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Yeh, I passed 8th grade math… but I got one wrong. So did Chris Sells. I don’t know which I got wrong… probably the one about mode, median, and average. I never really got those straight.
| You Passed 8th Grade Math |
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I spent the better part of last night working on a fresh new rendition of a portion of my game world, Primordia. The old map was hand-drawn and is starting to show it’s age. You can see a scan of the old map, here:
![TarrianGeography[1]](http://www.primordia.com/blog/archives/images/TarrianGeography[1].jpg)
That map was done with pen and colored pencil about 15 years ago while I was in college. I made one attempt at re-doing the entire map in Adobe Illustrator last year, but I abandoned that effort. My computer still isn’t fast enough to manage that much detail and still be productive. Or, perhaps, I don’t author my AI documents efficiently. You can find that attempt here:
![TarrianGeography[1]](http://www.primordia.com/blog/archives/images/TarrianGeography[1].png)
So, instead, I went and focused on a portion of the map and started from scratch. This time, I took advantage of some features of Adobe Illustrator which remained a relative mystery to me until now. These features allow me to create a relatively complex map in minimal time. The following map isn’t done, but it’s starting to come out very well.
![CradleOfEnlightenment[1]](http://www.primordia.com/blog/archives/images/CradleOfEnlightenment[1].png)
Just so you know, I stole the style and layout of the map from one published by Wizard’s of the Coast for the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.
In any case, when the map is done, it should have tons of detail. If anyone is interested in hearing about how I created the map and what those “mysterious” features of Adobe Illustrator are, send me some feedback.
This is a test post from a new Web 2.0-specific browser called Flock!
Seems like the designers working on the WoW had some free time to add some holiday cheer. Check out these Jack-o-Lanterns:
But it’s the hanging ghost that inspired this post!
As per yesterday’s announcement of the iPod’s new video capabilities, I got an alert that a new version of iTunes was available. Wow. 4.9 to 5 to 5.0.1 to 6.0 in just a few months.
I love the shiny glass mirror effect they have on the videos. Check it out:
I’ve been using FireANT for a few weeks now. It’s buggy but it gets the job done. Before FireANT, I actually used iTunes 5.x to watch video blogs (vlogs) such as CommandN , Diggnation, and Rocketboom.
One interesting note on FireANT is that the name mimics Gnu (Gnu’s not Unix), as in ANT’s not TV. Geeky. They went with the “Fire” prefix because “Ant” was already taken.
Being a big fan of Konfabulator, I was pleased to see that Microsoft’s upcoming Windows OS, Vista, will have their own widgets built in, called “Gadgets”.
I built a few widgets myself and I was always troubled by the fact that to get a good-looking Widget, you had to be a master of Photoshop. I am sure that this will not be the case with the Vista Gadgets which I am assuming will be based on X A M L.
Google came out with an RSS reader called Google Reader. I’m not sure when, but a colleague pointed it out to me this morning.
I was able to quickly import an OPML blogroll from Bloglines. They use the “lens” metaphor for managing a list of items and detail on those items. I found the interface very slow but the product is very promising. I’m kind of surprised to se anything Google does to be slow, but it’s true at least for now.
I’ve been disappointed in Bloglines recently. Their interface hasn’t changed and although they wrote a PDA version, I still find the need to customze it in ways I just can’t. I find a sans-serif font easier to view, for instance. I’m sure some greasemonkey can point me to ways to customize this myself, but I think it’s appropriate for Bloglines to support that.
Still, bloglines is a superior experience right now. It’s faster than the Google reader and it works the way I think.
I’ll continue to play with the Google Reader and it would not surprise me to see myself switching at some point.
I have insomnia tonight, so I thought I’d give myself a little project to keep myself occupied until I start slumping in front of the keyboard. This weekend, I’m going to a gaming convention with my college buddies up in venerable Schenectady, New York.
I feel a bit guilty that I went and consumed my second John Harvard’s growler, even after my friend Martin (also attending the gaming convention) suggested I save it for consumption at the con.
So, I thought I’d try and locate a few brew pubs in the Schenectady/ Albany area on the chance of aquiring a new growler of some sort. What I found is a fascinating cache of knowledge about beer. I figure I’d post a bunch of links that I’va been storing away and new ones I found tonight.
First, the history of various beers is chronicled on Wikipedia with surprising detail. First, check out the entry on Beer itself. Don’t stop there, find out about how IPA got started. Or, learn about the different styles of beer, like a Porter, Ale (like my favorite, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale), Lager (see popular brands, like Samuel Adams), Pilsener (think Budweiser), and Stout. Did I miss any?
So, in Schenectady, we can search for brew pubs near Schenectady. This yields a number of results. I can take these results and get driving directions to/from my hotel.
So then I check out one of t hese brew pubs and they wind up having a delightful writeup about beer and how it is generally mishandled in most beer distributors. So I learned that,
“A common myth is that cycling beer from cold to warm and back to cold temperatures will damage its flavor. This is only true in that warm temperatures are bad for beer. Keeping beer cool is always good for the preservation of its flavor.”
Like any checmical reaction, the breakdown of a beer is accelerated by higher temperatures. As the link states, beers don’t last forever, they are a “perishible food.”
One of he more interesting facts in the fresh beer article is that,
“While some beer styles will benefit from extended aging, the majority reach peak flavor about six weeks after brew day. There is little we can do to protect beer from time, other than accelerate it to near light speed to reap the benefits of time dilation.”
Golly, the author is also a physicist!
Another interesting fact:
“The above process takes a few weeks to perform, and is done by people called maltsters. Samuel Adams, the revolutionary war figure, was actually a maltster, not a brewer as some claim. Maltsters are wonderful people, because they enable the brewer to make beer.”
You can also read about “adjuncts” which is basically food for the yeast to do it’s job. The author claims that,
“Adjuncts cannot be used in Germany, because of their ancient beer tax law, the Reinheitsgebot (pronounced, rIn hIts ga bOt). Many of America's craft brewers, including the C.H. Evans Brewing Company, refrain from using adjuncts when brewing German-style beers.”
If I wanted to visit the Evans brew pub, I should go there before I go to my hotel. This map make that pretty clear considering I’m traveling North of 87.
Wish me luck!
Now playing: - EGC Clambake for September 30, 2005
This is just crazy. Ryan Dawson does up a new Shiny Orangy style for Avalon.
This is not much code. If you had .NET 2.0 Beta 2 and the September CTP bits installed, what you see there statically is dynamic and full of mouse-over glowing goodness.
As a corollary to my last post about tagging my home videos. I can also tag anything I find interesting on the web and, viola! it appears in my feed. Take this video of the muppets singing Mahnahmahna, for example.
I tagged that as oozevideo and bam, it’s part of the feed!
I just got done creating the infrastructure for a new video blog (vlog) feed. I thought I’d share how I did this.
I didn’t use any fancy blog software, like Movable Type or WordPress, even though I have access to these. I combined the social-bookmarking power of del.icio.us and enrichment and tracking capabilities of FeedBurner to do all of the magic.
I start by uploading a new video to my site and make sure the file is publicly accessible by setting the server permissions properly. I then use del.icio.us to create the feed. All I had to do was "bookmark" the url to the video and give it a specific tag. In this case I tagged the first video with oozevideo.
The standard RSS feed for the oozevideo tag is as follows:
http://del.icio.us/NickCody/oozevideo
However, that feed doesn't support the proper enclosure tags I need so a good video feed aggregator can automatically pull down the file. So, I added some special tags as follows:
http://del.icio.us/rss/NickCody/system:media:video+oozevideo
Notice the media detection type. I think there is a way to get audio enclosures as well as video, but I forget how. I can find out if you are interested. These special tags generate the proper feed with enclosure elements. Since I didn't want to expose the raw del.icio.us feed and since I wanted to leverage the statistics and tracking capabilities of FeedBurner, I wrapped the raw feed into a virtual one with the following url:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/delicious/nickcody/oozevideo
If you go to the FeedBurner site, it’s rediculously easy to wrap a feed. I can post an entry on some tips if anyone is interested.
You can use any old aggregator to subscribe to that feed such as Bloglines, NewsGator, FireFox, RSS Bandit, etc. You can then just click on the enclosure link (the video), and download the video yourself. However, I started using a really good video blog aggregator that works on Mac and Windows. It's called FireANT.
With this software, you arrange the feeds you're interested in into channels. The program automatically handles the complexities of downloading large videos and supports bittorrent out of the box. It then allows you to play them inside of the application. It’s very convenient and I think the experience rivals that of iTunes… for video anyway. I’m currently using FireANT 1.0b6. It’s a little buggy, but still enjoyable to use.
There are already 9 videos in the feed, all of which appeared in various episodes of Primordial Ooze. Most of thevideos are encoded with mp4, using QuickTime. I may settle on H.264 at some point or I may create a few format-specific feeds. For now, I just recommend that everyone who wants to watch t he videos on the feed install iTunes 5 (or later) which comes with QuickTime 7, which comes with the H.264 codec.
Let me know if you have any more ideas on how this can be used and/or feedback on formats or whatnot. Until then, enjoy!
