Archive for the ‘Interesting stuff’ Category

Journalspace

Sunday, January 4th, 2009

You’ve probally heard about Journalspace’s end. If not, read about it here.

I just wanted to reiterate some points I’ve made earlier to several friends:

  1. RAID is not backup!
  2. As a web developer, don’t trust your users (they think a user did it).
  3. As a web user, don’t trust your online data. With this I mean webmails(gmail, hotmail), photos (flickr), videos (youtube), documents(blogs, wikis, google docs), etc.

Texas Hold’em reference card

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

Here’s a nifty reference card for Texas Hold’em Poker. Print on A5 and laminate, and you’ll never be in doubt whether a straight beats a flush. Also included are denominations for the poker chips. At least the denominations that we usually give them.

GH1 and GH80 on the Wii

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

Finally some breakthroughs have been done for the Wii version of Guitar Hero 3. Some smart guys have modded the ISOs of the game, and changed the songs to those from the other Guitar Hero games. Here are some forum posts with instructions on how to do the modding. I should warn you, however, that the work involved is quite hard and takes a lot of time.

You will also require note charts and separated audio for the guitar, bass/rhythm, and band tracks. I guess that is why people are reusing the songs from the older Guitar Hero games, since they already have the required audio tracks. For the opensource game Frets on Fire, which is more or less a clone of Guitar Hero, you can obtain hundreds of tracks ready for inclusion to Guitar Hero 3.

If you look hard enough in the usual spots, you can find a version of Guitar Hero 3, modded to include the songs from Guitar Hero 1, and Guitar Hero Rocks the 80’s. Here are some screenshots of the song list.

After having played this for the past few hours, I can verify that these tracks indeed are those advertised. There are some things that doesn’t work, though, like co-op career (the lead guitar and rhythm/bass guitar tracks are the same), and practice mode.

But it is really nice to be able to play some other songs, than the 70 included on the retail version. Modded versions will do, until the Wii gets DLC.

Star Trek Marathon, revisited

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

I have received some questions about the Star Trek Marathon I previously posted, most of them are asking about how long that Star Trek marathon is compared to other popular scifi-series. Well, I can’t disappoint you, so here is a nice, pretty diagram:

Comparison of scifi marathons.

There you go, I had to stack several other scifi-series to match the total runtime of all the Star Trek series. As an interesting note, the slim, orange Firefly-sliver is smaller than the Star Wars-sliver. Firefly could really have used a longer run. The total timespan of all the chosen series are 65298 minutes, or 45 days, 8 hours and 18 minutes.

Other stuff on the web, part 2

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Back again with another installment of “Other stuff on the web”. Again, don’t spend too much time on these parts of the web, since this blag really is all you should ever need. If you somehow, deep down, believe this to be not true, I recommend you see your therapist again — but don’t take too long, you are needed back here for mindless mind slavery.

I’ll meet you back here when the next installment is out. “When is that,” you might ask, after which I point you to the RSS feed for this blag.

Flocker repository

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

I’ve sat up a repository to dump files in, using my newest creation: Flocker. This is essentially an online file locker, where I can place files and control who can see them. I’ll use this to dump files I want public, but also for files only a few people should have access to.

Flocker is created on top of CodeIgniter, mostly as a test of this framework. So far it looks good. I have not hit a wall with it yet, like I frequently did when I tested out Ruby on Rails.

Wind mill runs loose

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

A local wind mill broke today. Here’s a video. If viewed in slow-motion, you can see how it actually are the wings that breaks due to the high speed. The first wing breaks and flies away, leaving the remaining two wings unbalanced, which quickly makes one hit the beam of the wind mill. This happens with so much force, that the beam breaks, and the mill collapses completely.

This is what happens when you don’t regularly tests your wind mill brakes. The owner of the mill is rumored to have said, that the power generated while it ran at this ludicrous speed, covers the cost of a new mill.

Star Trek Marathon

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

I recently got the idea of finally watching all episodes of Star Trek. Not just the original series, but all episodes of all the series, spanning from the original series from the sixties, up to the latest one: Enterprise. Including the movies. But before boldly embarking on this mission, I have one simple question: How long would it take to watch all the episodes and movies of all the Star Trek series?

Wikipedia to the rescue!

Star Trek Runtime

Part Episodes Avg. runtime Total runtime
The Original Series 80 47 3760
The Next Generation 178 45 8010
Deep Space 9 176 43 7568
Voyager 172 45 7740
Enterprise 98 44 4312
Star Trek: The Motion Picture 1 136 136
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan 1 116 116
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock 1 105 105
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home 1 119 119
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier 1 107 107
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country 1 113 113
Star Trek Generations 1 118 118
Star Trek: First Contact 1 111 111
Star Trek: Insurrection 1 103 103
Star Trek Nemesis 1 116 116

That is 32534 minutes total! 22 days, 14 hours and 14 minutes nonstop Star Trek. Assuming an average life expectancy of 77.96 years, that would be 0.079% of one’s life spend watching Star Trek. Alternatively, a single episode or movie can be watched each day. Then it would take 714 days, or almost two entire years.

Maybe Star Wars is a better alternative? Just 6 movies. Those can be dealt with in a day or two. But I’ve already seen them, and it is Star Trek I would like to watch. Next question popping up is how to actually get to watch all this Star Trek. At the moment only TNG is being broadcasted on the channels I can watch here in Denmark, so I might have to purchase the DVDs.

A quick look around at the online stores to find some cheap prices for the boxsets gave this:

Star Trek DVD Prices

Part Seasons Price (DKK) Price (Euro) DVDs
The Original Series 3 1797 241 22
The Next Generation 7 1799 241 49
Deep Space 9 7 2093 281 48
Voyager 7 2093 281 45
Enterprise 4 2396 321 27
Star Trek: The Motion Picture 1 49 6 1
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan 1 49 6 1
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock 1 49 6 1
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home 1 49 6 1
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier 1 49 6 1
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country 1 49 6 1
Star Trek Generations 1 49 6 1
Star Trek: First Contact 1 49 6 1
Star Trek: Insurrection 1 49 6 1
Star Trek Nemesis 1 49 6 1

1425 €! That is a lot of money. But it buys approx. 200 DVDs of Star Trek, covering almost 23 days of footage, not including the extras. Double the time required if there are commentary tracks on each episode.

Next interesting thing would be to figure out, just how much shelf space is needed to store all these boxsets. I couldn’t find the dimensions of the cases online, so that will have to wait.

Other stuff on the web, part 1

Monday, February 18th, 2008

This blag isn’t the only thing on the web, even though you might think so. I know this magnificent blag is composed of several interweb tubes, but you should really take a look at some of the things online you’re overlooking. For your convenience, I’ll be collecting stuff that I find interesting, and presenting it here in bite sized, bulleted, insert-another-buzzword-here’d lists. After all, all stuff I find interesting is, by the power of my omnipotence, interesting to you as well.

  • Eyezmaze have published a new game, Dwarf Complete, which I suggest you check out. You should expect to spend 1-2 hours on this. Afterwards, check out the growth games on the same site.
  • 10 cursors adds a nice temporal angle to a simple game.
  • Spin the Black Circle. I love games that gives the entire manual in the title.

That’ll be it for this installment.

Crocs

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

Double-u, t, f? Why are people using these abominations of shoes? They are the ugliest things I have seen since… no, wait, they are in fact the ugliest things ever. I would like to apologize to the words “abomination” and “ugly”, for connecting them with Crocs. I actually thought I had torn out page 236 of all existing copies of the Necronomicon, until I saw a pair of Crocs sneaking down the street, worn by their newest mind slave. Tough I am omnipotent, I can not even begin to imagine what bowels of Hell, Crocs have been conjured from, or what diabolical scheme they are the masterminds behind.

I recommend you keep the following survival kit close by, so you are at least minimally prepared for the armageddon, which will be unleashed when the Crocs have gathered enough followers:

  • 1x flame thrower. The nemesis of the Crocs, this product can be used to carefully melt the Crocs off a mind slave.
  • 1x spaceship, fully fueled. Face it, once your flame thrower runs dry, you need to escape this planet. There is no way you can rid the Earth of Crocs once they have started the armageddon.

Good luck in the upcoming battle for freedom.