Someone has been considerate enough to put a flash-powered working World of Warcraft demo online. Realistic!

A full list of G-Man sightings in Half-Life 2. I can’t believe I’ve missed so many; I think I’ve seen him twice.

Update 19:00 - I finished the game. Spoilers inside.

The ending was quite abrupt, but when I think about it, a "last guy" is so inappropriate. It'd make the game feel like a game. The best thing about it was that it was so immersive. No cut scenes and load times broken up to keep them to as short as possible. I look forward to the inevitable Gearbox expansions and Half-Life 3.

The super gravity gun and the last chapter or two of the game were absolutely amazing. The game absolutely got better as it went on.

Next step, see how far I can get in difficult, and wait for the SDK release.

How to eat sushi. You may wonder why this is really necessary, but you must remember that sushi eating (and the art of making it) goes back to the time of the samurai. The rituals are detailed and wonderful, and this howto makes me want to visit Japan. Bonus: Includes a section on fugu!

The most recent news post for Steam contains this gem:

Next week we will be releasing the Source SDK, along with a surprise for the community.

The New York marathon did a fantastic job with the photos. You can search by runner name or bib number. For example, here are the photos for Jeff, including several of him crossing the finish line.

They clearly had some sort of automated system set up, likely connected to the wireless dongle that the runners had to wear on their shoes. The only way this could be improved, IMHO, is if the individual pages for the photos indicated the time the photo was taken, the distance the person had run, and maybe even a GPS location.

The photo prices, however, are ridiculous. The best value might be the $90 photo CD, but only if you were hypothetically very happy about the photos taken of you.

As of this morning, I am now using Remote Clip to synchronize the clipboards on my SunBlade 100 desktop (running Solaris 10) and my IBM T40 laptop (Windows XP). It’s got exactly the feature set I always wanted in ClipCopy, and since I don’t suffer from NIH syndrome, I have no problems abandoning the latter for the former.

The Adventures of Spelling the Vacuum. What the hell, folks? My life is like a Douglas Adams novel.

IBM’s monthly teaser, Ponder This, seems like fun. Part 1 of November’s only took me about 5 minutes and 66 characters of Perl. Part 2 is a little more analytical. I’ll work on it at lunch.

Stephen Spielberg will be filming a part of the War of the Worlds remake in my home town of Naugatuck sometime before Christmas. I’ll have to keep my eyes open for calls for extras. Nevermind, this article says “extras will not be needed for the scene shot in Naugatuck”. Oh well.

Mathowie has turned MetaFilter signups back on, for a $5 one-time fee. Totally worth it. I hope the MeFi stats get updated, or Matt announces how many new signups there were today. I’m user #17646.

Update 11-19: Matt got enough signups to pay for a full year of webhosting! My calculations show roughly 1200 new users in the last 24 hours, although there are certainly people who bailed between signup and donate in that count.

First thoughts on Half-Life 2:

1. Man am I glad I finally upgraded my computer.
2. More importantly, I'm glad I upgraded my computer a couple months ago, so that I had time to freshen-up my FPS skills.
3. The graphics, although amazing, don't really represent any giant leap forward. I'm still interested in trying the game out on a lower-powered machine (my new laptop, perhaps), since that may demonstrate the flexibility of the engine. But when you compare it to Doom 3 and Far Cry, they're visually all very comparable.
4. The physics engine on the other hand is far better done than I was expecting. It's so amazingly pervasive. My single complaint is that you can't use the gravity gun (even the 'push' mode) on corpses.
5. I'm three or four hours in (past Ravenholm, driving down the coast in a dune buggy), and I'm not 100% clear on what the story is. What the hell am I doing? I mean, I know my current task, which I won't expand on for fears of spoilering, but I don't know the whole point of what I'm doing in Half-Life-land.
6. On the other hand, that doesn't keep it from being a ridiculously fun game.

I have other thoughts, but they aren't important. This game is great. Steam worked perfectly. I wonder when the first mods will start coming out..

Imagine going to see a Broadway play, and discovering that it was based on your own life. This true story launches us into a sketchy world of ownership, idea-ness, and copyrights, and Malcolm Gladwell isn’t sure on which side of the argument he stands.

Fox is planning on creating twenty-four one-minute shorts based on characters from 24 for display on cellphones. I don’t have a phone capable of playing videos, but it would be mad cool. They’d make good TV advertisements, too, I bet.

Also: Mark your calendars. Fox has scheduled the two-hour premiere for Sunday 9 January at 8pm (or whenever the football game ends). Episode 2 is the next night at 9, in the show’s new timeslot.

RealPlayer is a steaming pile. I didn’t want to install it on my computer unless I absolutely positively had to, but NPR archives are all in streaming Real audio format. So I set about trying to be able to play Real audio and video with some sort of spamware-, spyware- and uglyware-free solution. Here’s how I did it:

Real Alternative. This contains the codecs needed to decode the Real file formats. If you don’t mind Media Player Classic, make sure you select it during the Real Alternative install, and you’re done.

If you prefer Winamp (like me), don’t install MPC. Get Tara’s Real Audio Plugin for Winamp. You’ll need to close and restart Winamp for it to recognize the new plugin, and it should even prompt you to associate itself with the proper file types.

Just before Halloween, the Mars Rovers silently passed the 50,000-image milestone. They have now sent back twice as many pictures as the three previous Mars missions combined. With another five months of their six month extension to go, they may be able to double that.

Oh My God It Burns, a humorous science experiement. Can a Brita filter turn vile cheap vodka into Ketel One™? This is the ideal science experiment. Repeatable, organized, funny, and most importantly the scienticians get drunk!

What’s the earliest news event that you can recall when it occurred? For me, it was the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle. In fact, I remember being afraid of pieces falling on me (even though I lived in Colorado at the time). The earliest political event I remember is the the fall of the Berlin Wall fifteen years ago today.

More on America’s non-existant red/blue divide: a fascinating analysis of Election result maps and cartograms.

Flickr is fun, and the tag system is perfectly done. For example, check out the photos tagged with marathon.

Some other good photos at amitgupta.com.

There are a lot of questions about this, but very few adequate answers available on Google. Solaris has a feature called “lofs” that allows you to mount some directory (say /bigvolume/foo) somewhere else (say /bar). The quick response is “duh, symlinks”, but if you want /bar to be read-only, or noexec, or nosuid, or some other uber-secure setting, this allows you to do it. Also, since chroot() breaks symlinks that point outside the new root, this can be used to simplify setting up chroot jails.

Since kernel 2.4, Linux has had support for mount binds (synonymous to Solaris' lofs), and here’s how to do it.

Command to mount /bigvolume/foo under bar:

# mount –bind /bigvolume/foo /bar

If there are other filesystems mounted under /bigvolume/foo, they’ll be ignored. To get them bound also, you’ll need to use –rbind instead of –bind. You can add -o and any options (like noexec, etc.) to the command.

To make this bind occur automagically on reboot, add the following to /etc/fstab:

/bigvolume/foo /bar none bind 0 0

Add any options after “bind” and a comma as you would normally.

New York City has chosen new street lights. I like them.

I’ve mentioned them before, but after Waxy Links mentioned another recent conquest, I’ve been revisiting the Improv Everywhere website. Seriously, some of the things they’ve done are brilliant. My favorites so far: the Moebius and synchronized swimming.

Gamestop has stopped taking pre-orders for the Nintendo DS because they won’t have enough units at launch. EBGames is warning that they will likely have to do the same thing. A launch of 300,000 units doesn’t seem like a lot, but 4 million in four months will roughly match the GBA and GBA SP sales.

It’s easy to think of the country in Red states and Blue states, especially for those of us who are a little bitter about the results of the election. But the truth of the matter is that it’s really not that clear-cut.

Update 11-05: Someone made a county-by-county version of the map , too.

Looking for a new cellphone, with lots of extra features and huge nerd cred? Don’t want to spend a lot of money? Well, if you buy a T-Mobile Sidekick II from Amazon before Nov 17 and sign up for a $40-a-month plan, it’ll be free, even including shipping. I kinda wish work didn’t give me a phone.

This post is a test of easy Amazon links and my new Amazon Associates account.