All entries from 2007
31 Dec 2007
29 Dec 2007
28 Dec 2007
22 Dec 2007
20 Dec 2007
18 Dec 2007
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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. on 360 imminent?
I missed this news last month, just googled it on the off chance. I hope it arrives in time to not be totally over-shadowed by fallout 3.
What is up with new entries for web comics showing up in your RSS reader before the graphic of the comic itself is available? It happens to me all the time with Penny Arcade and I've had it happen a couple of times with Double Fine Action Comics.
I really appreciate the feeds so I'm not trying to complain too much here, I'm just wondering what the cause is. Are their admin interfaces submitting the post and uploading the image in one step? Surely they should be doing the upload & preview then final submit dance.
Unless it's issues with a CDN or something, but penny-arcade's certainly appears to be coming from the same domain. And anyway, the delay seems far too long for it to be either of those things. Curious!
14 Dec 2007
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Authors@Google: J. Craig Venter.
Interesting Q&A session. People eyed him with suspicion when he took commercial funding to help trounce the official government funded effort in the race to sequence the human genome, but here he comes across as sincere and well-meaning.
11 Dec 2007
10 Dec 2007
Why is it so ridiculously hard for technology conference organisers and participants to have some structured publishing of the content after the fact? There are always half-baked promises of recordings and podcasts made, and whenever speakers are asked mid-talk if slides will be made available they act as if it's a given.
And yet, almost a month after @media Ajax 2007 took place, I still have to search all around the internet to cobble together a list that's only partially complete:
(NB: A couple of these aren't the talks that were give on the day, but are as close as I can get, ie. Crockford's and the Ajaxian's)
People. Get it together!
Build this into the contracts. Get copies of the slides when the speakers are there on the day. Stop relying on their word that yeah, they'll be up on their blogs just as soon as they get back from the 3rd stop on their speaking tour.
Also, promises of recordings and podcasts are all well and good (if they'd ever arrive), but audio isn't very valuable without accompanying slides. Wouldn't video be a far more preferable goal to shoot for? (You'd think that conference centres could readily supply the necessary equipment for that kind of thing, but it seems like a lowly VHS camcorder is all this year's venue could muster.)
Complaints around these conferences seem to revolve around poor wifi and catering, but to me, those are just niceties. Being able to review the things you've seen and heard days or weeks later is so much more important. There's no way we can remember every salient point, or note down every line of code. And given the price of a entry, we shouldn't be expected to.
Many of us are attending as chosen delegates from companies whose employees would all have benefited from being there. Access to content would give us the chance to present back to them more efficiently, bringing new ideas, and firing interests enough for them to want to take the trip themselves next year.
5 Dec 2007
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Pastel Games.
Beautifully produced flash games from the Submachine guy. Mostly point-and-click, some platform. I tried Daymare Town, Mission to Mars and Covert Front.
2 Dec 2007
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Chain Factor.
Cleverly addictive numbers & blocks flash game with unintuitive rules (so be sure and read the FAQ). Also something to do with a Numb3rs TV show ARG apparently but it's entertaining in its own right.
1 Dec 2007
So there was this mini brouhaha last week over trash talk on xbox live, and homophobic or discriminatory trash talk in particular. It was kicked off by a video posted on gaygamer.net of someone with the gamertag "xxx GayBoy xxx" playing Halo 3 multiplayer. Naturally, the air was turning blue around him. Despite the shocked tone of gaygamer's post, however, commenters have remained admirably measured in their response and note that the video only contains a couple of instances of full-fledged hate speech.
This week I finally got around to using a couple of trial days of gold membership on xbox live. A chance to see what it's like in the online multiplayer mirror-world. And a chance to find out what people think of my spectacularly unimaginative gamertag, "Matt and Katie".
I chose it because I signed up for a silver account just minutes after I unpacked my shiny new console and was in a rush. I chose it because I wanted to include Katie on the fun (although we later realised separate profiles make more sense where achievements and save games are concerned). And I chose it because "cool" screen names are kind of annoying.
So it turns out quite a few people think it's ridiculous. I've had sneers, jibes, jokes. But for the most part it's just talk. And it makes it all the more sweet when a loudmouth is calling you out as lame in the lobby at the start, and you end up above him in the rankings in the lobby at the end.
And really, who's to blame them when there's so little to go off. Much like a prank caller flipping through a telephone directory, a list of names is all the grist they have for their entertainment mill. If you have a gamertag that dares to stand out, dares to stray from leetspeak, dares to be something other than "armyguy420", then you're the only thing worth talking about.
To quote one of final trash talkers in gaygamer's video: "Who's leaving? GayBoy? Nooooo... dude! You're the life of the party!"
28 Nov 2007
27 Nov 2007
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LucasArts Games Emulation Makes iPhone Absolutely Perfect.
ScummVM for the iPhone. Looks like fun, and a good match. The main barrier I find to playing old adventure games and RPGs these days though is just the pace. Too much watching and waiting and not enough continuous, smooth interaction.
22 Nov 2007
14 Nov 2007
So what's it all about? Well, this is my new website. Mostly a blog, but in its dreams it's part tumblelog (give me a little while longer to work on that).
There's quite a bit here already that I've been pack-ratting around for so long that I thought it was about time I built it a home. If you peer into the archive you'll see that there's a few years worth of links culled from my bookmarking on del.icio.us, and a whole half decade earlier there's a few hundred blog entries from a more innocent age. Those were rescued from the ashes of a site called Pixelised that my brother Dan and I used to run.
Err, I'd link to that on the wayback machine but it looks like their developers might be having a bit of an off day. I did feel like web archival was in relatively safe hands until just now.
Anyway, it's been odd spending a good 5 years out of the blogging loop, and this website's really the outcome of too many times when I've felt like jotting something down and had nowhere to jot it. It's also odd being a web developer for a day job and having nowhere handy outside of work to try out more hobbyist or experimental ideas. Hopefully this little hypertextual homestead (ha) will go some way to meeting both those needs.
Next post: less of the meta-blogging and navel-gazing hopefully. Au revoir!
9 Nov 2007
7 Nov 2007
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JRuby: An Introduction.
There's been plenty of mentions of the potential for speed gains, but here's a short walk through what's possible when Java and Ruby are on good speaking terms.
6 Nov 2007
“...though we've seen a ton of games on similar subject matter, COD4 distinguishes itself with a washed-out gritty look...”
— Gametap (uh, what?)
3 Nov 2007
24 Oct 2007
19 Oct 2007
17 Oct 2007
10 Oct 2007
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Here cometh the annual drowning in Q4 releases.
I'm actually getting properly excited about stuff that's coming out for the first time in ages. Especially the Orange Box. Halo 3 was like the amuse bouche tantaliser before that five-course HL2 banquet.
6 Oct 2007
5 Oct 2007
2 Oct 2007
1 Oct 2007
21 Sep 2007
17 Sep 2007
12 Sep 2007
8 Sep 2007
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The Shock Doctrine.
Short film based on Naomi Klein's new book, produced and co-wrtten by Alfonso Cuarón, director of Children of Men
2 Sep 2007
28 Aug 2007
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Vim for PHP programmers (PDF).
Not PHP-specific at all actually, just a good power-user overview. Trying to decide on which non-GUI editor to learn more thoroughly since I'm spending a bit more time using ssh these days.
26 Aug 2007
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The Lemmings Story.
Behind the scenes of Lemmings for the Amiga. Doesn't go into the deformable terrain unfortunately and how the lemmings followed it. Would have thought that was one of the more interesting things about it.
12 Aug 2007
“The problem with "social media" sites is that they're like bars, even if they become the next Studio 54, they will all, eventually, become the next Studio 54.”
— Joe Gregorio
11 Aug 2007
10 Aug 2007
7 Aug 2007
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Tech 5 Engine Exploration.
John Carmack demos the tools and engine for Rage. I used to wonder when this kind of thing would finally become possible. Looks like we might finally be seeing the back of repeating patterns.
6 Aug 2007
“A vendor will come along and they'll store your identity but give you complete freedom to move it where ever you want when ever you want at no cost. They'll make it easy to do so. And they'll get rich doing it, if they want to.”
— Dave Winer
4 Aug 2007
2 Aug 2007
“Praising companies for providing APIs to get your own data out is like praising auto companies for not filling your airbags with gravel. I’m not saying data export isn’t important, it’s just aiming kinda low. You mean when I give you data, you’ll… give it back to me?”
— Mark Pilgrim
31 Jul 2007
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Rails slugs - Knowledge Base.
Apparently "slug" is the preferred term for the hyphenated title in place of an ID in pretty urls. Who knew? Make it a lot easier to search for different implementation ideas though.
27 Jul 2007
26 Jul 2007
21 Jul 2007
19 Jul 2007
16 Jul 2007
13 Jul 2007
5 Jul 2007
29 Jun 2007
26 Jun 2007
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Google Maps API Tutorial.
Not much to look at, but I found a fix in here for an infoWindow sizing problem I was having, so maybe there other helpful tips to be found in it.
22 Jun 2007
19 Jun 2007
17 Jun 2007
16 Jun 2007
15 Jun 2007
14 Jun 2007
13 Jun 2007
12 Jun 2007
24 Jan 2007
15 Jan 2007
7 Jan 2007
3 Jan 2007
2 Jan 2007