2007 Oct 22, 4:47I purchased the
Orange Box off of Steam a bit ago and like
others before me who have
discussed elsewhere, I already owned two of the five games that come from the Orange Box. However, the combined price of
HL2E2 and Portal, the two games I actually wanted was supposedly equivalent to the price of the Orange Box bundle. Incidentally, if anyone would like HL2 or HL2E1 I can
gift them to you.
HL2E2 was excellent of course but the big surprise for me was Portal. (Mild spoilers follow) It has a sort of zen simplicity: there are a few simple game-play mechanics, a handful of textures and
objects, and a deceptively simple story all used well and tied together to produce an entertaining and polished game. It seems a bit short but its probably better to end with the gamer demanding
more. The humor and the sort of
play within a play aspect of the game is what really sold me though. It has the funniest
ending theme I've heard (also
blogged by the creator). The voices of the automated turrets are so adorable I would feel compelled to hug them if they weren't
always trying to kill me. Additionally the
weighted companion cube seems like an experiment in understanding gamers'
attachment to NPCs. In this case the NPC is a box and yet I still felt awful incinerating it. The whole time I was vaguely reminded of
Solitary the reality show
that sticks contestants alone in small rooms forcing them to endure various tests all the while being watched by a humorous computer with a female voice. Someone should sue...
RPS has articles on Portal including
a Portal review, a page
suggesting Portal is a tale of
lesbianism, and
others.
hl2e2 game hl2 solitary valve portal nontechnical 2007 Oct 14, 3:12I've updated my homepage by moving stuff about me onto a separate
About page. Creating the About page was the perfect opportunity
to get
FoaF, a machine readable way of describing yourself and your friends, off my to do list. I have a
base FoaF file to which I add friends, projects, and accounts
from delicious
using an XSLT. This produces the
FoaF XML resource on which I use another
XSLT to convert into HTML and produce the About page.
I should also mention a few FoaF pages I found useful in doing this:
-
FOAF Vocabulary Specification - The standard on which I based my XSLT to add in info from delicious.
-
FoaF Explorer - Turns any RDF XML FOAF resource into a webpage with links to the other people, projects, etc mentioned in the FOAF file.
-
FoaF-a-Matic - I used this to produce my base FoaF file.
-
RDF Validator - This is the closest thing I could find for validation. It does RDF in general but unfortunately not FoaF specifically. I found two
links to sites that are down or dead that claimed to do what I actually wanted.
technical xml foaf personal xslt xsl homepage 2007 Oct 12, 3:20And now to fit in better with the rest of the emo kids on LJ, in no particular order here are some reasons why I feel old:
- I've attended friends weddings sorted chronologically by when I met them: Lucas from high school, followed by Carissa from college,
and then Palak from Microsoft.
- I rarely get carded for alcohol.
- Jon's moving to Germany soon -- this time permanently. He's already started the process of getting rid of possessions he's not taking with him like his car and TV. However, after doing so he
couldn't maintain his smug "I don't even own a TV" attitude and ended up trading me my small CRT TV
(as mentioned previously) for his DDR pads and games. A good trade for both since we were each looking to dump these items. So far I've
only convinced Sarah to try DDR once with me. Somehow I've gotten much worse at something I wasn't that great at to begin with.
- I have business cards.
- I still have semi-monthly nightmares in which I'm taking a Linear Algebra course for which I haven't studied or done homework in years. This differs from the more frequent nightmares I had
immediately after finishing that series of classes in which I was taking the final and it was all on the one topic I didn't study. In reality, the prof. had done his PhD work on this one topic and
I, correctly betting it wouldn't appear on the final, didn't study it. Apparently this was a traumatic bet for me to make given the wake of destruction left on my dreams.
- I have to remind myself that 2005 was two years ago.
personal nontechnical 2007 Oct 7, 4:12In a
previous post I mentioned an xsltproc like js file I made. As noted in that post, on Windows you can write console script files in
JavaScript, name them foo.js, and execute them from the command prompt. I later found that
MSDN has an XSLT javascript sample
which looks similar to mine, but I like mine better for the XSLT parameter support and having a non-ridiculous way of interpreting filenames. The code for my xsltproc.js follows. The script is very
simple and demonstrates the ease with which you can manipulate these system objects and all it takes is opening up notepad.
var createNewXMLObj = function() {
var result = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.FreeThreadedDOMDocument");
result.validateOnParse = false;
result.async = false;
return result;
}
var args = WScript.arguments;
var ofs = WScript.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
var xslParams = [];
var xmlStyle = null;
var xmlInput = null;
var inputFile = null;
var outputFile = null;
var error = false;
for (var idx = 0; idx < args.length && !error; ++idx)
if (args.item(idx) == "-o") {
if (idx + 1 < args.length) {
outputFile = ofs.GetAbsolutePathName(args.item(idx + 1));
++idx;
}
else
error = true;
}
else if (args.item(idx) == "--param" || args.item(idx) == "-param") {
if (idx + 2 < args.length) {
xslParams[args.item(idx + 1)] = args.item(idx + 2);
idx += 2;
}
else
error = true;
}
else if (xmlStyle == null) {
xmlStyle = createNewXMLObj();
xmlStyle.load(ofs.GetAbsolutePathName(args.item(idx)));
}
else if (xmlInput == null) {
inputFile = ofs.GetAbsolutePathName(args.item(idx));
xmlInput = createNewXMLObj();
xmlInput.load(inputFile);
}
if (xmlStyle == null || xmlInput == null || error) {
WScript.Echo('Usage:\n\t"xsltproc" xsl-stylesheet input-file\n\t\t["-o" output-file] *["--param" name value]');
}
else {
var xslt = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.XSLTemplate.3.0");
xslt.stylesheet = xmlStyle;
var xslProc = xslt.createProcessor();
xslProc.input = xmlInput;
for (var keyVar in xslParams)
xslProc.addParameter(keyVar, xslParams[keyVar]);
xslProc.transform();
if (outputFile == null)
WScript.Echo(xslProc.output);
else {
var xmlOutput = createNewXMLObj();
xmlOutput.loadXML(xslProc.output);
xmlOutput.save(outputFile);
}
}
js xml jscript windows xslt technical xsltproc wscript xsl javascript 2007 Oct 3, 2:55Similar to the previous piracy ad parody but this is what the ad would look like if it were technically accurate.
via:felix42 copyright law legal piracy advertising humor video 2007 Oct 3, 10:21Tim Berners-Lee writes about principles for new technology in the context of the evolution of HTML and the development of namespaces and XML.
architecture article tim-berners-lee w3c internet history evolution html namespace xml web mmm multimedia-mesh humor test-of-independent-invention 2007 Sep 27, 2:17Starting on a new simple project I wanted to get the history of my Delicious links. Delicious has an export tool available via the settings section so I thought I'd try that. However, the links
aren't exported in XML not even in XHTML but rather in HTML. Shocking. An example:
"Don't Tase Me, Bro!" (UF Student Tasered Remix)
Remix of the 'Don't tase me, bro!' guy getting tasered.
At this point I'm already not going to use this file because its in HTML but I'm even more disgusted by those date time values.
Raymond Chen of the Old New Thing posted about recognizing timestamps and timestamp sentinel values. From the first blog post and with the use of a calculator for base conversion one can tell that
those are UNIX style timestamps counting the number of seconds since 1970.
It reminds me of my hatred for the MIME date time format I developed working on my webpage's server side parsing of atom and RSS. Atom is
of course my favorite as Atom uses the Internet date time format described in the following documents. Here's an example of one
2007-09-27T020:50:00.000-08:00
On the other hand the evil and villainous RSS uses the MIME date time format now described in the more
recent IETF MIME standard. Here's an example Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:50:00 -0800
The Internet date time format has the advantage of being so easy to sort. An alphabetic sort with normal C-style collation rules of strings containing Internet date times will also sort them
chronologically. This is not the case for the MIME date time due to the preceding day of the week and the spelled out month name. This also means that when producing these you have to figure out
the day of the week and when parsing them you have to match month names rather than just parsing out numbers. Anyway now days if I see mention of a date time in a new proposed standard or spec I be
sure to point out the numerous advantages of the Internet date time format.
date xml html feed time technical date-time code atom rss 2007 Sep 21, 3:33Article on the graph of the relationships between you and your friends and the associated concepts and issues.
via:infosthetics graph social visualization information privacy blog article larry-osterman 2007 Sep 20, 12:20Article on the fall, division, and name changes of countries affecting top level domain names and vice versa.
dns internet domain icann blog article politics 2007 Sep 18, 2:16Sarah got me the
Garmin StreetPilot c580 for my birthday last month. I really like this because its a small device that makes my
life easier without me having to learn anything new. Just the way tech. should be.
The device gets current weather, traffic, and movie times. The information is sent via FM and received via the FM receiver in the cigarette lighter power adapter of the GPS device. MSN sends out this
info and I get a free one year subscription. In addition to taking traffic info into account when planning my route it will estimate the number of minutes I'm going to spend in traffic. Just knowing
how long I might be in traffic somehow makes it more bareable.
The other day while driving for dinner I got a call. I got my phone out of my pocket and answered it. I heard Jon's saying 'Hello' under my passenger seat. After a moment of confusion I remembered
that the GPS device also acts as a bluetooth hands free phone adapter and that it was under my seat.
gps garmin personal traffic nontechnical 2007 Sep 14, 7:37I previously mentioned how much I enjoyed
my new office. Well my team has moved to a new building and although we get more offices total
meaning no one on the team has to share an office, this building has less windowed surface area which means less people get window offices. Since I received the window office recently I'm kicked out
now in FIFO order. Stacks are so sad.
microsoft work personal office nontechnical 2007 Sep 11, 2:55There's been
some news recently on some guy hating on FireFox for its ad-blocking.
On a similar note here's a fun tip for IE7 users I got from Eric. You can get decent ad-blocking in IE7 by putting ad servers in the restricted zone. By default script inclusion is blocked between
different zones so you can put domains that serve up ads in your restricted zone after which, normal internet zone sites won't be able to include script from them. This covers most of the ads I run
into these days.
I use
Fiddler to figure out the domains that are serving up ads which incidentally also has an ad-blocking^H^H^H^H general purpose content blocking plugin. Here's
a screenshot of Slashdot and ArsTechnica from my browser. Notice the large blank areas in the screenshots:
ad-blocking personal ad ie7 technical browser tip ie 2007 Aug 21, 4:04Seeing
ErrorZilla I realized I could easily do a similar thing to the IE7 404 page using the same
technique I used for the
XML view and the
feed view.
So that's what I did: I made
a new 404 page for IE7. There's not much new here technically if you've read the previous blog
entries to which I linked. My 404 page change adds links to the
Internet Archive, the
Coral Cache, and
Whois Tool.
archive personal res cache resource ie7 technical browser whois 404 error extension 2007 Aug 16, 8:47More from Keepon the yellow blog dancing robot.
robot robots dancing video music youtube keepon 2007 Aug 15, 3:30I've been experimenting with adding video to my webpage. I tried to
embed video in my livejournal blog posts previously however ran into
some issues with that. When creating the LJ post I added an
tag but when I submit that tags
turned into an
technical youtube video personal livejournal homepage 2007 Aug 13, 3:35
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I've been told that family members after reading my webpage which contains some technical related material would turn to my cousins webpage. So, in an effort to not drive away
readers I've...
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