Life and times of a webgeek
Archive for February, 2004
The Battle for Wesnoth
Feb 27th
This week’s friday fun link is The Battle for Wesnoth, a free, cross platform strategy game that’s most similar to the older Warlords games. If you loved Warlords I or II on the old os 7 era macs, chances are you’ll like this. Note that the graphics are equivalent to those of the older Mac era too, so you need to look beyond the visuals a bit, but the gameplay is solid fun and it’s got cross platform networking built in too. Anyone think they can take me?
Remember – you saw it here first
Feb 26th
Something’s put me in a whimsical mood of late. I keep stumbling across oddball stuff that makes me laugh. Imagine a pogo stick that lets you launch yourself 5-6 feet in the air. No joke. You’ll be able to buy one soon enough, and shortly after you’ll be hearing about the wrongful death lawsuits on the evening news 
Seriously though, depending on how much these end up costing I would consider getting one. The concept sounds like an absolute blast. Who wouldn’t want to bound down the street in 6 foot high hops?
Get behind the EFF
Feb 26th
There’s a short piece over on wired about an EFF proposal to handle the legality of file sharing. It’s a basic system I’ve proposed before – have all ISP customers pay (or opt to pay in this case) a small monthly fee, in return for which they can file share to their heart’s content. The money goes into a pool that’s payed out to the artists on the basis of popularity. I love this idea. I think it neatly handles the issue of compensating the artists, it sidesteps the middlemen (the big music companies) and it would enable a broader and more diverse sharing environment as the small indie artists could start to actually earn money, whereas right now they’re basically locked out of the music industry. Plus it emulates a model that’s already known to work, ie Canada where a large surtax is paid on recordable media to compensate the industry for the music you’re presumably copying.
Another item for the geek lust file – killer headphones
Feb 26th
So I am just starting to emerge from a post-christmas state of being profoundly broke, thanks in part to the recent Waynflete presentation and a host of ebay auctions I held. Of course this means I’m starting to eye toys for myself again. Today I’m thinking I really want a set of these killer headphones, the ER-6′s from Etymotic Research. Everyone who has a pair raves about them, and I sit in my office 6-8 hours a day listening to tunes on headphones and wishing they did a better job of noise blocking. My birthday is coming up and between now and then I’ll be picking something out for myself – this is the first candidate.
Did you score your ‘free’ $20?
Feb 25th
A little over a year ago I pointed out that if you registered you would be entitled to as much as a $20 rebate as part of a lawsuit settlement dealing with price fixing in the music industry. You did pay attention and register, right? I got my check in the mail on Monday. Unfortunately it was for only $13.86 because of the number of people that did register for compensation. I’m thinking I will donate the money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the EFF) so they can spend it defending our rights against the predations of industry groups like the RIAA. I urge you to consider doing the same, assuming you did register and got your rebate.
Freaky fun link – geek oragami
Feb 25th
Check out this awesome collection of blueprints for animated models you can make out of paper and paperboard. While these cost money, they’re really very cheap and they’re sure to make any kid under 10 giggle when they see them.
When Dave talks, people listen
Feb 25th
Well, at least if the people in question are the history faculty at the Waynflete Private High School in Portland. I participated in a professional development day they held for their staff on Monday as part of a ‘No Child Left Behind’ grant they got. All in all it went really well. If you’re interested you can go to my homepage or to waynlfete.blogdns.com to see an overview of the presentation and links to various related resources, including several that you can actually play around with. Those that are interested are encouraged to check out the Wiki, since I plan to bring one online here.
Of course the best part was my fee, I was paid $250 for my participation and there’s a possibility that more consulting work will emerge from this. It’s interesting, I used to do a lot of consulting back when I made a lot less money than I do now, and I grew to hate it. But back then I was doing mainly desktop tech support and website consulting. I liked the preparation for and process of giving the presentation a lot better. I guess it’s mostly because I have a passion for the material and I enjoy playing around with it and showing folks how it works, whereas with the tech support stuff was just a means to an end, it was about the money and not about the material.
Dave’s place about to get a little wierd looking
Feb 19th
This Monday I have a speaking engagement at the Waynflete school. They’re paying me to come talk to their history department about ways to use technology in education as part of a grant they got. As part of that presentation I’ll be using a lot of different web-based resources, some of which will be installed on Dave’s Place. While the weblog isn’t going away, the links to it from the homepage will be, and the homepage is going to look radically different. I’ll be leaving that page in place for at least a couple of weeks so the teachers attending the presentation can refer back to it for links and so on. So… if you haven’t already done so, bookmark the weblog, or subscribe to the RSS feed, because you won’t be able to find it from the homepage starting shortly.
I really need to re-learn how to install virtual hosts in Apache. Sigh. I knew this stuff 4-5 years ago.
Once again, a warning to stop using Internet Explorer
Feb 19th
It must get tiresome listening to me ramble on repeatedly about the dangers of using Internet Explorer. But man, once again there is a critical flaw in the code that could compromise your machine if you’re running IE. This one is preposterously dangerous – visit a website with a specially created image on the webpage and BAM, your box is compromised. Folks….go get whatever your favorite flavor of mozilla is and abandon IE. There are more attacks to come along the lines of this exploit too – the leak of MS’s source code opens up a world of potential exploits.
Specifics, in case you can’t be bothered to read the article I’ve linked to – if you’re running IE 5, your machine is vulnerable. If you won’t switch to Mozilla, at least upgrade to IE 6 using Windows Update.
Changes to the site
Feb 15th
I made a bunch of changes over the weekend to this site. The most visible is the new icon in the URL bar, which you may need to clear your cache to see. It was time for a matching color scheme The icon is courtesy of Jesse. I also fixed the comment system so that it no longer uses popups, and I eradicated the last tables in use for presentation in the site. It still isn’t quite validating, I’ll get to that eventually. Oh and I fixed the line heights so headlines aren’t running into each other. Lastly, I upgraded MT to the latest version.
Anyway the point of this post is, if you see something broken let me know so I can fix it.
New gallery posted
Feb 14th
I spent some time looking through photos I’ve taken over the past several months and put together a new image gallery out of them. Lots of misc. stuff, the most interesting are the various shots of coastal maine and of the ultra-foggy mountain climb Andrew and I did in October of 2003, but there’s a random smattering of other subjects as well. Use the gallery link at the top of the page to check it out.
Not one but two xcom clones
Feb 14th
If I had to pick my top 5 games of all time, the original x-com would definitely be in there. Sadly, after the demise of Microprose the license has been horrendously mismanaged and there hasn’t been a good x-com game since the first sequel. There have been a couple of commercial games that aspired to emulate x-com but none have been particularly good, Jagged Alliance 2 being the lone exception. Tonight I stumbled across not 1 but 3 promising looking efforts to recreate x-com for the modern age:
- ufo 2000 takes the media from the original game and has made a multiplayer version of the tactical combat engine from the original game. This looks very promising and I would love to play against someone. It’s open source and comes precompiled for Windows, dunno if someone has gotten it going on Macs but the linux client works.
- Project Xenocide aims to recreate the entire x-com experience from scratch, geoscape, research tree, tactical combat, craft interceptions, everything. They’re hoping to ship by the end of this year and what they have so far looks great
- Last and in some ways most impressive, UFO – Alien Invasion is based on the quake II source code from Id Software. It’s the most impressive looking of these efforts by far, and has a team working on it that have previously completed at least one project. The only downside is that so far they haven’t added destructable terrain, though there is some hope they will in a future release. If you’re going to check out just one of these though, this is the one to scope out now, it’s the most playable 1 player experience
I should mention that the original developers of x-com went on to make a play by email game called laser squad nemesis that has a good implementation of a similar tactical combat engine. It’s missing a lot of things from the original x-com, but it’s been around for a couple of years now and they’ve been steadily adding features. Soon it will have a solo game and elevation levels, and at that point, I’ll be buying.
Face the awesome power of the Buttlord!
Feb 14th
Ever catch a portion of an episode of DragonBall Z while channel surfing and wonder who the hell enjoys that show? I mean, I guess I could enjoy it if I was say 10 years old. Maybe. Anyway, tonight I stumbled across an excellent, profane parody which, if you’re familiar with the show, you should definitely check out. It’s hand drawn comic strips, no need for plugins or anything fancy.
Brief lesson in the virtue of Bit torrent
Feb 12th
I’ve been talking about bit torrent for a while now. It’s replaced ftp and http downloads for me in most contexts these days, but I’ve had a hard time convincing folks to actually try it out. Last night I conducted a little experiment the results of which should help convince folks they should be using torrents. Epic released the demo of Unreal Tournament 2004 yesterday and half the internet was trying to score a copy. I logged into my gamespy account and got myself in line in the fileplanet que to download the demo. Meanwhile I fired up Azureus and got it going from a torrent on filerush . Long story short, I had the demo on my hard drive and ready to install 15 minutes before my turn had come up in the que at fileplanet. If that’s not enough to convince folks to give torrents a try I don’t know what is.
Desktop wikis – brilliant software
Feb 11th
I’ve mentioned several times how fond I am of wikis these days. We’ve run several successfuly at work, including my favorite, the romantic audiences project, and I’ve been promising for at least a year to get one up and running here on daves-place (which I still promise…actually there are three running at present, I just haven’t decided which one to go with). Anyway for work I’ve been investigating wiki engines again and in the course of doing so stumbled upon several desktop wiki software packages. In a word, they’re brilliant. I encourage all you pc users to go check out wikipad. Mac users, give voodoopad. In either case what you’ll get is a very easy to use, infinitely flexible desktop database/to do list/documentation system/place to store all the crap that you need to remember that you can never seem to actually remember.
These suffer in comparison to actual server-based wikis in that they’re tied to your desktop of course, so the information doesn’t follow you around the way it does in a real wiki, and niter of them has a complete feature set when compared to some of the best wiki engines. But give them a try, it’s a fantastic way to get an introduction to the concept and play around with one.
The new firebird is out
Feb 9th
The newly forged ‘Firefox (the browser formerly known as firebird) is out. Go get yourself a copy, or even better, use bit torrent to get it faster as the mirrors are all saturated while everyone tries to score a copy.
Thunderbird has alse been upgraded. I’ve been using the last release for a couple of months and am generally pretty happy with it; it’s worth a look if you’re not digging your current email client.
Are you a N.A.D.D.?
Feb 9th
Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder. Yep, I have it in spades. Not sure if you suffer from it too? Read all about it and draw your own conclusions. My favorite quote “You enjoy the content fire hose.’ Yep, that’s me, and proud of it
The title of world’s greatest free game…
Feb 8th
…goes to a a rogue-like of course (lately I’m most partial to T.O.M.E. but you can pick from among dozens – ADOM, Angband and Zangband are all particularly good). But that’s not what I want to mention with this post. I stumbled across a very cool 3d action game called Neverball. If you’ve played Super Monkey Ball on one of the various platforms that support it you’ll be immediately familiar with the gameplay (or if you knew someone who had one of those old Labyrinth table games) – you must tilt the playing surface such that a ball that rests on it makes its way to the exit, picking up bonus objects and avoiding various hazards as you do so. This is amazingly polished for a free game. Don’t be put off by the spartan webpage design, the game is great fun and well worth the small download. The early version of a minigolf game based on the same engine is worth grabbing too. These are available for Mac, PC and Linux so pick your version and get rolling.
The friday chuckle – cpu as wedding cake
Feb 6th
This week’s silly friday post comes courtesy of an old friend who happened across my site and sent along this happy story of a lovelorn geek and his quest to marry the girl of his dreams. Geek that he is, of course he looked to technology for the solution. Me? I think I would have just bent the knee and offered the ring, seems like a lot less trouble, and definitely less support issues to contend with
What price silence?
Feb 6th
It’s likely that you have at least one CD in your collection that has a track on it that consists of nothing but silence. Sometimes artists use silent tracks as ‘spacers’ to hide a track at the very end of the CD. Anyway in today’s world of instantly downloadable tunes and digital rights management, you can actually find yourself in the surreal position of having paid 99 cents for a downloaded track that has nothing in it. Amused by this, the folks at appleturns.com have compiled a list of the silent tracks one can download from the itunes music store. They also point out a side benefit – you can play these at maximum volume without fear of blowing your speakers or annoying your neighbors
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