October 2005 Archives
Here are some new pic’s of Conor. On the bike and with his Halloween Costume.
EDIT I should add that Conor visited 2 houses in costume, before wanting to go home. After that he helped me hand out candy to the kids. So it was a pretty fun Halloween!
In addition to dealing with the blog-spam, i took a couple of hours tonight to clean up my assp setup. This should help with the more traditional email based spam we get here.
Ignore your blog for a couple of days, and look what you get. Feh. All cleaned up, new rules in place. Everyone should be ok again. Sorry for the disturbance.
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Apple says that Aperture, its new photo-editing and -management program, is a boon for photographers shooting Raw files. Creativepro.com looks past the hype to the bare truth.
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I’ve finally remembered to post the Flickr upload script I used in the recent Flickr uploading festival.
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TinyDisk is a program from saving and retrieving files from TinyURL and TinyURL-like services such as Nanourl. It overlays a write-once-read-many anonymous, persistent and globally shared filesystem. Once something is uploaded, only the database admin ca
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Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TC
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Decorator for automatic code optimization. If a global is known at compile time, replace it with a constant. Fold tuples of constants into a single constant. Fold constant attribute lookups into a single constant.
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Porcupine is a web application server that provides an object oriented framework for developing web applications rapidly.
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File Selection Language (FSL) is a descriptive language for file selection. It is used to selectively pick files from a directory structure. FSL is useful for selective backups, for instance. FSL uses glob patterns as the basic building block. For fine-tu
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Unionfs, developed at Stony Brook university in 2004, is a stackable unification file system, which can merge the contents of several directories (so called branches) while keeping their physical content separate.
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DENIM is a system that helps web site designers in the early stages of design. DENIM supports sketching input, allows design at different refinement levels, and unifies the levels through zooming.
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As the online world moves towards Web 2.0, the concept of digital identity is evolving, and existing identity systems are falling behind. New systems are emerging that place identity in the hands of users instead of directories. Simple, secure and open, t
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Has CPP, which can be pressed into service for doing actionscript per-processing.
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Catalog, browse, and share all your books, movies, music, and video games with Delicious Library
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We set out to build a reasonable gaming system that will get you through today’s game titles without breaking the bank for around $500.
Damn toys for costing so much money!
I’ve been thinking about getting some kind of handheld media/game gadget for a little while now. When the PSP came out, it blew me away with its amazing screen and built in wifi. Unfortunately, because its Sony, its also closed up tighter then a (insert rude term here), so you are limited to doing what Sony wants you to do with it. And at CAD $300, you still need to buy some decent external memory (it comes with 32Meg’s) if you want to listen to MP3s or watch some of your own Videos.
Then, yesterday, Apple released their new iPod, which is video enabled. You get the great iPod UI and design, plus you can buy videos and tv shows via the Apple store. Amazing. However, it doesn’t do games at all, and the kind of video you can play is limited (as it is on the PSP). Unlike the PSP, for CAD $380, you get 30 Gigabytes of storage, which is nothing to sneeze at.
Finally, we get to the unknown GP2x. An open, hobbyist’s media and game machine. At CAD $315 for the device and a 1 Gig SD card, you get something that plays a wider variety of audio and video files then either the PSP or iPod. It also has, or will have, many retro games available to it via emulators (MAME, etc). It ships with an SDK, so developers can create new software for the device, without any interference from the developers of the hardware (or royalties). Something that is important to me is that someone already has Python running on it, and has ported the PyGame library as well. This makes it a very tempting platform to create games for.
As i said yesterday, far too many decisions, although having a choice of an open platform really makes me want to get the GP2x, and the underdog in me likes the fact that no-one really knows about it. Yet.
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The Battle for Wesnoth is a free, turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme.
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In this article I want to show you how to actually prototype a wireless robot. I’m going to take you through an initial prototype I developed in a couple of hours, and then show how I took this prototype to the next level using sturdier building materials
I’ve actually seen three new movies/tv shows that i want to talk about!
First, the movie Serenity. This is one i was pre-disposed to like, seeing as how i also liked Firefly, the tv show the movie is based on. Unsurprisingly, i liked it. Good action, effects, and Joss Whedon’s trademark smart dialog. I might even agree with some of the reviewers about it lacking a cinematic feel, but, hey, its tonnes better then most of the other scifi drivel out there.
Second, Howl’s Moving Castle. I somehow managed to miss this one until it hit the rep cinema’s. As a long time admirer of Miazaki’s works, this one fits somewhere in the middle of my list of his work. It was good, like all of them, but didn’t have the same something, maybe, ironically, magic, that his other films have. Knowing that this project was not from material he developed himself makes me wonder how if this missing-ness is due to the adaptation? This review of the book makes lean toward the adaptation being the cause of these feelings. At the end of the day, it was good, and, like Serenity, kilometres ahead of most anything else you are going to see.
Finally, we rented the new Battlestar Galactica mini-series last night. While i’ve been hearing from everyone that it was great, i had some reservations. Human looking Cylons? Starbuck is a female? All was made good very quickly, and i have become a convert. Space is going to be playing the series, so i’ll either watch it there or rent the DVD’s.
That is all. Well, other then Apple just announced video iPods. Impressive. I’ve been looking at the GP2x for a bit, which is a media player and game device. The iPod makes me waver in my desire to get one of the handhelds, but i can programme games for the GP2x (in Python with PyGame no less!) and it also plays tonnes of retro arcade games. Sigh. Decisions decisions.
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Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable.
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Bunchball is a platform for RADD (Rapid Application Development and Deployment) of Macromedia Flash-based social applications (multi-user, networked applications). Flash developers write to an Actionscript API and Bunchball handles: * users * gro
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Writing concurrent programs is notoriously difficult, and is of increasing practical importance. A particular source of concern is that even correctly-implemented concurrency abstractions cannot be composed together to form larger abstractions. In this pa
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Kamaelia is a project aimed at building large scale online media delivery systems for the long term. Large scale media systems are naturally concurrent systems since they assume large numbers of people watching programmes simultaneously.
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Some amazing emulators for Palm OS (v5) devices.
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GP32 and GPx2 english community site
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Originally developed for the Swedish Department of Defense, Swedish FireSteel is a flash of genius. Its nearly 3,000°C spark makes fire building easy in any weather, at any altitude.
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EasyDNS, a leading North American domain name management company, offers the following guidance to corporations, organizations and government departments/agencies of every size to avoid potential problems with these increasingly critical corporate assets.
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Kamaelia is a networking/communications infrastructure for innovative multimedia systems. Kamaelia uses a component architecture designed to simplify creation and testing of new protocols and large scale media delivery systems.
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Flow-Based Programming is a new/old approach to application development, based on a completely different way of thinking about building applications. Some of its roots can be traced all the way back to the early days of computing, yet it offers solutions
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An implementation of a queue using sockets.
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The “greenlet” package is a spin-off of Stackless, a version of CPython that supports micro-threads called “tasklets”.
