Point and click adventures are back! (2007/10/25)
I admit it: I’ve been a sucker for point-and-click adventure games for years. From Loom to Monkey Island, from Myst to the recent Sam & Max, I’ve played a huge number of these, and liked many of them. Some suck. Some are pretty good except for one bit or another – which sucks.
[read more...]Okay, this is ridiculous. (2007/10/22)
Hard drive capacities, as just about everyone knows, are given in base-10 gigabytes: 1,000,000,000 bytes. So, a 500GB drive is 500,000,000,000 bytes. Operating systems tend to use base-2 gigabytes, which are (1024*1024*1024) bytes – about 7% larger.
[read more...]I am the king of all packrats. (2007/09/19)
So, I’ve been going through my old computer stuff. (Suffice it to say that the pile’s noticably bigger than it was last time.)
[read more...]King of the hill (2007/09/13)
I’m donating my old computer stuff that I never use to Computer Heaven, a local computer-recycling place.
[read more...]I think it's plagiarism, but I'm not sure. (2007/08/03)
So, the New Yorker’s article on spam may contain plagiarism. What’s weird about this is that the source (Spamhaus) has blanket permission to quote them with attribution, but that the quoted material, rather than being attributed, is very slightly modified.
[read more...]Lolcat an sich! (2007/05/31)
Okay, so, lolcode is an attempt to build a programming language from lolcat captions. (One can only assume that this suggests a return to the older term for them: “cat macros”.)
[read more...]What I wish Weiss Kreuz had been (2007/05/19)
So, I was watching an anime called Weiss Kreuz, aka Knight Hunters. (Yes, I know that Weiss Kreuz is bad German for something that is not “knight hunters”. They have a hospital named “Magic Bus”, I don’t think there’s any kind of intent of coherence in the use of non-Japanese languages.)
[read more...]Instant review: Ruby (2007/04/27)
I like to learn new programming languages from time to time. Some, I like better than others; I put in a few years on the ISO C committee (and I’d still be there if I had funding). Others, I don’t like so much; my first gut response to PHP was “I think this language may be uglier than perl”, and the impression has stuck with me.
[read more...]Fanboyism (2007/04/16)
Engadget has a poll up, for “best console of 2006”. I first saw this through a link on a Playstation fan forum, where someone had cheerfully commented that “second place isn’t bad, with all the negative press”. Now, consider that, of the other three contenders, one is the Nintendo DS, which was released before 2006, and one is the “GP2X MK2”, a specialized hobbyist console. Obviously, the third is the Wii. The numbers were pretty solid last I checked; the Wii was at 63% of the vote, and the PS3 at 24%. Second place is, in this case, quite bad.
[read more...]Google Checkout sees poor customer satisfaction: Duh. (2007/01/21)
Google Checkout Sees Poor Customer Satisfaction, says Slashdot.
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