« February 2005 | Main | April 2005 »
March 24, 2005
Fuck, there goes Easter
Posted by dottie at 2:41 PM | Comments (0)
March 16, 2005
3d light graffitti
the menu to select the graffitto's is the rotating bit at the bottom.
Nice work
Posted by dottie at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)
SkypeIn!!
Skype have just added some very cool functionality to their little VoIP machinery.
What they did previously was to allow you call any normal number in the world for just the price of a local call. A friend of mine in Moscow uses ths all the time and after a couple of months still hadnt used up the €25 I had put into his account for him (the site wouldnt accept his credit card - he's Irish and living in Russia, I guess they thought he was a pirate or somesuch....aaarrrr!)
Land lines are great, even in these days when mobile phones have made the dream of being contactable everywhere at every time a reality (do I smell a whiff od sarcasm here?). Land lines have a different modality of operation - with a land line you sit down and have a long chat to your family and friends, it's like visitng without travelling. Mobile phones often dont encourage that.
What Skype has now done is to make it possible for you to effectively have a land-line number that follows you wherever you go. You can rent a number with Skype that is local to a specific area, say London, Paris, Hong Kong, New York wherever. When people phone that number from the local area they will get patched through to you for the price of a local call. So what? you say. Well, you can be anywhere. Also your friends in Paris can ring your local number there and get patched through to you, also wherever you are for the price of a local call.
Nifty.
When we have a version of Skype for those PDA cum Mobile phone things and broadband access for mobile devices is widespread and cheap then I can see the death of a few telephone companies. Or maybe, wait, legislation? Surely they wouldn't...
Posted by dottie at 9:41 AM | Comments (0)
March 15, 2005
Email servers lie!
My web mail client tells me I am using 3% of my quota.
No need to get personal!
I dont like my mail server anymore...
Posted by dottie at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)
Video Games
Video games used to be developed by mavericks. People who had a vision and the tenacity of a badger; they never let go.
This brought about great innovation - table tennis (pong!), maze games (pac man), platform games (donkey kong, frak...), punch ups (Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat..), graphic / text adventures (Zork, myst, Elder Scrolls...), simulators (Tank Battle, F16, MS Flight Simulator...), first person combat (Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, Rune...).
All other games are variations on a theme or interesting combinations of themes. Grand Theft auto could be thought of as a cross between an adventure game, simulator and first person combat.
The game industry is reaching a crisis point - are there any more genre to develop? What will drive all future game development? Better graphics? Fuck that.
Like they say you can't polish a turd.
Gameplay is king. The depth of the non-player characters, the storyline, the difficulty of the puzzles (which can include interactions with the NPC's) the texture and descriptiveness of the world where it all happens. These are the things that matter, not the fact that they use phong shading instead of trilinear whatever when they render the world in graphics. It could all happen through text and still be compelling (difficult to do, but not impossible!) The point is that we are humans and since time immemorial we have gathered together around fires and passed on stories, fables, myths and legends. What games shuold be doing is creating new stories.
Doom did it, but is now falling foul of its own success, its still playing the same tune. It may be on a gold-plated, highly decorative instrument but the tune is the same.
The problem with Game companies nowadays is that they are becoming monolithic. It is getting ever more expensive to develop games. HIgh definition computer graphics cost money to program. Realistic physics engines take money to buy and time for programmers to master. Marketing (by far the most expensive part) is all encompassing and must bow down before that great god of commerce everywhere - the lowest common denominator.
Game companies dont want to take risks any more. Game companies (or rather 'studios' now...) are created for one reason - to make money. Anything that imperils this is hunted down and killed and has its head put on a spike. Which makes sense - people work long and hard to become as talented as they are in order to develop such visually spectacular games, I for one dont want to see them on the streets with a begging bowl.
Something needs to be done and the rallying cry is being made. Check out these appeals made to an auditorium full of game developers by established game developers - from Greg Costikyan:
Stirring stuff - and who said Video games didnt incite violence? ;)
Posted by dottie at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2005
Guilty admission
I know I promised last year that I would be getting my head shaved for charity this week.
Its not going to happen - this year.
I still stand by what I said - give to charity, especially cancer research. Give a lot - you can be guaranteed that someone you know will one day be diagnosed with cancer.
Think about how much it costs you to go out for the night - give up going out for one night and donate that money to cancer research.
Better again, start a direct debit to your favourite cancer research group and give a tenner a month. Everybody can manage that.
Make me feel less guilty for not getting my locks chopped off - you know you want to.
Posted by dottie at 3:13 AM | Comments (0)
No sleep 'til whenever...
Its feckin late, I still have loads of work to do - finish off an ecommerce site, finish off a site for a friend (sorry Naoimh!), write a business plan, pressurise clients for money (fun!) and most importantly, have my accounts up to date by Friday as an accountant (yes a real live accountant!) is coming to review them for me.
Throw into all this the fact that next week has Paddy's Day in it (the day before I see the accountant too!) and it looks like I'll be getting a grand total of no sleep again this week, although with another head cold doing its best to infiltrate my sinuses again, I think I'll be lucky not to see out the week in intensive care.
Plus, I have discovered that drinking eight pints of caffeine-free coffee still results in a buzz. Who'da thunk it?
Posted by dottie at 3:09 AM | Comments (0)
March 13, 2005
Anniversary Month
This month usually has a sombre undertone for me. There are two big anniveraries, mt father and a good friend.
My Father, Jim, died on the 21st March 1997. Lung cancer - he had always smoked.
My good friend Cormac Kinsella died on 11th of March 1996 on the evening of his 23rd birthday.
Its strange that even though it was so many years ago, it only seems like yesterday that we talked, shared a joke, discussed inconsequential things.
I miss them both and hope they are having a good laugh together wherever they are, they were friends too of course!
Posted by dottie at 4:01 PM
March 10, 2005
My Apple Prediction
Here's my one and only prediction of what Apple will eventually release.
An Über iPod, that is the descendant along a logical line of added complexity and features (think what is happening with the iPod photo, the hacking people are doing to make their iPods do more than just play media) that will be combined with the long-lamented (by some) Apple Newton, the Airport, their iSync and iLife stuff to make some sort of fantastical PDA type yoke that will retain the form factor of the iPod.
Convergence is the name of the game, we need something that will organise everything for us. The üPod (trademark Mark Lennox 2005 ;) ) will do that for us!
Now if Apple would like to offer me a position in R&D, I'd be happy to accept - yo Steve, you gots my number!
Posted by dottie at 8:13 PM
Text adventures
Hitchikers guide to the Galaxy
I remember playing this on my BBC B (I think) waaay back in the day.
I managed to get to the pub at least!
Posted by dottie at 2:18 PM | Comments (0)
Terrorbytes!
I'm considering upgrading all the disks in my computers to SATA drives.
The advantages are that they are quiet, big, fast, easy to install, and use cables that take up WAY less space.
Downside? none that I can think of.
It does mean that the total storage space of my computers will be very close to 1 Terabyte.
Fuck.
When I started in college 16 years ago (holyshit batman!) my computer had 16 Megs of RAM, a 16 MHz processor (486DX - with turbo switch - oooh!) and a hard drive (which in itself was a wonder) that was all of 40MB in size.
That means that in the intervening years my storage space has grown by a factor of roughly 25 thousand.
The speed of my CPU has increased by a factor of 200.
And Microsoft Word is STILL sluggish*.
Bastards!
(* Note however Unreal tournament runs like a dream!)
Posted by dottie at 10:33 AM
March 8, 2005
EU Software patents
Yesterday the EU passed the Software patents bill. This is a bad thing.
This opens the door for Microsoft and its ilk to muscle out software innovation undertaken by smaller companies., or even rivals - can you spell monopoly?
It also opens the door to small companies holding the web to ransom should they wish to - the Eolas patent being an example of this.
There will be lots of unforseen results for this and plenty of work for IP lawyers in the years to come - I think its time for a change of profession....
Posted by dottie at 4:47 PM | Comments (0)