Mindjunk

Youtube's new user profile page

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:47:00 +0000

Besides generally disliking the new youtube user profile page there is this annoying bug. If you go to the comments tab of a video you are watching it tells you that you need to sign in to comment on said video, even if you are signed in. You can work around this by clicking "See all comments and video responses" on the comments tab which brings you the video's youtube page at which point you can comment. It is very frustrating.

Example Of Bug

ActiVision(less)

brandon.megamanzero@gmail.com (DreamtReality) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:24:00 +0000

*Please be advised links may have language not suitable for children*
Everyone's heard the controversy over poor phrasing by the CEO of ActiVizzard and from a gamer in a gaming community, only those with a pulse and a mind that can actually think for themselves are troubled by it. In general a large majority just don't care because they love to gobble up "sequel" after "sequel" of the same dull and boring material. Call of Duty(Insert sequel title or number here) will probably keep on selling till a vast majority of mind-numbed (numb-minded?) FPSers finally crave something new and refreshing. Now don't get me wrong, I used to love CoD but now it's getting ridiculous, to inducing nausea and random spurts of rage . ActiVizzard's versions of a once enjoyable game is nothing compared to Infinity Ward's contributions to the series and yet this company OWNS them. Not to mention you have a merger of these two companies and one is dominating PC gaming (sadly) with an easily playable, cookie cutter, monotonous, and vastly populated MMORPG and yes you can hate on me for that you fanboy/girl(s). Then you have a console dominating force "exploiting" games with sequel and the ability to cover all consoles. Then you have the similar theme of reguratating themes whereas Blizzard's side typically adds something to their games and "polishes" them. In fact I enjoy Blizzard's sequels very much, they add beneficial design elements that make the game better than the previous.

So why the heavily opinionated ramble of hatred aimed at this company?

It's simple, I don't want to see Call of Duty 12, Diablo 7, Starcraft: Beyond, etc. I don't want the same game rehashed and retextured or insignificant changes. While it has been stated that Blizzard Entertainment will continue to function as normal I am fearful that they will overdo it. Even though it is still early even a year and change after the merge. Companies are a winding and turmolous system of nonsense and nonstop murder and mayhem. Sure there are no human casualties but there are plenty of company and game casualties. Hellgate London headed by a former group of Blizzard Entertainment should have been a smash. Finances took it's toll and the company went under, death by bankruptcy. Hellgate London was extremely under advertised, it was underdeveloped due to financial restraints but the game was fun, new, fresh, creative, and dare I say it...not a sequel, heaven forbid. Ghostbusters, Brutal Legend, 50 Cent game, and the Riddick game (not that I care about the last two) were scraped off the boot of ActiVizzard because they didn't "have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million dollar franchises." Even though Ghostbusters would've netted them a huge quick slam of cash as well as Wet an action game in a Kill Bill style artistic feel. Oh well, we'll learn soon.

As a (hopefully) future game designer I would just hope that there is a small iota of people out there that will enjoy the games I hope to make as an excuse to be creative, not to make a dollar. Although a dollar would be nice just having them widely distributed or enjoyed or sold or whatever comes would make myself feel better.

/rant

R.I.P. Games created for the sole purpose of entertainment and not making a buck.
R.I.P. Flagship Studios
R.I.P. Sierra
R.I.P. New and refreshing games that aren't exploited, I mean molested, I mean stomped into the ground.

/mourn

Dreamer, out.

Leaving VPSLink Moving to Blogger and DropBox

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:50:00 +0000

Its been quite the bumpy ride moving from my own virtual private server to a 100% blogger hosted blog. Blogger's custom domain support is flaky at best with recommendations across the web to fix issues with it by turning it on and off over and over again. I've also moved all of my files from the files subdomain on vpslink to the free 2G I get at DropBox. So far I have had nothing but positive experiences with it.

The down side of moving off my own server is that all of the google search result listings for my old blog now error out. I also had alot of problems migrating my wordpress export file into Blogger. Each service has their own export/import file format. There are web based tools like Wordpress2Blogger that will convert a wordpress export to a blogger import file but I have had mixed results with doing this.

Now that Google is providing Java support through Google App Engine, I have little reason to continue to pay 40$/month for my own server. I look forward to playing with GAE later this year.

No LAN play for Starcraft 2

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:51:00 +0000

A few days ago blizzard announced that Starcraft 2 would not have LAN based multiplayer because such a feature would increase piracy. Many Starcraft fans are very upset about this news and I would like to attempt to explain why.

There a couple styles to multiplayer gaming.

Xbox Live/Halo - This style is much older than Halo but Halo is a perfect example of this. Each gamer in his or her own home on her own network connection signs onto the service. Friends find each other through the service and can game together perfectly fine. Up to 16 friends can play together (big team slayer) on Halo.

Starcraft/LAN Party - Instead of the different players playing from their own couch/desk, everyone comes together to one location be it a persons house or a larger venue.

What does battlenet2.0 mean for lan parties?

If the lan party has a internet connection everyone would connect to battle.net and join a private game. Depending on how the networking software was written each player could communicate with the game server and the server coordinated all communication between players. This is how games like World Of Warcraft work.

OR the game could designate a "Host" and all game communciation would remain within the hosts network. This way traffic wouldnt have to leave the network then come back in. This is how games like Team Fortress 2 work (for xbox360).

The second option would be better for the LAN style play because even a sufficiently large internet pipe would be stressed handling 20+ gamers communicating with battle.net servers. But the second option may not happen. Blizzard may decide allowing host to peer traffic is too hard to prevent cheating and statistics rigging.

All of this rests on the assumption that the LAN party has the internet.

Many big LAN parties are not in someones home, and it can be very difficult to get internet in whatever venue they choose to host the party in. In this scenario they cannot play Starcraft 2 at all. Even with the host to peer traffic because it requires connection to battle.net to create the game.

Why do old Starcraft fans care about LAN play so much?

Many of fans of the original Starcraft found out about the game through these LAN parties. Starcraft become something of a social phenomena where friends would get together to play a few games. For these players who broke their Starcraft teeth playing in friends basements, this decision is the most upsetting. Because Battle.net 2.0 encourages players to play at home, on their own internet connection communicating with their friends by microphone.

Has google talk been abandoned?

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:19:00 +0000

Today Customize Talk announced that it would be shutting its doors due to lack of updates to Google's instant messaging client Google Talk.

On August 24th 2005 Google Talk was launched. It has now been three coming up on four years since the official release and we still only have a windows client. In November 26th 2007 two years later group chat was finally added. Not much else has been added since then. There have been updates to the web based google talk clients, but none to the desktop application.

One has to ask, has the google talk desktop client been abandoned? Or have developers been pulled from it to focus on other products?

Lonely Island - Im On A Boat (Acoustic!)

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:48:00 +0000

By far the best song on Lonely Islands new release Incredibad is Im On A Boat. The only thing I love more than yelling and cussing about being on a boat, is a complete acoustic reenvisioning. Enjoy:

Here is the original if you have not seen it yet:

Court room puts evidence online

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:18:00 +0000

A Florida woman accused of killing her toddler daughter made a rare court appearance Thursday for a hearing regarding "disturbing" images of the scene where her daughter's skeletal remains were found.

Reads the CNN news article on the Casey Anthony trial. The issue at hand is the defense wishes to send photo's to experts outside the state of Florida. There is a concern that said experts could leak these disturbing photo's to the media. As a software developer the solution they came up with baffles my mind.

The parties agreed that the defense would set up a secure Web site for its experts to evaluate the photographs.

Instead of hand delivering copies of these photos to experts that have signed confidentiality agreements, they are going to be setting up a 'secure' website that contains all of these photos. They then have to communicate to the experts in some fashion how to login to said website. If the prosecutors were concerned about leaking with a sneaker net, why is no one throwing a red flag about putting this stuff up on publically accessible webserver?

The Used - Bird and the Worm

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:48:00 +0000

She asked what songs we would like covered. I requested The Used - Bird and the Worm. And she covered it!

Yahoo and MSN hate me

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 00:43:00 +0000

Google analytics is a great tool. It helps me track where my visitors are coming from. The vast majority of my traffic comes from search engines picking up my old posts. But not all search engines send me traffic. Really its just one, Google. So far in the month of December google drove in a whopping 94% of search engine traffic. I submit sitemaps to all three search engines and yet only google ranks me high enough to be noticed. Frustrating.

Doctor Office

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 15:26:00 +0000

I have been on psychiatric medicine since fifth grade. This was quite a long time ago as I am currently 23. Various forms of ritalin have been pumped into into my body through little pills or capsules. As I grew older I became more anxious and depressed and was eventually put on anti deppresants.

These two pills are my morning breakfast, a chemical smoothie for daily mental health. If I don't take them I know by lunch as I begin to experience withdrawls. It serves as a reminder that have swam too far from their chemically protected shores.

Today this all ends. I wait in this doctors office to tell my doctor, I am done, I want to go off my medicine. It won't be easy I will have to ween off them to help my body cope to their nonexistance. It's been a long road but I am ready to move on.

Ipod Touch

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:26:00 +0000

My newest toy has been the iPod touch. You may ask, why not just get a iPhone? I've had smart phones before and they just do not work for me. I am very bad about charging devices and a phone is a very important device. I prefer to have a phone that can stay alive for long periods of time on a single charge.

As a PDA the iPod is wonderful. Except for the ocasional safari crash, the applications are all wonderful. One thing that has was hard to get used to was the idea of paying for applications. I've lived in an open source world for a very long time and had forgotten the windows days of paying for even simple utilies. Now that I have just accepted this as reality (still no jailbreak for ipod 2g) I realize how good the iPod development platform is for potential developers.

Apple has made the purchasing and installing of applications as evilly simple as purchasing a song on iTunes. Open the app store app on the iPod find a neat app tap the install button twice and voilà your credit card is charged and an application is wirelessly downloaded to your device. I say evilly because this is the enemy of the impulse buyer but the wet dream of both publishers (apple) and developers. This takes away all of the nasties of paying for pc applications online. Couple all this with the fact that apple takes a very small margin from sales and it makes writing applications for the iPod a very lucrative oppertunity.

The only sad part to this whole story is apple only offers it's iPod sdk for apple computers. Hopefully they will port the sdk to other platforms so I too can become an iPod developer.

This was written on the free wordpress app on the iPod. I love technology!

Animal Crossing City Folk is an epic disappointment

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:59:00 +0000

I loved Animal Crossing for Gamecube. So naturally, I was looking forward to Animal Crossing: City Folk for the Wii. I got it over thanksgiving break and well...... its not worth the money I spent.

We can all agree that graphics are not everything, yes? So if a game is not going to improve its graphics with its next release how does it draw in potential buyers? Content and features. Well Nintendo has failed in that department as well. The game is EXACTLY the same as the version for the Nintendo DS. It even has some of the same bugs! Its so much the same game that when starting a new game it even asks you if you want to import your town from your DS.

When I go to KK Slider to get the weekly song the credits begin to roll down the screen and I feel depressed and confused. There is a very long list of people who worked on this game, what they have been doing these last couple years is beyond me. Oh and for a final kick in the groin, Nintendo decided to put a copy lock on the save game file. All that time I spent playing this game over thanksgiving break on my little brothers Wii (because obviously I was with family), gone. It refused to copy to my SD card.

The major push for this release was the city. The city is terrible. Five whole buildings. One auction house, which is empty. One theater which is stupid. One furniture and clothing shop that does not change items very often, if at all, and has prices in the 100,000 bells range. One hair salon which lets you change your hair style (for 3000 bells, and only once a day), but does not actually let you pick your haircut. The game asks you a series of questions like what kind of look are you going for, mysterious, radiant, etc etc. and poof you get a haircut. Its alot like playing Russian roulette. One fortune teller that does not seem to really do anything and a guy that will change your shoe color for 500 bells, again you dont actually get to pick your shoe color, you answer a random question and the game guesses at what shoe color you really wanted.

Another new feature is the Wii Speak (in game voice communication), I would love to review it but unlike the various other dongles and gadgets for Wii games, this one did not come with the game. It is sold separately for an extra 30$. The friend codes are back again. I, and many others, have complained so much about these that there really isn't anything new I can add to the chorus. As stated in a previous blog post, Nintendo PR seems to think we like the friend codes and how each games has a entirely new code to trade with your friends. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Thank you Nintendo for protecting me from myself.

Save your money and don't buy this game.

New Xbox Experience

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:41:00 +0000

Microsofts servers are being hit pretty hard but I managed to get the image of my avatar off (after many refreshes.) If you have already updated your xbox and created an avatar you can find pictures of your avatar at the following urls:

avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/(gamertag)/avatar-body.png

avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/(gamertag)/avatar-l.png

avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/(gamertag)/avatar-s.png

Or just click the following url: Let me see my avatar!
You may error out when clicking that link, just keep trying!

New Music

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 18:30:00 +0000

Sam Sparro - Black and Gold

Linkin Park - Given Up

Xbox Community

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:49:00 +0000

I emailed Major Nelson and got a email back. Color me stuned. :)

Nintendo, you fail me. No, you fail us all.

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:52:00 +0000

The game company I once loved has forsaken its core fan base to embrace themasses. It has forgotten those that still bought and encouraged others to buyits console and games even while Sony and Microsoft were gobbling up largechunks of market share. We stayed because we knew that one day Nintendo wouldreclaim its crown as King of the gaming industry. Nintendo has reclaimed thatcrown but things are not as we, the Nintendo fans of yore, had hoped.

Spinning back to the Summer of 2006. Nintendo crushes the competition at E3 withtheir new motion sensing controller. Videos quickly spread across the Internetof gamers waiting in long lines just to get a chance to try it. The fan basebecomes reignited with hope and excitement and in turn begins to beat the louddrums of fandom, generating massive hype around the Wii.

When we found out the hardware specifications of the Wii would pale incomparison to that of the Xbox360 and the PS3, we said that graphics alone donot make a game good. We reminded people of the joy they had while playing the2D games of the 1990s.

When we found out that the Wii could not output a HD video signal, we parrotedthe company line that only 10% of households had HD compatible televisions.

When we found out Nintendo would not allow us to easily communicate and gamewith our online friends, requiring instead that we exchange 16 digit numberswith each one of our friends to send them messages, we reminded everyone thatNintendo cares deeply about the safety of children.

When we found out that the "Wii Numbers" we had previously exchanged with ourfriends would not even allow us to play online games with them, and that eachonline game would have its own 12+ digit number that will have to be exchangedwith friends, we again reminded everyone that Nintendo cares deeply about thesafety of children.

When we found out that titles offering online play would not allow communicationwith other players whether it be text or voice, we again reminded everyone thatNintendo cares deeply about the safety of children.

When we found out that the online play in Super Smash Brothers Brawl was barelyusable due to bugs and lag, we reminded everyone how popular Nintendo was andthat the servers are probably under heavy load.

When we found out the Wii only had 512mb of internal memory in comparison to20gb+ on the other consoles we reminded everyone that there was an SD expansionslot that would allow us to increase the available memory for downloaded gamesand save files.

When we found out that the wii does not support SDHC cards (allowing for sdcards above 4gb), we reminded everyone that they can purchase multiple sd cards.

When we found out that save files and downloaded games could only be read fromthe 512mb internal memory making SD cards useless for this purpose, we remindedeveryone that they could still view photos from their SD cards.

When we found out that while the Wii could read DVD games, it could not play DVDmovies, we reminded everyone that they probably already had a DVD player andthus did not need DVD playback on the Wii.

When hordes of terrible games started to appear for the Wii, we remindedeveryone that every game console has bad games and that Nintendo at least wasstill producing quality games.

When we watched Nintendo's E3 2008 showcase, that involved games without score,without a concept of winning, without even a goal to accomplish. ShigeruMiyamoto proclaiming that children's toys are more interesting than video games.A middle aged woman talking about and showing photos from her skii vacation. Andthe utter shock and eerie quiet emitting from every core gamer, every Nintendofan in the room. What do we say? What can we say? We can remind people that E3really isn't a big deal, like it used to be. We can say that while no games wereshown that the core audience would be interested in, they did announce a newpikman.... We can say.....We can say......... I can't do this anymore. I'm donewith Nintendo. I'm done

Nintendo has pushed a Linux using, open source loving, Nintendo fan boy to buy a Microsoft console. And while I grip that elite edition, black, wireless,controller in my hands and play Halo 3 over Xbox Live with my little brother, acoworker and his friend I smile because I am remembering what its like to play on agame console that's made by people who care about its users.

Nothing to see here, move along.

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:46:00 +0000

So, the creator of the svg benchmark left some constructive criticism on my last post. He made some very good point so I decided to go out and download all these browsers and run the benchmarks on the same machine. Because you can't really compare stats from different hardware. The updated results are below.

Browser	CPS	MPS
Opera 9.21	719	1828
Opera 9.51	1883	3205
Firefox 2.0.0.15	914	1456
Firefox 3.0	N/A	N/A
Safari 3.1.2	2370	7092

Opera 9.51 is FAST

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:17:00 +0000

Post publish notes:

The important thing you should take away from this post is Mozilla has no plans to include Glitz.

The stats in this post has been proven useless. Better benchmark results.

All hail Opera 9.51 our new browser overlords! I ran the latest version of Opera through a SVG benchmark and was just about floored. The two things that it measures is shape creations per second and shape moves per second.

To give you a comparison here are the average results the author got for the various browsers:

Browser	CPS	MPS
Opera 9.21	180	530
Firefox 2.0.0.6	370	1700
Safari 3.0.2 beta	850	2800
Opera 9.51	2218	3353

The joys of hardware accelerated graphics. [It looks like Opera 9.51 isn't using hardware acceleration. It is something they are working on for a future release] With the release of Firefox 3.0, firefox now has the capabilities to use hardware acceleration for their SVG rendering. Please don't read that sentence wrong, as there seems to be some confusion in the community about this. The libary firefox uses to render SVG called Cairo supports hardware acceleration when coupled a backend called Glitz. But Firefox 3.0 is NOT coupled with glitz and thus has no hardware acceleration. There is an option to enable the glitz backend for cairo during the compilation of Firerfox 3.0. Don't try to build it though because as a bugzilla entry reveals it errors out. No one in the blogosphre has noticed comment #9 from Vladimir Vukicevic who states

Chances are this will become WONTFIX -- glitz won't be the way forward for us
for OpenGL/accelerated support, and what little bits of code are in there right
now don't work very well (with or without build patches).

So, the mozilla team has no plans on incorporating Glitz in the future. Does an alternative to Gltiz even exist? Does mozilla plan to write their own backend? These are currently open questions but don't hold your breath to Firefox performing as well as Opera until they make up their minds.

Update:
While Opera is shining with its SVG rendering times, Firefox 3.0 out preforms Opera on every SunSpider JavaScript benchmark minus one. The battle continues!

TEST COMPARISON FROM TO DETAILS

=============================================================================

** TOTAL **: *1.78x as slow* 3158.8ms +/- 0.6% 5631.2ms +/- 1.6% significant

=============================================================================

3d: *1.56x as slow* 362.6ms +/- 1.9% 565.4ms +/- 5.7% significant
cube: *1.55x as slow* 133.2ms +/- 1.7% 206.2ms +/- 20.6% significant
morph: *1.82x as slow* 108.4ms +/- 0.6% 196.8ms +/- 8.9% significant
raytrace: *1.34x as slow* 121.0ms +/- 3.7% 162.4ms +/- 6.4% significant

access: *1.43x as slow* 518.0ms +/- 1.1% 741.0ms +/- 3.5% significant
binary-trees: - 47.6ms +/- 6.6% 44.0ms +/- 37.2%
fannkuch: *1.40x as slow* 268.2ms +/- 0.2% 375.2ms +/- 5.2% significant
nbody: *1.44x as slow* 130.0ms +/- 3.2% 187.6ms +/- 0.4% significant
nsieve: *1.86x as slow* 72.2ms +/- 1.9% 134.2ms +/- 7.8% significant

bitops: *1.71x as slow* 365.0ms +/- 0.9% 625.0ms +/- 3.2% significant
3bit-bits-in-byte: 1.15x as fast 71.8ms +/- 1.4% 62.4ms +/- 1.1% significant
bits-in-byte: *1.32x as slow* 102.0ms +/- 0.0% 134.2ms +/- 7.8% significant
bitwise-and: *3.44x as slow* 82.6ms +/- 3.1% 284.4ms +/- 3.1% significant
nsieve-bits: *1.33x as slow* 108.6ms +/- 1.0% 144.0ms +/- 6.3% significant

controlflow: *1.41x as slow* 44.4ms +/- 4.2% 62.4ms +/- 1.1% significant
recursive: *1.41x as slow* 44.4ms +/- 4.2% 62.4ms +/- 1.1% significant

crypto: *1.38x as slow* 212.8ms +/- 1.0% 293.4ms +/- 6.9% significant
aes: *1.96x as slow* 79.8ms +/- 1.3% 156.2ms +/- 8.7% significant
md5: *1.08x as slow* 63.8ms +/- 0.9% 68.6ms +/- 15.6% significant
sha1: - 69.2ms +/- 2.0% 68.6ms +/- 15.6%

date: *3.33x as slow* 284.6ms +/- 1.4% 947.0ms +/- 1.1% significant
format-tofte: *1.66x as slow* 182.6ms +/- 1.3% 303.4ms +/- 3.6% significant
format-xparb: *6.31x as slow* 102.0ms +/- 1.9% 643.6ms +/- 1.3% significant

math: *1.20x as slow* 356.8ms +/- 2.2% 428.0ms +/- 4.4% significant
cordic: *1.21x as slow* 165.4ms +/- 2.2% 200.0ms +/- 8.4% significant
partial-sums: *1.25x as slow* 120.0ms +/- 6.0% 149.8ms +/- 7.4% significant
spectral-norm: *1.10x as slow* 71.4ms +/- 1.0% 78.2ms +/- 0.7% significant

regexp: *2.17x as slow* 234.8ms +/- 2.7% 509.4ms +/- 4.4% significant
dna: *2.17x as slow* 234.8ms +/- 2.7% 509.4ms +/- 4.4% significant

string: *1.87x as slow* 779.8ms +/- 2.2% 1459.6ms +/- 2.4% significant
base64: *1.76x as slow* 90.6ms +/- 1.8% 159.6ms +/- 10.1% significant
fasta: *1.63x as slow* 178.8ms +/- 2.9% 290.6ms +/- 3.7% significant
tagcloud: *2.16x as slow* 137.2ms +/- 3.4% 296.8ms +/- 4.7% significant
unpack-code: *2.05x as slow* 268.2ms +/- 2.8% 549.8ms +/- 4.6% significant
validate-input: *1.55x as slow* 105.0ms +/- 2.5% 162.8ms +/- 6.4% significant

Opera 9.51 benchmark url:

http://webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider-results.html?%7B%223d-cube%22:%5B188,266,187,187,203%5D,%223d-morph%22:%5B219,187,187,203,188%5D,%223d-raytrace%22:%5B156,156,171,157,172%5D,%22access-binary-trees%22:%5B32,47,31,63,47%5D,%22access-fannkuch%22:%5B359,375,391,391,360%5D,%22access-nbody%22:%5B187,187,188,188,188%5D,%22access-nsieve%22:%5B141,140,140,125,125%5D,%22bitops-3bit-bits-in-byte%22:%5B63,62,62,63,62%5D,%22bitops-bits-in-byte%22:%5B140,125,140,141,125%5D,%22bitops-bitwise-and%22:%5B282,281,297,281,281%5D,%22bitops-nsieve-bits%22:%5B141,140,141,157,141%5D,%22controlflow-recursive%22:%5B62,62,62,63,63%5D,%22crypto-aes%22:%5B141,172,156,156,156%5D,%22crypto-md5%22:%5B63,62,62,78,78%5D,%22crypto-sha1%22:%5B63,62,78,78,62%5D,%22date-format-tofte%22:%5B313,297,313,297,297%5D,%22date-format-xparb%22:%5B640,656,640,641,641%5D,%22math-cordic%22:%5B187,219,187,203,204%5D,%22math-partial-sums%22:%5B156,157,156,140,140%5D,%22math-spectral-norm%22:%5B78,79,78,78,78%5D,%22regexp-dna%22:%5B516,531,516,500,484%5D,%22string-base64%22:%5B141,156,157,172,172%5D,%22string-fasta%22:%5B297,297,281,297,281%5D,%22string-tagcloud%22:%5B281,297,296,297,313%5D,%22string-unpack-code%22:%5B531,531,562,578,547%5D,%22string-validate-input%22:%5B172,172,157,156,157%5D%7D

Firefox 3.0 benchmark url:

http://webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider-results.html?%7B%223d-cube%22:%5B131,133,132,135,135%5D,%223d-morph%22:%5B108,108,108,109,109%5D,%223d-raytrace%22:%5B121,120,116,126,122%5D,%22access-binary-trees%22:%5B47,46,52,46,47%5D,%22access-fannkuch%22:%5B269,268,268,268,268%5D,%22access-nbody%22:%5B131,127,130,135,127%5D,%22access-nsieve%22:%5B71,72,72,74,72%5D,%22bitops-3bit-bits-in-byte%22:%5B71,72,73,72,71%5D,%22bitops-bits-in-byte%22:%5B102,102,102,102,102%5D,%22bitops-bitwise-and%22:%5B83,82,81,86,81%5D,%22bitops-nsieve-bits%22:%5B108,108,110,109,108%5D,%22controlflow-recursive%22:%5B44,47,43,44,44%5D,%22crypto-aes%22:%5B80,79,81,79,80%5D,%22crypto-md5%22:%5B64,63,64,64,64%5D,%22crypto-sha1%22:%5B69,69,69,68,71%5D,%22date-format-tofte%22:%5B181,184,184,180,184%5D,%22date-format-xparb%22:%5B102,104,103,100,101%5D,%22math-cordic%22:%5B162,170,164,165,166%5D,%22math-partial-sums%22:%5B128,124,117,117,114%5D,%22math-spectral-norm%22:%5B72,71,72,71,71%5D,%22regexp-dna%22:%5B243,236,233,231,231%5D,%22string-base64%22:%5B90,92,92,89,90%5D,%22string-fasta%22:%5B174,184,175,181,180%5D,%22string-tagcloud%22:%5B135,142,136,133,140%5D,%22string-unpack-code%22:%5B259,276,268,270,268%5D,%22string-validate-input%22:%5B105,108,105,105,102%5D%7D

Blog Changes

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:08:00 +0000

You may have noticed things look a little bit different. Mindjunk has upgraded from wordpress 2.3.1 to 2.5.1. We have switched to a new theme and reduced the amount of widgets. The end result being a much cleaner and simpler site.

Things may be chaotic for awhile as I play with all the new features.

Diablo III - Five classes!?

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 12:05:00 +0000

Blizzard has finally announced Diablo III. In doing so they have revealed two of the classes coming with the game. The Barbarian and The Witchdoctor. Unfortunately, the FAQ reveals that the game will only ship with 5 classes total. Since we already know of two of them that means that there are three left. I am very disappointed with this. The current state of affairs is that in a Diablo II:LOD world we have seven classes to chose from. Amazon, Barbarian, Sorceress, Necromancer, Paladin, Druid, Assassin. This means a good chunk of the classes we have come to love will be gone in this new game.

The gameplay looks legendary incorporating destructible environment, massive hordes of monsters and a constant stream of story events. I just hope blizzard changes their mind and doesn't remove so many of the classes. Any bets on which ones are going to get the axe?

Quick overview of the known changes:

Back down to five classes

New class: Witchdoctor

Class specific quests

Destructible environments

Random scripted events

Gender

Potion bar is replaced with a wow-esque ability bar

Mobs drop health orbs that heal instantly upon pickup

I will add features as I find them.

Javascript Malloc and Free

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 11:20:00 +0000

There is no byte sized objects in Javascript. Numbers are 64bit floats and characters are 16bit unicode characters. I have been working on a way to give c developers in a javascript world fine grained control over memory usage. Right now I have two seperate implementations of my memory store. One is based on a massive string and is very efficient in size and reading bytes but it alittle slow at setting bytes. The other is based on a array of numbers. This one is not as efficient but much faster for reading and writing memory. Benchmarks show the array based store can allocate a megabyte worth of memory and set each byte to a value in about six seconds.

Here is a example class that is backed by the memory store:

JMM.ASCIIString = Class.extend({
    construct : function (mmu,value){
      this.mem = mmu.malloc(value.length);
      for(n=0;n<value .length;n++)
	  {
	     this.mem.setValue(n,value.charCodeAt(n));
	  }
	},
	toString : function(){
	   str="";
	   for(n=0;n<this.mem.size;n++)
	   {
	       str += String.fromCharCode(this.mem.getValue(n));
	   }
	   return str;	
	}
});

Centerfleet and Wormhole are dead. 2000 - 2002

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:53:00 +0000

There seems to be a good amount of interest and confusion on what actually happened to Wormhole. Here was the last news message posted by centerfleet prior to the site being shutdown.

2002.12.2 We regret to inform you that the Centerfleet website and Wormhole: New Ground is officially closing down. Centerfleet will no longer be taking subscriptions and will not process any checks or cash that we receive.

The website and the service will continue until December 31st 2002 11:59pm Pacific Standard time.

If you have any outstanding months after the service discontinues, we will refund you via check. All unprocessed orders will also be refunded via check. Paypal subscriptions will also be deactivated. Sorry for the inconvenience.

You can still see the old site up on the Internet Archive.

Wormhole Top 50 as of Dec 09, 2002

1 elohmrow 12617
2 Starlight_Disturbed 8365
3 stevensalibi 8045
4 KhMeR_SS3GoHaN 8005
5 SkullGuy 7728
6 Legendary_Phoenix 7702
7 Mystakil_Unreal 7640
8 Cheat_For_Rank 7568
9 Kabol 7568
10 eLite_S/\/1P3R 7011
11 Unreal_DraGon 7005
12 The_Whopper 6909
13 Omega_Maverick 6765
14 SkullKing 6750
15 Intheeyesoftruth 6666
16 pikachu_atrocity 6483
17 Orion_Kryptonic_ 6295
18 KillaThunder 6268
19 orion_racer 6103
20 Mr.Right 6099
21 ala 6048
22 KAYANON 6021
23 Airfeet 6003
24 lostitall5 5951
25 Unknown_Pride 5945
26 iLu\/jEsS!C4 5889
27 skullface 5808
28 SkullWeapon 5800
29 KhMeRaCeR 5715
30 PerfectPlayer 5708
31 Neo_X_Goku 5700
32 Skullmaker 5695
33 moneyman99 5654
34 BovineHeiferCow 5646
35 Suck_master 5645
36 wasiiiiii 5558
37 Cynic 5545
38 Dark_Death2002 5363
39 OLsKooL_PLaYa 5322
40 ]{iller_Maverick 5314
41 big_giant_head 5307
42 NuH_Weapon 5257
43 SkullWarrior 5252
44 The_Invincible_Man 5246
45 sharktyger 5243
46 Wild_Phoenix 5241
47 destroyer9 5231
48 de17mag 5230
49 Majin_SS3Gohan 5230
50 elevend2 5221

I hate trading in games

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:35:00 +0000

Trading games to a game store always feels like I am being cheated. You can bring in a almost mint copy of halo 3 and be offered 15$. You could sell the same game on ebay and make twice that. But ebay has its own hassles. A friend of mine recently told me that he has launched a new site that hopes to help you turn your used games into cash while avoiding the hassles of selling to people who live across the globe. Electronic Game List launched on June 8th and is craigslist but no spammers, and a focus on trading console games. I really hope his site takes off because I think its a great idea.

Python Development

noreply@blogger.com (TrashHalo) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:21:00 +0000

Python is great because all of the expectations on how a object should behave get stripped from the actual code and get moved to unit tests, documentation and unspoken assumptions.

Super Smash Bros Brawl: New Characters

Character: Olimar

The verdict is still out on this one.