As I mentioned two weeks ago, I’ve uploaded all the old photo’s I had to my Flickr.
It turned out to be just over a 1000 photo’s, with the most in the last two years. I had some good ones of Alex going back to 2001, and a ton of Zoe baby pictures.
They’re all uploaded, grouped in to sets, and I re-orded my set list to be in chronological order with all the kid photo’s.
I’ve added our Fourth of July photos, and we’re caught up in the present again.
I have never read a Harry Potter book. As avid a reader as I am, once something hits the mainstream, especially so ferociously, I just have to be different and not do it. (I’ve never seen Titanic either).
With that said, I took Alex this morning to Target post-haste and we purchased Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
A number of years back when Harry Potter was just starting to become popular, my wife bought a couple of the books and read them to decide if we could read them aloud to Alex or let him read them when he was older. She loved them, and he has loved them for the past couple of years.
Which led to being a good little American consumer this morning. I figure I won’t see Alex for a day or two until he’s done reading it.
I’m back from California, and getting caught up on misc. stuff.
I’ve updated the theme to K2 Alpha 3, added a new Flickr badge, and still don’t care that it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer. Go get Firefox already.
I mentioned the Burn It Club a while back. The summer Burn It session is now on if any of my three readers want to do it with me. I have to say I’m struggling with the theme, but I really want to participate.
I have a ton of stuff do this weekend, more as my muse wills later.
Ars Technica does a deep dive into the real truth behind Apple’s switch from IBM to Intel.
Focusing on how Apple has shot itself in the foot in regards to it’s relationship with IBM, and what Intel stands to gain in the iPod arena, it covers some things I hadn’t thought of until now.
One of the major factors in the switch was something that’s often been discussed here at Ars and elsewhere: Apple’s mercurial and high-handed relationship with its chip suppliers.
And the iPod:
For the real reason behind the switch, you have to look to the fact that it’s the iPod and iTMS—not the Mac—that are now driving Apple’s revenues and stock price. As I stated in my previous article on the switch, Apple is more concerned with scoring Intel’s famous volume discounts on the Pentium (with its attendant feature-rich chipsets) and XScale lines than it is about the performance, or even the performance per Watt, of the Mac.
It’s critical to understanding the switch that you not underestimate the importance of Intel’s XScale to Apple’s decision to leave IBM. The current iPods use an ARM chip from Texas Instruments, but we can expect to see Intel inside future versions of the iPod line. So because Apple is going to become an all-Intel shop like Dell, with Intel providing the processors that power both the Mac and the iPod, Apple will get the same kinds of steep volume discounts across its entire product line that keep Dell from even glancing AMD’s way.
Yes, I know silwenae.com is down.
I received an email from my hosting company that silwenae.com executed a denial of service attack approaching 100 Mb/s this morning resulting in the hosting company shutting my site down.
This is the second time my site has been exploited in the last 60 days. I’m starting to lose my patience.
I’m waiting for the hosting company to respond, and hopefuly re-activate my site.
I’m playing with the newest release of the Kubrick theme, K2, which is in an early alpha.
It doesn’t work in Internet Explorer correctly on Windows XP (the right hand sidebar is off significantly), but I really don’t care anymore. I’m sick of tinkering with themes because IE doesn’t render CSS properly.
If you are still using IE (and why are you?) please switch to Mozilla’s Firefox.
I’m going to leave the default colors up for now, maybe tinker with the sidebar, and when it’s final, I’ll apply a black style / CSS (maybe from the old theme by neuro).
On the Fourth of July, 89.3 The Current did a special, 50 Songs for 50 States, from 2pm until midnight.
Our timing driving back from Milwaukee was perfect, as the Rochester signal came in about quarter to 2, and we listened to it for the last few hours of the drive home, and I listened to it over the web for most of the night after that.
What a great mix of music – picking anywhere from 1-3 songs per state, either with the state’s name in the song / title, or an artist known for that state (like the Ramones for New York). It wasn’t just one song – it was over 150 songs, including some deep dives into specific cities in the U.S., including Athens, GA, Minneapolis, Chicago, Austin, New York and Detroit.
You can see and listen to the entire playlist (by hour) here.
William Gibson is another one who gets the remix culture.
In an article on Wired, Gibson writes of some of his early influences, including William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, one of the first authors to use sampling in literature.
Later, attempting to understand this impact, I discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers’ texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the ’40s and ’50s, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me.
By then I knew that this “cut-up method,” as Burroughs called it, was central to whatever it was he thought he was doing, and that he quite literally believed it to be akin to magic. When he wrote about his process, the hairs on my neck stood up, so palpable was the excitement. Experiments with audiotape inspired him in a similar vein: “God’s little toy,” his friend Brion Gysin called their reel-to-reel machine.
It will be interesting to see if Mr. Gibson follows up on what he says he believes here, and introduces any type of Creative Commons licenses on his books or how it affects him going forward.
Plaguelands has a summary up of the recent MMO roundtable hosted by IBM. Game Developers participating included Geoff Heath, CEO, NCsoft Europe & Steven Reid, NCsoft Europe; Raph Koster, Sony; and Patty Fry, Global Executive, Online Games & DCC.
We’ll ignore the others and focus on some very, very interesting things Mr. Koster mentioned, I highly recommend you jump the link and just read his section.
A bit on pathfinding:
On the tech aspect, something I didn’t know Koster mentions is that 40% of the cpu processing is utilized on pathfinding. Yes, fuckin’ pathfinding. A fuckin’ decade, and almost half of the potential processing powers developers are allocated is used to fuckin’ pathfinding. And you know what? Pathfinding is a joke, it could use a lot of work.
And databases:
Koster also delves into some details about mmos and their databases. The runtime database and the static game database and explaining their differences and how and what needs to be done so developers will have the hardware that allows for more dynamisms, more impact, making that world a virtual living breathing world in itself that players can impact and not just some static sandbox. It’s funny when Raph talks about players having an impact on the world and how we are seeing somewhat of a reversal instead of progressing. Notice how games like WoW do not allow players to drop items on the ground? While this may save a lot of CS headaches, this is the type of simple impact on the persistent world.
Who thinks about these things? Everyone wants to be a developer or a producer, and never thinks about what the programmers have to go through. Fascinating.
Ah, the good old says when the interweb was young, and to chat in a group required IRC.
Fazin pointed out a quote tonight at the site Bash.org which is just filled with quotes from IRC taking me back to another time. I highly recommend spending an hour and going through their top 100. I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt.
A few favorites I saw:
< [TN]FBMachine> i got kicked out of barnes and noble once for moving all the bibles into the fiction section
Spin: arrrr, pirates of the south west
Spin: thar be large pipes o’bandwith near ye’ol univarsety.
Pirate: yearg, ye may be an ta somethan thar.
Spin: what say ye we pull yonder USB hard disk longside yonder NMSU puter and begin tha lutin and plunderin.
Pirate: yearg. The master done gaved me a testin machine with a grand ol CDR.
Pirate: Avast!
Pirate: MP3s off the starboard bow!
Spin: stere clear of ye porn pop ups rollin in from tha east.
Pirate: I have mah trusty Opera browsa to help me fend em off.
Spin: encrypt the data holds, batton down thar security patches, argh thar be spyware abound.
(Mootar) morons.
(Mootar) these people who live in my apartment complex are connected to my wireless
(Mootar) they must think they’re super-cool hackers by breaking into my completely unsecure network
(Mootar) unfortunatly, the connection works both ways
(Mootar) long story short, they now have loads of horse porn on their computer
(mortalkombat) stfu mat|t u cu.nt
* Acaila sets mode: +b MortalKombat!*@*
( @Acaila) FINISH HIM
(mat |t) rofl
(mortalkombat) omg wtf man
- MortalKombat was kicked by Acaila (forward, forward, back, back, forward, punch)
( @Acaila) FATALITY!