And the music don't stop
Monday night friends treated us to a concert of Michael Franti and Spearhead in Paradiso, because we'd helped them move house. I didn't really know the band, except for seeing one or two of their songs on tv, but we were positively, totally and completely blown away. They started playing around 9:30 and they weren't done when we left at 1am... :-) Looking at the end of the stream of the concert at Fabchannel.com (see under "Latest Streams" and click on Michael Franti) I think we actually only missed the very last song. This was one concert to remember.
Jul 2, 2003 @ 09:23 » 1 comment » General
Die young, stay pretty
Guess I better forget about playing Lara's new outing Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness then. Gamespy reviews the PS2 version of the game and thinks it's downright lousy. The graphics apparently are pretty nice, but the controls are a dog, there are severe slowdowns in gameplay and mid-level loading screens, stupid bolted-on character enhancement quests, and the character interaction isn't worth much either. On top of that, there are many silly glitches and bugs, some even freezing up the PS2. The reviewer concludes,
[Lara Croft] was smart and sexy, and she gave us something that we couldn't get from any other game at the time. But the years have not been kind to Ms. Croft. When we asked her to show us something that would get us excited again, she opted for breast-enhancement surgery instead.
Ouch... Another game icon's reputation squandered. Debbie Harry sang it in a Blondie song, icons and heroes should Die young and stay pretty.
Jul 2, 2003 @ 16:46 » no comments » Games
Online games taxed
Slashdot points to a Gamespot article, noting that "electronically delivered goods and services" in Europe have become subject to a 17.5% VAT levy on the 1st of July, which means that at least all of Sony Online games, such as Starwars Galaxies, are seeing a price hike from $12,95 to $14,99. Everything's taxed, so why not online games? It adds to the total cost of playing games though, and that worries me a bit.
I'm a moderately dedicated gamer myself, but I think that any monthly fee over €10, just for playing the game online, is asking a bit too much. It adds up you know: broadband connection (or per-minute dial-up costs in large parts of the world), a yearly subscription fee for Xbox Live, then add the €60 or so you pay for the game in the shop, and then finally they want you to fork over 10 to 15 euro per month just to be able to play the game. I'd go along with a flexible pricing scheme, where the more you get from a game, the more it can cost, but they're gonna have to be careful that gaming remains fun. That you're not going to worry about not playing during a weekend or a holiday, because you're paying so much for the service already.
Jul 3, 2003 @ 09:49 » no comments » Games
Character entities
When writing for the web, you can use SGML Character Entities to display typographic symbols and characters with diacritical marks in your text. The format these character entities take, is: ampersand+CDATA+semicolon. So for the copyright sign you'd type © which shows up as ©. The euro sign for example is: €, €, etc. It's not ideal, because you still have to remember some codes and you don't get to just punch a key on the keyboard, but at least you can get your stuff to display. (Don't forget to set your character encoding to ISO 8859-1 and while you're at it, check your doctype.)
Jul 3, 2003 @ 10:09 » 2 comments » General
Zempt and Plugin Manager
Six Log mentions two great releases for MovableType users. I'm using a new weblog posting client, Zempt, to post this entry. It basically does the same thing as w.bloggar, which is allow you to compose your entries outside of MT's webinterface, thus offering some usability and interface advantages that are difficult to realize inside the browser window. Zempt however, is especially geared towards use with MT, offering some unique features, such as the "Post Options," that let you set the publish date, comments status and which URLs to ping. It's released at version 0.3 and there are still some features to be implemented, some polish to be applied, but it's already proving to be very useful. I hope the next release will feature better image support, resizable text entry boxes and more keyboard shortcuts (configurable of course...)
The other good news is that the first beta release of the MovableType Plugin Manager is now available. Installing plugins pretty much is copying the right files to the right directories, but the Plugin Manager will handle all that through a unified interface, check dependencies and allow you to update plugins easily. Hopefully the Plugin Manager will be included in the next release of MovableType, because right now, oh irony, installing the Plugin Manager itself is one of the more involved plugin installs.
Jul 6, 2003 @ 15:49 » no comments » MovableType
Body image
Sometimes images and texts drift together, forming a new message. Last week's Volkskrant Magazine featured an article about ideal typical body-images for women and the lengths women will, or will not, go to to achieve those. The article was illustrated by a photoshopped version of a Barbie doll. Instead of the longlegged beauty ideal, this doll was made to look like and old woman, with a pudgy belly, saggy breasts, grey hair and a lined and wrinkled skin. The article, obviously, took a critical look at how women experience getting older, how they perceive their own bodies and what role different (mediated) discourses on beauty play.
That photoshopped Barbie(like) doll reminded me of an ad campaign that The Bodyshop ran a couple of years ago. They had Ruby, who illustrated that "There are 3 billion women who don't look like supermodels and only 8 who do." In their 1998 annual report, the Ruby ad campaign is described like this:
Ruby's prize-winning face and figure are the dawn of a new consciousness in the beauty business: love your body - just the way it is. The Body Shop frontperson for its selfesteem campaign grabbed headlines all over the world. She looks like a girl who enjoys life to the fullest - and that’s what self-esteem is all about. Fret about who you could be and you’re merely wasting who you are.
I went looking for a picture of Ruby on the Bodyshop website, but it seems that Ruby pretty much has disappeared from their website. Searching for "ruby" yields one hit and takes you to one of the subpages of the Selfesteem campaign. On the home page, as well as on other pages of the Bodyshop website we now find beautiful, thin models, looking happy and full of selfesteem because they use Bodyshop products. It seems that the only place on the website where you can still find an image of Ruby, is in the aforementioned year report, which is not an easy to locate pdf file. Guess Ruby had her fifteen minutes in the spotlight and was summarily asked to exit the stage right and keep going.
The irony is, that this article about "escaping the role models of beauty," was immediately followed by an advertisment trying to sell some financial product, by showing a beautiful young girl, with perfect skin, no belly to speak of, and long legs floating in the sea on an air matress, presumably illustrating that if you invest with them you will have a carefree life.
Jul 6, 2003 @ 16:49 » 1 comment » General
Silent computing
Researching games is pretty cool. For example, you get to put together a rather high-end gaming rig and you don't have to pay for it. One problem with computers, that gets worse and worse the faster they get, is noise. All those cooling fans add up to a fairly consistent pressure on your eardrums. That's why I have made sure this new game machine is going to be as silent as I can make it, without having to put it in another room.
Making a computer quieter does cost some money, but it doesn't have to cost a whole lot. The thing is, you're going to spend the extra money on stuff like a quality case and a silent power supply, not on pure performance enhancements. Spending about €125 extra on making the system more quiet, means that you will have to make do with a 2.8GHz P4 or Athlon XP instead of a 3GHz one (disregarding the AMD P-rating for a minute here). With the extra €125 you wouldn't even have been able to get a 3.2GHz CPU and the average performance delta between the 2.8 and 3.0 GHz processors lies somewhere between 4 and 8%, depending on what game... err, application you run.
So is that trade-off worth the money? I think it is. When I compare what little noise my Dell desktop at work produces with the two systems that I have running at home, I'm pretty sure that the constant hum contributes to my overall tiredness at the end of the day and dwindling levels of concentration. Nevertheless, computer noise reduction doesn't appear to be a very prominent issue in computer sales. Finding general information about silencing computers wasn't too hard, but most of the referenced products are not available in The Netherlands and those products that are available often haven't been tested. Nevertheless, quite a bit of digging learned the following:
The background noise-level for a normal, quiet room is about 30 decibel. Ideally then, the noise from the computer would be 30dB or lower, which would make it nearly inaudible under normal circumstances. The main cause of noise in computers are the fans, not just because the fan itself makes noise, but especially because the airflow it causes is a very noticable and I think very tiring noise. A really silent computer would have no moving parts and no airflow. While Hush Technologies makes such systems, they're not exactly high-end gaming machines. 'Normal' computers, however, need cooling, and that means airflow, unless you want to install water-cooling, which, despite more and more professionally produced products, is still quite a delicate operation. The three major measures then, to reduce noise levels, are: a noise absorbing case, quiet power supply, and quiet CPU cooling.
Eventually, I decided to go with Nexus products, because they're the most readily available in The Netherlands and they had some good reviews. I settled on their iStyle case, which doesn't look bad either, the NX-4000 power supply, and the KCZ-2700ms CPU cooler. I also managed to track down a fanless high-end video card, the Sapphire Atlantis (Radeon) 9700 Pro Ultimate, which features an impressive heatsink. I didn't spend anything on making the harddrive more silent, as some people do, because I think that the very slight rattle that the Maxtor drives I've been using so far produce, will be absorbed by the case. I might have to add an extra low-rpm case fan eventually, for improved airflow in/through the case, but I'm going to see if I can do without (of course using Motherboard Monitor).
Hopefully, all this gear will keep the computer's noise level below 30dB in idle, or "websurfing and e-mailing" mode. When playing games the power supply will undoubtedly make more noise, but the game's noise is probably way louder anyway. When the system arrives, I'll write a short impression about its performance and noise levels. For the moment, I'm just waiting anxiously...
Jul 8, 2003 @ 11:41 » 2 comments » Tech
Playing the game
An AP news story is making the rounds and CNN, Mercury News, and Wired are writing it up. The story is about a bunch of guys playing mob characters in The Sims Online, and shaking down and harrassing other players. It's an old problem, something that every mudder will have experienced from time to time. Instead of suspending disbelief and immersing themselves in the alternative reality of the game, some players think it's fun to 'play' the game, to see what more or less 'legal' hacks of the game mechanics will let you achieve.
The really interesting thing to me, is not whether these players are involved in "extra-game" or "meta-game" cheats or behavior, but the way "in-game" and "extra-game" motives and activities blur. The separation between a player and his/her character is tentative, at best, and the ideal of role-playing — completely separating the fictional world of the character from the world of the player and suspending disbelief to totally immerse yourself in the world of your character as your character — is a fiction, as I also describe in my book. Creating and sustaining a shared fantasy depends on the willingness and trust of the players, and the bigger your player base, the more players you will have who are not willing and the less players you will have who know eachother and hence trust eachother. No amount coding will compensate for that, as any wizard who's tried will probably admit. The worst (ab)uses of code can of course be resolved, but at heart it remains a social issue: a player deciding to look at the game as a game, instead of seeing the role-playing as the game. It's a thorny problem and it's going to be interesting to see how new generations of MMOGs are going to deal with it.
Jul 8, 2003 @ 12:40 » no comments » Research
Demons
Demons are known to lurk in shadows. There is indeed substantial evidence (mostly from small children, however) for such situations. [...] Additionally, some people claim Microsoft software is already 'evil', how will additional demonic content affect them?
Quote from a nice tutorial on CSS and drop shadow effects.
Also: more to do with border slants.
And: encode your e-mail address with Javascript and don't worry about spammers when you make it available on your site.
Jul 8, 2003 @ 14:34 » no comments » Webdesign
Gamers are pretty normal people
A recently released study by Pew Internet & American Life shows that on a whole college students who play video games, are pretty normal people. A quick quote from the summary of findings (like I did read the whole report!):
Students integrate gaming into their day, taking time between classes to play a game, play a game while visiting with friends or instant messaging, or play games as a brief distraction from writing papers or doing other work.
Yahoo and Wired report about it, and focus on the fact that a scientific study challenges the stereotype of gamers as reclusive nerds. Well, not that this one report is going to make a whole lot of difference to the image of gamers lodged in public imagination, but at least it doesn't hurt.
Meanwhile, in somewhat related news, Gamezone interviews James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, who talks about positive effects of some types of games, and why it might be beneficial for young children to play videogames.
Jul 8, 2003 @ 15:34 » no comments » Research
Gender in text
The Boston Globe has an article citing Judith Butler about the performativity of gender. How often does that happen?
Actually, the article discusses the findings of an Israeli research group, who devised an automatic text classification algorithm that will sort English language texts according to the gender of the author with an 80% accuracy. Like most automatic text analyses, the study employs a frequency analysis, finding that it is not the "important" words that make a difference, but the much used personal pronouns, determiners (a, the, that), cardinal numbers, and quantifiers (more, some) that are significant. As the reporter notes, this isn't even terribly exciting news, but apparantly it got written up in the news media because the study kicked up some dust:
When the group submitted its first paper to the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the referees rejected it ''on ideological grounds,'' Koppel maintains. ''They said, 'Hey, what do you mean? You're trying to make some claim about men and women being different, and we don't know if that's true. That's just the kind of thing that people are saying in order to oppress women!' And I said 'Hey-I'm just reporting the numbers.'''
The article does a good job in discussing the different points of view in gender studies with regard to this kind "I'm just reporting the numbers" reporting. I'm sure the researchers did a decent job and that they found a statistically significant correlation. The problem, however, lies in the fact that the study starts from the premise that there are two (and only two) mutually exclusive genders, that the measuring variables are weighed according to that dichotomy, and that the findings reinforce the premise that there is a significant difference.
It's not so much that there is a difference, but rather what the difference means. That's where the reporter quotes another linguist, saying:
You find what you're looking for. And that leads to this sneaking suspicion that it's all hardwired, instead of cultural.... This whole rush to categorization usually works against women.
And this is exactly what annoyed me so much about the "I'm just reporting the numbers" statement. Numbers don't mean anything by themselves. Even if we for a moment disregard the whole socio-cultural-political framework that produced the research questions, methods and interpretations, and the grant to support the research, then the researchers should still be aware that they have a moral and ethical responsibility to take a stand on what they think their findings mean. "Just the numbers" can be used by anyone to mean just about anything, if only those numbers are framed in a particular way.
How do these researchers want their numbers to be understood? Do they want to reinforce the status quo with regard to gender? What do the differences in uses of pronouns say about the social, economic, and political situation of its speakers? What can be made of the reported fact that, when either a man or a woman writes for a specifically male or female audience, the reported algorithm 'doesn't work anymore'? It's these questions about real, everyday situations and consequences that consistently fall through the cracks of "just the numbers science," and I'm glad that for once, instead of just reporting the numbers, a mainstream publication goes a long way to question just that attitude in science.
The full article can be found on one of the authors' homepage: M.Koppel, S. Argamon and A. Shimoni (2003) "Automatically categorizing written texts by author gender," Literary and Linguistic Computing 17(4).
Jul 8, 2003 @ 16:35 » no comments » Research
Did I post a lot today?
Blame it on the ease of use that Zempt provides!
Jul 8, 2003 @ 18:55 » no comments » General
Phone dial web browser
Way grunge-matrix-retro-the-street-finds-it's-own-uses-for-it cool! Kottke points to the Phone Dial Web Browser. Instead of typing in some lame mnemonic alias for an IP number, you can now use a rotary phone dial to dial your favorite IP numbers.
Jul 9, 2003 @ 10:57 » no comments » General
Losing my tabs
One drawback of using Firebird with the Tabbrowser Extensions is that I've managed to loose all my open tabs a couple of times now. I love the fact that you can redirect all new windows to tabs, but still "Use multiple browsers ONLY when the users opens them." That way, you have the benefits of both tabbed browsing and of multiple browser windows where you can cluster one particular 'project.' However, if you have multiple browser windows open, each containing a set of tabs, Firebird will only remember the set of open tabs in the last window that you close. If you're not very careful, it's easy to close the window with all the important tabs first and then those open tabs are gone, kaput. With Opera I never had this problem, but then again, if you use Opera in Single Window Mode, then there is no option of opening a separate browser window with its own tabs: there is only a single browser window in which ALL tabs reside. So, I've set the Firebird Tabbrowser Extension to use the Single Window Mode too now, which to me is a loss of functionality, but at least it won't mean a loss of tabs anymore.
Jul 10, 2003 @ 09:09 » no comments » General
End of an era
I didn't buy last month's Wired magazine. I've read every issue of Wired cover to cover since the 1993 March/April 1.0 issue (or 1.01 according to the online archive). 11 years of Wired history fill a whole shelf in my bookcase. I'll probably pick up an interesting issue now and again at the newsstand, but the need-to-read has gone. Had gone for a while now, but my completist tendencies kept me buying the magazine every month. I'm done now though... I think.
Jul 10, 2003 @ 14:21 » no comments » General
Too hot to blog & a guestblogger
You wouldn't believe the weather... it's been too hot to think, too hot to blog. Also, I'm taking a while off during the summer, a well-deserved breather I think, so posting will remain infrequent at best for the next couple of weeks.
While I'm off, I've invited David Silver to post on this site as a guestblogger. This was a spur of the moment kinda thing, which we came up with while we were having dinner, as David happens to be visiting Amsterdam. It's a complete experiment... because I haven't let anyone post to this site before (except for the comments of course) and I think David isn't sure he wants to get into blogging because he might like it too much... which is an elaborate disclaimer for saying, don't expect anything, but be afraid... be very afraid ;-)
Jul 17, 2003 @ 08:37 » no comments » General
amsterdam
Guestblogged by dms
if coldplay saw it fit to name the last track of their last album "amsterdam," well, then i too see it fit to name my first blog entry the same name!
what an incredible city this is -- the people here are alive and wired and tapped in, the city absorbs you, the streets and canals speak to you. iole and i can't get enough of this city and its people. my thanks to frank for giving me a temporary space to share some thoughts, although i'm not sure how often i'll be online ... too much to do! peace.
Jul 18, 2003 @ 11:23 » 4 comments » Guestblog
worst blogger ever
Guestblogged by dms
it's official: i'm nominating myself as the worst blogger, or guest blogger, ever.
i'm finding it hard to get online to check email, not to mention post stuff on the blog. i'm learning to appreciate prolific bloggers, like frank, and wonder how they do it. i'm simply finding too much stuff to do, to learn, to experience here in amsterdam. my apologies.
i have enjoyed visiting with a ton of artists, activists, and all around freaks.
why aren't bicycles the mode of transportation for all cities?
Jul 25, 2003 @ 12:13 » 2 comments » Guestblog
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