This is a clip from the French version of Who wants to be a millionaire.
If you don’t understand French, the question is “what revolves around the earth?” and his options are A) the moon, B) the sun, C) mars and D) venus.
PC Flashbacks: A20# and more
Michael Steil explains the XBOX security system. An excellent description of the obstacles Microsoft was up against, the ways they failed, and a good demonstration about why a) security is hard, and b) PC hardware is a bitch.
I sent this to Udo, and his comment was
SUPER SUPER COOL. A20# Gate. When we were young. Although the hardware hack is really cooler, but the software-hack is more straight-forward. Funny, funny.
I knew he’d get a kick out of it. The A20# hack is just such a wonderful relic from crazy times.
[Listening to: Erebus (piano) – Andrea Baroni – (3:23)]
Hello, Vista
So today Vista finally hit the shelves. And I had the first bugreport from an eager user saying that The Longest Journey didn’t run on his newly upgraded PC. Welcome to the new world.
The past days, I’ve been working on getting the old game ready for Vista, and as a result, it’s installed on my work PC. Which means that I got past the “oh, shiny” impression of it, and got to see how useful it is as a work platform. Spoiler: I’m not impressed.
Verbieten! Alles verbieten!
This is a hot topic in Germany, so I’m posting in German for a change.
Sind jetzt alle verrueckt geworden? Die Mehrheit der Deutschen ist also fuer ein Verbot von ‘Killerspielen’. Gerade mal 22% der Bevoelkerung sind der Meinung, dass wir als Gesellschaft muendig genug sind, um ohne weitere Verbote auszukommen. Und das, obwohl Deutschland bereits eiens der Laender mit den schaerfsten Jugendschutzregeln ist.
WordPress
I’m converting to WordPress. Importing my Nucleus database to WordPress is a bit of a pain, to be honest, and I’m writing myself a script to do it. Which is horrible because of all kinds of Unicode/Latin1/python/mysqldb madness.
How much C++ should you know?
At the end of last year, a girl asked me how much C++ she would have to know to be able to confidently apply for a programming job in the games industry. It’s not an easy question.
Most of the people we hire have worked with games before. Either at other companies, or making games in their free time. These people know that they’ve got enough experience, they often have specialized knowledge (like 3D graphics), and the question doesn’t really arise for them. For someone who isn’t coming from the games sector, but has maybe done consulting or some other programming job before, I didn’t have a ready answer, but I found one anyway that I’m pretty comfortable with:
Memory Leaks? What Memory Leaks?
I may have done a Bad Thing yesterday. When I came in to work this morning, that’s how much memory my AO client was using 🙂
Great Gorilla Run: Results!
We did it!
The Great Gorilla Run was a huge success. I raised over £2,400, putting me in second place among all runners. Thanks especially to all the Eressea players that have donated in the past. You guys rock.
It was excellent of Jørn to come along this year, I doubt I would have had half as much fun without him – if you want to participate next year, my advice #1 is to do it with friends. If only because they can film you doing it. Speaking of which, we took a lot of photos (they are on flickr). And we have a short video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBtKO_mZa28]
Great Gorilla Run 2006
We’re running this Sunday!
22:37
That’s today’s time on my bike computer after the 350m climb from Gressbanen to Tryvannstårnet. And it beats my previous record by a whooping 54 seconds. Morten wasn’t very happy last time I beat him up there, but he hasn’t made any attempts to counter me yet – too busy being a daddy, I understand. Probably much more fun than crushing me, and I get to feel good for a tiny little longer. I’m sure I will lose my status as king of the hill before the year is up 🙂 In fact, I hope I will.
And yes, the pro cyclists do this in 15 minutes. We hate them.