Published at 15 January 2010
in linkdump.
I previously hit on the problem of China as a source (or at least carrier) of malware. Perhaps because of this I’ve been taking a greater interest in news from the Orient. And it seems weird shit regularly goes down in China: ninja monkeys & explosive sausages
I liked remote farming , also signed up as a spotter
In a counter-counter-culture rage, I bought two t-shirts @ https://shop.conservatives.com/
Searching “Belfast Telegraph startup” on Google brings back a BT article about the startups in Dublin. Just another reason why NI needs another national newspaper
Emerging markets & Stamps were the best performing investments of the past decade
Continue reading ‘Friday Linkdump’
Published at 1 January 2010
in gaming.
MAG is a 128-aside first person shooter exclusive to PS3 out in Europe on the 29th of this month. And basically that’s all you need to know, along with a 7 day open beta available on PSN from Monday 4th. But before you rush to order PS3 slims/preorder the game humour me for a minute and hear it out. I am (puts on best fanboi expressive tones) super excited with this title. More so than MW2. MW2 was formulaic. MW2 ignored the failings of it’s predecessor. Meaning
MW2 has lost my interest.
128 a side? I’ll sign myself up for some of that right away sir. Continue reading ‘Massive Action Game: Reasserting FPS Teamwork’
I got held up recently by a particularly nasty Trojan infection that seemed to come from a flash vulnerability - or at least it installed itself in a Macromedia directory at a time when embedded flash would have been running on one of the web pages I had open.
No ordinary decent virus this one though. It cleverly disabled my default browser - Chrome - coercing me into a specific set of steps that would ultimately place a rootkit on my OS. As my browser seemingly inexplicably was rendered useless, even after multiple uninstall/reinstalls, something else was up. Internet Explorer was attempting to connect to a “tolule.net” which on lookup resolved to a Chinese IP. So a quick entry into my Sygate advanced rules and I had a large swathe of Chinese IPs blocked. So I was safe for the time being giving me a chance to think about what was going on. (The Trojan was quite busy - attempting to connect every 10 mins or so and to multiple domains - initially always tolule.net but also gusmon.net and somemon.net - each time resolving to an address in China).
Continue reading ‘Trojans. Not Stupid.’
Published at 11 December 2009
in linkdump.
US Navy lags 18 months behind Wired who spat out a Piracy-awareness (well what else do you call it?) game in July. While the lag is shocking (won’t there be a new crisis by 2011?) each will be distributed to a different audience. The web may be open, but people still work with what they know - trenchline browsing.
The Soothing Green Light
I initially thought this was going to be a ridiculous article. 5 paragraphs later I was proved wrong. Rings very true but does this mean we’re now going to be inundated with sites imploring us to level up?
Continue reading ‘Friday Linkdump’
I should probably open my commentary on the SO community with a more wide-ranging piece on the effectiveness of self-moderation and social badge collecting in rapidly scaling a web community but hopefully by dumping this the second opinion will be more insightful whenever that may be.
Ok so really I’m just a petty net troll who completely overreacts to criticism online. That aside, I still cannot understand how the answering army at stackoverflow come to the collective conclusion that every question on a close-to-the-bone programming issue requires some inane form of rephrasing or just outright blanking.
Continue reading ‘The StackOverflow Rant’
image courtesy johnson7
App Engine is generally a new paradigm for webapp developers; replacing sessions with memcache and a schemaless datastore just two elements requiring new thinking for old problems. Unfortunately there are a few more hidden nuisances which have the potential to waste programming time relatively early on. Here’s four of my personal head-bangers:
1. the datastore doesn’t always store Properties
I’ve had trouble with it refusing to store arbitrary entity props unless I assign them in the entity constructor itself (these fields were optional btw). Just setting prop values after initialisation then put() on the ds didn’t write them.
Continue reading ‘Google App Engine Datastore Gotchas’
Slacktivism has been exposed as a joke.
Half way through last week a nation erupted; the Republic of Ireland football team crashed out of the World Cup at the hand of Gaul, that of a certain Thierry Henry. A Facebook group was established. It took on something of a life of it’s own - over 300k users inside the first 24 hours.
“Something has to be done”.
FIFA made no mention of the incident in their official match report. It was edited several times, each time the Magnum PIs on Twitter reporting to the world the latest breach of instant populist moral values and punch-drunk notions of democracy. Avatars may not have been coloured green, but the online social network air was turning a particularly dark shade of blue and the feedback loop of increasingly agitated noise fed into itself, reaching a deafening cresendo online while steadily losing touch with reality.
Continue reading ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes’
Published at 18 November 2009
in mobile.
Jase Bell made a prediction in his startup column in yesterday’s local press regarding the proliferation of small home-based projects in response to hard times in corporationland:
“With the amount of high-tech skills out there I predict a new wave of micro businesses (with five employees or less) over the next three years. Their sales area will be global instead of local and their areas of expertise will be broad and far reaching.”
Read more: belfasttelegraph.co.uk
This has a resonance somewhat further afield too - the Wall St Journal last week covered the emergence of the app store cottage industry as a growth sector in Silicon Valley. The iPhone and it’s appstore is this sub-industry’s poster boy of a platform built for the masses.
The low cost barrier to entry (SDK is free, while publishing an app costs $99), the ensembled army of early-adopting geeks and the global reach leverage of an appstore listing make for an attractive ecosystem to programmers. This has resulted in an abundance of apps for every conceivable smart phone task. At a guess I’d say the OS provides for 80% of the functions I use my netbook for. A computer in the pocket.
But I don’t like the iPhone.
Continue reading ‘Product Over Platform’
Published at 13 November 2009
in linkdump.
linking to a specific time frame in youtube vids - append ‘#t=xmys’ to the url, where x,y are the number of seconds, minutes respectively like this
picked this up late - you can now delete your GAE apps
the great big massive ’subscribe via email’ at the top of Boris Johnson’s blog tells me feeds might still just be a data muncher thing
“Can we just look at what the local market is, instead of dreaming of a large spaceship coming here from Japan and giving us some hi-tech employment.” Local businessman’s opinion on the money being splashed out in the regional development agencies race for ‘hi-tech’
get rich or die tryin’
Continue reading ‘Friday Linkdump’
Published at 10 November 2009
in gaming.
First of all - thanks Asda for selling it at 32 quid.
Played single player reg through til completion and while it was as polished as you’d expect from the Modern Warfare franchise it failed to eclipse the heart-pounding immersive nervousness of the original’s ghillie-suit level. Also the kablamo’ed White House scenario seemed to be lifted straight from COD5’s Reichstag finale. Ditto with the staggered progression as seen from the eyes of US Army Rangers and their SF counterparts. Personally I find that sort of storytelling disjointed and a distraction.
Continue reading ‘MW2: The First 12 Hours’
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