Life and times of a webgeek
Archive for November, 2008
Is there anything broccoli can’t do?
Nov 19th
Broccoli is a superfood. Almost every week there’s another study pointing out some healthful benefit of eating it. I’ve been linking over to them fairly often. Today’s example is a study presented at a recent American Association for Cancer Research conference indicating broccoli may lower the cancer risk for current and former smokers.The lesson remains the same – eat your broccoli, raw or steamed (but don’t overcook it!), it’s fantastic for you.
What if WWII was a game on xbox live?
Nov 14th
You have to be a gamer and have spent some time on xbox live or played some other online competitive game to appreciate this animated gif that tells the tale of WWII as if it had been fought as an online game, but if you have this is funny as hell. Warning though – harsh language, not politically correct by any stretch of the imagination, and it runs for a couple of minutes. Kudos to whoever came up with this though, it cracked me up.
Virtual Rome
Nov 13th
I have a thing for Roman History, mostly because of a couple of great courses I had back in college, and I adore I, Claudius, both as a novel and the BBC dramatic series. Google recently announced the availability of a virtual tour of ancient Rome (circa 320ad) for their Google Earth tool, and it’s fantastic. Google Earth is free, as is the tour. You can get the details and download it here where they announcement is. There’s also a short movie demonstrating how it all works and what it looks like. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re at all interested in Roman history.
More news on George RR Martin on HBO
Nov 12th
Image via Wikipedia
Last winter I noted that HBO had optioned the rights to George RR Martin‘s Song of Ice and Fire series of novels. I incorrectly assumed this meant they were going into production but it turns out that at the time they simply optioned the rights, and they’ve recently announced that they’re funding the production of a pilot episode. Pretty great news really – it still doesn’t guarantee we’ll be seeing the series on HBO, but it’s a significant step forward and increases the chances. Here’s hoping it’s good – as the article I link to notes, if anyone can pull this off it’s HBO.
If you’re unfamiliar with it, The Song of Fire and Ice is an as yet incomplete series of gritty high fantasy novels set in a sort of alternate medieval Great Britain. It covers some generally familiar ground, but it’s really well written, has some fantastic plot twists, and plays quite a bit with conventions in the genre. They’re definitely worth checking out if fantasy is your cup of tea.
Before the Devil Knows you’re Dead – two thumbs up
Nov 10th
Susan and I saw Before the Devil Knows you’re Dead this weekend, and we both liked it to differing degrees. Susan didn’t care so much for the open ended conclusion, wereas I thought it was pretty great – otherwise we both enjoyed it. The story concerns two brothers with cashflow problems who decide to pull off a robbery and the chaos that follows as things go wrong. Central parts of the story are presented as out of sequence vignettes, jumping around in the timeline of events, and one particular vignette may not even be ‘real,’ but I’ll skip the spoilers so as not to ruin it in case anyone reading this wants to see it. This makes understanding the story and identifying the characters challenging at times but it kept us engaged trying to puzzle out what was going on and who was who. The acting is uneven – Philip Seymour Hoffman is great in one of the leads, as is a very aged Albert Finney, but I was less fond of Ethan Hawke’s manic younger brother (the scenes in the car rental place in particular I thought were pretty bad) and have mixed feelings about Marisa Tomei’s character. All credit to her for spending half the movie unclothed, but several scenes, especially when she leaves Hoffman’s character, just came across as forced. On the plus side, she looks great 
This is a slow moving drama, so it’s not for everyone, especially not for a lot of my regular readers, but if you’re in the mood for a well crafted, thought provoking, reasonably well acted crime drama, it’s definitely worth checking out.
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Friday fun – Warzone
Nov 7th
Image of Desktop Tower Defense via Wikipedia
I mentioned a week or two ago how I had finally gotten the last and hardest badge for Desktop Tower Defense over on Kongregate.com and how I needed to find a new pastime for my lunch hour. I’ve found it. It’s called Warzone, and it’s cast from the same mold that DTD is. You purchase various kinds of towers and place them on the board, building a maze to channel the enemy forces through, slowing their march towards your home and exposing them as effectively as you can to the firepower of your towers. Warzone doesn’t add much in the way of innovation to this formula, but it’s well executed, comes with a number of maps and game modes, and so far, 5-10 games under my belt, it seems pretty well balanced. I wish it had some kind of slowing/freezing tower, and I wish it was over on Kongregate with badges etc would be the only things I would say in terms of enhancements. This is flash based so it should play on any machine. Check it out for a little friday fun, and good luck trying to beat my current high score, ~85k on the original map using cash mode.
Drupal wins open source CMS of the year
Nov 7th
Image via Wikipedia
We use Drupal at work and are pretty happy with it. I’m happy for the folks behind it because for the second year in a row they’ve won open source CMS product of the year from the folks over at Packt publishing. It’s also pretty cool that Earl Miles, who contributes extensively to the Drupal project and who is the principle author of Views/Views2, a central component of most Drupal sites, was recognized as an MVP this year. Kudos all around, both the award and the recognition are well deserved.
The fates were kind to me today
Nov 6th
So I’m driving to work. I normally take this backroads way to the office during the school year because the major road passes through South Hadley and the campus of Mt Holyoke College, ie it’s slow when the students are here. The road’s speed limit varies from 25 – 40 depending what section you’re on, and normally my speed is between 40 and 50 on it – everyones’ is, it’s a little back country road. There are kids catching their school buses though and I guess the cops decided to crack down, or maybe I’m just unlucky, because today as I came down a hill doing maybe 45 a cop pulled out behind me and flipped on his lights. I thought I was busted. I slowed down and started to pull over but there was a crossroad, so I decided to pull over after the junction. There was a car there waiting to make a left, and I guess the driver decided to try and bolt out in front of me so as not to be slowed down by the cop pulling me over etc, or maybe they were impatient, or…who knows, whatever they were thinking they suddenly pulled out in front of me, causing both me and the cop to have to jam on our brakes, nearly causing an accident. Apparently this pissed off the cop because he blared his siren, did a u-turn in the middle of the road, and took after the other guy. I was like ‘whoo hoo!’ and proceeded on my merry way to work. Three cheers for good luck!
What slapdash carpentry looks like…
Nov 6th
… if you’re not a carpenter. Andrew asked me to post some pics of the work I did on our basement staircase, so here they are. First, a beautiful illustration of the problem:
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As you can see, the staircase has some almost paper thin joints on it, and before I shored it up it was very wobbly as you walked down it.
Next, what I did about it:
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Not much to look at, but effective. The staircase is definitely much sturdier than it had been.
Audiosurf on sale for only $2.50 this week
Nov 5th
Image via Wikipedia
If you have a PC and you don’t buy this game, you don’t love fun. Audiosurf is this fantastic little music game that uses your own music collection to build levels you fly through, collecting tokens for points as you go. At $2.50 over on steampowered.com this week, you have nothing to lose by trying it – your morning coffee probably costs more than Audiosurf does and it won’t last nearly as long. Get thee over and buy it, then friend me on Steam so we can compare scores!
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Half a day of carpentry work for naught
Nov 3rd
Image via Wikipedia
Susan and I ordered a pellet stove in July, figuring on the most expensive heating oil ever this winter. While that’s looking less likely to be true, we still have a pellet stove coming this month, and part of the installation involved the removal of a cast iron steam radiator that sat where the pellet stove ultimately will. We had a plumber disconnect it a couple of months ago, but we’ve been waffling about what to do with it until recently. We decided to save it for the day when the house is sold in case the new owners want to install it in one of the rooms rather than selling it off to a scrap dealer. The only problems were it was too heavy for Susan and I to move, and the basement stairs were rickety to the point where we were afraid anyone trying to cart it into the basement would end up going through the stairs with it.
The first problem was easy enough to solve: we hired a moving company. The second problem we put me on, though I’m no carpenter. We picked up about 40′ of 2×4 on Saturday, and I spent the afternoon bracing the staircase. The end result looks a bit ramshackle, but the stairs are definitely sturdier than they were.
Our plan when the movers arrived was to have them slide the radiator into the basement on a skid plate, using a rope to control the descent, because while the stairs were much stronger structurally after my bracing them, some of the individual steps are still pretty rickety. The movers came, took a look at our plan, seemed to agree with us, then appeared around the corner with the radiator in hand and lumbered down the stairs before Susan and I could say boo about it. I sort of quietly freaked. I was sure they were going to plunge through, but all went well in the end, me at the top of the stairs like a nervous nellie encouraging them not to step in the center of the stairs. Now I think we could have gotten away with me doing absolutely nothing, but oh well. At least the stairs will be stronger when someone is looking to cart that radiator back up out of the basement.
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Incredible leaping dog
Nov 3rd
Susan and I have two dogs, Soolin and Nori. On Saturday they were flipping out in the yard, so we went to check it out and discovered what appeared to be a stray dog sniffing noses with them through the ~4′ chainlink fence that surrounds the yard. We live on the corner and one of the streets is pretty busy, so we worried about the safety of the dog, and both of us tried to coax it into coming over, Susan from inside the fence and me by making my way onto the street from the other gate. The dog was skittish and ran away once, but then came back and to our great surprise it coiled itself up in a ball, made a huge standing leap onto the top of the gate, perched there for a moment like an owl, then lept into our yard. It was pretty amazing to see. This was not a large dog, standing a bit shorter than Soolin at the hips, but boy, it could leap like a kangaroo. Our best guess was it was on the prowl for a mate based on how he chased Nori around, but he lept right back over the fence when we tried to approach him to read his collar.
The new Incredible Hulk movie? Mediocre at best.
Nov 2nd
I grew up reading men in tights comics, mostly the Marvel stuff, and David Banner shares my first name so I loved him as a little kid, predisposing me to like this movie. Instead I was mildly disappointed. The last 20 minutes or so are fun, with competently executed action and special effects, but they fail to make up for the rest of the film, with it’s turgid pace, uninteresting relationships, and flat acting. I mean, come on! There are some seriously talented actors starring the film – Edward Norton, William Hurt, Liv Tyler – and the director fails to get decent performances out of them. I think this is the first time I’ve disliked Norton in a film. The film is worth seeing if you’re a fan of comics or the Hulk, but all others are best off staying away, and even Hulk fans will probably be frustrated with how much the movie messes with hulk cannon (his origin, the origin of two of his nemesis being the chief offenses).
[edit] As Kevin points out in the comments, it’s Bruce Banner, not David Banner. No idea what I was thinking there – now I can’t remember why I loved the Hulk so much as a kid.
Apple shooting themselves in the foot
Nov 1st
I agree with the sentiments over on osnews.com, where there’s a brief discussion of Apple‘s refusal to allow Opera to appear in the Apple Apps store because it ‘competes’ with one of their products. This is hardly the first example of Apple doing this and using this justification. This is counter to Apple’s interests in my opinion, and seems to demonstrate a refusal to learn the lessons of the past. One of the absolutely fantastic things about the iphone/ipod touch is the breadth of application availability – finally, cell phones are starting to feel like the little handheld computers they are. Don’t presume to decide for me what software I want to run on it, that’s what the cell phone carriers have been doing for over a decade. If I want to run some other browser, LET ME. Compete on the basis of merits, not by exercising your monopoly power on the platform. Google‘s Android platform is out, the source is open, and hopefully they’ll force Apple’s hand on this issue. If not, maybe my next phone will be an Android phone, not an Apple one…or maybe I’ll jailbreak an iphone.
[update] Turns out this story has been widely misreported – note this piece over on daringfireball.net revealing that Apple has not in fact denied Opera. I believe the gist of my post above remains true though – Apple is denying software access to their platform and doing so is not in their interests.
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