March 2010
1 post
I'm no fan of Communist China either but...
"Chinese authorities on Friday told local news Web sites that
Google's Chinese site is likely to close and that, if it does, the
news sites will be required to use only official accounts of the
situation, rather than publish stories from anywhere else,
according to a person familiar with the order."
no wai
heh
i don't wish harm to the chinese people but it would be better for
them to have a civil war/revolution now rather than waiting
A: the thing is though, based on what I've heard a lot of
chinese students say...they like this.
not the Google thing perse
by better i mean for the rest of the world, they are already a
nuclears state so the inevitable could be messy
but the whole "we're one people, it's not good to show much
dissention"
nuclear*
oh sure.
C: brainwashing and traditional confucian values
crazy supersticious nonsense, its as bad as religion
February 2010
3 posts
Hardware-Accelerated Global Illumination by Image... →
This came up in the internal chat thread at work. I wish I took the graphics courses in university so I could actually understand what’s being said here. All I know about 3d lighting is what I’ve learned at work and the crash course a friend gave me when he was writing a simple engine for a summer job.
Starcraft 2 Ripped Audio →
jizaac:
Btw, Starcraft uses Ogg Vorbis and Theora audio/video codecs, hopefully the next <audio> and <video> tags formats for html5 ;D
0 for 3 so far this afternoon in StarCraft 2 due to a string of Terrans doing 1 base Marine rushes combined with my lackluster early-game.
Also, trying to find out how tumblr and twitter integrate.
August 2008
2 posts
You can probably play RA3 on the show floor...
Packing up for PAX today. I also did my first shoutcast for RA3; I was always thinking about doing so for Company of Heroes, but setting up all the software and hardware to get it right seemed like such a hassle, so I kept putting it off. Despite some odd initial issues, the WeGame client is surprisingly good; easy to use, unobtrusive and free. Not as flexible as the FRAPS and Audacity method, but...
Almost better than Quicksilver.
Had Gnome Do bork on me today. I couldn’t figure out what exactly was wrong (even did a re-install from Synaptic). But it seems a purge of all my old settings and plug-ins seemed to fix it.
$ killall gnome-do $ rm -rf ~/.local/share/gnome-do ~/.config/gnome-do $ gnome-do
https://answers.launchpad.net/do/+question/37248
July 2008
7 posts
Rock, paper and hydralisk
The EndWar beta is over (and has been for a couple weeks now). My RTS odyssey has continued nonetheless. I’ve been faithfully watching a lot of professional Starcraft; my weekly GOMTV sessions augmented by some great YouTube-hosted english commentated pro matches. The highlight of which has definitely been the OSL final with one of my favorite players taking the championship, JulyZerg. In...
Dude Huge is displeased.
And Gears of War 2.
Clearly the TV jingle didn't stick...
Oh yea, forgot to add Ghostbusters to that list. So awesome…
Most anticipated from E3 coverage...
In order of most anticipated:
Dawn of War 2
Mega Man 9
Prince of Persia
Pixeljunk Eden
Resistance 2
Rock Band 2
Tales of Vesperia
Dragon Age: Origins
Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia
Resident Evil 5
Oh man, that list turned out longer than I had thought.
Estrogen and TF2 make for a powerful combination.
I had lunch with a couple of old high school friends today, and it came up in conversation that one is recently engaged. After thinking about this later, I realised that this was now no longer an uncommon event among my friends; sort of.
A large number of my female friends are now engaged or even married. And those that aren’t are in what I would imagine are serious long-term relationships...
Some noob is botting at iTunes
There are a lot of differences in the philosophy of software engineering when it comes to games versus pretty much anything that’s not a game with the exception of DRM. A game, while designed to be fun and (hopefully) easy to use, likely has limits on its usability.
Whereas the ideal, for example, web browser is designed to be as usable to as many people as possible, a game is not. Sort...
Testing Tumblr with Ping.fm
Let’s hope it works?
June 2008
1 post
Two RTS's, one iCCup?
I’ve been going on a bit of an Strategy/RTS binge lately. Although I’ve done a lot of TF2 and am thinking of joining/creating a TF2 casual league with my friends, a lot of my mindshare has been taken up by thinking and planning RTS strategies in a variety of games. My DS time has been completely occupied by Advance Wars: DoR (although I am more than mildly excited by the previews of...
May 2008
4 posts
Impulse running smoothly but solely on sub-light...
I couldn’t sleep last night. I felt like playing some SoaSE, but I thought that this would be a good opportunity to finally get around to doing two semi-related things:
Get Galactic Civilizations II plus all the expansions
Get them through Impulse
I’d wanted to see Stardock’s Steam alternative was any good. Their DRM-free policy along with the fairly pleasant experience I had...
Was wondering why my work computer failed to recognize my 360 controller. I just had it upgraded by sysadmin for some new software so it went through a complete reboot. I thought something borked in the update, but it turns out I forgot to connect it to the network, ergo Windows couldn’t connect online to download the controller’s drivers. Problem solved.
Best episode of the week without 'splosions?...
I’ve been diligently keeping up with this season’s anime line-up, and even added a few more to my list: Toshokan Sensou and Kurenai. Kurenai is especially good, in an artsy kind of way. But by far the best one of the bunch, further reinforced by this week’s fantastic episode, is Macross Frontier. I would’ve thought that their somewhat shallow but heavy on the production...
Pwning n00bs in the name of hardware testing.
UWS has finally gone live in the computing science centre, where I’m working for the summer. While this would normally be worthy of celebration for the day, the fact that we just got an Xbox 360 in at work trumps this by several orders of magnitude. I brought in my wireless controller, Halo 3 and GTAIV for…”testing purposes”. Yes.
I’m still wondering about several...
April 2008
3 posts
I AM BULLETPROOF! ...kekekek?
I’m waiting for a spot on my daily TF2 server.
I’ve spent the past week brushing up on my Starcraft, watching a lot of replays and practicing some Zerg builds. I played Starcraft way back when, but I never did anything more than cheesy Map Settings games and the campaign (and even then, I did it when cheats on). My recent fixation with Company of Heroes has progressed to RTS’s...
My Muta micro is sub-par.
I’m following a lot of anime this season. So far this week has had some good episodes. Macross Frontier was great, and i think it’s been consistently the best so far this spring. The OP comes out this week. Woo! The first episode of Allison & Lilia didn’t blow me away, but the second episode has definitely picked up, and now I think I’ll followi t regularly till...
I love variable fighters.
I could blog about my anemic bioinformatics project or the fact that I may fail my statistics final, but that would be too depressing.
Instead, I’ve come to realize that this is the start of one of the best TV seasons in a long time. Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who for my western sci-fi fix. As for anime, there’s a lot of good new shows this season. Soul Eater, Macross Frontier,...
March 2008
10 posts
“Meowth, that’s right!”
– http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=260
7 tags
XNA, GSoC and iPhone apps are very much for the...
I pre-registered for PAX a couple days ago. Summer looks like it will end in an exciting manner. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, it looks like the rest of summer will be hectic.
First, I’m returning as a high school camp instructor for the CS department. Except this time, instead of using the fairly outdated Neverwinter Nights camp framework (Much love Bioware!), we’re going to...
As awesome as it could be, using anti-armor...
I finally caved in and took up the recommendation by TRS to watch Avatar: The Last Airbender. And in my customary obsessive compulsive fashion, I’ve gone and watched every single episode. I really like this show. I wish I had a show like this to watch when I was a kid. I love you Transformers, but your writing is not nearly on the same level as Avatar.
After watching for the entire day...
Rocket wagon, ho?
I queued up for a 1v1 ranked match in Company of Heroes tonight, hoping to get some live experience in before the day was over (I had previously played a LOT of CPU skirmishes in the public beta over the past few weeks and had played another CPU skirmish this afternoon). Unfortunately, I slipped up and chose to queue up as a British player instead of an American player, so I was in for a bit of a...
Oh Webkit, how do I love you? Let me count the 93...
I find it hilarious that all of a sudden, now that Webkit is in the limelight as the leader of the Acid3 tests (and therefore the most compliant to modern web standards), you see the Slashdottians and Diggers complaining about how Acid3 isn’t a “realistic” test, and that web standards “don’t really matter” as long as they get their widgets and their extensions....
Still not understanding my latest assignment for my Operating Systems class. Which is a shame for two reasons: 1. I truly enjoy this class, and I’m not understanding it because I’m spending my time on two other classes which are equally truly shitty. I can’t believe I’m doing stats and a frustrating bioinformatics project instead. 2. I’m being sidetracked by Google...
Isn't putting a web server on a mobile device...
I finished an assignment for my Operating Systems class about a week ago that dealt with pthreads for a simple web server. I’m looking through the iPhone SDK and watching some of the developer videos, and I’m realizing that the iPhone also uses pthreads. Is the iPhone even multi-threaded? Can my iPhone run my web server assignment? I’m reading that the iPhone won’t run...
“I need the panda.”
Oooh, Atari on Steam? Yes please. Now I don’t have an excuse to avoid getting The Witcher.
From a paper in my cluster computing class: “…it is still posible to generate efficient code for scientific computing and leverage many of Python’s RAD features.” Capitalization is not mine. Hilarious out of context referral is totally mine however.
February 2008
5 posts
Insipid Insect?
My brother hosted a LAN a couple days ago, and due to how our network is secured, he had to add a bunch of his friends to our router’s DHCP list. Since we’ve had neighbors jumping onto our network before, I made sure to get out of him a promise to resecure the network after his friends left (ie. removing them from the DHCP list was my interpretation). It’s been a day and a half,...
"Our scrying has revealed nothing!"
Ohhhh my. Thank goodness reading week is coming up soon, because I will definitely need a lot of time for this. I’ve only had the game for two days, and I’m already heavily addicted. Company of what?
Webkit vs. Firefox, ROUND 3: FIGHT!
In this corner, after being beaten successively due to bloat and crashes but coming back swinging with a fully complete OS X native interface is Firefox 3 beta. And in this corner, the successive champion for the past two rounds, the Webkit nightly build. And now apparently faster than ever, this perrenial favorite isn’t about to go down lightly. The past two times I’ve tested both...
So it’s taken me this long to figure out how to force Gmail to load in the old “clunkier” interface by default. As much as I love newfangled Javascript hawtness, the fact that keyboard shortcuts (in Webkit) require me to click somewhere on the page (presumably to give focus to the page?) before I can actually use them seems to somewhat defeat the purpose of keyboard shortcuts....
Whee Advance Wars!
So in terms of saving money since the holiday credit card bill showed up, I’m doing a pretty shitty job. Since Christmas, I’ve gone and bought a PS3 with Ratchet and Clank, bought the full edition of Rock Band (both of these are arguably worth the price), contemplated re-applying the leech that is a WoW subscription (most definitely a waste of both time and money, but avoiding relapses...
January 2008
12 posts
8 tags
*BSD is chunkier than Linux, and Folding@Home is...
Firstly, it is damn cold in Edmonton today. -31 degrees Celsius, down to -50 with windchill. Brrrr. Cold enough so that I decided it was in my “best interests” to skip class today. Heh heh. It also helped that public transit was paralyzed due to weather. So I spent this morning finishing up my presentation for my protein folding over a distributed network assignment and editing my...
Note to self, when importing your MacBook’s .profile file to use as your Ubuntu box’s .bashrc, remember to do one of two very important things: either delete the .profile file when you’re done, or make sure it doesn’t export $HOME as your MacBook’s $HOME directory. This will save you many many MANY hours of frustration and puzzlement arising from why Gnome insists on...
Addendum on Ubuntu: Another hour later, display is not only dual-monitor functional, but dual-monitor friendly. I spent a good amount of time contemplating percussive maintenance to get it, before narrowing down the problem: MetaModes. In the short period of time between my knowing next-to-nothing about the term, to now, MetaModes have gone from a Ubuntu-related curiosity to the bane of my...
Ubuntu, bioinformatics, not-bioinformatics and...
Got my second computer up and running with Ubuntu tonight. It took over 2 hours worth of futzing with the display settings to get my dual monitor setup to work properly. Still have to put it through some more rigorous testing but I’m getting the feeling that it’s finally working. I’m using the fact that I’m setting up my Ubuntu machine to avoid doing two assignments which...
A post with Tina Fey and probability distribution...
I’m very rusty when it comes to calculus. And lo and behold, a significant calculus assignment is given in my statistics class. I’m especially angry with myself since I had the opportunity to switch into a different, more practically oriented statistics course with no calculus involved. However, since the email notification informing me that I could swap courses came late Friday night,...
Got my replacement hard drive for my Ubuntu box a week ago, and I’ve finally gotten around to installing it. The old hard drive held both Ubuntu and XP, and it physically died, so a completely fresh install is necessary. I’m going for a 32-bit Gutsy Gibbon with a blank partition left for a future XP install. I’ve read on psychocats.net about how I should be partitioning my drive...
Fun with IRC
tuquee: refrigerator / is more than it seems to be / robots in disguise awg: refrigerator / confuses kkparrot / robots in the sky Digital: omg ponies / flying through the lovely sky / robots in disguise Gamblore: nanobots are cool / our life is better with them, / robots in this guy
I have no willpower.
One of the nice things about being a social misanthrope is that you don’t have to spend a lot at Christmas. In fact, I severely overestimed how much I would spend, so much so that my margin of error was large enough to buy a PS3. So like any good misanthrope who enjoys spending weekends shut up in physical isolation while engrossed in virtual socializing, I made up that margin by buying such...
A CYBORG River Tam is better.
My God, they actually did it. And it’s actually really really good. Summer Glau and Jewel Straite both back on sci-fi TV? Yes please. I can’t really imagine what can be better than seeing Kaylee and River Tam on a regular basis again.
Macworld: There's Something Appley in the Air |... →
One year after the iPhone announcement and a doubling of Apple’s stock, Steve has to have something big in store. Mac tablets and ultra-slim MacBooks aside, it’s interesting what the banners in Moscone have written on them. Intel’s announcement of integrated WiMAX into their base PC platforms (Intel develops integrated WiFi / WiMAX / DVB-H chip - Engadget) at CES could be a hint...
Formal languages and information theory, computational neuroscience or applications of cluster computing? Ah, decisions decisions. Too bad it’s a decision that affects my GPA. Otherwise I’d feel spoiled for my academic appetite.
Bad luck with both of my desktop PCs. My Ubuntu/XP box has a bad boot HDD, and my gaming PC has a loose CPU heatsink. While I can forgive the occasional HDD failure (this isn’t the first time), I find it hard to believe that one of the largest manufacturers of desktop processors can’t whip up a decent heatsink restraint system. Intel engineering at its finest.
December 2007
3 posts
The first bit of Doctor Who in months and I already can’t wait till series 4 starts. They’re even bringing back all of the companions for multiple episode arcs. Yay Rose!
Any Christmas spent killing virtual Nazis is a successful Christmas in my humble opinion. That said, I’m frustrated that CBC isn’t carrying the Doctor Who Christmas special, because the only thing better than killing virtual Nazis is watching fictional Time Lords futz with the space-time continuum.