Sarah and I have finished playing through the games "Paper Mario", "Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door", and "Super Paper Mario" last week (including the various Pits of 100 Trials). We played them all on the Wii, because even though Super Paper Mario was the only one released explicitly for that platform, Wii maintains compatibility with Game Cube games such as Thousand-Year Door and Paper Mario although originally released for the Nintendo 64 is now available as a pay for download game on the Wii's Virtual Console. So, yay for Nintendo!
I think my favorite of the three is Thousand-Year Door mostly because of the RPG attack system. In Thousand-Year Door and Paper Mario when you come into contact with an enemy you go into an RPG style attack system where you take turns selecting actions. In Super Paper Mario you still have hit points and such, but you don't go into a turn based RPG style attack system, rather you do the regular Mario jumping on bad guys thing (or hitting them with a mallet etc...). Thousand-Year Door and Paper Mario are very similar in terms of game play but Thousand-Year Door looks very pretty and has made improvements to how your party-mates are handled in battle (they have HP and can fall as you would expect) and there's an audience that cheers you on during your battles.
Even if the gameplay sucked the humor throughout the series might be tempting enough. Mario's clothing and mustache are mocked throughout and standard RPG expectations are subverted. I hate to describe any of these moments for fear of ruining anything but, for instance, an optional and very difficult enemy who may only be killed after hours of work only results in one experience point, or a very intimidating enemy who you imagine you'll have to fight actually challenges you to a quiz.
Despite how I personally rank them, all the games are great and I'd recommend any of them.
![['Neverending story' by Alexandre Duret-Lutz. A framed photo of books with the droste effect applied. Licensed under creative commons.]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/90/252757784_3de44cbeb4_m_d.jpg)
Information about URI Fragments, the portion of URIs
that follow the '#' at the end and that are used to navigate within a document, is scattered throughout various documents which I usually have to hunt down. Instead I'll link to them all here.
Definitions. Fragments are defined in the URI RFC which states that they're used to identify a secondary resource that is related to the primary resource identified by the URI as a subset of the primary, a view of the primary, or some other resource described by the primary. The interpretation of a fragment is based on the mime type of the primary resource. Tim Berners-Lee notes that determining fragment meaning from mime type is a problem because a single URI may contain a single fragment, however over HTTP a single URI can result in the same logical resource represented in different mime types. So there's one fragment but multiple mime types and so multiple interpretations of the one fragment. The URI RFC says that if an author has a single resource available in multiple mime types then the author must ensure that the various representations of a single resource must all resolve fragments to the same logical secondary resource. Depending on which mime types you're dealing with this is either not easy or not possible.
HTTP. In HTTP when URIs are used, the fragment is not included. The General Syntax section of the HTTP standard says it uses the definitions of 'URI-reference' (which includes the fragment), 'absoluteURI', and 'relativeURI' (which don't include the fragment) from the URI RFC. However, the 'URI-reference' term doesn't actually appear in the BNF for the protocol. Accordingly the headers like 'Request-URI', 'Content-Location', 'Location', and 'Referer' which include URIs are defined with 'absoluteURI' or 'relativeURI' and don't include the fragment. This is in keeping with the original fragment definition which says that the fragment is used as a view of the original resource and consequently only needed for resolution on the client. Additionally, the URI RFC explicitly notes that not including the fragment is a privacy feature such that page authors won't be able to stop clients from viewing whatever fragments the client chooses. This seems like an odd claim given that if the author wanted to selectively restrict access to portions of documents there are other options for them like breaking out the parts of a single resource to which the author wishes to restrict access into separate resources.
HTML. In HTML, the HTML mime type RFC defines HTML's fragment use which consists of fragments referring to elements with a corresponding 'id' attribute or one of a particular set of elements with a corresponding 'name' attribute. The HTML spec discusses fragment use additionally noting that the names and ids must be unique in the document and that they must consist of only US-ASCII characters. The ID and NAME attributes are further restricted in section 6 to only consist of alphanumerics, the hyphen, period, colon, and underscore. This is a subset of the characters allowed in the URI fragment so no encoding is discussed since technically its not needed. However, practically speaking, browsers like FireFox and Internet Explorer allow for names and ids containing characters outside of the defined set including characters that must be percent-encoded to appear in a URI fragment. The interpretation of percent-encoded characters in fragments for HTML documents is not consistent across browsers (or in some cases within the same browser) especially for the percent-encoded percent.
Text. Text/plain recently got a fragment definition that allows fragments to refer to particular lines or characters within a text document. The scheme no longer includes regular expressions, which disappointed me at first, but in retrospect is probably good idea for increasing the adoption of this fragment scheme and for avoiding the potential for ubiquitous DoS via regex. One of the authors also notes this on his blog. I look forward to the day when this scheme is widely implemented.
XML. XML has the XPointer framework to define its fragment structure as noted by the XML mime type definition. XPointer consists of a general scheme that contains subschemes that identify a subset of an XML document. Its too bad such a thing wasn't adopted for URI fragments in general to solve the problem of a single resource with multiple mime type representations. I wrote more about XPointer when I worked on hacking XPointer into IE.
SVG and MPEG. Through the Media Fragments Working Group I found a couple more fragment scheme definitions. SVG's fragment scheme is defined in the SVG documentation and looks similar to XML's. MPEG has one defined but I could only find it as an ISO document "Text of ISO/IEC FCD 21000-17 MPEG-12 FID" and not as an RFC which is a little disturbing.
AJAX. AJAX websites have used fragments as an escape hatch for two issues that I've seen. The first is getting a unique URL for versions of a page that are produced on the client by script. The fragment may be changed by script without forcing the page to reload. This goes outside the rules of the standards by using HTML fragments in a fashion not called out by the HTML spec. but it does seem to be inline with the spirit of the fragment in that it is a subview of the original resource and interpretted client side. The other hack-ier use of the fragment in AJAX is for cross domain communication. The basic idea is that different frames or windows may not communicate in normal fashions if they have different domains but they can view each other's URLs and accordingly can change their own fragments in order to send a message out to those who know where to look. IMO this is not inline with the spirit of the fragment but is rather a cool hack.
I got a FlickrMail from Emma J. Williams a bit ago saying that they wanted to
use two of my photos in their Schmap San Francisco Guide online travel guide. So now you can see two of my vacation photos on the Westfield San Francisco Shopping Center Schmap page and the Hotel Diva Schmap page.
I think its wonderful that digital cameras are at
the point where I really don't have to know much about their workings to produce a photo that's reasonable looking. And its thanks to Flickr and searchable tags that Schmap could find my photos.
Since my photos on Flickr are all licensed under a Creative Commons license named Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works
2.0 Generic which only applies to non-commercial uses, Schmap, which is advertisement supported, kindly asked me if they could use my photos. I agreed to their license which was human readable
and included wonderful stuff like I get in place attribution and the license is only applicable while Schmap makes their guide freely available online.
Previously I've only heard of folks having their flickr photos used without their permission so I'm glad to know that's not always the case. Or perhaps this is just Schmap's clever method of getting me to blog about them.
IPv6 address syntax consists of 8 groupings of colon delimited 16-bit hex values making up the 128-bit address. An optional double colon
can replace any consecutive sequence of 0 valued hex values. For example the following is a valid IPv6 address: fe80::2c02:db79
Some IPv6 addresses aren't global and in those cases need a scope ID to describe their context. These get a '%' followed by the scope ID.
For example the previous example with a scope ID of '8' would be: fe80::2c02:db79%8
IPv6 addresses in URIs may appear in the host section of a URI as long as they're enclosed by square brackets. For example:
http://[fe80::2c02:db79]/. The RFC explicitly notes that there isn't a way to add a scope ID to the IPv6 address in a URI. However a draft document describes adding
scope IDs to IPv6 addresses in URIs. The draft document uses the IPvFuture production from the URI RFC with a 'v1' to add a new
hostname syntax and a '+' instead of a '%' for delimiting the scope id. For example: http://[v1.fe80::2c02:db79+8]/. However, this is still a draft document, not a final
standard, and I don't know of any system that works this way.
In Windows XPSP2 the IPv6 stack is available but disabled by default. To enable the IPv6 stack, at a command prompt run 'netsh interface ipv6 install'. In Vista IPv6 is the on by default and cannot be turned off, while the IPv4 stack is optional and may be turned off by a command similar to the previous.
Once you have IPv6 on in your OS you can turn on IPv6 for IIS6 or just use IIS7. The address ::1 refers to the local machine.
In some places in Windows like UNC paths, IPv6 addresses aren't allowed. In those cases you can use a Vista DNS IPv6 hack that lives in the OS
name resolution stack that transforms particularly crafted names into IPv6 addresses. Take your IPv6 address, replace the ':'s with '-'s and the '%' with an 's' and then append '.ipv6-literal.net'
to the end. For example: fe80--2c02-db79s8.ipv6-literal.net. That name will resolve to the same example I've been using in Vista. This transformation occurs inside the system's local
name resolution stack so no DNS servers are involved, although Microsoft does own the ipv6-literal.net domain name.
MSDN describes IPv6 addresses in URIs in Windows and I've described IPv6 addresses in URIs in IE7. File URIs in
IE7 don't support IPv6 addresses. If you want to put a scope ID in a URI in IE7 you use a '%25' to delimit the scope ID and due to a bug you must have at least two digits in your scope ID. So,
to take the previous example: http://[fe80::2c02:db79%2508]/. Note that its 08 rather than just 8.
Sarah and I went down to California at the end of last month for a Thanksgiving visit with my parents. We visited the famous Monterey Bay Aquarium (fun fact: the aquarium scenes in Star Trek IV were filmed here) and saw many jelly fish. We wandered around Capitola where we visited many local
shops and ate on the wharf. We shopped in Carmel and ate at the Forge in the Forest (fun fact: Clint Eastwood was the mayor of this city in the late
80s). We visited the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk which was very cold and closed.
My parents took us out to dinner on the first night and the rest of the nights we ate dinner at their house. They had the Shelton's over and I got
to see Chris and Alison. It was fun to talk with them and catch up since its been quite a while since I'd seen them.
We stayed in the lovely beach house of our family friend's the Goodwins.
My parents have been helping them fix it up and decorate it and it looks great. It was quite a treat staying in a house right on the ocean. Also of note, this was the first trip on which I was old
enough to rent the car and accordingly I did all of the driving. This trip was very fun and relaxing.
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