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April 29, 2006
CSS Reboot
I have decided that I will join in with the May 1st CSS Reboot this year. And finally actually give this blog some sort of design. The excuse of 'cobblers children...' just doesnt hold water any more.
Its not even really a competition but it does garner some attention - all press is good press, eh?
Since I only decided yesterday, time is tight! Plus I splurged on an Indian takeaway and Erdinger last night so my head is a little woozy. Not to mention that I will be at Emmet's sons christening today - I am the proud godfather :)
Anyway, back to it...
Posted by dottie at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2006
Machinima gets its wings
Machinima is the 'art' of using a games engine to create animations. One of my favourite is 'Red vs Blue' which uses the Halo (and now Halo2) engine to produce their animations.
Now I think Machinima is coming of age with the release of Episode 1 of Bloodspell
This is a real labour of love from the crew who have put in about three years of unpaid, hard labour to produce every aspect of the movie - music, plot characters, graphics, and the blood sweat and tears of producing the raw footage never mind editing it!
There is a surge of interest in home-brew video and creative content (ie. what big media companies call product). The likes of YouTube, Google Video, Flickr, Blogs and podcasting have made people realise that they can produce something relevant and fresh and creative and help push the boundaries.
Bloodspell is a bigger, more organised part of that - a sort of ad-hoc guild. Heres to the future.
Posted by dottie at 7:59 PM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2006
Furgin Power supplies
Came home last night to find that the power supply on my work computer had fugged itself to death.
Although I didnt know that at first. The smell of burned silicone made me think that my porcessor, memory, motherboard, hard drives, case and possibly even the wooden floor had been thrust through the veil and were now playing texas hold-em in some afterlife waiting room for computer parts (the wooden floor being very confused and wondering aloud why it was there, but winning every second pot so happy enough..)
I carefully (with tears in my eyes) took the cover off the computer expecting the contents to fall out as either a fine ash or a vitreous goop of plastic, copper and silicone.
Thankfully neither happened.
I spent an hour tapping and smelling all the major components to find that the smoothing capacitor on the power supply had fired itself and thankfully nothing else.
It does mean that I had to swap out the power supply from my gaming computer (someone is determined that I dont get to play Oblivion). I took the opportunity to swap the memory in too so I now have 2 Gigs on my work computer which is very fine indeed thank you (Photoshop only takes 10 minutes to produce a text field now...).
At least I now have an excuse to order stuff from Komplett!
Me want: big screen surround sound new processor
Me get: new powersupply, DVD media for backing up my work and some extra memory!
Comments
rory
get ouwa that garden !
Posted by dottie at 10:29 AM | Comments (1)
DMCA double or quits and Software Patents
Did you see the US are planning to increase the breadth of the DMCA - including more offenses, higher fines and doubling the jail terms for offenders. It is now illegal just to download software that MAY be used to break copyright.
Farewell fair use.
This is all pushed by the same company that has just decided to sue a family for illegal file sharing - a family that does not even own a computer!
I would love to think that the EU and our own glorious government will not follow in their footsteps but unfortunately our MEP's are staunch supporters of big business. I remember seeing some footage of the recent software patent debates in the EU Parliment with Mary Harney obfuscating, bullying and generally ramming through software patents.
Software patents are a BAD bad idea. If someone sits down and thinks up some new way of doing something with software - clicking on a link to pop-up an IM window for instance - they can get a patent for it. The important thing is they never have to develop this functionality or even give some technical basis for how it might work. The idea is patented and patents are given for ideas that have prior art.
What this means that if some hard-working chap builds a company and implements an idea that is demonstratably similar to the patent then they can be sued and forced to pay costs, fines and licence fees. Poor hard working chap goes out of business. Everybody who works for him loses their job. Entropy increases.
Most of the software patents are held by big companies - either filed by them or bought out by them. These companies have the money to pay patent lawyers to search existing applications (ie. from the dawn of the internet), or newly developed applications or whatever with the goal of prosecuting all offenders.
Entropy will increase sometime soon near you.
Posted by dottie at 8:16 AM | Comments (0)
April 21, 2006
Spinning Apple
Just noticied that Apple are being creatively ambiguous with their use of language (have I only just noticed? nah)
They describe the iPod ghetto blaster as the 'home stereo re-invented'.
Apple always want to be seen as the inventors.
They don't invent. They innovate. They stand on the shoulders of giants and re-work, re-imagine, re-purpose even co-opt, but invent they do not.
The whole thrust of the reality distortion field for years has been to 'think different'. With all the iPods of one ilk or another wandering around I find that about as believable as a 'sub' culture like the Goths claiming they are being individuals.
Yah. Right. mmhm.
Apple is a marketing company. They survived tough times on the power of their marketing alone. They have managed to win over legions of fans who act as apologists no matter how dissapointed they are by Apple's releases.
iPod battery life too short? - well at least its not an iRiver
iBook showing phosphene-like spots on the screen? - well, at least its not a Dell dude!
the latest OSX update trash your fonts, recent work and backups? - well, at least you dont have to handle the icky windows interface
Am I a Microsoft apologist? Certainly not. I remember Windows 1 when it came out. It didnt actually do anything. It was a graphic desktop that did nothing and was tied into DOS and was still tied into DOS until very recently.
My take on it? All operating systems are evil.
Choose your poison and get on with it but dont expect me to listen to your fanboy tales!
Posted by dottie at 7:22 PM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2006
Understanding Turbans
I just saw the title of a news item on the Seattle times - Understanding turbans.
Which is great.
One big problem though. The mouth-breathers who will actually attack anyone wearing a turban probably wont (or dont have the literacy level) read the article. Who were they writing the article for?
Does it mean that someone who is wearing a turban and is not on the list is fair game?
Posted by dottie at 2:14 PM | Comments (0)
Oblivion tweaks
I have started playing the new Elder Scrolls game - Oblivion. Fantastic. Thankfully the DVD drive on my computer has packed in so I cant play it again until I replace it, otherwise it would quickly eat up all my spare time.
I stumbled across a great site for tweaking the game to get better graphics performance
I cant wait to try it out - check it out Brendan and let me know how it works!
Posted by dottie at 1:55 PM | Comments (0)
April 12, 2006
Self sustaining (mostly) house design
in relation to my last post - serendipity!
Award winning house design
not that that means anything...
Posted by dottie at 3:54 PM | Comments (0)
Iran and alternative power
The US is about to launch a 'tactical' nuclear strike on Iran. Check the internet - especially anything by Seymour Hersh (yep, the same guy who was told to shut up when he started talking about torture in Abu Ghraib...)
'Tactical' in the sense that they *believe* that Iran may be five years from developing their nuclear arms technology to the point where they will be able to start producing / testing weapons.
Five years.
A lot can happen in five years. Think what five years of diplomacy could bring. Think of it this way - the US has spent the last five years turning Iran from a centrist, pro-democracy, pre-secular society into a society that has eschewed the tenets of so-called western democracy and elected a hard liner essentially turning their secular society into one driven by fundamentalism.
All this means that we can expect the US to cause huge pain, suffering, death and of course oil shortages. As a result of an unprovoked attack the middle East will blockade transport of oil or just stop selling it to the US and probably the rest of the 'western' world.
Where next then?
Alternate energy
We should have been pouring 10's of percents of GNP into research for alternate energy since the 70's. We havent, and we wont likely anytime soon.
Bleak outlook: we're fucked. Party's over. Welcome to the middle ages.
Positive outlook: community based efforts can make a difference. The myth of the hydrogen economy has to be busted and we must embrace ubiquitous use of solar energy (each home with a solar panel and a solar heat exchanger for heating water) and wind turbines of some description coupled to a bank of batteries somewhere in the house.
Basically, we are all going to have to look after ourselves, but we need help to get there. Government / EU funding of research into producing retrofittable kits to produce energy for a home - enough to reduce demand on the national grid. Car sharing, electric buses like they have in Canada, reduction of public consumption of electricty (think street lights etc. - cant be turned off but consume LOTS of electricity).
If we dont cut down our reliance on fossil fuels and find a viable alternative we wont have a future.
Posted by dottie at 2:46 PM | Comments (0)
April 5, 2006
How to topple a giant?
I wonder if there are any anti-Microsoft hackers out there?
Of course there are! what am I saying...
I mean, I have a proposal for them - how to kill (or at least severly undermine) the release of IE7.
Save up all your exploits, hacks, and what have you until IE7 is fully mature then release them all at once, or even better one at a time not releasing the next until the previous exploit has been patched.
That way everyone realises what a piece of crap IE really is and follows the advice of all those in the know and migrate from IE to Firefox, Opera, tin cans and string - anything but IE.
You know it makes sense!
Posted by dottie at 4:21 PM | Comments (0)