Archive for July, 2004
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29 Jul 2004
I’ve never really had anything specific against PHP. The problem I’ve always had is that it’s too similar to Perl for me to be able to keep them straight in my head, but too different for my Perl skills to be much use at all. Someone has now contrasted PHP and Perl from a strict usability point of view. And the arguments make perfect sense.
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28 Jul 2004
So “Nintendo DS” is the official name. It’s one hot handheld. Stereo speakers builtin, ~$170 release price, and more than 120 games in development. I’m signed up.
Also, I finally got an official quote from the horse’s mouth about wireless: “DS users will be able to connect with a local wireless network of up to 16 players. Nintendo’s guaranteed range is 30 feet, but will extend far beyond that depending on circumstances. It … will make use of both IEEE 802.11 and Nintendo’s proprietary communication protocol, which provides low battery consumption. … The DS technology also provides for a wireless LAN connection, which could allow a theoretically infinite number of players to … compete at a central game hub on the Internet…” (Emphasis mine) Holy hell.
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28 Jul 2004
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy teaser trailer. Lots of mirrors in the discussion, but the official link worked for me. This is going to be the best movie ever made, no matter how bad it is.
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26 Jul 2004
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26 Jul 2004
At work, we got new dual-Opteron SunFire v20z‘s for the newly-acquired TravelWeb. I got to test one. First thing I decided to do was a distributed.net client benchmark.
Desktop: Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz, 512K L2 cache, 512M RAM.
Opteron server: Dual AMD Opteron 248 2.2GHz, 1M L2 cache, 2G RAM.Dnetc benchmarking only runs on a single processor, but I ended up with the Opteron running twice as fast as my desktop. I’m in love.
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26 Jul 2004
Law & Order: Artistic Intent. I love the show, and I love the final piece in this collection: “A Night Away“. Update 14:36 – You guys thought CSI had a lot of sunglasses shots. L&O is just too nerdy for sunglasses.
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24 Jul 2004
Okay, so The Bourne Supremacy was pretty damn good. It sustained the atmosphere and intensity of the first one, and the story was done in such a way that it didnt feel like “another movie with the same characters”, like some sequels tend to. I enjoyed it enough that I decided to look into the books a little. Sadly, the books appear to be critically poor (especially the third one, The Bourne Ultimatum). But reading through the synopsis of the second book, it looks like the storyline was totally changed. So the third movie, if it’s made, has hope.
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23 Jul 2004
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22 Jul 2004
There are no words to describe how I feel about 68.5 fps Doom3 at 1600×1200 at high quality. I wouldn’t have said it was possible. (Page 4 actually looks at non-crazy-expensive video cards).
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22 Jul 2004
Okay, this link needs a little introduction. The article is primarily about the latest Rush album, which I know lots of people dislike, but the phenomenon that’s described is not limited to that one band. Imagine that this story was about Your Favorite Band.
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21 Jul 2004
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20 Jul 2004
The Monty Hall problem is hard enough to confound lots of smart people and lots of professional mathematicians and probability experts. Now imagine two corollary problems. My initial reaction is to say that neither will affect the optimal action. But if the Monty Hall problem has tought us anything, it’s that intuition is usually wrong, and rational thought is almost always more wrong.
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20 Jul 2004
I contribute to the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia on almost a daily basis. I’ve written articles on Danbury and the Danbury Fair almost from scratch, and rewritten several articles, like Handheld game console. Check out my User page for more contributions.
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20 Jul 2004
With Moveable Type, several freely available plugins, and a fair amount of HTML and CSS knowledge, I’ve been able to create a website with three totally independent sections, each behaving differently and managed independently. I’m fairly proud of how this website has turned out.
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19 Jul 2004
The Hundred Thousand Gallon Restaurant, from the infinite depths of the Halfbakery. Try the top ten, they’re delicious.
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19 Jul 2004
You’d think this would be easy. Sadly, 10-digit numbers don’t fit in 32 bits. I’ll let you know when I’ve solved it.
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19 Jul 2004
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16 Jul 2004
Interesting fact #1: Doom 3 for PC has gone gold. Release date is August 5. “More remains to be done for the OSX version … and that will take some time.” Sorry. Oh, and there will be a demo.
Interesting fact #2: Half-Life 2 specs have been revealed. Sadly, my desktop is still 50% slower than the minimum, but I’m planning on finally upgrading for these two games. “Late summer release”?
Interesting fact #3: I need to add Eurogamer to my daily reading.
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15 Jul 2004
Penny Arcade Remix Project. A little old, but still funny.
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13 Jul 2004
Achewood gets a book deal. I’m so fricken excited.
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12 Jul 2004
My parents are enlarging their bedroom and bathroom by about 50%. Being nerds, they’ve set up a ConstructionCam so we all can watch.
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12 Jul 2004
Gmail Agent API, plus a lot of great details on URLs and how the Javascript works.
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12 Jul 2004
Temporal Anomalies in Time Travel Movies. Simply incredible. I recommend the 12 Monkeys article in particular.
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9 Jul 2004
Right now marks the official launch of the new Plutor.org site. Powered by Moveable Type 3.0 and a mess of plugins, I hope to keep this place updated now. I’ve got my own sorta-blog, but the focus of this site will be my coding projects. Ironically, that’s the one part of the site that I haven’t yet finished. Hopefully early next week I’ll figure that out.
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9 Jul 2004
Allmusic.com gets a redesign Monday (07-12)! I’m excited! Update 07-12: Hey, my math was wrong, I think. Tuesday.
