Funny:
Weapons of Mass Destruction not found
Microsoft Word bytes Tony Blair in the butt
Mehr Linux – Mehr Freiheit
Protecting Its Proprietary Pork
Scary:
Lawsuits in the Internet Age
RFID Chips Are Here
Month: July 2003
4th of July
The official 4th of July celebrations in Norway always happens on the last weekend before 4th of July – so that families can come and enjoy it together. My friend April was helping with the organization this year, and I dopped by to see how they were doing.
I came just in time to help with the cleaning up. Perfect timing as ever, because it meant I didn’t have to stand in line with a lot of screaming kids to fight for a ride on the bull.
Doppelspieler
Mit so etwas hat man als Eressea-Spielleiter zu tun. Ist das nicht toll? Die Namen der Beteiligten habe ich zensiert, es handelt sich da um Spieler, die relativ weit bekannt sind. tut auch nichts zur Sache, wirklich.
Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2003 21:10:41 +0200
From: Doppelspieler
To: Enno Rehling
Subject: Re: Partei xxxx
Hi
| Du schickst seit mindestens 16 Wochen jede Woche die
| Befehle für die Partei xxxx und yyyy ein.
Ich war in einem Buendis mit *censored* und als Daemon auf sie angewiesen. Obwohl ich viele ihre Zwerge finanzierte haute sie ohne ein Wort in den Sack und aenderte die email auf mich. Wenn ich die Zwerge bisher spielte
dann weil die Daemonen ohne sie nict spielbar sidn und weil ich hoffte dass ich doch noch eine Vertretung finden wuerde.
| Du beide Parteien spielt, und gelegentlich auch noch
| zzzz.
Das war doch klar dass *removed* nicht lange von Eressea lassen konnte und seine Partei wieder uebernehmen wuerde. Das muss man die Partei doch nihct gleich in die Tonne klopfen.
| Ich muss Dir nicht erklären, was Doppelspiel ist, oder?
| Die Partei wird diese Woche aus dem Spiel genommen.
| Und wenn von Dir nochmal für irgendeine Partei ausser
| für yyyy Befehle eintreffen, dann verschwindet die
| andere Partei auch. Obowhl, eigentlich sollte ich die
| gleich mit rauskegeln. Das macht mich jetzt echt
| stinkesauer.
Wird vielleicht gar nicht noetig sein denn meine arme Partei stirbt in Raten und ich uberlege sowiso schon die ganze Zeit ob ich nicht einfach aufgebe und sie toete.
Ich wollte in den naechsten 2 Zuegen wenigstens eine Hand voll auf eine andere Insel retten. Aber dafuer haette ich wegen dem Hunger auf eurer Insel Zwischenstation machen muessen. Ich ahtte *censored* gebeten mit dir deswegen Kontakt aufzunehmen weil er sicherlich mehr Einfluss bei dir hat als ich. Aber da du ‘echt stinkesauer’ bist ist das dann wohl von vornherein zum scheitern verurteilt.
Star Wars Galaxies, first impressions
I just got into Star Wars Galaxies for a few minutes. It’s been down a lot today, and downloading the patches took quite some time, too.
Character creation is nice. The character models can be morphed quite a bit (they don’t use actual bones to do that, but it looks pretty good anyhow). The character models have a nice resolution, there’s some bump mapping on them, too. They learned from our mistakes, and didn’t try to do character creation ingame 🙂
The tutorial explains the most important bits of the GUI rather well, and it’s part of a little sequence where I get to ill a terrorist. Nice, I’m totally by myself during the whole time. The camera controls are something you need to get used to. They’ve done something new with the controls, the character makes actual steps when turning around, so you don’t have those instant 180 turns that other games have, which is probably nice for the client-side prediction, too. No overshooting compensation. I wish I had a second client to see how they compensate for errors in the local prediction. Later.
The scanning of your clone data is directly taken out of Anarchy Online. They even call it insurance terminals, funny. There are a lot of things taken from AO, like the 10 buttons at the bottom right (which AO has in the top right).
Characters that you talk to have their conversation selections around their head. This is pretty irritating if you want to read them and the character moves his head as part of the idle animation (nice idle animations on everyone, btw). It keeps jittering by a few pixels all the time.
After the tutorial, I went to a starting city, met two other players, was happy to see that the character models stay the same. I’ll have to look at the technology some more when I’ve got more time.
Visuals are really nice. The screenshots look better than the game, unlike AO where the game always looked better than the screenshots. The physics are not impressive. There is very little that I can collide with. I can walk through people, tables, chairs, etc. and it seems like the only things that have a collision volume are walls and larger contructs (like the fountain I’m just standing next to). You can’t jump, which is probably a blessing for the level designers…
Now playing: Never on Sunday – Radiohead
Second Copy
A week ago, both my harddrives were not recognized, and my PC booted saying “insert system disk”. I guess this is among the most dreadful things a PC can say to me, and my mind started racing: “What do I have backups of?”, “I didn’t commit those changes to …” and worst, “My entire mail archive will be lost”. Luckily, Windows had just somehow shot the boot sector, and I was able to get back at the harddisks.
There’s no backup of stuff on my Windows PC. I decided I had to change that, and since I’m too lazy to shove my data onto my home on the network at regular intervals, I needed software to do that job for me. I found Second Copy. It’s something like an rsync for windows, with a user-friendly interface. You say which folders it should back up, and every few hours, it checks whether you’ve made changes and synchronizes them to the target directory (a folder in my home). It can also store the backup in a ZIP file. Or, if you want two computers to be in synch, it can synchronize in both directions.
I analyzed which folders I’d really miss in case of a crash, and now I use it to synchronize my User Profile, My Mail, and my local Documents folder.
This is very, very useful stuff, and I recommend you try it out for yourself. It costs money, though, so if any of you anyone seen something like it on sourceforge or anywhere that we can use for free, that would of course be even better…
My Triptych highscore
It’s probably not the best score in the world, but it’s good enough to serve as a test for posting images here. Resolutions of 320×240 are the new format for this site 🙂
Mein Blog
…ist im Netz, und kann hier besucht werden.
Done with visuals
It’s taken quite a while. I was googling for weblog designs, and thought there’s probably be something I liked. It’s amazing how many ‘girlie’ designs there are, and how few that are jsut what I was looking for. Clean, fast to load, pleasing.
I think this one is it, though. The bloghaus design was orriginally created for blogger, but I messed with the pages long enough until it worked in nucleus, and here’s the result. I may be changing the links and some other bits, but for tonight, it’s as good as it gets.
The design a bit limiting when it comes to putting up pictures. I may widen it a bit to allow me to post my regular 400 pixel wide images. But I never liked the text next to the image style I used earlier, so maybe this is definitely for the better.
Now playing: Wolf at the Door – Radiohead
Comic of the day
Now playing: Sympathique – Pink Martini
What I’m using here
The blog server uses nucleus, which was very easy to install, and I’m extremely happy with it so far.
To update the blog without using the web forms, I found w.bloggar, an amazing client that understands all the current blog servers. Real nifty.
I also use the Winamplog plugin, to put the “Currently listening” information into the postings.
The webcounter is from goweb.de, and I’m taking it with me from the old site. It’s at 1108 now, which is quite a lot given I don’t write much interesting stuff.
Now playing: No Hay Problema – Pink Martini