Check out this awesome set of instructions for navigating your way out of phone tree hell and to a human being. Unfortunately my primary bank (Key) isn’t on the list, but paypal, ebay, and visa all are as well as tons of others. Next time you’re dreading that 20 minute exercise in frustration that is trying to reach a human being at a company, check this list first, your blood pressure will thank you.

I found a handy little resource today - check out html-kit’s favicon generator - simply upload a pic to their site and they’ll give you back the pic reformatted as a favicon. I finally got a placeholder icon up today thanks to this site. Free, simple as pie, and it works as advertised.

Per repeated requests from various family members, I’ve put my Christmas list together, you can view it here:

http://www.metamusing.net/weblog/christmas-2005-wishlist/

I’ll get a link in the sidebar so you don’t lose track of it, at some point. Also remember you can always search for it.

I’m off from work for a couple of days and working on this website, meaning things could get a little wonky here. So far I’ve taken care of a number of things, including upgrading from gallery to gallery2. I’ve said it a number of times - gallery is one of the finest open source projects around. While the upgrade process wasn’t quite as smooth as some of my earlier 1.x upgrades, in the end I managed it and it took me less than two hours. This means once again some image gallery links will be a bit of a mess, short term. If you find something amiss, let me know and I’ll fix it.

I’ve also got another potential candidate for kick ass open source project, gregarius. I’ll write more about it and link to my instance once I’ve got it fully configured. So far so great though.

I also got sitebar up and running again, once I’ve finished configuring it I’ll link to my instance of that as well.

I’ll post more info as I continue working on things.

Gothic 2 is one of the best role playing games ever made. It’s the spiritual successor to games like Ultima Underworld and System Shock. It features a huge 3d world to explore, a compelling plot, tons of spoken dialog, an action oriented (as opposed to turn based) combat system, and 10’s of hours of gameplay. Unfortunately due to it being an import and its unconventional control scheme, neither it nor its prequel (also a superb game) reached the mainstream audience it deserved in the US. This led to the expansion pak for the game, Night of the Raven, never getting a release in the US. Until now that is. Just in time for Christmas, Gothic 2 Gold has come out and includes both the original game and the expansion pak for only $15.00 at Amazon or $20 elsewhere. You can’t get more for your gaming dollar than this - anyone who has a pc and is a fan of rpgs should be all over this deal. I’ve linked to the amazon entry for it, though you can also find it at ebworld and at amazon.ca if you search for it.

I linked to a desktop version of the superb wiki engine moinmoin for the mac some time ago. I noticed today that this is now also available for the PC. If you’re looking to experiment with wikis after hearing me babble about them endlessly over the past couple of years, this is one of the easiest ways to go about it, and one of the best. Moinmoin ranks up there amongst the best of the available wiki engines - it’s super featureful, well thought out, and relatively easy to use. It doesn’t get any easier to get your own knowledgebase going on your machine.

I’ve written about synergy2 a couple of times here, most recently back in may of this year. It’s a fantastic little utility that allows you to use the same keyboard and mouse across multiple computers. I use it on almost every machine I own, windows mac and linux. It can be a bit of a bear to setup though, especially for long time mac users who faint at the thought of having to edit a text file to configure an application. Today I happened across SynergyOSX, a handy little GUI to help you configure Synergy2 on macs. If you’ve previously taken a look at it but were put off by the command line interface, check this out. Synergy2 is awesome if you’ve got more than one computer sitting on your desk.

Today I learned a lesson that made me feel pretty foolish. I’ve been working towards practicing what I preach, abandoning long-used commercial software packages like photoshop and word for open source alternatives. I’ll get around to writing about that eventually. I figured the same should apply to file formats, so when I redesigned my site I started using .png instead of jpeg files. This is why the header graphics were taking so long to load - some of them were as large as 320k. This was driving me nuts and several of you have commented on it. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how best to optimize PNG files, never bothering to read any actual documentation of course, and never making any significant headway. I tried a variety of tools on mac, win32 and linux (pngout.exe, AdvanceComp, optiPNG, PNGCRUSH, plus several others), all without much luck - at best I was shaving a few k of the files, not the 30-50% reduction I was hoping to see. Finally I headed over to wikipedia and read up on the png file format and discovered I was operating under a misapprehension the entire time. PNG is for replacing GIFs, not jpegs. 10 minutes later I had a collection of header graphics that were literally 1/10th their previous size. So. Apologies for the crappy website performance, it’s fixed now. At least some of you may find the links to the png optimization tools useful, if you’re not already on a CS version of photoshop any of the above will do a superior job optimizing your pngs, and most of them have compiled binaries for multiple operating systems, as well as GUI’s.

I’ve mentioned before how much I dislike MacOSX’s metadata files and how it writes them everywhere by default, including to almost every single directory users touch on servers I manage. It’s my sincere wish Apple would address this themselves, but given that the problem has existed for years it seems unlikely. Meanwhile, enter another solution - BlueHarvest. It’s a control panel for OSX which allows you to disable the creation of DS_Store files on a per location basis, remove existing files, and change the default permission profiles assigned to them. Do the world’s networks a favor, mac users, and install this and turn of creation of metadata files for anything but the volumes you own, it won’t cost you anything and the world’s network admins will thank you.

OK here’s another cool human-powered vehicle to consider for AGCW next year, or for the camping trip with the families especially - a giant inflatable human hamster ball. Runs about $205 US, but it’s only available in Australia at the moment. This is the least expensive of all the ones I’ve linked to so far. The site has a bunch of other cool water toys, like for example the Sumo Tube. Who’s brave enough to clamber inside that thing.

[via engadget]

So I mentioned the other day about how a random passer-by popped into my photo gallery and left unkind comments on one of the pics. For whatever reason she left her real name and city, so tonight while I was playing WoW during idle moments I googled her. Talk about karma - it appears that about 3 months after she left her comments, she died. I can’t be certain it’s the same woman, but same name, same city, within 3 months, and a relatively uncommon name. Seems likely to have been her.

Today’s example - bookmark tags, a firefox extension that lets you tag all your bookmarks. Who needs rigid hierarchical categories? Not you, after you’ve installed this. If you’re not already a del.icio.us user and care to experiment with tagging, this is a simple way to play around with it.

[via downloadsquad]

I’ve been writing about how appealing I find Ruby and especially Ruby on Rails these days. We’ve struggled at both my current job and my last position in terms of what platform/s we develop on. Bowdoin was largely a perl shop with some flash in the mix; Skidmore is, unbelievably, still trying to tell everyone it’s Cold Fusion or nothing. (fortunately I’m able to bypass all that). Meanwhile though as I imagine other positions I might move to in the future and what toolsets I’d focus on, Ruby is tops on my list. At Bowdoin there were several architecture astronauts who were trying to force us into an all-Java development model. This was largely an effort to take control of the college’s web communications by the technical staff and I argued against this while I was there. I’m not sure where they’re at with it now. Anyway I got to musing on this today after running across an onjava.com interview with James Tate, the author of Beyond Java. There’s a great quote:

There are developers that can’t stomach learning servlets, Spring, XML, Hibernate, Struts and then some UI glue frameworks. They’re going to be unleashed in Rails.

He’s describing me. My first exposure to a java development framework was the cocoon project. I mean no offense to the developers, but man, I developed a life long aversion to the complexity of these frameworks from that project. We had two really smart sys admins working for us during my time with Cocoon and we still struggled with it. It’s not that there’s something wrong with Cocoon specifically, it’s that the amount of grunt work required to implement projects using frameworks of this nature is so onerous as to drive me to anything that enables me to avoid 700 line xml configuration files. I’m hardly an architecture astronaut - my basic philosophy is to focus on results, and my dabblings with rails thus far are showing me that rails is going to get me to the results even faster.

As if anyone needed it - the guardian has posted a poll designed to uncover the top 20 geek novels, and as of now I’ve read 18 of the top 20, I’m missing only Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks and Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham. I just read my first Banks novel earlier this year, The Player of Games, and really enjoyed it, so I’m adding Phlebas to my wishlist. I’d never heard of Trouble with Lichen before and Amazon doesn’t seem to have much info on it.

In terms of which of those top 20 books I’d name as my personal favorite, I’d have to go with:

Dune

Though it’s a pretty tough call - Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Watchmen and Cryptonomicon are all killer books that I really enjoyed.

I honestly have no idea if this is all going to work out as this current.boom seems to think it is, but man, it really is the second coming of client-server. Today’s example? A flowchart engine built in flash from gliffy.com. They’re in beta and unfortunately not taking new accounts right now, but that link will give you a pretty good sense of what their service is about.

There’s a pretty good comment in the latest cringely column that touches on the core of this I think - he’s talking specifically about Microsoft when he says this:

1) Gates and Ozzie HUGELY over-estimate the role of advertising. This is intentional because it distracts with enthusiasm and plays into current Internet hype. Advertising alone will not be able to support these services, especially if Microsoft benefits from them only tangentially as Ozzie suggests. Remember that for Gates and Ballmer to be happy, Microsoft will have to maintain $2.5 billion per month in revenue and $1.5 billion per month in profit. That’s FIVE TIMES the size of Google without Google’s ad expertise or ad infrastructure. It simply won’t happen.

But the takeaway is - there’s not as much money in net advertising as there is in selling licensed software, not by a ginormous order of magnitude. I agree with Cringley, it’s hard to imagine Microsoft sustaining itself on this business. The question is, can all these smaller players like today’s example? Some of them, including Gliffy, seem to intend to upsell into paid services for some of this stuff, but at least as far as I can recall there’s not a ton of success with this model. Anyone know how many folks actually pay Yahoo for an enhanced email account, for example? Or Flickr? My sense is not a lot, and you’re basically dis-incented to do so because there’s always someone else with a better deal anyway. I’m seeing tons of cool applications coming out these days (Writely, Gliffy, Num Sum, and so on) but what I don’t see is the business model. It reminds me of the first dot.bomb, bigtime. Anyone seeing something I’m not here?

It’s sometimes hard to believe that my earliest truly memorable gaming experiences revolved around mono-color text. It may surprise folks that the form, interactive fiction, is still going strong. In fact there’s an annual competition and this year’s winners have just been announced. You can download them from the IF site, and you can also review this year’s submissions. I’ll confess, I rarely play these anymore, though I usually check out the contest results each year. While I’m hardly a graphics snob (I still play super nintendo games and arcade games I played in the 80’s, for example), I find I rarely have the time you need to devote to this form. It’s unfortunate, in that they’ve evolved and become rather sophisticated in style, evolving with their audience I guess. There’s an irony lurking here, in that I suspect these would actually appeal to a lot of folks who wouldn’t be caught dead with a PS2 controller in their hands. If the notion of interacting with a novel appeals to you, check these out and give one a try. The software is available for win32 and MacOS, and for most of the offerings there are ways to get them running under Linux as well.

Digicamreview has reviewed the Panasonic Lumix DMC LX1, the first consumer level 16×9 digital camera. I’m in the market for a new camera. My trusty canon a40 has been great but 2 megapixels doesn’t cut it anymore. This one is tempting - I shoot a lot of panoramas of the hikes I go on, and this thing would be fantastic for that, both in wide and tall mode - wide so I can take fewer shots per panorama, tall so I can capture more of the sky when I’m shooting the mountains I hike in. To be honest I would never have considered a panasonic until I saw this review. I’d been focusing on Canon and Pentax so far, Canon because they rule and Pentax because they have a decent submersible camera that’s fairly inexpensive. I can get a wide angle lens for several of the Canons I’ve been considering but it adds bulk to the camera and this time around I’m trying to get as light and small of a camera as I can. The review is generally positive, it’s main complaints are with the noise levels the camera produces and the fact that it’s relatively expensive for an 8MP camera. I’m adding it to the list of models to consider when I get around to buying a new camera this spring.

Of course wags will observe I basically still am, but check out this awesome inexpensive gocart project. Take two cheap cordless drills, add sanding discs to them, bolt them down onto a platform, add wheels, and you’ve got a gocart that controls like a tank. Add a tennis ball launcher to this and some protection for the occupant and you’ve got the best kid toy ever.

[via Make]

The latest version of one of if not the finest game series ever, Civilization IV, is on sale for the next 2 days at gogamer.com. I held off on buying it at first because early reviews were super positive but also mentioned a lot of bugs, and from the looks of things they simply rushed it out to get it out in time for Christmas. The developer has a decent track record of patching things post-release, so I figured I would hold out for a deal like this and pounce on it. Which I’ve done.

If you’re not familiar with the series, Civ IV has been around for a long time, roughly since ‘92, and versions of it have run on a number of operating systems over the years. It’s even run on some consoles. It’s a turn-based strategy game where you try and shepard your civilization from the dawn of time up through the near future, managing your citizen’s military strategy, economic, political, and philosophical development whilst competing with the other civilizations. I’ve had a version of it running on each of the computers I’ve owned basically continuously since my first copy for my Mac IIsi way back when. My favorite remains Civilization II - III added lots of eye candy and some helpful automation for your settlers and not a lot else. This time around they’ve again gone nuts with eye candy (civ moves to 3d) and completely refashioned the combat model - no longer will a horde of spearman sink your fleet of battleship, nor will your tanks fall to the cavalry of your opponent. It’s also completely extensible this time around - xml data files, all the art binaries exposed, and python for introducing new program logic. I can guarantee there will be some completely awesome mods for this engine in a year’s time - the folks over at Apolyton and elsewhere are already tearing the engine apart. Imagining that perfect lord of the rings strategy game you’ve always wished someone would make? I bet they’re already working on it.

Meanwhile as I mentioned the critics have basically loved the game and the new changes despite some reservations about bugs, and the first patch is due within a week or so. Gogamer has it for $37 shipped, which compares pretty nicely to the list price of $50. Here’s a box shot/link to amazon.com for more info if you’re interested:

If anyone else picks it up and would care to play some multiplayer, I’m game. I call dibs on the Romans, we’ll see if starting with written language is as useful as it was in previous versions.

I have a weakness for epic fantasy, borne of my mother’s decision to read the hobbit and then the entire lord of the rings trilogy to my sister and I over the course of our childhood. George RR Martin’s ‘A Song of Fire and Ice’ series is along with Steven Erikson’s Malazan series about as good as it gets these days in terms of this genre, and after a 5 year wait the latest volume in Martin’s series , A Feast for Crows, is out. Early reviews are sadly mixed, observing that the book is overlong and demonstrating a lack of good editorial advice, but I’m buying it nonetheless. Fortunately for fans, the next volume shouldn’t take nearly as long to arrive - Martin basically wrote himself into a 1000+ page corner and decided to re-edit and cut the massive tome into two volumes, so the 6th book in the series will supposedly come out this spring. We’ll see about that, but in the meantime there’s the current volume to enjoy. I’ll post a review once I’ve read it, though it will be a while. I’m currently wading through the latest Malazan book from Erikson (House of Chains) and my bet is I won’t touch another epic fantasy for a while. Don’t get me wrong, Erikson is great, but a single 1k page epic is enough for me for a while.

Full disclosure here - I’m testing integration of wordpress (my weblog software) and Amazon. Clicking on the link means I’ll get a small commission if you buy the book. I’m actually not trying to make any money here, I just find it convenient to have an easy and legal way to get product imagery into my weblog. For example: