In the second level of Doom 3, “Administration” (just as you arrive at the Alpha Labs), you come across a PDA (as you do frequently). One of his emails on the PDA is a spam. The website it mentions exists, and even provides you with a cabinet code. That’s genius. I haven’t looked for the cabinet much, but I’ll have to remember to try it.
The goal: Running a marathon before my 30th birthday. The next step: A 10k. The New York Road Runners call the 10k the “perfect racing distance for most runners”. The NYC Marathon training schedule for first-time marathoners might be a good place to start, even if I’m not looking at an actual 26-miler until next October at the very earliest possible.
The Darien Road Race would be a good one to run (trying to stay in the running-for-charity theme), but I don’t think I’d be ready for that by next weekend.
Katy, M, Nomad, and I — in that order — ran a 5k road race this morning. Congrats to Katy for getting 49th place, placing her in the top half of the finishers!
Update 09-15: Here are our results:
| Rank | Name | Time | Pace/mi |
|---|---|---|---|
| 49 | Katy | 24:31 | 7:54 |
| 69 | M | 26:38 | 8:35 |
| 75 | Nomad | 27:25 | 8:50 |
| 97 | Logan (me) | 32:36 | 10:30 |
| Full results | |||
Amail, Bmail, Cmail, Dmail, Email, Fmail, Gmail, Hmail, Imail, Jmail, Kmail, Lmail, Mmail, Nmail, Omail, Pmail, Qmail, Rmail, Smail, Tmail, Umail, Vmail, Wmail, Xmail, Ymail, and Zmail
It’s old, but this quote from Gabe Newell is pretty interesting. “We’re doing [the CS:Source Beta] before we RC Half-Life 2 to give us time to fix any issues that surface … We also get information back from the engine when it crashes … So don’t think of this as a CS:Source beta as much as it is a Source engine configuration and compatibility test.”
Leave it to Wikipedia to teach me a ridiculous amount of stuff about a simple thing: in this case a fricken power plug.
In January 2001, shortly before his Inauguration, The Onion published an article called “Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over’”. Little did we know how true the details of what was meant to be satire would be.
Wow. Listen to George W. Bush cover U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”.
I’ve ranted a couple times recently about how tantalizing interactive physics — like that seen in Doom3 and Half-Life 2 — is. True full interaction is the next big step in gaming, like the jump from Duke Nukem’s 2½D to Quake2’s 3D. The day I can (in-game) set a house on fire with an RPG, or level any wall (made of an appropriately destructible material) with a gattling gun will be a good day.
I’ve heard that Red Faction, released three years ago, had something the marketrons called Geo-mod. Anyone play this game? I’d like to get my hands on it..
The Geiger Counter on Planet Half-Life isn't archived or permalinked, but it's got a good discussion of the current plan:
Valve has announced that they will be delivering an RC (release candidate) to Vivendi around the 15th of this month. That does not mean that HL2 will be out immediately thereafter. Vivendi will still have to approve the RC, a process that could take another two or three weeks, depending on their QA department and how fit the RC is to be released. If it were rejected, Valve would have to cook up another one and submit that for approval. Once an RC is approved, we should get a "gone gold" announcement. Those of you who preloaded HL2 and intend to buy it online would *may* be allowed to purchase it shortly afterward and start playing it once you've downloaded the last few files (I'm still not certain whether Valve contractually obliged to wait until it's on the shelves - I don't have Fragmaster's psychic spy network). For those of you still intending to buy a physical copy, it would be at least another few weeks before the game hit the shelves; duplication, packaging and shipping take a while.
The "RC on September 15" information comes from this Gamespot story.
Three years ago, NASA launched the Genesis mission. The satellite spent more than 1000 days orbiting the sun, collecting particles that are part of the solar wind. By the time the return capsule enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it will be travelling twenty-five thousand miles per hour. Then it will be caught, in midair, by a helicopter.
All of this to bring less than a half of a milligram of stellar matter to the ground.
Update 09-08: The parachute (that I forgot to mention was supposed to open during reentry, before the probe was caught by the helicopter) failed to open, and the Genesis return capsule slammed into the ground. Breaking news stories on Google News.
Jeopardy is showing new episodes again, and Ken Jennings has won show number 39 in a row. My favorite among some KenJen statistics: The last time that Final Jeopardy was mathematically necessary (i.e. the last time Ken did not have more than double the score of the next-best contestant) was June 29.
Update, 09-08: Huge KenJen spoiler.
Lots of numbers are special. 2 is the only even prime. 28 is perfect. And if you’re patient and know a lot of esoteric mathematics, you can find something special about every number.
There’s something big wrong with plutor.org right now. Things aren’t rebuilding right, and some templates got reverted weirdly, and there are all sorts of other issues probably related to the Moveable Type update I did last week. I’m going to do an export-and-clean sometime this week to fix it. Please be patient.
M, Mari, Chris, Nomad, and I just got back from our trip to the family camp in Maine. It was a fun time, but it was pretty dang chilly all weekend. Here’s a few of the highlight photos.
Update 09-08: Chris has posted a few of his pictures from the trip, including their visit to Boothbay and Popham Friday morning.
I just upgraded Moveable Type to version 3.1. The upgrade borked because Postgres 7.2.1 doesn’t support “ALTER TABLE foo ALTER COLUMN bar SET NOT NULL”. I had to do some jimmying by hand, and now I’m getting strange errors in strange places. Let me know by reply or by email if you see anything seriously sketchy.
Only one article so far, but I plan on following this Hacking Congress column. I’m quite interested in statistics and large data sets and screenscraping. Like I needed to tell you.
This is one of the few sci-fi short stories that really sticks out in my mind: The Nine Billion Names of God, by Arthur C. Clarke.
Despite the reaction this will provoke from Chris, I will take this opportunity to go off on a tangent on Sir Arthur (probably best known for writing the 2001/2010/2061/3001: A Space Odyssey series). Although I love that short story, and 2001 was pure genious (more elaborate than the movie, and really shines a bright searchlight on Kubrick’s obfuscations), most of his other stuff that I’ve read was really dismal. The book that he’s said he’s most proud of — Childhood’s End — ended about a hundred pages before the back cover.
Not only do I have dreams like Roast Beef’s in today’s Achewood (substituting ‘Google’ for ‘Yahoo’), but in fact the whole story feels like Onstad is stalking me.
The only game I wish I coulda tried at our LAN Party last weekend was Tribes: Vengeance. I gave the original Tribes a chance (in fact too many chances, probably, considering the weight I put on Freshman year), and I tried to give Tribes 2 a chance (although my computer wasn’t quite up to it). I will track down the source of the problems, I swear it.
Reminds me of this classic.
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.
Around the the end of January, I was doing some reading for work on the Document Object Model (DOM). The DOM (ideally) allows JavaScript to access and modify any element in an HTML document in a heirarchical Object-Oriented fashion (well, as OO as Javascript can ever be). The more I read about what was possible, the more I realized that I could create a totally interactive application written in merely HTML and JavaScript.
Then I remembered what I think is the most useful JavaScript feature in existance: asyncronous HTTP requests using the XMLHTTP object for Internet Explorer or the XMLHttpRequest object in Mozilla-based browsers. Using this object and a little server-side scripting, I could not only keep important logic and large files like dictionaries on the server, but I could also create multiplayer (potentially massively multiplayer) interactive online games that required nothing but a modern browser.
Think about PopCap, Pogo, Yahoo Games, and MSN Games. Every single one of the games on these sites could be done without requiring a single plugin. I thought about it, and I decided to set about demonstrating it. (It was only after this game was mostly completed that I noticed SSCrabble. While it uses similar client-side scripting techniques, it lacks the multiplayer functionality entirely, which is too bad.)
WEBoggle is primarily HTML and JavaScript. There’s fewer than 100 server-side lines of Perl, and a 90,000 word dictionary.
All WEBoggle requires is either Internet Explorer 5 or newer, or a Mozilla-based browser like Mozilla, Firebird or Galeon. (Internet Explorer 4 should work, but I’ve never tried it.). There are a few caveats, and good reasons why other common browsers like Opera do not work, but those are all listed in the Bugs section below. Also, your browser must accept cookies. Sorry.
Cheating in an online game is an inherent problem. I’ve worked as hard as I could in order to keep important scoring logic server-side in WEBoggle. I’m only human, and it’s possible that I’ve missed something and it’s possible to modify the JavaScript source code so that it submits invalid words and they get erroneously scored.
A much easier way to cheat, however, is to write a script to give you all of the words that can be found on the board. I could have made it more difficult to do this, but as long as the letters are legible to the player, you could simply type them into a command line script that would then give you a list of words to type back into the game. There was simply no way to prevent this. (I wrote such a script in about 60 seconds, so if you’re considering it, your effort won’t make you “the first”. I was able to get more than 50 points consistantly.)
I just hope that everyone who plays this game remembers that cheating is no fun, not for you, and not for anyone with whom you’re playing..
Once WEBoggle started generating several thousand player-games per day, it started interfering with the operation of the sites on my webhost. I took it down until I could make it more efficient, and a guy named Evan Simpson came forward with an offer to mirror it for the time being.
As anyone who’s seen my Projects listing will agree, I have a short attention span. Updating WEBoggle kind of fell off my radar, and I told Evan that he was in charge. He’s done far more than I ever planned or expected: “missing words” submissions, two simultaneous games (one of which is Big Boggle), the ability to rotate the board, and a list of “words that nobody found” with each round.
I’d like to thank everyone who helped me test WEBoggle and suggested stupid improvements: BrainiACK, Nomad, Splatta, Kazy, and especially M. Also, all the people who donated money through Paypal and posted links to WEBoggle on their blogs. At its height, more than 6000 person-games were being played every day. And a thousand thanks to Evan Simpson for mirroring and then improving the game.
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.
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.
Woman’s skin grows over wedding ring. Massive kidneys. Note: Neither of these links are for the weak.
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.”
