot blogging
Just stumbled into Pivot, a Dutch homegrown piece of blogging software. Looks pretty cool and workable. One of the biggest pros would be that it needs nothing more than PHP 4.0.4 or higher on the webserver to be able to run. So, if you find yourself with a rather limited webserver setup, you could give it a try.
Oct 17, 2002 @ 17:43 » 1 comment » Blogosphere
Homepages and weblogs
Quite, I'll say... If you point Google towards the domain of one of Holland's bigger providers (home.planet.nl) and you search for "blog" it returns 70 hits, many of which point to one user's site. If you search the same domain for "weblog" you get 113 hits that are spread out much more evenly over different users. However, if you search the home.planet.nl domain with the term "homepage" you get approximately 22900 hits.
Interesting, blogging appears to be a relatively minor activity among Dutch internet users. Another Dutch ISP (XS4all, known for its tech savvy users) gives 201 and 741 vs 25500 hits respectively. Of course, they might be blogging on Blogspot or on their own domains, rather than on the webspace provided by their ISP. (One thing that's for sure is that Blogspot is pretty darn slow; most of the blogs need a little gentle coaching from the reload button a couple of times before they want to show up...) Searching Google for "nederlandse weblog" you get 6270 hits. Still not a whole lot... to be continued.
Oct 22, 2002 @ 16:47 » 1 comment » Research
Book reviews
Now I want to go read the other two books ;-)
Oct 22, 2002 @ 17:42 » no comments » General
Research blogging
In two months I'll be teaching again, this time a 'research seminar', where a small group of students will go from formulating a research question, to writing a research proposal, to actually doing the research and finally reporting on it, all in three months time. They'll be working together in groups of three or four students on this project and I figured that it would be an interesting experiment to have them work together through a group-blog. I talked to the people who have to authorise these kinds of things, but the main problem turned out to be getting a suitable server from the IT dept.
At the moment the IT dept. is trying to restructure their server park and is consolidating on a Windows/Cold Fusion platform. For many, but mainly organisational reasons it's not easy for them to just set up another server that runs Perl and/or PHP. Some active people are still looking into this, but as a back-up plan I asked my friendly neighborhood webhoster what it would cost to host the site with them for a year, and got quoted a very friendly price. The good news is that I got permission to set up my educational group-blog externally, yeey! I'll talk to the IT people this week and see if they can set it up on one of the dept. servers, but if not, I'm going to set it up myself and host it externally. I'm really looking forward to the experiment!
Oct 22, 2002 @ 22:23 » 1 comment » Research
Re-installing
Well, I'm about to re-install my computer. The unzip program that is tied in with the explorer through right-click context menus now manages to crash the explorer, on top of the swapfile problems reported earlier. Bah. Burn one last backup cd, disconnect the second harddrive that now holds all data, insert Win2k disc, reboot, repartition (spare partition for dualboot with Linux) and reformat, then re-install. Then swear some because I realize I forgot to backup something after all. If you never see me online again, you know what happened...
Update 23:20: well, could have been worse I guess. The re-installing isn't so bad, it's just that you have to reboot every time, even for the mouse drivers. I haven't thought of anything that I didn't back up *knock on wood* and the essentials, namely e-mail and browsers are functional. Tomorrow's another day for Office and other handy tools.
Oct 23, 2002 @ 16:13 » 1 comment » General
Limited trial version
Humbug! I'm trying out the Internet Researcher software that promises to create backups of websites, including pages that are launched through javascript popups, but the trial version is too limited. About halfway through downloading a website with various javascript popup windows the silly thing announced that I had reached the maximum number of pages that the trial version allowed, but at that point all the pages hidden behind javascript were still queued, so now I still don't know if this program will work for me or not... sigh!
Oct 24, 2002 @ 16:26 » no comments » Research
Official reference
APAstyle.org and the section on referencing electronic sources. I can't believe they really want me to write:
Author, A. A. (2000). Title of work. Retrieved month day, year, from source.
where the source usually is an URL. The whole "retrieved" part is so aesthetically displeasing. But what can you do... APA says so.
Oct 25, 2002 @ 10:50 » no comments » Research
Photoblogs
Oct 28, 2002 @ 13:12 » no comments » Blogosphere
Trillian
I have been seduced by Trillian. Trillian is a free instant messenger (IM) client that gives you access to all major chatservices (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and even IRC) through one single interface and so far it's been working brilliantly for me. I never really got instant messaging before, maybe mostly because of the clunky interface and when ICQ introduced those ads in the interface, I immediately uninstalled the whole thing. But now that I know a couple of people that regularly use an instant messenger and now that the interface makes sense, courtesy of Trillian, it somehow seems a much more sensible proposition.
Which reminds me of a conversation I had with someone at the AoIR conference. We talked about how, when we were new to the Net, we explored every possibility to talk to other people, to strangers. We'd join mailinglists, IRC, MUDs, Talkers, etc. just to see who was there, what they were doing and to talk to them. We both had the impression that a lot of our students these days don't want to use the Net in that way. For them the Net is a way to stay in touch and talk to their friends. They don't even seem to surf all that much, really just places where they have to go, like the university website. Instead of seeing the Net as a place to explore and to meet people, it seems they don't want to be confronted with unknown others and they voice concerns about people not being who they really are, being misled or feeling that it's just pointless to talk to someone you don't already know or you most probably can't meet face to face anyway. That way the Net goes from being a global network to an infrastructure that supports local friendships (and I'm pretty sure we can find a correlation here with how mobile phones and texting are used by the people who grew up with them, ie the people now in their teens or early twenties). The most intriguing thing to me though, is that they appear to think or ask of other people to be (or at least present) one single, coherent and persistent identity. When I tell students about my research on identity and gender in a MOO, many tend to keep off, think it's silly and pointless and potentially very harmful. One of the first questions often is if people don't completely lose themselves, lose their real identity in role-playing and that question is always immediately followed by the question if mudding isn't terribly addictive. This is so intriguing to me because it is said we live in a postmodern society, but many students seem to cling to a singular, integrated, Enlightenment ideal of identity.
(One small complaint about Trillian though: the program hijacks all ctrl+shift+key combinations and I need some of those for easy editing of text in the MovableType interface in Internet Explorer. Let's see if I can do something about that in the preferences... Nope, not really. Good idea anyone?)
Oct 30, 2002 @ 08:43 » 1 comment » Software
Fake copy application
This application pretends to be copying files, when in fact no files are being copied. Feel like goofing off at work? Run this application and when your boss catches you, point to your computer and say, "See, I'm working on those backups..."
Oct 30, 2002 @ 11:25 » no comments » General
Office wars
Slashdot and the Register report that Suse is introducing their Linux Office Desktop distribution, which runs Microsoft Office right out of the box.
In completely unrelated news on News.com and Webwereld Microsoft announces that the new Office Version 11 will only run on Windows XP and Windows 2000 with the latest ServicePack 3 funk installed.
Looks like Codeweavers will have write some more Crossover emulation code soon...
Oct 31, 2002 @ 09:22 » no comments » Software
Blogger typology
Good fun, Portrait of a Blogger, though I kind of miss the Research Blogger.
Research Blogger (Reblogger)
Percentage of blogger population: 1.634%
Hours spent blogging: 10/week (varies heavily with approaching deadlines)
Habitat: Typically found at a desk somewhere in an university department, often sharing a room with other students, although quite a few are known to also blog from home. Rebloggers however also travel and take the opportunity to blog from other universities and conference venues.
Average Age: MA level Rebloggers in their early twenties, while PhD Rebloggers are approaching their thirties with alarming speed.
Favorite hangout: Air-L
Last Book Read: Postmodernism: A Reader.
Favorite Offline Activities: Movies and books.
Mode of Dress: Casually, although this varies with geographic location: the northern countries displaying a much shabbier appearance than more southern countries.
Psychological profile: INTP
Typical post: Oh, cool! I found this amazing repository of links to faux cities in America, ranging from well known examples like Disneyland to lesser known 'ghost town' type fake cities like Legend City near Phoenix. For research sake I should really visit them all, let's see who's going to be silly enough to fund this trip ;-) Seriously though, this really helps with the discussion I'm writing up now for my dissertation (well, would be writing up if I weren't blogging this, damn... now I feel guilty all over again) on the Real and the Virtual (Baudrillard: simulacrum; Lyotard: the unrepresentable in representation itself; Lacan: phantasmatic; Eco's rephrasing of Baudrillard's Disneyland example; I could go on...). Better get back to writing this up, I'm really excited about this!
Oct 31, 2002 @ 10:41 » 4 comments » General
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