07.15.2008
One of the local alternative stations (no, not KROQ this time) has been playing 3 tracks from MGMT’s album Oracular Spectacular. MGMT is a New York based 2-pc. synthpop band that has some interesting hooks and an overall sound that reflects it’s overall synthetic existence but yet utilizes some deft hooks.
‘Time to Pretend’, ‘Electric Feel’, and ‘Kids’ are the tracks receiving the most local airplay but there are other gems on this album, specifically ‘Weekend Wars’ and ‘Pieces of What’. The album isn’t perfect by any means, but it is a very interesting album in that it combines an overall positive feeling via light and technically sophisticated melodies while maintaining a surprising (at times) lyrical edge
The best bet here is to take a listen somewhere and evaluate it. If it’s something you find interesting, go out and either download it via iTunes or buy the CD and support the artist.
07.02.2008
In my younger days, I was as avid a computer games player as anybody today. I concentrated on a few games to feed my obsession, games like Star Wars Galaxies, Planetside, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Anarchy Online.
And then there was Diablo I/II/LOD. The time I spent looking for miscellaneous Diablo loot by doing Baal and Mephisto runs far exceeded the total time I spent grinding my Jedi in Star Wars Galaxies, the time I spent getting to BR20/CR5 in Planetside, the time I spent playing RTCW to improve my gameplay, or any other effort I put forth on any other of the games I played in. Literally hundreds of hours over a several year period were spent playing the Diablo series of games. I grew older, my priorities shifted, and Blizzard started putting it’s push behind WoW so I figured Diablo had run it’s course and was done.
Well it turns out that Diablo is going to be back for a 3rd installment. After reviewing the PC Mag story and the 1up.com writeup, I’m left with some brief and probably premature impressions.
I like the following about what I read/saw:
Game Engine: The game engine looks strong. They’ve retained the isometric perspective (although tweeked a bit) and have done a seemingly great job with things like creature scaling, interactive environment, and textures (with one notable exception I explain below).
Performance: While I realize the gameplay shown was just a demo and likely tweeked/enhanced for sellability, the gameplay looked smooth and didn’t appear to be struggling. Hardware is only going to get better by the time this is released so there is at least some hope that the game will be playable by what will then be mid-line rigs.
Viewable Demo: So many times when a game is announced, there isn’t anything other than artist renderings of what the game will look like. The clip on 1up.com shows a full 20 minutes of gameplay through an entire section including one boss. I have to applaud Blizzard for getting that done before announcing the game to the public.
Having said all of that, I do have a couple of concerns:
Color Palette: One thing I didn’t really care for is the choice of color palette used in the demo. Diablo has always been a dark, dare I say gothically skinned game with lots of browns. The demo appeared very blue to my poor eyes, a bit too clean compared to previous Diablo efforts. I’m hoping that Blizzard keeps an eye on the online petitions circulating requesting a change in the overall color palette.
Vaporware: Blizzard seems to deliver what’s promised, I just hope they haven’t bitten off more than they can chew with this effort, WoW, and the upcoming Starcraft II release. Sony Online Entertainment suffered from too much product in the pipeline too quickly, I’d hate to see Blizzard have to make some bad choices.
Subscription Model: If Blizzard forces a monthly subscription on players, I suspect this game will fly like a lead balloon. I’m hoping that Blizzard decides to keep the game free to play online even if a larger amount of money is needed upfront in terms of sales price.
I’m going to keep an eye on this, if the game isn’t subscription-based and not too outrageous in terms of cost, I’ll buy it. While I’ll never play an online game the same way as before committments, there is room for distractions.
07.01.2008
Yep, I’m the new, recent owner of my very own appendectomy performed 6/18/2008. While the above picture appears brutal, I’m grateful to have had the procedure done in the age of laparoscope and small incision vs. the old days of large incisions (and scars).
My recommendation is this: if you experience right-side abdominal pain, loss of appetite, and a low-grade fever, listen to your significant other and seek out a doctor. As annoying and painful as an appendectomy is, the alternative isn’t nearly as pleasant. 
06.02.2008
I can’t stand CAPTCHAs. It’s not that they are unsightly, clumsy, or a resource hog (which are all true at times). The main reason I don’t like them is that they are really poor at serving their intended purpose: thwarting automated processes.
ZDNet does a great job at summarizing how ineffective the Microsoft CAPTCHA effort really is by recapping a recently published research paper entitled “A Low-cost Attack on a Microsoft CAPTCHA“. The ZDNet summary of the paper:
In this paper, we analyze the security of a text-based CAPTCHA designed by Microsoft and deployed for years at many of their online services including Hotmail, MSN and Windows Live. This scheme was designed to be segmentation-resistant, and it has been well studied and tuned by its designers over the years. However, our simple attack has achieved a segmentation success rate of higher than 90% against this scheme. It took ~80 ms for our attack to completely segment a challenge on a desktop computer with a 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 CPU and 2 GB RAM. As a result, we estimate that this Microsoft scheme can be broken with an overall (segmentation and then recognition) success rate of more than 60%. On the contrary, its design goal was that “automatic scripts should not be more successful than 1 in 10,000″ attempts (i.e. a success rate of 0.01%). For the first time, we show that a CAPTCHA that is carefully designed to be segmentation-resistant is vulnerable to novel but simple attacks. Our results show that it is not a trivial task to design a CAPTCHA scheme that is both usable and robust.
90% failure rate compared to an intended failure rate of .01%. That’s downright bleak and unfortunately representative of how easy captcha is to defeat even on other platforms.
While I am sure text-based CAPTCHAs are eventually on the way out, the battle for their replacement should be interesting.
05.29.2008
Anybody that runs a blog knows what a PITA comment spam can be. Even smaller blogs like mine routinely receive comment spam, its an unavoidable fact of blogging life. Any tool that can help combat the spam plague is a welcome addition in my book. But how should I feel about solutions that aren’t marketed as standards but as proprietary formats?
How I ultimately feel about Typepad AntSpam ultimately depends on whether Typepad allows non MT based products to access it via API or other method. Akismet has worked well so far, but I am always willing to look for alternate or additional methods of combating the plague known as comment spam. I hope that 6A considers opening up the standard to everyone if it’s successful. They well might given it would be a chance to provide a consistant anti-spam standard. Then again, they may not if they take any ques from Apple.
05.22.2008
Star Wars has always been a big thing for me. I saw all six films in the theater and can honestly say that I enjoyed most of them.
For true Star Wars geeks, The Secret History of Star Wars deserves at least a casual glance. It’s long but interesting reading. Several of the central ideas of this e-book are fascinating to me, namely:
1. Star Wars started as the telling of the tale of Luke Skywalker but ended up being about the life and times of Darth Vader.
2. George Lucas’ personal problems led to the abandonment of the originally proposed episodes XII-IX.
3. George Lucas’ propensity to rewrite history isn’t limited to his re-editing of his motion pictures.
I can’t vouch for the accuracy of either the facts or the conslusions of this work, but the author has made a large effort to properly annotate and credit his sources so I suspect there is at least some truth to it.
