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Love ballad to a 30 inch cinema display, awesome:
Notice too, the production quality of the video… pretty good by YouTube standards. Likely made on a mac. There are times when I still miss my Ulead VideoStudio on my PC since it had a lot of nice features and I clocked at least 5 years of use with it. Still, things just seem better on the other side.
Thanks Koson!
You just have to watch this to understand!
Oh, and watch it until the very end since that's what brings the whole thing together!
I’m was a big fan of Jonathan Coulton’s Thing a Week and re: Your Brains was probably my favorite of the bunch. Although Skullcrusher Mountain and Baby Got Back are classics.
As I tried to send a linkto the mp3 to a friend, I see there is an awesome World of Warcraft/machinima (ala South Park) video of the song on YouTube! Although the video does take away a little bit from the “office space” nature of the song, it adds so much more that I don’t really care!
While I was at the GDC this year, my friend Martin was shaking his head at my need to visit the Apple Store in San Francisco. This comic explains my mindset perfectly.
(click for a larger version)
Thanks Kevin!
It’s not often that I get to tag a blog entry with the beer AND science categories, but here it goes.
A colleague of mine sent a very cool video of a beer freezing instantly, by merely tapping it on a counter. Of course, the beer was super-freezed by a liquid nitrogen bath.
Now, not everyone has liquid nitrogen laying around the home. However, if you have a lime, you can do a similar experiment. Here are the steps.
While you wait for the Corona to thaw, go grab a good Belgian beer and perhaps you’ll forget about that Corona. Note that a good beer does not require a lime.
My only explanation for this is that the freezing temperature of beer is below that of water. So, the water from the lime hits the colder-than-freezing alcohol and causes the water to freeze.
Thanks John for the and thanks Jen for the correction. Of course Liquidnet nitrogen would not lock up a beer, as it would only promote flow ;-)
What better way to kick off the weekend then to generate your own beer, in name anyway:
http://www.strangebrew.ca/beername.php?Mode=Generate
Mine was:
Non-Euclidean Grunting Wit!
I just watched the classic episode of South Park entitled, “Make Love, Not Warcraft” (via iTunes) and I laughed at the term I’ve heard in a few places, pwned (man, that’s hard to type).The whole episode was classic, I was bursting at the scenes for the entire trip.
Anyway, the word ‘pwned’ (likely pronouced “poned” but there is some debate) was likely first used via a spelling mistake by a programmer for Warcraft II Tides of Darkness and it’s use just grew from there.
The Wikipedia entry on Pwn is pretty fascinating.
A funky song about the moon which was recently turned into a video… now on YouTube!
In response to my lamentations about blowing away a perfectly good partition table in my last post, jschimpf mentioned a link where I could have fixed it if only I had consulted Google and poked around a bit more.
The solution was so mind bogglingly cool that I had to write a bit more about it. Here is the link:
Basically, you need to use the Disk Utility (available when you boot from your OS X install disc) to make a new image file of the restore disk. Then, now get this, you can MOUNT THIS DISC AND MAKE CHANGES. Then burn it to DVD again.
How cool is that?
I suppose I can do that under Windows, but I’ve never heard of a way to modify an ISO image that I mount so I couldn’t begin to enumerate the steps involved. Under Windows, volumes that I mount from an ISO are generally read-only.
Thanks jschimpf
I got my first Mac this summer, a sleek black MacBook some call a BlackBook. At the time, it was cool to say that you paid the “Black Tax”, which is the extra $150 you pay when you chose a black MacBook as opposed to the regular white one. The only technical difference between the two was the $50 hard drive upgrade, so the remaining $150 was the “tax.” Not sure if this is still true, it looks like the Black Tax is now $50 (based on upgrading a white MacBook to the 120GB drive standard on a black MacBook).
I digress.
I have since gone and bought two iMacs and through whatever set of circumstances, the Mac OS X install disc that came with one of those computers was laying around my desk the next time I wanted to install Mac OS X Tiger on my MacBook.
Now, why I needed to re-OS my system is the subject of another story entirely. Rest assured that I was forced to uninstall a pre-release copy of a beta OS in preference to the tried-and-true Mac OS X 10.4, “Tiger”.
For weeks, I’ve been trying to install Tiger, but I kept getting a confusing message during the first steps of the install which basically said, “This software can not be installed on this computer.”
What? Did the beta software mess up my drive? I avoided an explicit reformat at first but even a clean format of my partition yielded the same message. Hmmm… was the volume format “new” or somehow incompatible with Tiger, I thought?
I avoided a repartition since I had an absolutely beautiful boot camp partition running Windows XP. In OS X, I was able to run this windows partition from Parallels or I could choose to reboot and load it natively. It was awesome. But, in my continued desperation, I decided to, sniff, blow away the partition table completely in a reckless attempt to “start over” from as close to scratch as I could imagine.
Still, “This software can not be installed on th is computer.” Arg!
Then, a funny thing occurred to me and I ejected the OS X install disc and saw something like this:
Whoa! Wait a minute. Are all OS X discs not created equal? This is a major shock for a Windows user like me who, aside from “restoration discs” that some manufacturers ship with their computers (like Dell and Gateway), Windows install discs are generally valid for all possible hardware. But not these discs. Notice the iMac on the front:
Oh, this was a painful lesson to learn. iMac is clearly marked on the front, yet I tried to install this disc onto my MacBook for weeks and weeks. If only I would have realized this earlier, I could have saved myself so much trouble.
So, I went into my MacBook packing box (I can’t bring myself to throw it out… it’s just so pretty) and I opened up the little gray flip-out box that had the original discs and manuals. Sure enough, the Mac OS X install discs had MacBook clearly labeled on it.
Doh!
Now, when I eventually upgrade to Leopard, I’m sure that the copy I’ll get in the retail store will be valid for all Apple hardware, but I suppose this is just not true for the discs that ship with new machines.
This makes perfect sense in hindsight. How else could Apple users with hardware that comes out after the initial release of Tiger get full and latest device support on the disc? A download? Nah.
If the disc had said “restoration disc” on it, perhaps I would have treated it more carefully and realize that it was for a specific computer since this is how things work in the Windows world.
Back to the drawing board. TextMate, rails, ecto, bleh. Install zombie I am.
Last week I went to the GDC 2007. This is the first time, though, that I’ve had even a moment to try and write something down about it. Hey, four kids and gamer friends keep you pretty busy.
During the conference, I managed to finish reading The Power of Events, by David Lukham and I put a good dent in Networking and Online Games by Grenville Armitage, Mark Claypool, and Philip Branch.
Last week was a blast. I spent a lot of the before and after convention hours with my friend Martin who went to the GDC to check out the Indie developer scene. I went to the GDC to see what the gaming industry did about scale. It seems that managing 8 million subscribers shares a lot of similarities to managing millions of trade executions per hour.
I went to the GDC in 2000, also with Martin, while we were developing our first game, Iron Dragon. As I sat through the sessions of this new GDC, I thought a lot about my current work experience and what I did to pump out the Iron Dragon game. This was a huge case of “if I knew then what I knew now…” that left me constantly thinking about how I might attack a new game title if the opportunity ever presented itself.
So, below is a whirlwind tour of what I saw and what I thought as I made my way through GDC 2007.
My flight was easy and uneventful (is there a better variety?). I arrived early enough on Monday March 5 to attend some of the Indie sessions on Monday. This was just filler, really, since Tuesday was the day I was most interested in. At night, I went to a nice brewing restaurant/bar called Gordon Biersch. I ordered up some of their garlic fries (on a friend’s recommendation) and two pints of their Blonde Bock. The blonde bock wasn’t as “blonde” as I expected, but it was a delightful malty beer which left me quite satisfied. Our walk to the restaurant took me to a small part of the Embarcadero, a nice walkway along the San Francisco bay which I would get a LOT more familiar with the next day.
One Day 2, I attended the meat of my attendance at the GDC. A large-scale game development tutorial which talked a lot about coping with large teams, large source code bases, and lots and lots of load.
It was clear that agile development techniques were becoming an increasingly popular theme in all the sessions I attended, and this large-scale app development was no exception. There was an entire segment dedicated to SCRUM, for instance.
The speakers were very experienced and I was delighted to miss the pretentious tone I’m so used to at conferences like this. I got the feeling that these guys have been through a lot and their advice was well-grounded and pragmatic. Topics covered were:
The part on performance management was excellent and the speaker from Alcatel-Lucent executed an engaging presentation on the topic. Perhaps I’ll write a bit more about that in a future post.
That evening, my friend Martin and I went on a wild foot adventure that led us from our Hotel (Parc 55) to the Embarcadero, Pier 39 (and dinner), to Coit Tower, and through the vast mountainous jungle of San Francisco. When I say mountainous, I mean hills of course but these feel like mountains when you’re at the end of your day and you have no gasoline-powered locomotion to help you. Martin “Mr. Fit” didn’t seem to mind, but I thought that perhaps we went a few miles too far in our adventure. Still, now that it’s done, it was a nice experience. Oh, and here is a nice pair of pictures:
(This image is a composite of two separate pictures of Martin and I… since no one was available to take the shot… The bridge in the background is the Bay Bridge.)
(That small silhouette at the base of the Coit Tower is Martin)
On the third day, I guess Wednesday, I attended a lot of filler sessions. One of the topics that interested me was how the designers and artists worked with developers. How do the two teams share in-game assets for example? Also, how to artists feel about the new agile methodologies? At one point, the GDC staffer in charge of entry to the lead artist/art director round table shrugged and asked the artists to be creative and make the packed room bigger. The leader of the session laughed and said something to the effect, “I don’t know, that sounds like a coder problem.”
We all laughed, though I was probably the only one in the room on the butt end of that joke.
Thursday was largely uneventful and my trip home was quiet and smooth. So ended my trip to the GDC, but lots of memories and insight to last me for a long time.
And… the photo:
Oh, but now I’m onto something else:
Ooooh, that’s a good beer.
So, tonight is a “Friday Night D&D” night. A few friends get together online and chat via TeamSpeak, view a common GameTable map, and play with characters defined on our Wiki.
You’ve heard all of this before.
Tonight, my beer of choice is Victory’s HopDevil:
…though a few bottles of Guiness were also enjoyed.
We’re fighting a rediculously powerful creature, some kind of metallic construct that is very hard to hit (high AC) and when you do hit, you do very little damage (damage reduction).
My character is the one in black robes, a tempest fighter who spins around with dual blades and in this battle turns out to be pretty much useless.
Soon, we’ll all die but I figure I’d write before the end…
