| Uptoeleven Syndication |
[Feb. 9th, 2007|05:57 pm]
Dai Aku
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It looks like someone was nice enough to set up a syndicated account for uptoeleven.ca (I couldn't because I'm not a paid LJ member), so you can see my entries on your friends page if you're interested. |
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| Bully |
[Oct. 30th, 2006|10:12 pm]
Dai Aku
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I finished "Bully" tonight. Overall, I'd highly recommend it, particularly if you like the general style of the GTA3 games (but maybe not the level of vulgarity quite so much).
I found the combat a lot more enjoyable in Bully largely I think because it was more hand to hand rather than the running-and-gunning that the control scheme for GTA never made easy. Overall, it wasn't a particularly difficult game - I screwed up the occasional mission but never had to try any more than maybe twice - but that sort of kept things moving and it was a lot of fun to play. |
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| Battlefield 2142 vs. Bully |
[Oct. 22nd, 2006|10:24 pm]
Dai Aku
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| [ | mood |
| |  disappointed | ] |
Greg and I went shopping today. He got "Bully" and I got "Battlefield 2142". I tried out Bully for a bit and it looks pretty good.
Unfortunately, my Battlefield experience has been pretty ass. I think it's partly not what I was hoping for (having not played any of the other Battlefield games, I think I was hoping for something a little more like UT2K4) but it's also pretty ass technically. Getting it to not crash out to the desktop after 15 seconds of play required reinstalling video drivers, DirectX and installing a patch. Now it just crashes to the desktop after maybe 30 minutes of playing. Not much fun.
I think tomorrow I'm going to trade it in and get Bully. |
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| \m/ RAWK! \m/ |
[Oct. 19th, 2006|09:11 pm]
Dai Aku
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| [ | mood |
| |  accomplished | ] |
I finally beat Guitar Hero on expert mode... hopefully my arm will recover from "Cowboys From Hell" before Guitar Hero II arrives.
Random Guitar Hero Trivia Update: When you finish the game, you get the "Battle Axe" guitar, whose description reads "Judge this race not by its remains". Genesis' song "Watcher of the Skies" contains the lyric "Judge not this race by empty remains" (which I always heard as "Judge not this race by its remains", but the internet consensus says I'm wrong), so I'm curious as to whether that's where the quote comes from or if there's some other source. |
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| Where the X's Go |
[Oct. 11th, 2006|12:02 pm]
Dai Aku
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I downloaded the Firefox 2.0 release candidate last night and tried it out at home. I can't say I've used it enough (or that it's strikingly different enough) for me to have a lot of strong opinions about it, but it did remind me of a user interface "debate" that seems to be going on right now: when you've got tabs, where do you put the little "X" that closes the tab?
- Firefox < 2.0 puts a single "X" at the far right-hand side that closes whatever the currently active tab is
- Visual Studio 2005 does the same thing
- Firefox 2.0 puts a separate "X" on the right side of each tab
- Ditto Eclipse
I tend to prefer the former approach because my general working habits are: - Gradually open more and more (and more) tabs
- Go on a tab-killing spree and close all but a very few tabs
- Repeat...
Having a single "X" in one place lets me cull whole swathes of tabs without having to move the mouse (until I encounter a tab I actually want to keep open, and then I have to go and select a different tab to make it active); it's a much slower process when I have to keep moving to a new "X" each time (particularly since they're a relatively small target).
On the other hand, I can see the argument in favour of doing it the other way: you get a much tighter coupling between a tab and the button that closes it, rather than depending on the convention that that one button over there closes whatever tab happens to be active. There's also the advantage that you can close tabs without making them the active tab. I think if you're more likely to want to close one or two tabs at a time (as opposed to my 10+ tab clearances), the latter implementation makes more sense.
I just finished downloading Firefox 2.0 at work, and maybe if I'm lucky I'll find out that the button placement is an option.
Update: There is indeed... if anyone else cares, you can go to about:config and change the value of browser.tabs.closeButtons to 3. There's more info about the available options here. |
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| But in other news... |
[Aug. 30th, 2006|10:03 pm]
Dai Aku
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I wanted to say (again?) how much I like Ruby on Rails.
I think I mentioned it before, but I've been working on a "Wedding Management" application in Rails. It's actually been "in production" for several weeks now. We're using it to track the guest list, but I've also been adding things like invoice tracking and random other stuff as we need it. My biggest love of the whole thing is just how easy it was to get it up in the first place, and how easy it continues to be to add new functionality. Specifically, no crappy repetitive CRUD methods every time I add a new data model. Really, there's almost no code at all to add a new model, just the code to display what I want to display.
The one negative thing I will say is that doing a basic Rails app is not a good way to learn Ruby... there's so little coding involved that you can get by with only a rudimentary knowledge of Ruby syntax :) (presumably that changes once you graduate to grander things). |
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| The World Is Flat |
[Aug. 30th, 2006|09:15 pm]
Dai Aku
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I bought the World Is Flat a while ago and started reading it last week. I'm about half way through, but I don't think I can make it to the end.
The first part was okay, but then Friedman started going into his list of factors that "flattened" the world. Examples include the invention of the web browser and rise of the web, outsourcing, search, web 2.0 stuff, etc. Anything vaguely technical (and there's a fair bit - web browsers, tcp-ip, email, Google, P2P) gets a lengthy layman's introduction. To someone entirely unfamiliar with a) the internet and b) the business world in general I'm sure the descriptions are helpful (and necessary), but to me it adds up to a lot of skipped paragraphs (and the occasional cringe when a technical detail is misrepresented for the sake of not confusing people).
Anyway, I thought I'd keep giving it a chance; maybe once the technical explanations were out of the way, there'd be some more insights on the way. So far, though, everything else has been pretty unexciting. What insights there are are spread between innumerable quotations from different interviews of people saying "the world is flat" in different ways.
I think what it comes down to is if you've spent the entirety of the 21st century connected to the internet (and even more so if you've spent those years working in a job that depends on the internet) you likely already take all of the "flatteners" for granted: the level of collaboration that the internet allows isn't a surprise; the speed at which technology is changing is old hat; pretty much everyone in software has spent at least a couple minutes thinking about whether their job could be outsourced to India. The things that Friedman says aren't really anything new if the only business/technology world that you've ever been a part of is the one dating from 2000 through 2006.
According to a lot of the Amazon reviews, the book gets a little more... "prescriptive" near the end (depending on whether the reviwer liked or disliked the book it's either described as "a wakeup call" or "propaganda"). I don't think I'm going to get that far though. Despite the informal writing (or perhaps because of the "meandering prose", depending on your point of view) there just doesn't seem to be enough of interest there to warrant getting through the remaining 250 pages. |
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| Pirates = Awesome... |
[Jul. 22nd, 2006|12:23 am]
Dai Aku
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... therefore I am truly amazed that Disney have made not one but two movies about pirates that are fundamentally not awesome.
The first Pirates of the Caribbean I got bored part way through. I thought maybe I just wasn't in the mood or tired or something when we saw it. But having just returned from the sequel I don't think my reaction to the first one was a fluke.
There were so many parts where I could just picture a huge committee sitting around a board table trying to decide what would appeal to a twelve year-old.
Jim: Okay, we really need something that'll knock their socks off!
Bob: How about a sword fight?
Jim: Yeah, sword fights are awesome, but we've already got sixteen of them... how can we add some "zazz"?
Cheryl: What if instead of just having two people in the sword fight, we have a three person fight?
Jim: Hmm... better... but it needs something else! After all, a three person fight is basically a small brawl and we've already got ten brawls in the movie.
Mike: How about during the fight we add a part where they pointlessly climb some stairs, and then swing from ropes?
Jim: I like it! But we do already use that two other times in the movie... come on guys, THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX!
Frank: What if... what if after they've climbed the stairs, they go out onto the roof of this old mill inexplicably located in the middle of a deserted island, and then they get on top of this big waterwheel and then it comes loose and the rest of the fight takes place on top of a giant rolling waterwheel of doom?
Everyone: AWESOME!
As a side note, say that you were going to design some sort of "super-cannon" with not one, but three barrels that you could use to smash your enemies. What possible purpose could rotating the barrels like some giant gatling gun possibly serve? I'm sure it'll make an awesome selling point when they release the "Flying Dutchman Playset".
There were some romantic sub-plots, but I really didn't care about any of the characters enough to be that interested. I kind of just hoped they'd all die or something so the movie could end. The one redeeming quality of the movie was that just when it seemed like it was about to roll into (what felt like) its seventeenth hour, it suddenly ended in a cliffhanger.
Best line in the movie: "We have to abandon the ship... or abandon hope!" It certainly made for a dramatic moment. I probably wasn't supposed to laugh out loud. |
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| Egads! |
[Jul. 13th, 2006|04:29 pm]
Dai Aku
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Holy crap! I want me some Dr. Octopus arms (but not the evil kind)! |
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| More Comics |
[Jul. 13th, 2006|01:42 pm]
Dai Aku
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I don't think I need to worry about having comics to buy for the forseeable future. I picked up an awful lot today, although I had some catching up to do with series that started a little while ago, so hopefully there will be less to get next time.
Interesting (to me) side note, both DC and Marvel comics charge $2.99 USD for a comic. DC translates that to $4.00 CDN, while Marvel charges $4.25 CDN. Aside from the price descrepancy, I find it interesting that both use nice round numbers (at least if you're talking in terms of quarters) for the Canadian prices and forego the normal .99 prices. Of course, that doesn't really make them any easier to pay for since you have to add 14% (down from 15%... woo?) tax on top of that which turns the nice round $4.00 into $4.56, but whatever.
Anyway, I got selections from All Star Superman (as recommended by  phlebas) and All Star Batman & Robin (written by Frank Miller, so hopefully pretty cool), but I need to fill in a couple holes in both of those series. I also got a couple Green Lantern issues (the newest features the Cyborg on the cover which could either turn out extremely cool or extremely dumb), the third ION issue, and a couple of the Marvel Civil War tie-ins. Also, apparently there was a Filler Bunny book that I didn't own, but now do. Woo.
Tomorrow Greg, Bill and I are going to see Superman Returns at the IMAX theatre in Mississauga. There's also apparently a big comics store in the Square One Mall there, so maybe I can fill in some of the gaps of what I've got. Hooray for comic-book geekery! |
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