Check out http://c64s.com/, which has a Java – based Commodore 64 emulator that lets you play a large selection of classic C64 games in your browser, and which also does a ‘game link of the day’ thing on their homepage, which is fun to stop by and check out for a little walk down memory lane now and then. If, unlike me, you didn’t grow up with one of these machines, you might find the graphics and sound outdated enough to put you off, but if you give a few of these games a chance you’ll find that there are awesome gameplay mechanics underneath the crufty skin – things like Commando and the Bouler Dash games, Archon, and Bruce Lee are all still fun today.
Handy windows file launcher – Rock-it Launcher
I’ve mentioned repeatedly how much I think of Quicksilver, and I’ve linked to a number of similar tools for windows. The truth is none of them compares, though. On a feature by feature basis neither does Rock-it Launcher, but it gets the file launching piece right. Hit your control key sequence, start typing the name of the application, document, or whatever it is you need to be working with, and it pops right up. If you’re not familiar with file launchers of this nature, the basic premise is instead of littering your desktop with icons, or having to burrow through your file system looking for the program you want to launch, simply begin typing its name and you’re all set. Rock-It Launcher is free and speedy. Its only downside is its large memory footprint (42MB on my machine). Also for folks like me who jump right in without reading the docs, take note: you need to generate a file system catalog before it does anything useful – hit the catalog button and go from there.
This has become an essential utility for me in just the few short days I’ve had it installed. Kudos to the developer for an excellent piece of software.
Web-based photo editor
This isn’t going to replace photoshop anytime soon, but check out PXN8, an HTML/CSS/Javascript based image editor. You can crop, adjust color balance, remove red eye, rotate, and a bunch of other basic image editor tools are also available. Pretty slick stuff and potentially handy if you find yourself in front of a computer that lacks an image editor. It’s also available for licensing for incorporation into your existing project or to run on your own servers.
Serverless forum software
This is a brilliant idea. Instead of a single server hosting a web forum, apply the principles of p2p software to them and have every forum participant host a full copy of the forum database on their local machine. What you get is excellent security, a forum that’s immune to the slashdot effect with better overall performance in general, and (at least in theory) better search. It’s called Keyforum and it’s free and open source.
It’s a little on the clunky side right now and not easy for non-geeks to get up and running unless you’re on windows where they have an .exe installer, but the intent is to get this running on all platforms. I can see immediate potential for this on campuses where the faculty lack access to sufficient IT resources to bring a forum online for them.
The next phase of my career starts shortly
I can finally let the cat out of the bag. Those of you who have been paying close attention have probably noticed veiled hints and even some rather obvious comments over the last couple of months about how change was in the works for me. It’s here. I tendered my resignation at Skidmore College today. I’ve accepted a position at Amherst College as Director of Web Services, where I’ll begin work on March 6th, assuming all goes smoothly in terms of my departure from Skidmore and arrangements to live in the Amherst region.
Of course I couldn’t be more excited, though there’s a tinge of sadness too. I reconnected with parts of my family I had lost touch with when I moved to Saratoga, and I rediscovered my love of hiking. Also just in general I love the region – ever since I was a young kid I have been coming up here, and to live in the region turned out to be even better than I had anticipated. I’ll be sorry to go.
On the positive side I’ll be back working for my old boss Peter from my Bowdoin days. We had a great working relationship and I produced work that I’m exceedingly proud of during my time working for him. My expectation is we will continue to build on those efforts at Amherst, with greater resources and several more year’s experiences under my belt. The future looks bright.
I’ll post more in the coming days, for now I figured it was time to get the word out after months of speculation and uncertainty.
VMware offers a gift to the world, and most fail to notice
Here’s my little contribution to trying to correct this. Quite some time ago, VMware announced the availability of the VMware Player, a free version of their superb VMware Workstation product line. While it’s feature limited compared to their commercial products, it’s still an absolutely awesome piece of software and has become an essential tool on my machines.
If you’re not familiar with it, VMware workstation and its siblings are virtual machine applications. These are not emulators like Virtual PC – they use the native hardware of the machine they’re running on and thus perform relatively close to the native speed of your machine when running software. They allow you to run additional operating systems simultaneously on your machine, say for example Windows 98 inside of your Windows XP machine, or Windows 95, or, in my case, linux.
This has become enormously useful for me – I run a duplicate of my server’s operating system (the server hosting this site) on my pc and test out software builds and patches on it before I install them on the actual server, saving me the heartache and time. I’ve also used it to test out a variety of other linux distros and even OSX on intel – there’s a user community out there that’s busily offering up a host of different operating systems and flavors for the free player. Whether you’re doing software/web development stuff, want to test out linux, or just want to play some old DOS games, or for any of a hundred other reasons, this is a fantastic tool that’s worth checking out.
Note that this is Win32 and Linux only, and while performance is really good, you wouldn’t want to be playing a modern 3d shooter using VMware player. Older stuff from the pre-windows xp days generally works fine though.
Next purchasing cycle at work, this is going to become part of my professional toolkit as well (the workstation product) and help me get rid of the ridiculous array of screens strewn across my desk. I’m at 5 and occasionally 6 at this point. I also hope they consider developing an OSX port of their product once OSX is running on intel hardware.
A few fixes to the site
I made some adjustments to the site today to accommodate safari users – you should find the navbar at the top is no longer wonky, and you should find that the webcam links now work correctly and don’t hide part of the image offscreen. I had to drop overlib.js and move to lightbox.js, which is excellent. Kudos to the developer, Lokesh Dhakar for a superb script.
Note that this now means anyone wanting to use the webcams has to click on the links, you can no longer simply roll your mouse across them.
My favorite 2006 CES gadget – the sony ebook reader
Yeah, everyone one else’s eyes were glazing over after checking out their 999th HDTV (this one has a background glow! This one has extra bright pixels! This one only costs $11,000!). Meanwhile all I want is one of those Sony ebook readers. Sony initially released this in Japan, but with an absolutely draconion DRM scheme which boiled down to ‘your $500 ebook reader can only read our stuff.’ They’ve apparently learned a little bit of a lesson since then, and the US model will cost less (between $3-400) and will allow you to import pdf and txt files onto the device.
Most folks look at it and think ‘black and white? feh!’ My reaction is: how many full color paperback books do you have? You’re missing the point of the device. It’s still a little spendy, even at $300, but the tradeoff is you can carry your entire library around with you, and unlike a laptop it’s very light, has a much higher contrast screen, and the batteries last for at least 10 hours. I would use this thing constantly, it’s an evolution of the form (the book) that appeals to me tremendously. I do have two criticisms though. First and most damning: there is no search feature. None. One of the primary strengths of an ebook over paper is search! Forget who a character/place/thing is in a book? A quick search later and you remember. How Sony could opt not to include it is beyond me. My other criticism is more of a hunch – the press release refers to sony software you use to move content onto the device, and sony has an absolutely atrocious record in this department. Apparently their marketing folks haven’t yet noticed that no one is buying their mp3 players. Or maybe they have and they just haven’t figured out is the reason is because of assinine DRM and awful software which compounds the problem. So I tremble to think of what their ebook management software will look like.
Hopefully either they’ll have learned their lesson and made sure their software is decent by the time the device arrives here (this spring), or the hackers will take care of it for us. Either way I have my eyes on these, I really really want a digital book. I’ve been tinkering with another Tablet PC as the solution to this, and in many ways they work very well, but they have two fundamental problems: weight and battery charge.
Oh, and I have one wish as well, not that I have much hope it will come true. It would be excellent of the device came with some form of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), which I’ve written about before. If you haven’t tried it, check out Dictator for an example of the form. The project is inactive but the software is free, open source, and relatively easy to install.
News of the diabetes epidemic hits the mainstream
I’ve been talking about this here ever since I came down with it – today I note it’s finally starting to truly hit the mainstream. I was as oblivious to this as anyone else was until I was afflicted. If you’re an american, especially, apparently, an east coast reared american, you are strongly urged to spend some time learning what a healthy diet is all about. A brief statistic from today’s New York Times to help drive the point home:
One in three children born in the United States five years ago are expected to become diabetic in their lifetimes, according to a projection by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The forecast is even bleaker for Latinos: one in every two.
33% folks, one third of the population, is now predicted to suffer from the disease. Our north american lifestyle, and especially our eating habits, are completely fucked is what this is all about, and corn syrup in all its forms is playing a big role in this. Read the labels of the foods you eat and if it has high fructose corn syrup in it, don’t eat it! (which, alas, is terribly difficult, since everything has it in it). Eat vegetables, lots of vegetables, and not in the ‘yeah yeah I had 3 sprigs of frozen broccoli with dinner’ kind of way, and search on diabetes here if you want more folk advice from me, but more importantly, go read the New York Times article published today (registration probably required, use bugmenot.com if that bothers you), and the rest of the series this week. And most importantly, please, if you have kids, stop feeding them the crap you’re feeding them.
An idea for World of Warcraft developers – let the users develop the content
I’m an avid World of Warcraft player, along with 5 million or so others as it turns out. If you play, you may note that Blizzard re-uses a lot of art assets – many objects in the world share the same icon, and even some abilities share common art assets. One of my Tauren Druid’s powers, for example, shares the same icon as a quest-related drop (bear tongues). The icon looks nothing like a bear tongue – in fact it’s a bear’s head.
This used to be more common than it is now – with each subsequent patch Blizzard seems to be adding in icons for objects, and what this suggests is that the resource lack is one of art production time. It seems to me there’s a relatively simple solution to this – let the players create the content. Publish the specifications (color palette, file size limitations and so on), hold contests, and let the playerbase develop the art. You could even let the community vote on who wins the contest. It’s a win for everyone – Blizzard can spend its art creation time building genuine new content for the game, it can encourage community engagement in the development of their virtual world, and it solves the problem of bear tongues looking like bear heads. This is a successful model in many other contexts, from the slashdot community to the infinite variety of modifications built on top of the various FPS engines, to Second Life where the entire model is built on player content creation. It also potentially helps Blizzard identify a pool of new talent to hire, again a model used extensively by the first person shooter genre where successful map makers, texture artists, modelers, sound engineers and even entire modification development teams have been hired by the game publishers to produce new commercial content.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 