Archive for August, 2004
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31 Aug 2004
Boggle is arguably one of the best candidates for a simple online multiplayer game. All of the interaction between players is at a single moment, and the scoring can be easily automated. JavaScript with DOM allows you to do a lot of really neat things, so as a test of my skills, I decided to try to make a massively multiplayer online Boggle game. It worked, but my backend code was pretty inefficient. When I brought it down, Evan offered to mirror it. He’s not only done that, but he’s improved the game beyond even my plans. Check out the game.
Read more…Discuss -
31 Aug 2004
I was thinking of protesting at the RNC this week, since how often do you get a chance to protest something so big and so close? I was trying to come up with something vaguely nerdy but also political. This protester outdid any hypothetical alternate-universe me.
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31 Aug 2004
Liberated Games aren’t abandonware, but they’re just as Free (as in Beer in some cases, as in Speech in others). I was just thinking the other day how my new rig would handle Homeworld.
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31 Aug 2004
Woman’s skin grows over wedding ring. Massive kidneys.
Note: Neither of these links are for the weak. -
31 Aug 2004
Despite the fact that God closed the book on the View Askewniverse at the end of “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” (ignoring the inconvenient and short-lived existence of the Clerks cartoon series for the moment), it is being reported that Kevin Smith is working on a Clerks sequel (ignoring the inconvenient existence of Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, and JaSBSB). Filming is set to start in January, and it looks like the important core cast is all set to return. Based on this quote from Smith, I have hopes that it’ll be Clerks or Mallrats quality, not JaSBSB quality: “The whole process [of making the Clerks DVD] reminded me why I got into the film biz in the first place: to make talky, low-budget comedies.”
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30 Aug 2004
This is a test of the new method for photo entries. Please ignore it for a while if it goes wonky.Looks like it’s working. Hooray for MT. (A sample post with the new photos-in-blog method.) -
30 Aug 2004
Not to insult M or anything, but the “Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About” seemed a lot less hilarious and insightful three or four years ago, before we got married.
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30 Aug 2004
Another massive construction project: Chubu International Airport (more on Wikipedia)
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27 Aug 2004
I now have one new gmail invitation available. If you want it, or know someone who knows someone who wants one still, first come, first served.
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27 Aug 2004
OMFG. The Half-Life 2 preload begins. “Purchase options will be released soon.”
Be sure to keep an eye on the Steam Network Status page (specifically the yellow line on the bottom graph). Will Steam be slashdotted?
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27 Aug 2004
Just some quick comparisons of benchmarks of my old machine (Athlon 800) and my new one:
Benchmark Increase CPU int (dhrystone) 2.83x CPU float (whetstone) 3.38x CPU MMX/SSE 2.59x CPU 3DNow! 2.49x RAM int bandwidth 3.95x RAM float bandwidth 4.05x Cache and RAM “combined index” 3.77x 3DMark 2001 ~4.75x I certainly don’t think I have the most beastly machine in the world (Nomad has more memory and a pair of RAIDed SATA drives, for instance, and at least one person I know at work has a Radeon X800), but I’m amazed with how much faster this machine is than my old one. I guess that’s what happens when you wait 5 years between upgrades.
Update 08-28: 3DMark 2003 benchmark for the new machine: 3811 3DMarks.
Update 08-30: Doom3 High Quality timedemo: 30.4 fps (I couldn’t run Ultra Quality because I only have a half-gig of memory) -
26 Aug 2004
Long, but fantastic trailer for a movie that won’t exist: Grayson. Years after Batman’s death, Dick Grayson returns to his role as Robin to find the killer. Fanfilm at its finest, and it only cost Untamed Cinema $18,000 to make.
Movies that take place in an alternate timeline are dangerous, especially when DC Comics is trying to jumpstart a new series in their Universe.
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25 Aug 2004
I wish I had had the balls (and the legal argument) to respond this way when I was served a Cease and Desist.
Heh, I just noticed that it’s the same law firm as my C&D. I should find it and scan that thing in.
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24 Aug 2004
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24 Aug 2004
“I found a digital camera in the woods”, Blair Witch for the Internet. Keep reading a few pages.
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24 Aug 2004
Science and Industry is a teamplay based modification for the game Half-Life. I was an active part of the community for a couple years, running a server, working on some applications, helping with testing alpha versions, etc. Eventually, I became a full-fledged member of the development team, helping PapasNewBag out with the coding for the mod. Many of the visual enhancements included in version 1.0 were my contributions.
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23 Aug 2004
For those of you having problems with VPU Recover errors with a brand new Radeon 9600XT (and the future me, the next time I reinstall), this page has the solution to all your problems. Turning off AGP Fast Writes and flashing my BIOS worked for me.
Update 20 Feb 2006: After getting a new motherboard and updating all of my firmware and drivers, I started having problems again. I found this page and tried some of the things on it. Setting AGP to 4x, in particular, seemed to help a lot.
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23 Aug 2004
I don’t miss this car one bit. Okay, maybe one bit, but it’s a 0.
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23 Aug 2004
I was doing research into hard drives for my new computer, since I’ve determined that my ancient Deathstar is really holding back everything. I saw good reviews about the new Hitachi Deskstar, and I happened upon this great deal. Check out the option dropdowns at the bottom though. Since “No” or “None” is the bottom choice on all of them, they’re all set to a non-free option by default. Click “order” without changing them all, and you end up with $346.90 on your bill, not $63!
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23 Aug 2004
I discovered Crux Linux exactly when I needed to. I was getting sick of Redhat’s big-endian-ness. Upgrading was always a challenge, and the complexity of the boot scripts made things really confusing. Based on a BSD-like “ports” system, Crux is a built-from-source Linux in the tradition of Gentoo. But it’s far simpler, and for the first time I really feel like I understand how Linux works, from one end to the other. There’s only very weak dependency support (an advantage, in my mind, over having to run
rpmwith--nodepsthree-quarters of the time), and it’s not for newbies (you need to partition your disk by hand, and compile your own kernel), but I’m in love. I was a ports maintainer for several months. -
23 Aug 2004
Yeah, it’s twelve years old, but it’s an Olympic story that still moves me: Derek Redmond and the 400-meter. (Aside: Which is worse, reading something at work that makes you cry, or something that makes you laugh out loud continuously?)
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23 Aug 2004
“[W]hen an American mouths off about French military history, he’s not just being ignorant, he’s being ungrateful.” A war buff defends French military history against Internet jerks.
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20 Aug 2004
Update 08-23: Since I was just about on my way out the door, I didn’t look too carefully at these pictures when I made the post. Looking at them now, they’re phenomenal. I love the style, and they’re obviously framed and developed by someone with a great eye and a lot of patience. These pictures are part of Rosi’s thesis at The University of the Arts. Congrats to Rosi.
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19 Aug 2004
Alton Brown’s sorta-blog, updated every couple weeks or so. See his March 5 post in particular.
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19 Aug 2004
First, you hear about free iPods, and it’s an obvious scam. Then you read a Wired article about how it’s not so much of a scam. Then you read other things about the deal. Then you check it out, and you realize that, well, it is a pyramid scheme of sorts, but not the kind where it necessarily costs you money. Give freeipods.com a spam-filtered email address, give AOL a credit card number and don’t let them bill it, and get five of your friends to do the same. Seems worth it, and if Wired says it’s legit, I’ll go along with that.
Please follow this link to freeipods.com if you’re considering doing it, so that I get your referral.
(See also freeflatscreens.com)
