Elonian Nomad - 3rd Strike

News:

• New Orphaned Works Act would limit copyright liability
• Are new mathematical truths discovered or invented?
• Half A Million Microsoft-Powered Sites Hit With SQL Injection - I hope your webserver isn’t one of them.
• Shoe-box data center
• India launches 10 satellites in one go!
• Sports social networking
• Karaoke on MySpace? Next thing you’ll know we’ll have social gardening too… wait a minute…
• Warner Bros. sets-up two more sites to distribute their shows online.
• Holographic storage, 150GB discs finally coming to market
• Google’s has a new visual ranking algorithm. Can we use this to make an automated hot or not?

Gaming News:

• To the US GuildWars players, you might want to check out the GuildWars 3 Year Anniversary Sweepstakes! Sweepstakes ends on May 31. Prizes will be drawn on June 11.
• 40 days ’till D&D 4th Ed! Here’s some info including details about D&D Insider, an online role-playing tool.
• OK, so there will be a Call of Duty CCG released, but now a Gears of War boardgame too?

• » Comments (0)

Purchases:

• “Starship Troopers” by Robert A. Heinlin

• “Necronomicon: The Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft“

Currently interested in:

• Eee PC

• Checking out karting at Speedzone

Other Stuff:

• Watched “Forbidden Kingdom“, it’s so-so.
• Finished reading “Rise of Endymion“. Ok, so there’s closure to basically everything since Hyperion, but the Endymion books are still very disappointingly below-par from Hyperion. Read only if you really need to know the answers.

• » Comments (0)

DIY: HW:

• If Sherlock Holmes has access to a PC, he’d probably use something that looks a little like this.

News:

• Yahoo! “refunds” disappointed search advertiser $8,962,385,800… well… they almost did.
• Open Yahoo!
• EMI says you can’t store your own music files online
• Sun looks to free up the rest of Java - I’ve been hearing about this for so long that I thought they abandoned the idea.
• Intel Atom-based Eee PCs in June - I’m really inching toward getting an Eee PC. The more I read about it, the more mobile computing possibilities come to mind. Right now the only thing stopping me is battery life (aside from the ubiquitous financial issues).

Opinion:

• 8 (Pointless) Laws All Comic Book Movies Follow
• Vista’s 11 Pillars of Failure - You really should save yourself the trouble and upgrade to XP.
• How would Microsoft Live Mesh mesh with Yahoo’s Y! OS?

Stuff:

• Ksplice - rebootless linux kernel patching
• John Cho will play Mr. Sulu in the upcoming Star Trek flick
• Gamasutra interviews David Sirlin about SF HD Remix
• The World of Indie Games

• » Comments (0)

Those of you who have tried it prior to yesterday would have noticed that “darthvid.com” and “www.darthvid.com” resolves to their respective URLs.  My intention was that all non-www would be redirected to www, but I’ve never been able to implement it properly in my host (I’ve been using 110mb for almost a year now and it’s been very good to me and my humble needs).  I got it working to a certain degree (I used the solutions here and here), but I haven’t rigged the redirection to work with permalinks yet.

As I re-tried to get redirection working yesterday, I learned about the efforts of some to advocate for the deprecation of www in URLs.  Granted that the so-called “deprecation” of www is still in the air, it’s pretty much expected to find another group advocating the opposite (complete with a complementary URL to boot!).  As polar as their views may be, both camps appear to agree that BOTH www and non-www should be supported, albeit they’d rather the URL resolves to each camp’s favored format.

I remember considering which version to use when I first got my domain, and I honestly can’t remember why I chose www (perhaps the reason is in this blog’s archives).  Regardless, given the recently gleaned information from both sides, I’d like to give my current default (yes-www) another thought.  I believe that at this point in time people will gravitate to personal preferences, with mine currently based on the fact that including “www” easily clues one in that text in question is a URL even without the clunky “http://” in front.

Knowing myself, I’ll probably attempt to setup the site to easily switch between both, inlcuing handling of permalinks prior to updating my decision.
[side notes]
Just for fun, lets take a look at these samples side by side

Having the subdomain as part of the domain name really makes the URL look awkward.

www.slashdot.org resolves to slashdot.org.  I’ve gotten so used to this format for slashdot that it feels right to me.

wired.com resolves to www.wired.com.  I typically use wired.com in conversations, but when specifying the URL, www.wired.com is personally more appealing to me text wise.

• » Comments (0)

Doodads:

• THE wedding ring for the SysAd/Network Engineering couple

News:

• Good bots vs Evil bots -
• Stephen Hawking believes that (primitive) alien life is very likely.
• Priest who floated away using helium balloons for a fund raiser is missing.
• Pig urine plastic ware (or “You packed my lunch in what?!”)
• In this analysis P2P is no longer the major bandwidth hog.
• Hotmail via Outlook Express no more after June 30th - I don’t remember getting that email.
• (Human) Memory improvement algorithm. - This is a looong article. There is even software to help achieve better memory.
• Academic search engines vs commercial search engines
• Uwe Boll asked Blizzard if he could make the World of Warcraft movie for them. Blizzard says “no”.

• » Comments (0)

News:

• Glowing plans on the moon may be feasible
• Software can now fix off-pitch chords! - Before you know it they’ll be making microphones with stuff like this built-in, improving performances of karaoke nights and deluding more people into thinking they can actually sing.
• D&D 4th Ed will have a new System License. The d20 STL will cover fantasy and a d20 GTL will cover general gaming.
• One atom thick transistor.
• Warner Brothers Warns Guy Who Named Harry Potter A Decade Before JK Rowling
• Marvel will publish comics based on Ender’s Game. For some reason, I am less than enthused.
• Stan Lee will create a new superhero universe under Virgin Comics

DIY: SW

• Piwik: Open source web analytics

Opinion:

• Opinion piece on the effects on D&D 4th Ed on Open Gaming

• » Comments (0)

I was extremely skeptical when I first saw this article from joystiq.com.  Yes, you read it right!  The title sounds like an April fools prank already, and I just couldn’t fathom how it could happen.  But given the official website, I guess it’s no joke.  And then I saw the trailer…

… … … OMFG!!!

Now this has me really really excited!  My only gripe right now is that I never liked the Mortal Kombat system.  Granted, I only played the 1st three games, and I honestly don’t know if the fighting system improved in the more current versions.

I hope it did, and I’m certainly hoping that I’ll like whatever system this one will use.

Please pleeeease be a good game!

• » Comments (0)