links for 2007-12-01
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Neat tricks with iptables... prevent SYN attacks, address spoofing, smurf attacks, bogus packets, tcp reset attacks, port scanning, and password attacks
« October 2007 | Main | December 2007 »
November 30, 2007
November 28, 2007
links for 2007-11-29
November 27, 2007
links for 2007-11-28
November 21, 2007
links for 2007-11-22
November 20, 2007
links for 2007-11-21
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Fun little gravity gadget
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Some nice themes for Wordpress...
November 19, 2007
links for 2007-11-20
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This is a pretty amazing tutorial, though the 100% retouching makes her look very synthetic. The 50% blend is brilliant.
November 17, 2007
links for 2007-11-18
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Cool CSS positioning
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Such a sad picture of poor pluto
November 16, 2007
links for 2007-11-17
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Disassembly on steroids
November 14, 2007
Line Rider!
November 13, 2007
College Humor
Oh no, God no. It’s happened. I have found a new addiction and it’s called CollegeHumor.com.
I just watched three, actually four… make that five videos and each one is a hall of famer in my book:
Trinity Miracle: End Zone Shot
After these five, I started to see the typical YouTube fair.
Anyway, subscribed!
XM Radio Dashboard Widget - Roll your own with Leopard
When I bought a GPS system for my car, the salesmen talked me into an XM Radio subscription since he claimed I would get traffic updates over XM. It turns out that his claim was true and I can honestly say that the system works. The system very often tells me when there is a problem ahead and offers to reroute. More often, though, the alternate routes are no good so all I get is advanced notice of my misery.
In any case, the added benefit of the XM subscription is, well, having XM Radio in the car. The quality is good and the commercial-free music is a nice thing to have.
Since I’m already paying for the subscription, I recently tried to get more for my money and started listening at work. The XM website has a web page which serves as a simple and clean tuner. It’s jacked up with lots of Ajax goodness, too. I find that Channel 70, “Real Jazz,” is the most non-distracting kind of music to listen to while I work.
For my day hours, I’m on Vista and I found a nice Konfabulator, er, Yahoo! Widget which lets me eliminate the annoying browser component.
At home, though, I’m on a Mac and the only widget in town (as far as I can tell)doesn’t seem to work with Leopard.
Then I remembered that Safari has a cool new feature called “Open in Dashboard.” It turns out that this works great!
All you need to do is bring up the player in Safari and select “Open in Dashboard…” and a nice UI comes up allowing you to select the area of the page to use as the new Dashboard widget.
Once I did this I had a fully functional dashboard widget. Freaking cool!
(Also, Apple added some nice UI dressing to the clipped portion of the page, making it look like a real widget and not some sloppy web clipping I expected to see. Here are the choices:
Enjoy and rock on.
UPDATE: Remember one more step. On the widget, click the “i” to flip to the widget options. Make sure you clear the checkbox that will cut audio when you leave dashboard mode.
Second UPDATE: Unfortunately, the widget’s browser session will time out and this effectively disables the widget. So nothing I said here is of much use. I was thinking about this all day and fond it to be true when I got home and experimented. At this point, you might as well just open your browser and minimize it to the doc.
links for 2007-11-14
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Cool kaleidescope images... creates a vector svg for use in Illustartor, web, or whatever
November 12, 2007
"Papers" your personal library of science
Papers is an application for Mac OS X which is a boon for anyone who deals with many PDF files. The UI and feature set is highly focused on being a serious research tool for scientists.
Once installed Papers collects all of the PDF’s on your machine and offers to copy them to your new repository in ~/Documents/Papers. You can copy the PDF’s or move them.
From there, papers offers an iTunes-like or browser-like interface for managing y our PDF collection for for getting new PDF’s.
Online repositories you can search out of the box are:
- Google Books
- Google Scholar
- PubMed
- Web of Science
The program is cognizant of the source and other meta-date of the paper so you can organize your collection by Author, Journal, your own rating, Publisher, and so forth.
I did a search for “pathfinding games” using the “Google Scholor” repository and found over 700 results, most of which were available for free.
While you can always just use Google to search for these papers:
pathfinding games filetype:pdf pathfinding games filetype:ps
and get over 20,000 results, the advantage to using Papers are as follows (as far as I can tell):
- You get organization around your local collection
- ps files are automatically rendered and read as easily as pdf’s
- You can choose to download all search results and begin to perform detailed searches
- Filter results on criteria such as where full text is available for free (not available for all repositories… each repository plugin supports only criteria that it can handle)
- It’s just cool. It’s a very slick OS X interface that just makes sense.
Go check it out.
November 11, 2007
links for 2007-11-12
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Looks like a great utility for the security conscious (paranoid)
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Papers will revolutionize the way you deal with scientific papers. Search for articles using the built in search engines, retrieve and archive PDFs, and read and study them all from within Papers, your personal library of Science.
November 9, 2007
links for 2007-11-10
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Cool Mac P2P file sharing...
November 8, 2007
links for 2007-11-09
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Wow... make automatic call using a computer generated voice, with the words of your choosing and specify the caller ID number. Cool
The Magic Calligraphy
I don’t understand how people can do this stuff. He’s using ink, can’t erase, and it comes out flawlessly:
And up-side-down mind you!
November 7, 2007
links for 2007-11-08
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Wow, cool looking site... will have to explore their tutorials soon!
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Some cool cheat sheets
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Ooooh, some cool drawing lessons.
November 6, 2007
Wooden Spoon Trick
Oh, they just keep coming.
Via haha.nu
Tesla Coils Playing the Mario Bros Theme
How cool is this?
From Milk and Cookies
This is a solid-state Tesla coil.
The primary runs at its resonant frequency in the 41 KHz range, and is modulated from the control unit in order to generate the tones you hear.
Twin Solid State Musical Tesla coils playing Mario Bros theme song at the 2007 Lightning on the Lawn Teslathon sponsored by DC Cox (Resonance Research Corp) in Baraboo WI.
The music that you hear is coming from the sparks that these two identical high power solid state Tesla coils are generating. There are no speakers involved. The Tesla coils stand 7 feet tall and are each capable of putting out over 12 foot of spark. They are spaced about 18 feet apart. The coils are controlled over a fiber optic link by a single laptop computer. Each coil is assigned to a midi channel which it responds to by playing notes that are programed into the computer software. These coils were constructed by Steve Ward and Jeff Larson. Video was captured by Terry Blake. What is not obvious is how loud the coils are. They are well over 110dB If you look at another You Tube video which is from a different angle, you can hear the echo off the building and get a better idea of how loud it is.
Via Gizmodo. Thanks John!
StarCraft 2
I’m pretty excited about the upcoming release of StarCraft II.
StarCraft was probably the only game where I saw hundreds of hours of gameplay. Others where I saw upwards of 40–70 hours include Diablo and Diablo II, Ultima Underworld, Homeworld/Cataclysm, Doom/II, and maybe a few others. Recently I’ve probably logged about 40 or so hours of World of Warcraft but that’s only because it’s a job. To put that list in perspective, I have friends that can boast a list at least ten times that.
Anyway, StarCraft was the grandaddy favorite for me. It was played on at least three generations of hardware and each time I installed the game I hoped that it would somehow get better with my new machine. But that’s not what StarCraft was about. It was a near perfectly balanced sci-fi strategy game that stood the test of time. Well, people might argu that it was well-balanced burt certainly it was well-balanced enough that after the Brood War expansion was released, the game has since seen only minor tweaks. In my head, StarCraft needed change like Chess needs change.
Wikipedia has a nice writeup on StarCraft’s legacy:
StarCraft was the best-selling computer game in 1998[1] and won the Origins Award for Best Strategy Computer Game of that year.[2] StarCraft was listed on IGN's "Top 100 Games of All Time" featured as #7, and in 2006, received a Star on the Walk of Game at Metreon, San Francisco. Nine million copies of StarCraft and its expansion pack, StarCraft: Brood War, have been sold since its release,[3] making it the third best-selling computer game in history (behind The Sims and The Sims 2). It is especially popular in South Korea, where professional players and teams participate in matches, earn sponsorships, and compete in televised matches.[4] Blizzard initially intended to continue the story with the tactical shooter StarCraft: Ghost, which was later put on hold indefinitely. The sequel, StarCraft II, was announced on May 19, 2007, in Seoul, South Korea.
Now consider StarCraft II. From what I can see from via their beautiful high-resolution gameplay demos, Blizzard has done something heroic. They have somehow maintained the essence of the original game but have effectively lifted a milky veil over the experience and brought to bear a visceral, lifelike, mind-blowing experience.
Having a free-moving camera is just the start. They have added havok physics best demonstrated to me by the falling pieces of a Protoss Colossus sliding down a ramp it was destroyed upon. They can support hundreds of on-screen units which should make any player favoring the Zerg very happy. Units can now walk up and down some cliffs, finally shedding the original game’s artifically feeling tiles. I can only imagine what the level editor will allow you to do.
I have questions around how they will charge for online play. Blizzard has monotized well on World of Warcraft and the pay-per-play model has proven a successful model across the industry. Part of the reason why MMORPG’s like WoW need to charge per month is due to the heavy level of multi-player interaction that needs to happen as an artifact of the MMO game design. This interaction can only be realized when it’s hosted by an industrial-strength datacenter. Such datacenters are expensive to run. They require power, new hardware, and most of all they require salaries for expensive technicians and game arbiters.
My hopes are that StarCraft will not fall prey to the same model. There are a number of reasons why I think the game will remain free after the initial purchase but only time will tell. Blizzard’s site seems pretty mum about the issue, but I wonder if anyone following the game more closely knows more? I’d love to know.
In my head, a significant factor in the massive success of the game could well be due to the pricing model. You buy the game and play it for free after that. In my head, games like WoW are driven by an addiction and thus fit nicely into the midset where you simply need to play all of the time or your friends will blow past your level and you’ll be playing alone. Also, it’s a persistent world so you essentially are driven to play continuously since the world is continuously evolving.
If Blizzard hopes to keep their goose laying golden eggs then I hope they maintain the existing model which, IMHO, facilitates the tournament-style mentality of its players. Unlike WoW, StarCraft is not a continuous experience. You play a match and walk away.
The questions in my mind are whether Blizzard loses money in maintaining battle.net for all of those South Korean tournament players. Also, will the support for new massive armies require heavier server resources and thus datacenters equivalent to those needed to run WoW?
Those parameters to these economics are simply not available to me. If that turns out to be a losing equation, it think we’ll be looking at some form of monthly charge to play online. I have a few friends who love StarCraft dearly but are so against pay-per-play models that I fear they will boycott the new release on principle. I do not think they would be alone.
Oh, lest I forget. StarCraft II will be available on the Mac!
November 5, 2007
Feed problems and on moving to WordPress
At least I hope they are fixed. For the past two weeks an error has appeared at the bottom of all the Primordial Ooze Blog pages, below the footer. Unfortunately, the error was also reported in the RSS (at the end), which invalidated the XML structure and caused some feed aggregators to choke… such as IE and Feed Demon.
At this point, I’m pretty sure that I am gooing to make the switch to WordPress by the end of the year. WordPress has seen amazing growth in the past few years. There are tons of themes, tons of plugins, and a very active community.
Plus, my web host supports WordPress and allows me to one-click upgrade to new versions. That’s a big deal as my current process is manual and error prone.
The likely plan will be to leave http://primordia.com/blog alone. The new blog will likely be at http://primordia.com/ooze (not active yet). I’ll make a final “we’re moving post” and then redirect FeedBurner to the new RSS feed. This should mean that everyone currently subscribed will not notice anything and they’ll continue to simply get new articles without any modification to their aggregators. Ah, blessed FeedBurner.
November 4, 2007
How We Met animation
Cool stop-motion animation. Warning, very hairy video… via haha.nu
What I wonder about is how he erases the previous drawing so completely, yet can create smooth frame-by-frame transitions?
November 3, 2007
links for 2007-11-04
November 2, 2007
Beer and Turkey
With Halloween behind us, it’s time to start thinking about Thanksgiving. What better than this post found on YesButNoButYes:
Beer lovers have a saying, “What wine goes best with Thanksgiving? Beer!” There’s a push this Thanksgiving 2008 to get people to think about drinking beer over wine. After all, beer is what the pilgrims drank. See the Beer and Turkey site. What types of beer should you go with? The Beer Advocate has more specific suggestions. Pilsner’s and Lager for starters. Pale Ale’s for hors d’oeuvres. Belgian-style ales for that turkey dinner. Stouts and thicker bodied beers for dessert. And 2 Advil before bed. Now that Halloween’s over…Happy Turkey Day.
links for 2007-11-03
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Cool way to find the name of a color
November 1, 2007
Mouseman
Could not have said it better, and didn't
A while ago, I wrote this whole long fit of blather about why I switched over to Mac-land.
Then, the other day, my friend the Zingman says essentially the same thing it in just a few short sentences:
But Vista looks like a total dog that jumped the shark, and PC hardware design reminds me more of Soviet-era cars with each year. Meanwhile the Macs keep getting better and better. Not only are they sleek and shiny and integrated and all, but they include Linux and you can run Windows on ‘em still. Best of all worlds.
If you read that, he uses fdisk /mbr. This is one of my all-time favorite commands since it is the command which allowed me to kill my first virus… by hand.
a note on del.icio.us links
Yesterday one of you friendly readers noted that yesterday’s del.icio.us link auto-posted to this site was a domain squatter (m acx m). Apologies for the deception, I had bookmarked it in haste and didn’t realize it’s nature.