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We had great game development libraries for stuff like that 10 years ago, e.g. Allegro. While I appreciate the Perl support here, I don't think anyone would put more than a couple of hours' worth of effort into a game that doesn't support pretty 3D stuff on modern graphics cards. If you want to do such things, SDL_Perl isn't a viable option (look at the effort involved).

So, sit down on your bums and write a Perl API for DirectX with good WINE support, folks. ;-)

So, sit down on your bums and write a Perl API for DirectX with good WINE support, folks. ;-)

Unfortunately, the SVG support is very half-backed :(

My module, Graph::Easy (see Output under http://bloodgate.com/perl/graph/manual/) contains a SVG backend, but I had to change quite a few things to make it work halfways with Firefox :(

FF doesn't support viewbox, it doesn't "calculate/know" the size of a SVG embedded via "object" tag (so it shows up as a default of 150x50 or so pixels and see following point: ), no zoom/pan is implemented (so user can't change size of an SVG), text-zoom on a page with an SVG zooms the text of the SVG, but not the SVG (which quickly becomes garbled due to half of the content changing and half not), Firefox ignores CSS rules with fontsizes (instead rendering the font in the size the user specified, but since all the rest of the content is not scaled to match, you end up with a garbled SVG again), etc. I could go on. :(

Hopefully the support will improve, but I think it should have been labeled as "Firefox has experimental/limited SVG support" instead of writing it as if FF supported the full spec (which it is quit far from if you look closely at their SVG roadmap).

Currently developing SVGs for the web feels like CSS 1.0 again - you never get it to work on all browsers together. :-(

But since Opera seems to gear up to a full SVG support (8.5 has only "SVG tiny" and 9.0 has only "basic), things should get interesting in a short time.

Tels

The SVG support is, alas, incomplete. Trust me, this is like "CSS x.y (with some bits and pieces missing)" all over - you now have SVG files that display properly in Firefox 1.5, but not Opera 8.5, or 9.0. Or vice versa *sigh*

For a test, see http://bloodgate.com/perl/graph/svg.html and http://bloodgate.com/perl/graph/manual/output.html

Tels

The SVG support is, alas, incomplete. Trust me, this is like "CSS x.y (with some bits and pieces missing)" all over - you now have SVG files that display properly in Firefox 1.5, but not Opera 8.5, or 9.0. Or vice versa *sigh*

For a test, see http://bloodgate.com/perl/graph/svg.html and http://bloodgate.com/perl/graph/manual/output.html

Tels

"(Try drawing a finite state machine using only text. It just doesn't get the message across as effectively as pen and paper.)"

While I agree with on many points, this is one I have to refute:

You *could* enter your finite state machine in an easy-to-learn syntax like this one:

[ Start ] --> [ Main ]

[ Main ] -- Until not done --> [ Main ]
[ Main ] --> [ End ]

and then use one of these fancy programs, like this one:

  http://bloodgate.com/perl/graph/

(or Graph::Easy on CPAN :) to render it as ASCII:

Best wishes,

Tels

I do have my licens embeded into these pages:

photos

But maybe I did it the wrong way? Also, shouldn't I embed the license as content into the EXIF or comment fields into the images?

Tels

My photos are under CC, but not listed in Yahoo. (In fact, most of the search results for "bloodgate" were not relevant at all...)

Back then, when I choose a license, I tried to submit this to the CC database, but I never got it to recognise my work.

Now Yahoo! does not list it either, and to submit my site, I have to login to Yahoo! (WTF?).

images.google.com doesn't have them, either. I think something is wrong with my sitecode :)

Tels

I am sorry to hear about Kalutara. I visited there 6 months ago. This is sad :(

(Yes, I know other areas were hit even hard. However, I can only relate to Kalutare since I was there and got to know some of the people there).

I wish I did more photos of poeple.

Here is one of the strand you see in the satelitte photos:

Beach

Tels

Here some of my images from Sri Lanka from this summer (the latter are exactly from the spot they posted satelitte images):

Yala

Kalutara

Best wishes,

Tels

Here some of my images from Sri Lanka from this summer (the latter are exactly from the spot they posted satelitte images):

Yala

Kalutara

Best wishes,

Tels

Jeez...

- OpenGL
- Direct3D

I personally think Direct3D is a bit better, since it can apparently handle more than one separate object at a time.

Back to the drawing board, OpenGL dudes!

Learn from Microsoft next time.

Not to mention that the license is well bloody-too-damn-complicated for images - I wanted to donate some of my photos to the wikipedia, but I never figured out whether their license is compatible with my CreativeCommons one or not - or how a license that talks about 80% about texts like "frontcover", "backcover" etc applies to images (and don't even mention subtle questions like "What about embedded (c) remarks? strings? comments? metadata?").

Oh well :/

Tels

"Of course making it crawl /?yada=yada links has problems,"

Which is why google does not crawl them. Which is probably good. I have a small photo gallery (http://bloodgate.com/photos/) and while it contains only 440something images, google could "view" each image in almost infinite variations. With blue, red, green etc color schemes, blue, red, white, black etc backgrounds (exactly 24 bit of different background colors - but luckily only a dozends or so are reachable via links), footer on/off, menu on/off, etc etc etc. And all these options can be combined.

$search_engine would never finish crawling this database, although it would not find new content.

Cheers,

Tels

Moin,

* 1) Register a domain (come on, they're cheap now)

Done.

* 2) Get an email address from your ISP or other provider (yahoo, fastmail.fm etc) that is complex and convoluted - no names or words

No need for it. I can create arbitraliy "mailboxes" an my domain (basically the same idea, only that I control this popbox).

* 3) set up mail redirection with Zoneedit, redirection.net etc. with a catchall to your new mailbox.

I don't do this and you will see why:

* 4) Use a different email address every time you must sign up for anything (ie amazon.com@newdomain.com)

Noooooooooooooooo!

because you email inbox might be spamfree, but you see every adress you ever used will get all the spams ten times, and what this means in the end you can see here:

http://bloodgate.com/spams/stats.html

every increasing spam. It might not make it pass through to your filter, but it will _still arrive at your server and clog up the pipe, and use resource!:

>Also helpful is to change your reply-to address >every few months and give your friends different >addresses based on how clueful they are

Unless you want to loose these friends, dont do this.

I will no longer hide from spammers, I will personally hunt them to death.

best wishes,

tels

Reminds me of this system ...

Bloodgate spam stats - see for yourself...

Cheers!

" Seriously, I've been getting less spam lately thanks to filters."

You get less or you see less?

I get more, and see less.

Maybe ./ wants to creat 800 Meg of dupes per year..

Anyway, my personal information count was very low for a couple of years (amassing email, and 90% of that is my spamarchive), but once I started taking photos, I created about 8 Gig of information - in 6 months! (And that's with JPEG, I wonder what would happen to my HD if I shot in RAW..)

Cheers,

Tels

Maybe you would like to run your spam through Mail::Graph - see cpan or bloodgate for the scripts, and here for an example.

If you have any questions, mail me.

Tels

Maybe you would like to run your spam through Mail::Graph - see cpan or bloodgate for the scripts, and here for an example.

If you have any questions, mail me.

Tels

Or look at the Phototainer (running linux, alas they did not release the source :( and Archos (Archos.

Both have a harddisk, big screen (albeit both have only around 350x350 respectively 320x240 pixels, I wish they would make one with 640x480 like the Sharp Zaurus C750//60 - that display is _coool_), and play movies, mp3, have TV out etc.

See also here for hacking the Phototainer...

Best wishes,

Tels

Here is the same hack with a Phototainer (which is way more cool than an Archos, anyway :-)

Cheers!

"hardware accelerated OpenGL is fast enough on linux."

Yes, even when using Perl to drive it :-P

"While computers gain more powerful hardware (faster CPUs, bigger memory, etc...) the coding for games will go forward to the newer languages that makes coding easier. You may not like it, but don't worry. "

Yeah, someday they might use Perl. Oups, already did that.... :-P

Some german going by the name Tels has made an in-depth study of his spam levels going back to Oct. 1998. The daily graph is most interesting. In the last six months his daily total has been growing faster than his average total, indicating that he is receiving spam at an increasingly faster rate. Of course, his experience is completely anecdotal, but it does jibe nicely with what the MS-AOL-Disney folks are saying, and it provides a nice visual. If their word is to be believed, and I think it is in this case, then the problem is getting worse faster and faster. Tels' data certainly suggests that it is.

I also found a good study by the Center for Democrocy & Technology. They created several hundred email accounts and used them in ways that would reveal how spammers discover them. They found that the most common method spammers used to discover valid email addresses is eploying spiders to crawl the web for them.

This suggests a simple measure that could be immediately effective in the short run if it were widely implemented. The CDT suggests that when you would like to post your email address to a website you should post it using HTML numeric entities. Webmasters can go even further. Encode the email addresses for your users before saving them to the database or a file. This is easy to do and will, in some small part, save your patrons from email hell.

Apparently, the vast majority of email harvesters use a plain text search for parsing web pages and do not evaluate html entities. This is why the above method can only work in the short term. If websites start implementing the above method en masse, the spiders will start parsing for HTML entities and the method will no longer work. Same with human readable forms that the study mentioned.

This is why we must have legislation to deal with spam. Technical solutions just won't work effectively in an environment as open as the Internet. It will inevitably be an arms race between the spammers and the spam fighters, resulting in an internet that may be more secure, but less usable. Therefore, we must look in another direction. If our nation were to legislate effective deterrents for spammers operating in the U.S., other countries would follow suit. As it becomes increasingly difficult for spammers to hide overseas, it becomes increasingly viable to sanction governments that allow spammers to operate within their borders. Cutting them off at the net-block level also becomes increasingly viable as the number of net blocks that harbor spammers decreases.

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And you can even get a Lego one:

Set 8457 :-)

I consider this the uebergeek hobby.

Cheers,

Tels
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