Happy
Happy New Year
Jan 1, 2003 @ 15:44 » no comments » General
Copy cat
Pirated Sites is a site that I occasionally visit. An interesting question: when is using another site's design as a template for your own site blatantly appropriating someone else's hard work and when have to tweaked and changed it around enough to be able to call it your own?
Stopdesign also had it's design 're-purposed' by another site (just like I found my design including all the notes I made in the stylesheet on another site) and Bowman's comments strike a certain chord with how I felt when I found out:
A site I designed and built by hand from scratch. Earned knowledge gained through experience and lots of trial and error. [...] I didn't realize the uniqueness of my collective design decisions until I saw them replicated verbatim in another setting.
Of course, I have benefitted greatly from picking apart other people's designs and reading through all the different tutorials and CSS based templates as well and looking at it that way, we all stand on someone else's shoulders. Personally I don't mind if you pick apart my design and copy a trick or two, because that's the way to learn and to do it, I think. That's the way I do it and I try to be conscientious about it and to leave references in the remarks in the source about where I got a good trick or how I arrived at a solution based on someone else's work.
It becomes quite another thing imho when you simply copy and paste and just change the content, rather than going through the process of really understanding what goes on in the code and making it your own. So maybe the 'rule' should be to create your own design, making a unique set of design decisions to paraphrase Bowman, while using, or rather building on the knowledge and expertise of others, preferably referencing it as you recreate a particular effect or trick you got someplace else.
Jan 1, 2003 @ 17:27 » no comments » Webdesign
Keyboards
Remember those old IBM keyboards? They weigh a ton because they have a solid steel backplate and when hitting a key it travels a satisfying distance before ending its journey with a solid *click*. The quality of typing on those keyboards has never been equalled IMHO. But they're getting hard to find nowadays and they're old AT style keyboards mostly, with big old AT style plugs and missing those special windows keys between the CRTL and ALT keys (mostly superfluous, but I can't do without the windows-key+E shortcut anymore).
So what do you do when your old and trusted keyboard dies? Martin (who had an old NCR keyboard, which I recon is similar to the old IBMs) got a new keyboard:
I just want a keyboard, dammit! With qwerty keys so I can type words. I don't want it to take up half of my desk with widgets that start up my mailer, fast-forward music, and just about everything short of making a tasty cheese sandwich.
He seems happy enough with his new Microsoft Internet Keyboard, but I really need to take this opportunity to extoll the virtues of the Dell AT101W keyboard. While it isn't as solid as the old IBM keyboards and hasn't as satisfying a click, it's the best 'new' keyboard I've found. It's a plain keyboard, no extra bells and whistles, just the keys you expect. They travel with just the right resistance to their endpoint where they click just right. It's nice and heavy and doesn't slip and slide around, even though it doesn't have the solid steel backplate. I got mine about 2 years ago direct from Dell, but I now see they can be had for as little as 15 euro, or about 25% what I paid Dell for it. Highly recommended.
Of course, if even the old IBM keyboards are still too newfangled for you, you can always wire up a Smith-Corona typewriter and use that to type your blog entries (via Slashdot).
Jan 2, 2003 @ 11:58 » 2 comments » General
MMOG's
Some massively multi-player online games in varying stages of beta-testing that I'm keeping an eye on:
EVE Online
Neocron
Earth and Beyond
Star Wars Galaxies
Shadowbane
In other unrelated news: Wired's Vaporware 2002 Index.
Jan 2, 2003 @ 16:14 » 1 comment » Games
Skewed statistics
The online banking website of my bank works best in Internet Explorer 5+. The site kind of works in Opera 6 and works okay, but looks a bit squashed together in Mozilla. Opera is my primary browser, Mozilla my back-up browser and I only fire up IE to access Movable Type (because it's the only browser that supports the text-area shortcuts) and to access the online banking site. This however doesn't send the right message to the bank: their access logs will not show that I would much rather use an other browser than IE to access their site. Lock-in, lock-out.
Jan 5, 2003 @ 16:03 » 4 comments » Webdesign
The Fast and the Furiously Slow
Slashdot points to an article that explains why Internet Explorer sometimes displays websites blazingly fast and why it sometimes is so damn slow. Turns out that Microsoft is breaking one of the most elementary rules of the TCP/IP protocol that underlies all traffic exchange on the internet.
If you connect to a Microsoft webserver with IE, connections will be set up really fast (other conditions permitting) but the setting up of that connection will happen in a completely non-standard manner. If you don't run a Microsoft webserver, your webserver may respond to such non-standard requests for webpages in two ways: A) it may send a message informing the browser that the request could not be fulfilled, or B) it may just drop the request and do nothing. In situation A Internet Explorer will immediately set up a connection with the webserver in a standards compliant way and the connection speed doesn't suffer all that much... so it does know how to behave, just not up front!
In situation B however, IE keeps sending non-standard requests without properly setting up a connection with the webserver and thus IE has to wait for every request it sends to time out before it will send out a standards compliant request. So if situation B occurs, your connection will appear gallingly slow, thanks to Microsoft yet again breaking the most elementary rules of playing together.
Lock-in, lock-out...
Jan 6, 2003 @ 07:14 » 2 comments » Webdesign
Yowzers
Brad Choate's got big plans for the new year. I'll be happy if I can do about 10% of what he's got planned on my site.
Luckily Owen Briggs provides us with his generic text styles template that will help us help the people surfing with Netscape 4.
Jan 6, 2003 @ 17:04 » no comments » Webdesign
WG links
Apparently a new book entitled Pattern Recognition by William Gibson is coming out in hardback in February. Mr. Gibson also has a brand spanking new blog, that is so new that the archive holding only one archived post isn't functioning quite at the moment. More writings online by Gibson in the Source Code section. On top of that there now is an official message board. And a fascinating fan/information site called the William Gibson Aleph.
Jan 7, 2003 @ 15:28 » no comments » General
Going virtual
There.com, more here (via Slashdot).
Jan 8, 2003 @ 15:35 » no comments » Research
Busy
Papers, presentations, classes. Later.
Jan 15, 2003 @ 20:28 » no comments » General
More online gaming
Online Gaming - Comments and News, interview about Imperial Wars (via Slashdot).
Flashbacks of Elite... Freelancer and preview at FiringSquad)
Jan 19, 2003 @ 13:18 » no comments » Games
Unification and plurality
Wired reports on developments in "grid computing" or how it will pretty soon actually be feasible to not only connect super computers and data centers, but to have them work in unison, effectively forming a much bigger 'virtual' computer. Examples benefitting from such computational power are earthquake research, a unified database of mammograms or a simulated 'virtual' universe for astronomers. The authority quoted on grid computing in the article is Dan Abrams, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who thinks that
The assumption is that people will buy into this and we'll be one unified community. [...] We could basically have pseudo labs -- let labs at a distance do our work.
And that will counter some of the troubles besetting science in Abrams' view:
It's all done in an ad hoc manner. [...] Everybody's doing things independently of each other, and some don't share at all. If they do, there's no standard data format.
Even though I can see some clear benefits of hooking computers up in a grid, I'm a bit worried about scientific diversity. What if we end up running experiments within the same simulation models, what if we plough through the same unified data sets? In the end it will become harder and harder to think outside the big distributed box that we've built for ourselves. I firmly believe in standards and don't think we can do without them, but I also think that there is an inherent benefit in plurality. Sometimes you just need to start from completely different premises to get ahead.
Jan 21, 2003 @ 08:50 » no comments » Research
Pop quiz
A girl phoned in to the radio station with the right answer to a pop quiz and won herself a domain name of choice plus a year of webhosting. She was really happy with it, telling the presenter that she'd been wanting a custom e-mail address and a cool place to put her stuff online for quite a while. Pretty amazing to think that in 1996 (which really isn't all that long ago) most people I talked to didn't know about e-mail in the first place or couldn't think of what they'd do with it. Now they're giving away domain names on radio shows and next we get one free with a box of cereals.
Jan 23, 2003 @ 09:20 » no comments » General
In Bremen
Blogging to you from Bremen where I've just finished my presentation. Presentation went fairly okay, it's a fairly fun conference as we're here with all the people from the research group and doing a presentation of us as a group as well. The International University Bremen is a private university, something we don't have much of a tradition of in Europe. The campus is pretty amazing and the whole university is only a couple of years old, so seeing what they've done with a lot of money and an old army base is rather neat.
Jan 25, 2003 @ 14:05 » no comments » General
Prelim FX findings
I've been scouring the websites of Dutch hardware shops looking for good prices on the various components needed to put together a fairly high-end gaming PC for a while now. The current king of video cards of course is the Ati Radeon 9700 Pro, but Nvidia's next-gen part, the GeForce FX, is getting close to release. The new GeForce FX has been hyped quite a bit, but the first benchmarks (in German; some English remarks on that article) don't appear to give the FX a decisive lead over the Radeon 9700 Pro. Indeed, the Radeon is in the lead in some tests. Of course, these are some rather preliminary figures, as the card hasn't been released officially yet, but TecChannel has a pretty good reputation.
Apart from performance, price is another important factor. Rumors have it that the FX will initially cost around 600 USD (542 euro excluding local sales tax in this article), whereas the Radeon 9700 Pro can be had for around 400 euro. Quite a difference... plus, I've been thinking of putting the system into one of those very quiet Shuttle XPC mini cases and with the huge active cooling system of the new GeForce taking up the place of the PCI slot next to the AGP slot, it wouldn't even fit in that tiny case. Decisions, decisions... guess I'll just have wait a little longer for more details to arise.
[Update 15:14] Heh, guess the findings aren't all that preliminary. There are full-scale reviews of the GeForce FX up on AnandTech and TomsHardware and their servers are straining under the load. Results look sort of like a mixed bag, but Anand mentions that Nvidia says that the highest-end version of the FX should be available for 400 USD, depending somewhat on how the third-party manufacturers are going to equip their cards. Interesting...
Jan 27, 2003 @ 14:31 » no comments » Tech
Updates and upgrades
Well, Opera released their version 7 browser yesterday. News.com actually writes that it's Opera's "first final version", which is a bit paradoxical, but it makes sense that there will be updates before too long. I've been surfing around a bit with Opera 7 and I must say, it seems to work very well, it's very fast, faster even than Opera 6 and it just looks rather slick right out of the box.
In unrelated news, Ben and Mena just announced that the version 2.6 of MovableType is only a couple of weeks away. Some interesting updates and add-ons, but I'm mostly looking forward to the more advanced text-formatting options. Can't have enough of those! Hopefully one day we can even have WYSIWYG editing right in the browser window.
Also our department's friendly IT guy re-installed my computer this morning. I'm glad to say I've finally left Windows NT behind and am now happily typing away on a Windows 2000 machine. The NT installation had become rather cluttered over that past 2 years and last week my NT profile got messed up beyond repair because I had logged in on a Windows 2000 machine in one of the class rooms. I don't know if it's just that it's a fresh install or that Windows 2000 simply is faster, but there's a noticeable general speed-up. Yay!
Anyway, I found out that our IT guy originally is from Iran and he's the driving force behind an amazing (and awarded) site about Iran's art, culture and history: IranChamber.com. Well worth a visit.
Jan 29, 2003 @ 13:36 » no comments » General
Snap!
Thanks to a friendly colleague I can now play around with an almost ancient digital camera, a Sony Mavica FD7. It's about twice as big as my walkman and uses a 3.5 inch floppy for storage. It's slow, big and clunky, but with all my money spent on buying an Xbox, I'm just really happy with it. Expect some snapshots around here... and some redesign eventually to accomodate them better.
Jan 29, 2003 @ 17:11 » no comments » General
Light and snow
An eery blue hue in my study because last night it snowed a little, with some snow left on the branches of the tree outside the window. The camera works! Thanks Rogier :-)
Jan 30, 2003 @ 08:36 » no comments » Photo
Halo, or how those things happen
Quite a while ago some rumors surfaced about an exciting new game in the making, called Halo. Microsoft announced its new gaming console, the Xbox, and bought game developer Bungie and Halo was to become one the launch titles for the Xbox. The console was launched, the critics raved about Halo, I lusted after the game, but the Xbox just was too expensive, at least for the practical me, who reasoned that there wasn't a whole lot of things the console could do except playing games.
I was surprised when I spotted the novel The Fall of Reach, "The official prequel to the award-wining Xbox game" in the sci-fi section of the local bookshop about a month ago. I had no idea that Halo had become something of a franchise with other products being sold besides the computer game itself, but I just had to buy it, right? Reading the novel would at least give me some surrogate Halo experience. (I wouldn't be too surprised though to see some more franchising of the Halo brand, especially when Halo 2 comes out, as the game seems to have quite a bit of brand recognition.)
Reading The Fall of Reach was something of a guilty pleasure. You know the book is a shameless marketing ploy, trying to hitch a ride on and/or boost the popularity of the original computer game. It's a derivative and derivatives really can't be as good as the original -- or maybe that's just too normative an idea lodged in my brain. What didn't help either is that Bungie, Halo and this book are part of the big money-hovering Microsoft monolith. And Microsoft isn't exactly a company you immediately equate with fun. MS is about work and getting things done, writing documents and doing spreadsheets and even the saccharine Windows XP look feels like fake cheerfulness, like two-tone paint on a family sedan. This seriousness seems mirrored in the Xbox console. The Xbox is a big, black, serious-looking machine with serious specs, so surely you must do some serious playing on it. "Xbox" is serious name, whereas "PlayStation" immediately tickles my funny bone as well as my console thumbs. What helps of course is that Sony makes other fun consumer devices, like Walkmans and Aibos, carefully building their 'high quality fun' brand experience.
The narrative backdrop for a game is often not more than one or two pages in the manual and functions as a minimal (and sometimes laughable) conceptual framework for the game. Having a whole novel as the narrative backdrop for a game is fairly unusual, but not entirely unprecedented. Regardless, I was pleasantly surprised by the novel itself. The storyline of The Fall of Reach is rather straightforward, trying to push but not exceed the limits that the game sets. There's a lot of detail about the Halo universe, the different technologies, the aliens and the battles fought. On the one hand it's exactly what you want to read about, while on the other hand the whole set-up of two opposing forces and their radically different technologies and cultures -- especially the human military -- feels a bit strained, as if the author had to limit himself in his descriptions and ideas. Still, the author has done a great job weaving personal stories and idiosyncracies into the tapestry of the Halo universe. It's clear though from the storylines of ensign Lovell, the young not-yet-commander Keyes and the young dr. Halsey, that given some imaginative elbow room the author can write very compellingly. Eric Nylund is that author and his name rang vaguely familiar to me, until I realized that at several occasions I'd actually considered buying some of his other novels, Crimson Skies and Signal to Noise. Those novels are now at the top of my to-buy list and that is praise for The Fall of Reach. I enjoyed The Fall of Reach as a novel even though when I read it I had neither an Xbox nor had I ever played Halo.
You can probably guess what happened next... I even dropped a clue yesterday. Microsoft had lowered the price of the Xbox to 259 euro before christmas and the local electronics superstore had a special 299 euro offer on the Xbox, three games (JetSet Radio Future, Sega GT 2002 and of course Halo!) plus the dvd playback kit. So between christmas and new year and after an optimistic assessment of the money I would still receive from my research expense account, I succumbed and bought me a Xbox. I must say it was a bit of a cathartic moment, buying a machine that will do nothing but play games and dvd's. Until now I've always played computer games on computers and I could justify buying a new computer or some components with the many useful tasks they can perform besides playing games. So I arrived home giddy as a kid with his hand in the cookie jar. Actually, I was kind of surprised by the size of the Xbox... not nearly as big as it was made out to be, probably about two-thirds the size of my VCR. Setting up was a snap, nothing to say about that really.
The reviews were right. Halo is one fantastic game. Of course, if I wanted to I could jot down some minor complaints, but that's really besides the point: everything's just right about Halo. I've never played a game whose controls were so intuitive and well balanced that even the aiming is a pleasure (which is something where a lot of games fall down). Pacing, checkpoints, cut movies, enemy AI, graphics and music, it just all comes together in an amazing and absorbing way. I'm pleased to say I've completed Halo -- on *cough* Easy level. Right now I'm replaying on Normal level and I'm impressed again how the game teaches you to use new tactics to defeat the now stronger enemies that previously could be dealt with by brute force and just absorbing their hits.
Of course, in the end, the whole exercise is merely a justification for continuing to buy and read Edge magazine, the only, truly worthwhile games magazine on the planet.
Jan 31, 2003 @ 01:37 » no comments » Games
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