November 2004 Archives
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has good image management tools
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flash rpg engine, game physics links, 3d and tile engine - nice flash stuff
Having to cook beans and toast on the BBQ for lunch was kind of interesting, but having to get all the candles setup and cook for diner with no electricity was a lot harder. I never thought about it before, but "back in the day" kids must have been trained pretty early not to play with candles. That was my biggest worry with Conor, him getting into them and setting himself and/or the house on fire.
One of the nice things about having a power outage is just how quiet it gets. No hum of the fridge or heating, no computers, no stereo. Just quiet. We ended up going to sleep before nine last night, because reading by candle is hard on the eyes. And we were pretty tired. I think the power must have come on just after we were asleep, sometime around 9 or 9:30 pm. Ah well, we did need some catching up on our sleep debt.
Over the weekend Conor got out to be part of his first Santa Clause Parade! We were very fortunate that a friend of ours has other friends with kids, so decided to have a party at his place to watch the parade from his huge third floor windows. The other kids seemed to really enjoy it, but Conor didn't really care at all, he was just happy to run around and eat food he wouldn't normally get. There was a girl that he was very taken with, he always wanted to be close to her and kept staring at her. It was too bad that she was less then impressed with his attention, and rebuffed his advances. Con has thick skin and recovered from this rejection with little scaring, so all is well that ends well. I'm just glad we were not down on the street - it was crazy. I had to go to the store just as the parade was starting, and it was a challenge just to get out of the apartment, let alone to the store. It was kind of sad to see that there were still quite a few families just showing up, and i just knew that the kids were not going to be able to see anything - people had been waiting on Bloor since 7:30am in some cases, to make sure they had a spot. So, either show up at least 2 hours before the start, or make sure you have a friend with a place that overlooks the parade route!
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about simple vs complex design
The bell technician did not show on Saturday. This is after being told they would be there sometime between 9 and 4. Which means that we organized our day around having to have somebody here for nothing. To say that we were angry that evening is a bit of an understatement. I guess we were "lucky" as a tech did come on sunday, although it was luck that we were home he showed up. The upside is that we now have 160 KBytes a second internet service, which is better then i can ever remember having at this house. The downside is that our internal phone wiring, when hooked up, kills our internet access. So currently i have our home phone forwarded to my cell-phone, until we get a DSL-splitter. Unlike the filters you put on individual phones, this not only protects the phones from the DSL signal, but also the DSL signal from any interference from the phones. I'm hopeful that this will fix the problems we are having right now.
So, until then, if you phone us at home, its really my cell phone!
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oh god, do i even want to start to look into running my own PBX
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light weight flash debugger tool
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a demo/alpha for a nice flash debugging tool
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good article on phone lines and DSL stuff
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mp3 player for windows. i think its by some of the nullsoft folks (now ex-nullsoft folks)
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user group for the family hostorian geneology program
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digital photo print service. from the states but gets the best reviews
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Looks like a nice SMTP anti-spam tool
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an open source community/education toolset. cms, sharing, work flow etc etc
A tech person is coming over to our place, sometime between 9 and 4 (could that be more vague?) to check our lines and figure out why our ADSL is so slow. This makes me happy, with the caveat that they better figure out why our lines are so noisy and be able to do something about it. I have to admit that the previous owners wired the house themselves and used cat 5 to run both the network and phones lines. This is, i've learned, not a great idea. I hope this isn't the problem, and that its something down-stream from us, that Bell will have to, or be able to, fix.
On my further exciting IT infrastructure adventures, i've installed ASSP - Anti-Spam-SMTP-Proxy. This is a service that sits in front of your SMTP server, intercepting spam and virus email before it gets to your SMTP/Pop server. I'm pretty excited about having this tool available. It was pretty easy to setup, just requiring Perl. Now, if Bell can get our ADSL up to speed, i'll finally be able to get The Organization moved off of Korax's servers!
I don't know if i mentioned it before, but we bought a Slimp3 music player. As this is a Mp3 player, i've been going through the difficult task of deciding how i want to digitize all my music. As is usually the case, i wanted to use FLAC, a lossless compressor, to maintain the best possible quality. But, in the end, the ability to use iTunes to rip the CDs made the decision to go with MP3 pretty straight forward. I know, there is the apple lossless compressor, but there isn't a lot of info about that one out yet, so i'm just going with the plain old MP3. I am ripping all the cd's at a high bit rate (256), and i'm going to try to not get caught up with quality issues. As long as it sounds good on the stereo, i'll be happy, and so far, i'm pretty happy.
I'd also like to mention that the player/server has all kinds of crazy plug-ins available. The latest release of the software adds a RSS news reader! Reading ClickableCulture on my MP3 player! Crazy. Anyway, i'm having fun with it, and at some point will have all my CD's moved onto the server in the basement.
Last Friday Conor and I got out to the Royal Winter Fair. We were there pretty early, which was good as i think every school in Toronto decided that the last Friday was the best time to bring their class'. Favourite animal were the piglettes, tho it would have been better if we could have actually touched them. We did go to the petting "zoo", which Con really liked. He kept running over to all the small goats and, well, petting them.
Every year i go and keep expecting to see more food places. Like, "good old Canadian farm food", not some pizza chain place. I don't know if my memories of the fair are playing tricks with me, or if there just aren't as many (any) as there used to be. I was disappointed.
Con's grand-parents visited on the weekend, so he got a chance to hang out with them. And he got a brand new toy - a fisher price train set thingie that makes all kinds of noises. Not a bad toy, pretty cool actually, but Con is quite obsessed with it. It is not enough for him to be playing with it, but you have too, or he gets angry. I had to hide it today so i could get a break from it!
Tuesday at the park was more like a day from August rather then mid-November! So warm and sunny, we were out in short-sleeves with all the other kids. Wednesday was quite mild too, but i guess because it was so overcast fewer parents were out with their kids. We did have a bit of excitement tho, just before we were leaving to come home for lunch. There was the strong smell of gas in the air, and suddenly several fire-trucks pulled up, closing Queen Street. Must have been a pretty big leak, tho the firefighters didn't seem to be in a big panic, so it couldn't have been that bad.
I keep meaning to take some new photos so that i can put some up here. This weekend, during the Santa clause Parade should be a good opportunity.
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cool bubble tricks
Well, we've got some kind of ADSL internet action happening here! More tweaks to be done, but we are finally back on high-speed. I can't tell you how happy that makes me.
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a place to post ideas and, ideally (get it), to have feedback and help in developing them
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A python plugin for the eclipse IDE
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bunch of zip files with different lists of words. good for brute force password tests
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Nice paper airplane plans
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great article sort-of rant
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old password cracking software - telnet, smtp etc. brute force and word-lists
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list of cracking tools
So... No new photos of Conor, check. DSL still fucked, check. No posts about sad results of US election, check. Jos feeling frustrated, check.
Situation FUBAR is in full swing here! Enjoy!
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email exchange about base 32 numbers. looking into this for a compact way to send integers as strings
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lots of actionscript code for encryption. also a base64 encoder - further about sending numbers as strings
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software for young young kids
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crypto actionscript stuff
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more flash encryption stuff using the TEA algo
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article about ipsec and wifi. might be interesting wrt publicIP
Ok, well we are back on the 'net, but via dial-up. I think the last time i remember using dial-up to access the net was when i was at Ryerson in the early 90's. Oi. But, its way better then not having access at all!
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freak'in long list of VCS systems and their features
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edu games for families and kids - free
ISP problems have conspired to keep the house un-connected for, well, over a week now. No email, no blogs, no web, so sad.
Not that i really have too much to say. Everyone here has a cold, the weekend was great weather, Bush won, some cool graphics of the range of votes in the states rather then the blue vs. red ones you usually see.
More, hopefully, later.
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nice tree component for flash
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flash RIA framework. looks interesting
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standalone actionscript compiler in beta
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list of article related to flash - some good intro's to actionscript 2.0
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article about tile based games in flash - they have also developed an engine
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interesting online web game with interesting decions which affect your nations political leanings
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a high volume high content list about MMOGs, MUDs and the like. Great list, but takes a lot of time to keep up with
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another interesting web-app, for listing stuff you would lend out - cds dvds etc. free so far
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digital photo organizer by google.
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an article about a wifi setup with TV, PVR goodness shared to all around
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a site for all arcade game remakes - lots and lots of them1
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a remake of the c64 classic. going to add network support too.
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they have some old albedo anthropromorphics comics for sale
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a tool to disguise ones voice - to allow roleplay of a female by a male etc
All you have to do to really feel that you have no unique ideas around game design is spend some time reading the MUD-Dev list. Here is a thread about the grind, and another about removing experience points. I don't really read this list that often, as the amount of posts and their length and depth makes it a very time consuming occupation, but if you are thinking about computer games, you can save a lot of brain cycles by reading what others have already pondered into the ground.
I've had to turn off trackback for all the blogs hosted here as the spamers hit really hard over the weekend. I got over 800 pings in 2 days. Sigh. Anyway, hope to have MT-Blacklist up and running on the new server sometime soon, which should take care of this kind of thing.
