neoGAF on married life

February 9th, 2008

clan match roman holiday
neoGAF has an interesting thread on the effects of married life on all evening gaming binges. I mean im sure its not as bad as some people’s lives, but check it out. Its an interesting read confirming the fact that you’ll never get good at COD4.

MarriedGAF

Greasemonkey Script for Joystiq.com

February 6th, 2008

Just a quick update. I wrote a greasemonkey script to remove ads from joystiq.com. Its very static, but it gets the job done. The script can be found on greasespot.

Amazon selling R4 carts for Nintendo DS

January 31st, 2008


While I was searching for a GPS Bluetooth transceiver, I noticed amazon is currently selling the R4. The R4 is essentially a cart to let you download and play roms of “backups” of games you own. (Similar to the EZ Flash V). Basically you go to a torrent, download your game, and put it on the card and viola. I’m suprised amazon of all companies is selling them. They might as well just go all in and start selling mod chips.

Link

Piss off Roadrunner

December 30th, 2007

dns.jpg
Roadrunner just began resolving bad DNS queries to a search page. Absolutely stupid as this breaks the whole state machine of the internet. request some ridiculous domain that doesnt exist like “bestbuy.co” and instead of getting a DNS server error the server name will resolve to 24.28.199.152. This in fact is a roadrunner webserver which will in fact return a 200 response from the webserver. absolutely ridiculous. So now a site that doesn’t exist suddenly has a server with the page you requested.

As if breaking the state machine for web browsing wasn’t enough, whats at the top of the results? SPONSORED results. I’m sorry but piss off roadrunner. I pay enough for your flaky service to not have to deal with you trying to sell me shit at the drop of a misplaced “m”

UPDATE:
DSL reports noticed this also. Check them out for some additional details.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/90502

Facebook Beacon: Perfect for self-centered pricks.

November 16th, 2007

beacon_48.png

Facebook Beacon is a new effort announced by Facebook to allow users to share their buying preferences. A few lines of javascript allows a website to post to facebook what items you purchased, games you played, movies you saw etc. Hell attach the three lines of code to your toilet so you can alert your emo friends when you drop a deuce.

Seriously, are we that vain of a country that we need to tell everyone in the world we bought a DVD. I don’t care who you are I don’t give a toss if you bought friends volume 1 on DVD on overstock.com. If you think everyone does, you’re an ass.

Zune 2: Bigger Faster Stronger

November 13th, 2007

zune tattoo guy
Simply put the new version of the Zune software is amazing. Microsoft took all the suck out of the last version and released something that rivals iTunes. Its podcast support is awesome now. Simple and to the point with an excellent browsing interface. The social actually is social now. Please note the new zune social card under my xbox live gamercard. Wow so sweet. Thanks zunenuze for the code to embed the zune social card. Most important update though. Wireless sync.

Steam = Everything wrong with DRM

November 8th, 2007

Steam servers are too busy to handle your request.

Oh well I do beg your pardon Steam. How absurd of me to attempt to play a game I purchased. Please accept my apology for bothering you while you were doing other, much more important things. I’ll try back later when its more convenient for you.

T-Mobile trademarks magenta

November 7th, 2007

magenta.jpg
Apparently one can trademark colors now. Gizmodo reports (via a long chain of sources) T-Mobile, in their copyright and trademark statements has managed to state that:

T-MOBILE, the T-MOBILE logo, T-ZONES, the T-ZONES design, the HOTSPOT design, T-MOBILE MDA, T-MOBILE SDA, T-MOBILEWEB, the WORLDCLASS logo, the “digits” design, the T-MOBILE acoustic logo, and the color magenta are registered and/or unregistered trademarks of Deutsche Telekom AG in the US and/or other countries.

Amazing. Consider mauve officially mine. I trademark mauve. Its mine. Use it, I’ll fucking sue you then kick you in the shin.

Via: Gizmodo

Why Java applets are obsolete.

November 6th, 2007

old man java
Recently I took a test where I had to write a Java Applet. I realized something while I was writing it. Java Applets are obsolete and deprecated. Anything they can do, faster newer technologies can do better. Lets look at the two main purposes of a Java Applet: animation and robust GUI development.

In terms of animation Applets fall short… way short. Writing a program to animate something is as painful as drawing a picture with LOGO. Applets lack the ability to draw and animate as effectively as alternatives like flash and silverlight. Flash gives the user simple easy ways to import media or draw vector (or raster) images and animate them using keyframes. Need advanced animation or programatic animation? Flash actionscript has you covered. It can animate as well as provide an event driven program.

Java Applets however have none of this. Each frame must be drawn programatically and requires a blanking in between. While this isn’t a huge inconvenience it shows Java applets are not intended to be powerful animation tools.

Additionally Java applets are supposed to provide a robust GUI experience. In actuality Java applets provide for a clunky slow loading experience frequently resulting in a large ominous gray box in the center of a browser.

When Java originated (early 90’s) applets were a very powerful tool allowing for robust GUI development. Java applets were leaps and bounds ahead of any early version HTML controls. This utility however diminished as HTML became less of a presentation markup and more of an interaction markup. My realization that java applets are obsolete was concreted by AJAX, asynchronous Javascript and XML. This technology fixed the primary problem still plaguing HTML: The HTTP protocol.
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Child’s Play 2007 Starts

November 5th, 2007

Childs Play Banner
Just letting all my 3 readers know that Child’s Play 2007 has started. Child’s play is a charity created by Penny Arcade to give video games to children’s hospitals. Contributors can directly contribute by purchasing items on a local children’s hospital’s Amazon.com gift list. This way you can ensure that the children will get good games like “Beautiful Katamari” instead of “Cars” and other games they think they’ll like. They historically have a very low overhead so please contribute and give the kids who really need it video games (instead of buying yourself games just to get out of doing work by saying “well I really should beat halo 3 on Legendary before anything else”)