‘Twas the night before Christmas
And all through the sphere
Not a blogger was whining
Like headlights with no deer
The Beta Boys had spread
Each to his own state
Where many gifts and gadgets
Were his to await
Would it be an unlocked G1
Or Kindle from on high
We dreamt of DS Lights
So tiny and nigh
But behold,
Though the Beta Base is empty tonight
All of us gone
On our cold winter flights
We can always come back
To post something here:
A link to a video
To spread some good cheer
So where have we been
This whole merry year
To start Zach reads too much
And Sean’s drowning in beer
I got to meet some lovely ladies
One of whom1 let slip
Tales of LucasArts’ layoffs
With no good titles left to ship
Brian’s taken up drumming
To help with the band
(You should buy an mp3 or two
To lend us a hand)
Nate’s gone through boys
In both series and parallel
While Matt’s still open sourcing
Projects he loves so well
We even celebrated Hanukkah
With no care for thrift
While eating hearty pizza
Over cocoa and gifts
So tonight across the city
From Bay to Breakers and all the rest
From the heart of the Mission
We give you each our very best
But what is the one thing
For which I still wish?
Just access to MOMA2
So I can be stalkerish
- 1. Of course she never called me back. Hussy.
- 2. Google’s. Not SF’s.
Garfield the cat doesn’t actually speak, so what would Garfield the comic look like if he just wasn’t there? Apparently it would look like Jon is a mental patient.
betabites
Techcrunch mentioned last week that Google’s Toolbar was going to start redirecting 404 pages to show a Google search box. Well, it looks like this “feature” shipped with a few bugs. Unfortunately, the redirection happens if a page fails OR if any of the iframes in the page fail to load. So pretend you are running ads from a server hosted at Rackspace and another truck crashes into their datacenter. If any of those ads are loaded through an iframe and return a 404, Toolbar will helpfully take over your entire page. Super fun! Even better, if you have the Dell branded IE, you get the horrible ad covered page seen below:
If you want to try this out yourself, here’s the HTML I used to get the screenshot above. Just toss in in a file and load it up on a browser with the toolbar:
<html> <head> <title>This is a test</title> </head> <body> This is a test of Google Toolbar's new 404 replacement "feature". <iframe src="http://asdfkljdfjkas.com"> In here is some stuff no one cares about. </iframe> Observe as Google's Toolbar "helpfully" redirects the enclosing page to a search page. </body> </html>google, programming, rant, web
A very cool new scooter design from the MIT Media Lab Smart Cities Group.
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The fine folks over at Adroll (including our own Brendan Doms) just launched into private beta today. Adroll is a really interesting concept for buying and selling advertising. I got a chance to play with it a few weeks ago while it was still in alpha and I was very impressed. Basically the site takes a page from social networks and blogrolls and aims to improve the online advertising experience for everyone from advertisers to publishers to consumers.
The Holy Grail of online advertising is a perfect targeting system. Advertisers and publishers want to know that their ads are being put in front of people who care (re: people who will click through and buy things) and consumers don’t want to be bothered about things they’re not interested in. Google does this pretty well using their text based relevancy scoring and a small amount of data about the consumer (IP address, language, etc). They call it AdWords and it’s made them a ton of money (AdSense is the publisher facing half).
The problem is that online there’s a trade off between specificity and readership. A website that talks about, say, Northern California Surfing is the perfect place to advertise if you want to reach surfers. But a site like that isn’t large enough to set up and negotiate advertising deals with major surf gear makers. If only there were a bunch of other surfing sites that they could band together with to form a much larger and more attractive virtual publisher. Well, that’s exactly what Adroll lets you do. Similar sites can join together into highly targeted Ad Communities and use their combined readership to attract advertisers that might have ignored them before. There are also Tagrolls, which are similar to Ad Communities, but based on the publisher provided tags, giving an alternative way to target ads. Check out an example of an Ad Community below.
In order to make trying out their service basically risk-free, you can actually use your existing ad platform in concert with the Adroll service. Simply paste in the javascript you use to serve AdSense or Yahoo or whatever ads, set a reserve price for the ad space on your site, and if they can’t match it, they’ll just display your backup ads transparently. Cool, huh?
The idea behind Adroll is pretty neat, but it’s the execution that really sold me on the product. The site design is really clean and simple, navigation is easy, and a lot of effort clearly went into the interaction design. Check out this dynamic summary text when you go to buy an ad:
Very clear and concise, right? Include the fact that Adroll discloses the cut they take for each billing cycle, and there’s a lot of transparency in the whole system for both the buyers and sellers, which in my experience is sorely lacking in the advertising world.
I’ve only described the biggest features of the site, there’s a ton more I haven’t even touched on. Here’s a quick list of some other things I really liked about it:
- Publishers and advertisers also both get an excellent reporting system that makes it really easy to see
- Referral program for inviting in both Publishers and Advertisers
- Tag based searching for advertisers and publishers
- Publishers can find advertisers they think are good matches and offer a free trial
Basically, if you’re an advertiser looking for a better way to target your ads, or a publisher looking for a way to sell your ad space, I’d definitely recommend checking out Adroll.
Disclosure: I’m good friends with their lead developer and they promised me cookies if I wrote up my impressions. However as I’m hungry right now and the cookies aren’t here yet, I think it probably balances out.
Update: TechCrunch finally has a piece up about Adroll too.
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betabitesThe ROFLCon preliminary guest list is up. They’re trying to get every famous internet meme or celebrity to go to Harvard in April for a conference. Must attend!
betabitesIn case you actually decided to try Dwarf Fortress: The best how-to guide ever on how to play.
No TagsJust in time for another huge wave of FPS’s this month (Call of Duty 4, Crysis, Soldier of Fortune, and Unreal Tournament 3) I’ve got some brief thoughts on the single-player experience of the games from earlier this fall. That means I’ll leave the Team Fortress 2 discussion for another day…so that I have more time to snipe Brian in the face right now.
Portal
Not a strict shooter, but still in a first-person perspective, Portal is the most amazing puzzle game I’ve played in recent years. The personality and character built into the AI that instructs you throughout the game is incredible and hilarious. The actual levels are fun and challenging without being too frustrating, and the game unlocks some really hard and mind-bending puzzles at the end to give even the most hardcore some nice re-playability. The story tie-in with Episode 2 is also a huge bonus, and works really well once you’ve played through both stories.
Of course, the best part of the game is the way that the gaming public has carried away a couple of its concepts. First is the “Weighted Companion Cube,” which is simply an item that you must use to complete one of the levels…but the game gives it such personality (including a hidden love shrine for it) that everyone who has played the game has a huge amount of sympathy for it. Yes, I am planning on getting a plush one for myself (shown below).
The mantra “The cake is a lie” has become synonymous with the game, and there are rumors of t-shirts. I won’t tell you what it means, but that should just be more motivation to buy the game. And if you have played, then you already know that it’s true.
Finally, the ending song is the funniest finale to a game I’ve ever heard. I was literally laughing out loud throughout the entire thing. Of course, it’s not that good if you haven’t just played through the game, but it’s still worth listening to, being written by our favorite online composer, Jonathan Coulton.
Halo 3
Halo 3 is much better than Halo 2. But then again, you knew I was going to say that, as I pretty much despised Halo 2 and let everyone know what a terrible job Bungie had done on it compared to the first. That said, Halo 3 still does not live up to the first game, but it comes considerably closer than the previous sequel.
The single-player campaign is of a fairly appropriate difficulty, though I still would have preferred Heroic and Legendary to be harder. The addition of achievements also gives some more reasons for going through more than once. The main problem is just that it was not up to par with what I was hoping for.
The story is really not that epic feeling, and nothing really happens. It felt like the first game established so many new ideas and concepts and all the second two did was dilute them. I really thought they were going somewhere interesting with the whole Cortana being possessed thing. Tycho and Durandal (crazy AI that are your main source of story) were the best part of Marathon 2, but Cortana in this game in no way lived up to their legacy. The ending is also terrible. I was left with a “what?” and completely unsatisfied feeling.
In general, I just wanted more “awesomeness” and “epicness” - fast paced war-like action with alien carnage in beautiful HD surround-sound was my order, and Halo 3 gets a poor tip for its delivery.
Bioshock
Bioshock is the best FPS I have played in recent memory. It is definitely a contender for my favorite FPS of all time, at least based on my first time through. My brain puts it in league with games such as Goldeneye and Halo. The RPG elements thrown in - getting experience and spending it on upgrades for magic-like powers and skills - are a welcome addition to the run-and-gun genre. The atmosphere, artwork, music, and setting are impeccable in their attention to detail, consistency, humor, and even story. The art and the way it communicated what the game was about blew me away.
The story of the city of Rapture, told through audio diaries and radio calls, is an intricate and well-crafted piece of fiction. Themes from the game revolve largely around capitalism and the idea of the utopia. Having never read Ayn Rand, but being familiar with the general gist of her stories, I’m fairly certain that Bioshock touches on many of the same concepts. There is even a FAQ that analyzes the story and reads like a thesis, comparing it to literature with slants describing what it says about religion, gender, and race. You just don’t see those for most games made nowadays (though I’m betting Metal Gear Solid has one as well).
If you’re looking for an excellent FPS with RPG elements and the best story this side of Rapture, you owe it to yourself to go play with the Big Daddies and Little Sisters of Bioshock.
No TagsWhat Google Won’t Find is a great look into quantum computing and the limits of computation by someone who really knows what he’s talking about.
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