April 2012
27 posts
Not Getting Lost Anymore
Everybody that knows me well (and now you, unknown reader) knows how easily I can get lost, without or even with a map. Over the years I did practice reading maps, understanding them and so on, but in the end I just completely lack any sense of spatial direction. For the past few years though things have been a bit different. Why? Because with my phone I now have a portable GPS and mapping...
If I Could Draw
I always maintained that to be a good graphical user interface designer, you have to be good at two things: Graphical design, and software conception. I have an odd impression that if it weren’t from my complete inability to draw, I might actually be a good GUI designer. One of the difficult challenges of software design is to map an inherently complex combination of computing machine states...
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The Adventures of Lolo
The trilogy of games titled “Adventure of Lolo” are very well made puzzle games made for the NES in the early 90s. I played them again recently, and they stood well the test of time. They are essentially Sokoban-like games, but with the addition of various creatures, and that you have to collect all heart items before getting the chest to open the door.
The first game (which wasn’t released...
Managing C
Managing large amounts of C code within a single process can be quite daunting. If any single thing breaks, everything breaks spectacularly. It is not surprising that on Unix, the system C was originally made for, encourages modular, multi-process design that communicate through pipes. While this kind of modular design works well for multi-machine, distributed systems, it doesn’t work too well...
FreeIndieGam.es
A quick post to mention that I’m now a regular reader of the site freeindiegam.es. As its title implies, this site showcases free online of computer games made by independent developers. While they are far from big productions of video game consoles, they tend to be quite original yet still entertaining. I’m often surprised at how clever or “freshly original” they are, and since they’re are...
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New Web Design Tools
This afternoon I was preparing the CSS of my new blog location when I notice how better web design tools are now compared to ten years ago. Firebug, the extension for Firefox has always been a leader, though I often used external software for CSS editing. With Safari came a powerful set of built-in tools that can inspect any page element and show how and why it was styled a certain way. Google...
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Blog Move Almost Done
You can look at the new blog at the temporary address http://blog2.benad.me/ . It’s on Squarespace, and I imported my full blog archive. For now I’m still using Posterous and autoposting to everything else, but this week I’ll finalize the move. I still have to clean up the page style, tweak things here and there, use Twitterfeed to auto-post links to Twitter (using s.benad.me),...
Learning a New Language
I was thinking this morning that I could, on a whim, start learning a new language, and for once by that I don’t mean a programming language. The thing is that even if I start doing so on a whim, this would lead to a multi-year effort, so even if learning a new language is a whim, which one to pick isn’t. So let’s break them down into multiple criteria, rate them, and pick the best. The first...
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Kubrick Upgrade
As I’m reviewing the movies made by Stanley Kubrick, I’m starting to get to the point where their visual aspect is important, actually spectacular. It just so happens that there is a collection of Kubrick movies on Blu-ray. To compare, I bought this 9-disk DVD collection in 2003. Now, I’m normally against buying newer media, and I postponed buying a Blu-ray player for the longest time out of...
Norwegian Wood
So I just got by mail from Norway a bamboo USB key from Opera, the makers of the Opera web browser. How? Because I won a contest from their April fool’s. If you signed up to their bogus “we’ll send you data to offload our servers”, you would have gotten an email containing a bunch of ones and zeros. Of course, they were encoded messages. And here’s how I decoded them, using Perl and the pack...
Server Bloat
My main annoyance with “entreprise” server operating systems is how much proprietary bloat they have. Up to now, I’ve see it with Solaris 10, RedHat Enterprise Linux, IBM AIX and of course Windows Server. I understand that in the enterprise world there are a ton of requirements, which inevitably leads to feature bloat, but what irritates me is that each time there is bloat it is described with a...
Back To Work
Well, the vacation is finished, and now I’m back to hectic work. Finished much too late, and I still have a few emails to send. The net result is that I have to go back to my optimized “media consumption process”, and maybe find ways to optimize things a bit more. For example, my podcast queue tend to grow too big as the week goes by, meaning I need to trim it down to a more reasonable size....
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Lolita
This is part 4 of 12 of my retrospective of Stanley Kubrick’s career. At last Stanley Kubrick was able to independently make a movie on his own. Also, from this point on, all of his movies are part of the Stanley Kubrick Collection DVD Set I acquired many years ago. As you can expect, he had to do something controversial by commissioning Vladimir Nabokov to adapt his book “Lolita” into a...
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My Blog is now on blog.benad.me
Well, I just finished moving my blog to blog.benad.me. Kind of. It’s still hosted by Posterous, and my web site is still hosted by Fused. It seems that recently their configuration panel now supported an “Advanced DNS Zone Editor”, which let me point “blog.” to either an IP (“A” record) or another domain (“CNAME” record). Since Posterous supports custom domains, this was a breeze to set up. Now,...
No Console
At times, I drool over some new “indie” games available to download (at a reasonable price) on Xbox 360, for example Fez and Bit.Trip Runner 2. But then I don’t have an Xbox. So here’s the problem. Xbox starts at $200, and with a decent hard drive at $250 (but that’s a special price, since normally that would be $300). Add also $60 a year for Xbox Live Gold, or whatever that means. It gets...
The Plot is Missing
I mentioned in a previous post that professional movie reviewers tend to review based on their expectations on what a movie should have rather than its artistic intent. With animated movies, I still contend that due to their different form, there should be more leeway about reviewing them, especially for the potential lack of plot (the movie Fantasia comes to mind). I recently came across a...
Macs are Still Not PC-compatible
A few days ago I feebly attempted to create a live Linux USB for my MacBook Pro (mid-2010 model). And, oh boy that failed miserably. While there is no issue booting from a CD, this can cause a problem on newer Mac models that don’t have a CD drive at all. In those cases, simply dd-ing the ISO (or converted to DMG) file to a USB doesn’t work at all. Why? Well, I can’t say exactly why, but...
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The Ten, Make That Nine, Habits of Very Organized...
“The Ten…” by (the) Steve Martin is a compendium of some messages he posted on his Twitter account. It is a somewhat small book (unsurprising given that Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters), but it is quite funny and worth the read. To give you an idea of his humor and style when using Twitter, here’s a recent example: “So beautiful today in New York. Each leaf on every tree bloomed...
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The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich
Running at over 57 hours, I listened to the audio version of “The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany” by William L. Shirer. By covering the history of Germany from the end of the first World War to the end of the second through the peculiar Austrian Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist political party, the book covers two world-shaping parts of history I knew little...
Blackberry "Security"
One of the truism in the world of cellphones is that Blackberry is secure, or at least implied more secure than Android and iPhone. And nothing annoys me as much as that falsehood. First, if you’re not using it with the “enterprise” server, then it’s definitively less secure than a normal IMAP+SSL email client. Why? Simply because you give all your credentials to Blackberry that will access your...
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Spartacus
This is part 3 of 12 of my retrospective of Stanley Kubrick’s career. At this time of the year, like clockwork, TV stations present Ben-Hur (and The Ten Commandments) due to its Judeo-Christian undertones. So of course I find it fitting to watch the “like that but better” movie Spartacus, instead with undertones of Communism. Event though this is not a Kubrick movie per se, since Kubrick was a...
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Spaceward Ho! for iPad
The strategy game Spaceward Ho was ported on iPad last week by developer Ariton. If you don’t know, it’s a game where you have two resources, money and metal, that can get collected by building colonies and mining planets. Using these, you can build ships of various kinds, including scouts, fighters, colony ships, satellites and so on. The rules of the game are quite simple compared to other...
20+12
So I planned my vacation days to include my birthday, and hopefully I can do that each year. I’ll do my best to not see in the 33rd year of my life an ominous sign. Hopefully, it could be an eventful year, at least one where events are not related to my health or half-broken stomach. Indeed, in the past two year I was able to recover much to the point where only once or twice a month my stomach...
iOS Text Editors
As you may have noticed in my previous posts, I’ve been looking for a while for the “best” iOS text editor (well, at least best for my posts to this blog). Well, it so just happened that Brett Terpstra compiled a list of all the text editors for iOS with the name iTextEditors. And it’s a huge list. For now, I think I’m satisfied with Nebulous and Byword, as both a quite optimized for markdown,...
Sleep Mode
Now, vacation time. I really really need to rest. This winter wasn’t as bad as last year’s, but I still need a few days off to recover. So, in the spirit of slacking off, today’s post will be short. There. Posted via email from Benad’s Blog | Comment »
My Last (Physical) Book
If the past two years are of any indication, my copy of That Is All may be the last physical book I acquire. The same can be said for the one or two CDs and Blueray discs I got, since they are more “collector’s items” than anything else. It helps though. Those collector’s editions are mostly just filled with useless crap. The ones I own are not due to their size or packaging, but for the extra...
You're Fooling No One
Well, this year’s April Fool’s day wasn’t too bad. Engadget has a nice roundup of the jokes around the Internet. Techcrunch has a more complete list. A special mention that’s not listed in the above links goes to XKCD, with a uniquely generated comic just for you, with dozens of permutations based on your browser type, ISP, location, window size and more. I normally dislike browsing the web this...
Time
<markdown> Being “connected” to the world through the Internet can make every day’s pace to be hectic. Combine that with the simple consequence of the inter-connectedness of billions of people, where every single important event is made aware to the rest of the connected world instant, and that’s enough to make anyone dizzy or exhausted after a while.The problem with...
March 2012
31 posts
Animated Arts
Recently I have seen this review of the animated movie Redline, and compared with my review, oh boy, rarely I have read a review so much off the mark. My own review mentioned that it’s both jevenile but a great piece of art, yet Monji focused entirely on the juvenile aspect, using its lack of official awards (of an incredibly biased and unoriginal industry) to brush off any consideration about...
My Favorite Programming Language
Recently on hacker news there were surveys of their readers about their favorite programming language and their least favorite one, with interesting results. While I’m surprised that Java has a higher ratio of least liked to favorite than the horrible PHP, this raised another question: What’s my favorite programming language? It’s difficult to answer, because to me most languages are not too...
One Week
So, starting next Wednesday and for the week after, I’ll be on vacation. And by vacation I mean not doing much except maybe finishing my taxes, if I don’t finish that this weekend. There’s now a daily ritual of me barely waking up in the morning, feeling tired, being awake after lunch, being tired at 4PM, and being exhausted by 6PM when I leave work. But worse, since last Thursday or so, I get...
News Deluge
Who said that RSS is dead? Given the deluge of news in the tech world, with my busy schedule it’s difficult to be up-to-date, even with the podcasts I listen to. So, I broke down my news sources in 3 sections: important low-volume, medium, and noise. For the important stuff, I mostly subscribe using Google Reader to a bunch of RSS feeds that tend to be seldom ly updated. I use use Reeder as my...
Information Overload Design
To follow up on my rant yesterday, I suspect that today’s visual designers obsession with minimalist, simple design with “large margins” is a reaction to our current digital age. To contrast, you can observe the way visual design in the mid 80s and 90s embraced sensory over-stimulation, from nearly chaotic representations of “cyberspace”, to fluorescent colors everywhere. Even then, this wasn’t...
White Space Design
Something I was careful about a few years ago when I designed my web site was about not wasting too much visual space, especially since the site might be viewed by mobile browsers. Still, for the past few years, the “cool design thing” to do is to place your content at the middle of a huge canvas of white space. So I wasn’t too much surprised when a co-worker’s first impression of Windows 8’s...
The need for DJs
My main gripe about the music streaming service Rdio is the lack of per-genre radio stations to discover music. As I started to use the service a year ago, I was overwhelmed by the choice, so at first I just expanded my music horizons to just a bit beyond what I already know. I understand that a big part of Rdio is the social aspect to discover music, but the problem with that is that I need to...
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Rango
At its core, Rango is a western movie. Yes it stars a pet chameleon that gets lost on a desert highway, and finds himself in a western town that is going through a drought. (Yes, World Water Day was yesterday, but that was only a coincidence.) Beyond that though, it is a superb animated movie by Industrial Light and Magic, worthy of its Oscar. The movie is not simply a sequence of jokes loosely...
Rogers and the End of the 3-year Cycle
I’m nearing the end of my 3-year contract with Rogers, and it’s easy to tell since they already started spamming me by mail and with calls. The contract I got on the release date of the iPhone 3GS is half-decent. Though limited to 50 minutes a month, it’s unlimited after 6PM and on the weekends. Unlimited SMS, MMS (who uses that?), call display and voicemail, all extras. An expensive $30 data...
Need Vacation
On this early summer day (hurray for global warming), those are the hints I need a few vacation days: I can barely multitask at work, so listening to music or podcasts while I work is out of the question. Result? My podcast queue is getting huge. Getting late on outside-of-workplace work, like my taxes. Even if I had the time to do it, I don’t feel like I want to watch a movie. I want to avoid...
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Bit.Trip (part 2)
Before jumping into the second half of the series, a mention about the music. The games can be considered “rhythm” games because, even though you can get through them based only on the visuals, hitting the “beats” at the right time makes sounds that fit in correctly with the soundtrack. As a testament to this, falling into the “Nether” mode, which has no background music, is so disorienting that...
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Bit.Trip (Part 1)
Atari (well, the company that bought its name anyway) was in the news recently about a contest for software developers to do a remake of Pong. First thing that came to mind was, well, Bit.Trip already did it. Bit.Trip is a series of 6 games that mix both old-school video games in a retro style with music and rythm gaming where you need to perform certain actions in synch with the music. They...
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Paths of Glory
This is part 2 of 12 of my retrospective of Stanley Kubrick’s career. World War I; 1916; the French army. A suicide mission; a court marshall for cowardice; blackmail. Paths of Glory, based on the book of the same name, has a strong anti-war message done convincingly. The movie presents arguments through both riveting action sequences and displaying the hypocrisy and inhumanity of the French...
Not Playing Anymore
I was about to write a long review about the Bit.Trip game series, when I simultaneously felt tired and noticed how little games I played in the past few months. Yes, I played a few “casual” games from time to time, but rarely more than a few minutes at a time. The game Infinity Blade is the first time in months I played more than 10 minutes in a row. After all, games take considerable amounts...
Trying Out Byword
So today I’m trying to write this post using the iOS application Byword, a plain text and Markdown editor. It works quite well with Dropbox integration, though at first I was a bit lost about how to display the shortcuts (slide the bar above the keyboard). The editor has more Markdown-oriented shortcuts than Nebulous, but has far less file management options, and is less customizable. Otherwise,...
Bad Movies
Apart from watching good movies from time to time, I sometimes watch bad movies on purpose. So, how do I discover particularly bad, yet enjoyable movies? The first way to discover these is through the podcast How Did This Get Made. If the movie they want to review is accessible enough (mostly through Netflix or iTunes rentals), then I watch it, and the I listen to their review. Often times their...
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A Clash of Kings
As far as book sequels go (to A Game of Thrones, that is), A Clash of Kings is a good one. It follows all the characters we loved and hated from the first book into “What happened next”, expands the world to more places and kingdoms, is that much a bit darker and magical than the first one. But I still have three gripes about it. First, there are too many narratives. In the first book, you had...
Long Reads
A quick post, because I have a book to read. As I mentioned yesterday, I’m reading A Clash of Kings, and it took me forever to read. I need to have more discipline or use a schedule, otherwise taking months to read a book makes you lose all form of pacing it could have. Maybe as an audio book it would be easier, but even then it doesn’t work well for me for long reads since I read as fast at 2x...
Posterous to Shut Down?
I was about to finish the last two chapters and then review the book A Clash of Kings when I read the news that Posterous was acquired by Twitter. It’s very clear that by the nature of their different businesses, this was a kind of talent acquisition, so when on their FAQ they weasel around the direct question “Will you shut down?”, it can’t be clearer that they don’t care and that it will shut...
No Screens Today
I didn’t sleep too well last night, and on top of that we lost an hour (DST), so today I’m avoiding all screens, be it TV, computers or iPhone (VoiceOver mode). Actually, right now I’m typing this on my Kindle, which technically doesn’t count because it’s not backlit. OK, enough typing on this sucky keyboard. Posted via email from Benad’s Blog | Comment »
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Infinity Blade
At its basis, this iOS game is a RPG style done many times before of repeating battles from one “generation” to another until you can finally defeat the last boss rather than losing every time. You’re a knight, and you use swipe gesture to attack in certain direction, or press “hot spot” areas at the right moment to attack weak spots or parry. Along the way you can collect cash and items, and...
Magazine as the Best of Websites
The free magazine The Redditor is a great example of magazines built up from the contents of a web site, in this case Reddit. Like Distro for Engadget, but most importantly Macworld, PC Mag and many others, magazines ends up still existing in digital form, with great layout and typography, and at the same time still serves a purpose to summarize the deluge of daily contents from a web site, plus...