Xbox 2 details

Microsoft's deal with IBM for providing the CPU for the Xbox 2 is all over the web. They're changing the hardware platform quite drastically, so my first question was: what about backwards compatibility? Am I going to be able to play Xbox 1 games on an Xbox 2 console? Sony has probably benefitted a lot from offering that backwards compatibility in the move from PlayStation 1 to PlayStation 2. Sony recently announced that they've managed to shrink all the PlayStation 2 components onto one chip, so it's not going to be all that expensive for Sony to incorporate the previous hardware platform into the next generation PlayStation, even if they change the hardware as drastically as Microsoft.

Wired, however, is the first publication shedding some more light on Microsoft's plans. They say that Microsoft is going to use the Virtual PC software they acquired from Connectix last year to run Xbox 1 games on Xbox 2 hardware. That makes sense. Virtual PC was/is software for the Mac and the Mac runs on IBM PowerPC CPUs, of which one version or another is now destined for Xbox 2. All in all an interesting move from Microsoft and as the Wired article notes, possibly an indication of a more hardware independent future Microsoft.

In unrelated news: having the flu sucks drips.

Nov 4, 2003 @ 12:50 » no comments » Games

Multiple versions of IE in one Windows installation

Could it be? Could it really be that someone figured out how to run several different versions of Internet Explorer on one and the same Windows installation? It sure looks like it! Joe from Insert Title Web Design explains how he discovered this:

Now, also being the curious type, I wondered about this "IEXPLORE.EXE.Local".... so I deleted it. I now saw that this message about "Press Ok to load content" was gone when loading a flash movie and soon realized that this "IEXPLORE.EXE.local" file was the one thing that was allowing the browser to run separate from my default browser. Wow!

Indeed. Wow! (Via Markup & Style)

PS If you wonder why this is a big deal, consider the fact that different version of IE render websites differently, so when developing a website you really need to check it in those different versions in order to make sure it really works. Consider too the fact that by the tight integration of the browser into the operating system, Microsoft made it (appear) next to impossible to run those different versions on one and the same Windows installation, forcing webdesigners to either keep several machines running different IE versions around, or booting into different Windows installations on the same machine.

Update: I've tried it out and it works just fine with the caveats mentioned in an excellent thread on this over at Mezzoblue; links to prepackaged previous versions of IE over at Skyzyx (download and extract to new directory and off you go!); to top it off color coded IE icons.

Nov 9, 2003 @ 16:42 » no comments » Webdesign

Girls, games, and advertising

Grinning girl holding game controllerThere's a brief interview/article with a female game developer over at the BBC new site. The article presents two frequently raised issues with regard to girls and gaming: the gamer stereotype of a geeky male and advertising targetting almost exclusively the male 18-35 demographic. By chance I just ran across a UK tv ad for Playstation2 (available in Windows Media and QuickTime), that shows a girl thoroughly enjoying World Rally Championship 3, but is very obviously targetted at male players. Still, I can't seem to make up my mind if it's not a good thing that this ad is showing a girl having fun with a videogame after all. Have a look and let me know what you think...

Nov 13, 2003 @ 10:52 » 1 comment » Games

Gender genie

A friend just reminded me of the Gender Genie. The Gender Genie will take a text, do some statistical analysis, and will then tell you whether it thinks that text is written by a man or a woman. As it turns out, most of the time (statistically speaking), women and men use language differently. It kind of worked for me. The Gender Genie correctly identified two texts I fed it (the About Fragment.nl and About Frank), but misinterpreted one (the Story about fragments) and rubbed it in with "Well, he writes like a girl." Heh... anyway, pretty much in line with the overall statistics for this algorithm (~70% of the time it's correct).

Nov 13, 2003 @ 11:54 » no comments » General

GameSpy MMOGs overview

Finally complete, GameSpy's massive Massively Multiplayer Online Games overview, from MUDs to the present day and beyond.

Nov 14, 2003 @ 14:39 » no comments » Games

Polyphasic colloidal foam

I got a real espresso machine for my birthday a week or two ago. I've been learning a lot about grinding beans, pulling shots, and foaming milk meanwhile. I bet you didn't know that the crema on top of your espresso is a polyphasic colloidal foam.

Forcing water at nine bars of pressure through hard packed fresh ground coffee produces what the Italians call "crema". Impossible to define, it has been described as a polyphasic colloidal foam. Polyphasic means changing states, going through phases. With over a thousand aromatic compounds continuously breaking down and combining and a foam structure that is releasing its gas and aromas with each passing second, espresso is a perfect cuisine to have developed in the second half of the 20th Century. It is a superb example of chaos. You can guess at what it is by determining its chemistry relative to an exact time after brewing-but by the time you have picked up your pencil it is something else. Espresso is a culinary chimera.

Search Google for polyphasic colloidal foam.

Nov 17, 2003 @ 16:13 » no comments » Espresso

Espresso links

This is a big espresso links post, lightly annotated, for future reference.

Okay, down to the nitty gritty of how to pull a good espresso. Quite a few factors weigh in, so here are a few tutorials.

Nov 18, 2003 @ 16:08 » 1 comment » Espresso

Bit slow

Okay, so it's been a bit slow here. I've been busy and will be for some time, so it might stay fairly quiet here for a bit longer. Then again, usually when I say it's going to stay quiet for a little longer, I end up posting a number of entries in a row. Also, behind the scenes there has been a bit of a reshuffle in the server department and right now I can't post through Zempt, so that kind of cramps my style.

Nov 24, 2003 @ 10:47 » no comments » General

Neat trick

A very neat CSS trick. A standards compliant browser disregards CSS properties that it doesn't know. Luckily IE isn't all that standards compliant, so that with some trickery we can feed the 5.x and 6.x versions of IE different values for officially non-existent properties, like so:

element {
   property: value1; /* all browsers */
   _property: value2; /* resets property for IE 5 & 6 */
   _prop\erty: value3; /* resets property for IE6 only */
}

Too bad we still need hacks like this, but when it's only one or two properties that you need to adjust to make your design work across all the browsers, I find it easier to keep that information 'inline' instead of using the midpass hack.

Nov 26, 2003 @ 14:07 » 2 comments » Webdesign

Miss Digital World

The Miss Digital World contest. The announcement of the contest sounds so surreal that I just quoted most of it. I mean, if we're talking about computer generated characters, what does "date of birth," "height," "eye color," or "hair color" still mean? We quite easily manage to change quite a few of those for ourselves already, and with a CG character, you only have to change a few digits for another result. Never mind the silly requirement that this virtual woman should never have appeared in some sort of erotic or pornographic film. I mean... if you only ever so slightly alter the parameters making up a CG character, changing what passes for that character's DNA, is he or she still the same?

Miss Digital World, the first ever virtual beauty contest, strictly for the most beautiful and intriguing virtual models made using the most advanced 3D graphics tools.

Terms
To take part in Miss Digital World, contestants have to have the following requirements:
  • never to have taken part, not even as extras or cameos, in any type of pornographic films, shows or plays.
  • never to have made public pronouncements of a potentially embarrassing nature, or in any way not in tone with the moral spirit of the Competition.
  • to have, however, the complete and unconditional availability of their own image and name.

Each contestant must submit the following when applying:
  • 5 photos for the photo book in jpeg format
  • date of birth, name, address, etc.
  • hair colour
  • eye colour
  • height
  • vital statistics
  • video that can be seen in streaming in Quick Time Movie or in .avi format

Every participant gives full and unconditioned agreement to the use of his image rights to monumedia srl for the promotion of the event Miss Digital World with no title to any remuneration.

Competition time
The competition Miss Digital World will last for 12 months.

Selection and deadline
The competition will take place in three preliminary selections heats and in one final poll to choose Miss Digital World 2004. Each intermediate round will select 20 contestants for the final poll.

Nov 27, 2003 @ 13:15 » no comments » General

Internet imag(in)ed

Graphic depicting the internet as clusters and nodes

A beautiful rendering of the structure of the internet, created by the Opte Project. They've apparently developed a method that allows them to remap this huge structure on a daily basis, allowing for a kind of internet weathermap. More images here, to make a beautiful desktop background image.

Nov 28, 2003 @ 15:16 » no comments » General

Generic Host Process

When it comes to Microsoft Windows, I must confess to having a bit of a paranoid streak. The other day, when investigating some strange network traffic, I bumped into one of my Windows pet peeves again. Windows allows various libraries that are not really programs to run as programs through the "Generic Host Process," that is embodied in svchost.exe. I mean, if a piece of code is not a program, then it should not run as a program, and certainly it should not run as a program under alternate credentials. That's just asking for trouble.

If you check your taskmanager, you're bound to see one or more svchost.exe instances running. The strange network behavior I was investigating stopped when I killed one of those svchost.exe processes, but because each svchost.exe process can host several libraries, I still didn't know which library was causing the problem. But, I finally found a good explanation of svchost.exe in the MS knowledgebase, that describes how you can install a program contained on your Windows 2000 or XP cd-rom that allows you to inspect which libraries are running hidden behind the Generic Host Process.

I still don't really know what the strange network traffic was, because it had stopped after a couple of reboots and some poking around, before I found the above inspection tool. Meanwhile, I also stumbled upon BlackViper's great Notes for a Happier Computer and User (XP oriented, but much also applicable to Win2k). The XP Services 411 finally gave me the low-down on which services, besides some of the more obviously useless ones, I could safely disable altogether or set to manual. Even if you don't (want to) know much about how Windows works, it's probably a good idea to decide yourself which services (such as Automatic Update, Background Intelligent Transfer Service, and Remote Registry Service) you want to have running on your system.

Nov 28, 2003 @ 17:40 » 3 comments » Software



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