Sorry but IE6 is an abortion and any Web developer with any brains puts a browser detector and redirects the visitor to a "you are running IE6 please upgrade or use firefox or you will notice strange things on the website due to the faulty browser that IE is..
Any web developer worth employing knows about browser deficiencies, and will effortlessly code around them using various sniffs, hacks and conditional comments. Giving a significant proportion of visitors a degraded experience just isn't on - coding for one browser is lazy, and choosing, say, Firefox as a preferred platform is no better than choosing Internet Explorer. (Remember IE-only websites?)
Idealistic? Hardly - you may find that the Person Who Pays The Bills is running IE 6...;-)
Pretty much every other application lets me arrange it the way I want it, GIMP insists on splattering windows all over my desktop so they look like a mess with whatever is underneath. I don't way to walk down the One Gnome Way, give me a normal workspace with dockable widgets.
Er... The GIMP does have dockable widget thingies. Drag a toolbar heading or tab to where you want it to be - you can amalgamate the usual two windows into the main 'GIMP' toolbox window if you like. No, you can't merge them into an image window, but I don't think you can do that on Photoshop either.
(In fact, this 'ere Photoshop CS3 on a Mac is pleasingly familiar for a long-time GIMP user...)
I don't get it. I can tell they look different, but they both look equally good. I guess #2 is a little sharper; is that the GIMP one?
Nope, that's Photoshop!
The only change I made to the text rendering settings was to disable hinting in The GIMP - which is a single click in the checkbox just beneath the font size, so it's not a remotely hidden option.
Photoshop's got even more rendering options, and its text editor thingy is way more capable, allowing different styles in the same text (kind of like a word processor) - but the idea that The GIMP's actual text rendering is rubbish is just a myth...
I can't use GIMP because I NEED CMYK (seriously, how many people on/. need CMYK?) and I'm a professional photo editor (according to GIMP related threads,/. is positively infested with photographic professionals).
Heh. These same 'photographic professionals' will be bitterly disappointed with higher-end software like Apple's Aperture and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom - I didn't see any references to CMYK in the fully-functional trial versions I played round with the other week. Plus I liked the latter program so much that I bought it - and the only colour-space options I can find are 'ProPhoto RGB', 'AdobeRGB (1998)' and 'sRGB'.
Oh no! However will those Slashdot pundits cope?
As for Photoshop Photoshop - I'd been using The GIMP since version 0.99something, nearly ten years ago, and the other week I finally got round to switching to Photoshop CS3. Photoshop is definitely a smoother, more streamlined and more capable program, and most of my image-editing skills have transferred intact (creation of texture maps for computer games and the like, so pretty involved) - but for most stuff, the latest version of The GIMP manages just fine. And its colour management has progressed way beyond the previous pretend-it-doesn't-exist status of not so long ago...
Can Photoshop Express replace The GIMP? Err... no, except perhaps for some very vague, ultra-simple tasks. If anything, the two could complement each other - in a vaguely similar way to how I have both Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom installed on this 'ere Mac.
Photoshop Express? Online image management, and very basic rotation and correction. The GIMP? A full-scale image editor.
I think it's a great idea to give people a taste of what Photoshop is like.
... Except it's nothing whatsoever like Photoshop. At all.
I had a quick go at 'editing' a photo in the test-drive thing, and there didn't seem any way of actually drawing anything. I'd say it's much closer in concept to a drastically simplified Photoshop Lightroom - it's even got the same colour scheme and vague general layout. Except where Lightroom will manage untold gigabytes of photos on your own computer, doing on-the-fly conversions and adjustments from raw format, Express looks more like an advanced, online photo management system.
It's definitely not Photoshop Photoshop.
Re:really, i didn't make it up
on
Matter
·
· Score: 1
A vague comparison - in the couple of American bookshops I've been into (Borders? Barnes and Noble? Something pretty mainstream like that), I've very rarely found many Iain M. Banks books. Usually just one or two paperbacks, with stunningly awful covers - stuffed edge-on, on long shelves amongst many other authors with surnames beginning with 'B'.
By comparison, the not-particularly-large Waterstones I often go to in Derby (that's Englandland, for any Americans) has basically his entire back catalogue permanently in stock, both M and no-M. I'm wandering in tomorrow to pick up a copy of Matter, and I'm sure it'll be on fairly prominent display. Perhaps not in the windows (it's been out a month or so), but I'm sure it'll be easy to find.
Conversely, books by Stanislaw Lem are way easier to find in American bookshops (what I actually went in for!) - I've only ever managed to get 'em from Amazon in Britain. Never seen them on shelves...
Anyone with taste should be listening to the 2001 soundtrack. I've got it playing right now - my dodgily re-recorded electronic version, copied from my father's original, contemporary-to-the-film soundtrack LP. (The cover artwork is gorgeous...)
Don't forget the Fountains of Paradise - in which mankind reaches up to Clarke's favoured geostationary orbit in a manner somewhat more substantial than mere rockets...
Disconcertingly, the person who many years ago thought it would be a laugh to choose the username 'Ford Prefect' for this new 'Slashdot' thing is now, erm...
Living in Belgium.
Having a disgustingly rude swear-word as part of my address is great, of course. It's just that hardly anyone recognises it as such.:-(
This is distributed in two ways: the first is a flash video player, modelled on youtube, that shows the videos low-res in a browser window.
In my suspiciously successful attempts at using this aspect of iPlayer outside the UK, I discovered the actual video data being sent from an Akamai-controlled IP address. So presumably, if ISPs want to control bandwidth usage from this source, they'd just need to host an Akamai node thingy?
The video quality for this 'lesser' iPlayer is still pretty good. I clocked it at about 100kB/s (i.e. ~800kbit/s) - it looks okay fullscreen if you're using the computer as a telly. Haven't tried the Kontiki thing yet - I've been doing this on my Macs...
I took these pictures of last year's March 3rd lunar eclipse in the UK with a Canon EOS 350D and the 70-300mm IS lens. Exposure? Initially, 1/320s, f8, ISO 200 - and eclipsed, around 1/30s, f5.6, ISO 1600.
(Something about telling myself OH YOU SILLY TWIT REMEMBER TO TAKE YOUR TRIPOD WITH YOU NEXT TIME - the shots were all hand-held! It's pretty straightforward to get some half-decent pictures, and with a bit of work some excellent pictures are there for the taking. Hope the weather's good - it was utterly fantastic for the eclipse I saw...)
rm -rf * -- bypasses steps 2, c, IV, 00000101, and many more...
Yes, but it removes the possibility of leading Mr. Limbaugh realistically on to step (xiv), the Infernal Dance of Data Recovery - namely, him dancing around on the charred remains of his former abused Macintosh, stark-bollock-naked, covered in animal grease, recovery CDs stuffed up his backside, singing the Swedish national anthem.
Backwards.
Y'see, you have to pace your technical advice properly. What's the use of destroying all his data in one fell swoop? No fun at all.
"Yes, Mr. Limbaugh, if you just open a terminal right now... then type rm -rf ~/Library/Mail to initialise the backup... Have you got your Time Machine plugged in? Good, if you'll just open Disk Utility, select that disk, and 'Erase'... yes, Mr. Limbaugh, it's just to erase space for the new backup... Have you disabled the firewall yet? It needs to backup things from the local network, you know.... Now open Safari, type in g-o-a-t-s-e-dot-c-x, yes, that's a virus-checking website, it'll make sure there are no gaping holes in your security... What's that, Mr. Limbaugh? It's found a gaping hole? Oh no! We'll need to cleanse your firewall with FIRE! Get the matches, Mr. Limbaugh! This system must burn!"...
During the first bootup process, I just ticked the option to recover from Time Machine, and everything transferred -- my mail boxes, rules, accounts, passwords. I was quite impressed.
It's not difficult to do manually, either. I've duplicated the contents of Mail.app's mailboxes between computers without problems (basically, I didn't want to download a large set of IMAP mailboxes again) - you just need to know which files to copy. I think I cheated and did the whole of ~/Library/Mail along with ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist, but you can do it on a finer-grained basis too.
Pah! Using imperial unit to do the calculation was a dead give-away. Real physicists use CGS.
Actually, they use SI. CGS is deprecated, but still appears in lots of older papers, textbooks and the like. Multiple metric systems? The horror!
(Although some would argue that realer physicists just use electronvolts, the speed of light and the Planck constant for everything. Even in situations that don't appreciate it, like tiger attacks. Consider a tiger of mass 8.92*10^37 eV...)
I'd be interested to know some details on how the titles were nominated and how the voting was done. Care to share?
Vague approximation from memory: first stage late last year, each ModDB mod and game profile had a vote button on it - each ModDB member was allowed to nominate an unlimited number of mods and games.
Second stage: the top hundred mods and games from the first stage were subjected to a second vote. I think that, once again, each site member could vote for as many as they liked. I think there may be limits on new user accounts, or something - I wasn't paying much attention.
Finals: the top five unreleased mods, then the top five independent games (apparently there weren't enough unreleased games to make it worthwhile, or something), and the top five released mods are posted. Winners!
Tomorrow: the editors' choice awards, which will almost certainly be more esoteric than today's populist results.
While we're on the subject of Atari keyboards, the keyboard on the Atari ST deserves at least an honorable mention in this worst of list. The layout wasn't insane. The suckiness of this keyboard was both subtle and gross. On the gross side, they had a very mushy feel with no tactile feedback.
I got my old Atari ST working again fairly recently - I sincerely hope the rubber membrane in the keyboard has perished over its 20-year lifetime or something, because it's truly horrible to type on now. Where a decent keyboard goes 'clack' (you initially have to push hard, then it suddenly 'gives'), this thing seems to progressively resist the further you push the key in. It's not very nice.
The Mega ST apparently had a fantastic, separate keyboard - full microswitches or something. But the bog-standard ST's mediocrity never stopped my mum from typing on it at some ludicrous speed - other typists are obviously complaining for no good reason...;-)
I also anyone to dare find someone that even mildly likes their laptop's keyboard.
I really like my MacBook Pro's keyboard - it's clacky, fairly loud and definitely isn't squidgy.
It seems they're a bit uneven in nature (I've seen some horrible complaints about MacBook Pro keyboards which just don't match up with mine), but I imagine the less-than-wonderful ones are still better than the new iMac keyboard. Which is truly, truly awful - I got one with my iMac, along with a Mighty Mouse, and soon switched to an old Compaq effort with an adaptor and a Logitech mouse with a ball in it.
My dad, however, absolutely loves the castoffs. Weird.
It's based on PHP, MySQL and Smarty - I initially wrote it as a test-bed for trying out different templating engines for PHP, before using the victor in subsequent, proper work. Smarty proved to be marginally less inelegant than some of the alternatives, so that's what subsequent versions have stuck with.
I originally designed it without having ever seen the admin side of WordPress, Movable Type or any other mainstream blog - an administration's view looks just like what the public sees, except with unpublished articles, more buttons and links available. It's remarkably streamlined.
Would there be any interest if I released the source for it? It's incredibly light on the dependencies (Smarty and PEAR's XML/RPC are the only oddities) and seems to work okay - plus I wouldn't mind if I got a few of the Missing Features written for me. Along with some of the uglier, hard-coded-in-templates nonsense removing.;-)
Earlier this year, I visited Boston for a few days. Sadly, it wasn't the one in Lincolnshire. As a British person, looking at a map of Massachusetts is terribly confusing, what with all the countless borrowed place-names...
Re:Isn't it time to say goodbye to 'levels'?
on
Level Design For Games
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So what do I want instead? Give me environments! Give me worlds! I want freedom to explore, to find out of the way nooks and crannys, and more than one way of getting from point A to B. I want to solve problems using logic, not by playing "guess what the game designer wanted me to do or go next"? Game designers: Create a living, breathing, interesting world, and then let your players enjoy their time here. Stop shoving the player along a conveyor belt.
I wouldn't describe myself as a level designer, rather just a mapper (or map designer if I want to sound posh). But I've made the moderately popular MINERVA single-player mod for Half-Life 2, which people keep claiming is quitegood - it's got an interesting world to explore (if you can see it in the distance, you can get there pretty much always), and while it's fairly linear it does have a couple of branches, double-backs and efficient use of architecture. It's definitely not a long, solitary corridor with no turning back...
The book review is interesting because the book sounds like it's managing to focus on things which I've never really thought about - I've never decided to build ' Also in my eyes, parts of the list are the wrong way round - don't take the chapters' ordering as some kind of specified route as to how things must be constructed, rather than aspects to the whole process. Theirs:
"Defining the Game"
"Enemies and Obstacles: Choosing Your Challenges"
"Brainstorming Your Level Ideas"... "delves into the creation of concept sketches and reference images, the creation of a level's storyline, the drafting of a level description and the design of the puzzles and scripted sequences within the level"
"Designing With a Diagram"... "the scope and order of levels within the game"... "lay it out in diagram format by creating a grid"
"The Template"
"Improving Your Level,"
"Taking It to 11"... "architectural style, the addition of details like trim and borders, the appropriate use of textures and props, and the like"
"Ship it!"
My utterly awkward route:
Think of a setting. Metastasis was basically ISLAND!, while the upcoming Out of Time is CITY! - this helps with...
Think of an ending. This is the most important part of the whole experience, and will define the beginning. For Metastasis, the beginning is basically the reverse of the ending.
Think of a middle, and of the whole plotline. This defines what the available enemies will be (the selection needs to be plausible to fit into the plotline - no striders 500m underground, or zombies wandering around a tightly controlled and maintained Combine facility).
Define and build the architecture. Build it appropriate to the setting and plotline, and with an eye on enhancing details which provide interesting gameplay. You know the beginning and end, so you need something to constantly drive the player towards the ending. Give them something to fight for, and they will. Pull, don't push. Metastasis's architecture changes throughout - and tells a lot of the story though how things are constructed. The game is a result of the architecture, not the other way round. I've got some ideas involving architectural styles imparting major themes and plot-points in Out of Time too - except this time it's borrowed from different areas of the real-world Warsaw...
While doing all that, add the gameplay! In Metastasis, there was a section which I never bothered adding any enemies to - it was far too atmospheric and interesting just wandering through a seemingly abandoned World War Two-era base to spoil. If I'd decided 'NEED COMBAT-FREE SECTION NOW' before I'd bu
Slashdot Mirror
Any web developer worth employing knows about browser deficiencies, and will effortlessly code around them using various sniffs, hacks and conditional comments. Giving a significant proportion of visitors a degraded experience just isn't on - coding for one browser is lazy, and choosing, say, Firefox as a preferred platform is no better than choosing Internet Explorer. (Remember IE-only websites?)
Idealistic? Hardly - you may find that the Person Who Pays The Bills is running IE 6...
Women prefer big p0lypi for s3xual satisfaction!
Tennyson, your spam is reaching me already.
Er... The GIMP does have dockable widget thingies. Drag a toolbar heading or tab to where you want it to be - you can amalgamate the usual two windows into the main 'GIMP' toolbox window if you like. No, you can't merge them into an image window, but I don't think you can do that on Photoshop either.
(In fact, this 'ere Photoshop CS3 on a Mac is pleasingly familiar for a long-time GIMP user...)
Nope, that's Photoshop!
The only change I made to the text rendering settings was to disable hinting in The GIMP - which is a single click in the checkbox just beneath the font size, so it's not a remotely hidden option.
Photoshop's got even more rendering options, and its text editor thingy is way more capable, allowing different styles in the same text (kind of like a word processor) - but the idea that The GIMP's actual text rendering is rubbish is just a myth...
Yes. Yes it does.
One image, and another. One from Photoshop CS3 10.0.1, the other from The GIMP 2.4.4. Same font.
But which? Choose now!
Heh. These same 'photographic professionals' will be bitterly disappointed with higher-end software like Apple's Aperture and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom - I didn't see any references to CMYK in the fully-functional trial versions I played round with the other week. Plus I liked the latter program so much that I bought it - and the only colour-space options I can find are 'ProPhoto RGB', 'AdobeRGB (1998)' and 'sRGB'.
Oh no! However will those Slashdot pundits cope?
As for Photoshop Photoshop - I'd been using The GIMP since version 0.99something, nearly ten years ago, and the other week I finally got round to switching to Photoshop CS3. Photoshop is definitely a smoother, more streamlined and more capable program, and most of my image-editing skills have transferred intact (creation of texture maps for computer games and the like, so pretty involved) - but for most stuff, the latest version of The GIMP manages just fine. And its colour management has progressed way beyond the previous pretend-it-doesn't-exist status of not so long ago...
Can Photoshop Express replace The GIMP? Err
Photoshop Express? Online image management, and very basic rotation and correction.
The GIMP? A full-scale image editor.
Completely different.
I had a quick go at 'editing' a photo in the test-drive thing, and there didn't seem any way of actually drawing anything. I'd say it's much closer in concept to a drastically simplified Photoshop Lightroom - it's even got the same colour scheme and vague general layout. Except where Lightroom will manage untold gigabytes of photos on your own computer, doing on-the-fly conversions and adjustments from raw format, Express looks more like an advanced, online photo management system.
It's definitely not Photoshop Photoshop.
A vague comparison - in the couple of American bookshops I've been into (Borders? Barnes and Noble? Something pretty mainstream like that), I've very rarely found many Iain M. Banks books. Usually just one or two paperbacks, with stunningly awful covers - stuffed edge-on, on long shelves amongst many other authors with surnames beginning with 'B'.
By comparison, the not-particularly-large Waterstones I often go to in Derby (that's Englandland, for any Americans) has basically his entire back catalogue permanently in stock, both M and no-M. I'm wandering in tomorrow to pick up a copy of Matter, and I'm sure it'll be on fairly prominent display. Perhaps not in the windows (it's been out a month or so), but I'm sure it'll be easy to find.
Conversely, books by Stanislaw Lem are way easier to find in American bookshops (what I actually went in for!) - I've only ever managed to get 'em from Amazon in Britain. Never seen them on shelves...
2010 had a soundtrack?
Anyone with taste should be listening to the 2001 soundtrack. I've got it playing right now - my dodgily re-recorded electronic version, copied from my father's original, contemporary-to-the-film soundtrack LP. (The cover artwork is gorgeous...)
Don't forget the Fountains of Paradise - in which mankind reaches up to Clarke's favoured geostationary orbit in a manner somewhat more substantial than mere rockets...
Oi. Garfield is still hilarious - if you remove the eponymous cat...
Disconcertingly, the person who many years ago thought it would be a laugh to choose the username 'Ford Prefect' for this new 'Slashdot' thing is now, erm...
Living in Belgium.
Having a disgustingly rude swear-word as part of my address is great, of course. It's just that hardly anyone recognises it as such.
A much more important question: do you know where your towel is?
In my suspiciously successful attempts at using this aspect of iPlayer outside the UK, I discovered the actual video data being sent from an Akamai-controlled IP address. So presumably, if ISPs want to control bandwidth usage from this source, they'd just need to host an Akamai node thingy?
The video quality for this 'lesser' iPlayer is still pretty good. I clocked it at about 100kB/s (i.e. ~800kbit/s) - it looks okay fullscreen if you're using the computer as a telly. Haven't tried the Kontiki thing yet - I've been doing this on my Macs...
I took these pictures of last year's March 3rd lunar eclipse in the UK with a Canon EOS 350D and the 70-300mm IS lens. Exposure? Initially, 1/320s, f8, ISO 200 - and eclipsed, around 1/30s, f5.6, ISO 1600.
(Something about telling myself OH YOU SILLY TWIT REMEMBER TO TAKE YOUR TRIPOD WITH YOU NEXT TIME - the shots were all hand-held! It's pretty straightforward to get some half-decent pictures, and with a bit of work some excellent pictures are there for the taking. Hope the weather's good - it was utterly fantastic for the eclipse I saw...)
Yes, but it removes the possibility of leading Mr. Limbaugh realistically on to step (xiv), the Infernal Dance of Data Recovery - namely, him dancing around on the charred remains of his former abused Macintosh, stark-bollock-naked, covered in animal grease, recovery CDs stuffed up his backside, singing the Swedish national anthem.
Backwards.
Y'see, you have to pace your technical advice properly. What's the use of destroying all his data in one fell swoop? No fun at all.
"Yes, Mr. Limbaugh, if you just open a terminal right now
And so on.
It's not difficult to do manually, either. I've duplicated the contents of Mail.app's mailboxes between computers without problems (basically, I didn't want to download a large set of IMAP mailboxes again) - you just need to know which files to copy. I think I cheated and did the whole of ~/Library/Mail along with ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist, but you can do it on a finer-grained basis too.
Actually, they use SI. CGS is deprecated, but still appears in lots of older papers, textbooks and the like. Multiple metric systems? The horror!
(Although some would argue that realer physicists just use electronvolts, the speed of light and the Planck constant for everything. Even in situations that don't appreciate it, like tiger attacks. Consider a tiger of mass 8.92*10^37 eV...)
Vague approximation from memory: first stage late last year, each ModDB mod and game profile had a vote button on it - each ModDB member was allowed to nominate an unlimited number of mods and games.
Second stage: the top hundred mods and games from the first stage were subjected to a second vote. I think that, once again, each site member could vote for as many as they liked. I think there may be limits on new user accounts, or something - I wasn't paying much attention.
Finals: the top five unreleased mods, then the top five independent games (apparently there weren't enough unreleased games to make it worthwhile, or something), and the top five released mods are posted. Winners!
Tomorrow: the editors' choice awards, which will almost certainly be more esoteric than today's populist results.
I got my old Atari ST working again fairly recently - I sincerely hope the rubber membrane in the keyboard has perished over its 20-year lifetime or something, because it's truly horrible to type on now. Where a decent keyboard goes 'clack' (you initially have to push hard, then it suddenly 'gives'), this thing seems to progressively resist the further you push the key in. It's not very nice.
The Mega ST apparently had a fantastic, separate keyboard - full microswitches or something. But the bog-standard ST's mediocrity never stopped my mum from typing on it at some ludicrous speed - other typists are obviously complaining for no good reason...
I really like my MacBook Pro's keyboard - it's clacky, fairly loud and definitely isn't squidgy.
It seems they're a bit uneven in nature (I've seen some horrible complaints about MacBook Pro keyboards which just don't match up with mine), but I imagine the less-than-wonderful ones are still better than the new iMac keyboard. Which is truly, truly awful - I got one with my iMac, along with a Mighty Mouse, and soon switched to an old Compaq effort with an adaptor and a Logitech mouse with a ball in it.
My dad, however, absolutely loves the castoffs. Weird.
Surely if you're a real nerd, you've written your very own blogging software from scratch?
I wrote the, erm, fantastically named BaaBaa-BlogSheep(tm), which is currently powering my game modification blog and, in a stunning 100% increase in number of deployments, now a general Half-Life 2 map news blog too.
It's based on PHP, MySQL and Smarty - I initially wrote it as a test-bed for trying out different templating engines for PHP, before using the victor in subsequent, proper work. Smarty proved to be marginally less inelegant than some of the alternatives, so that's what subsequent versions have stuck with.
I originally designed it without having ever seen the admin side of WordPress, Movable Type or any other mainstream blog - an administration's view looks just like what the public sees, except with unpublished articles, more buttons and links available. It's remarkably streamlined.
Would there be any interest if I released the source for it? It's incredibly light on the dependencies (Smarty and PEAR's XML/RPC are the only oddities) and seems to work okay - plus I wouldn't mind if I got a few of the Missing Features written for me. Along with some of the uglier, hard-coded-in-templates nonsense removing.
What, this one? It's the original!
Earlier this year, I visited Boston for a few days. Sadly, it wasn't the one in Lincolnshire. As a British person, looking at a map of Massachusetts is terribly confusing, what with all the countless borrowed place-names...
I wouldn't describe myself as a level designer, rather just a mapper (or map designer if I want to sound posh). But I've made the moderately popular MINERVA single-player mod for Half-Life 2, which people keep claiming is quite good - it's got an interesting world to explore (if you can see it in the distance, you can get there pretty much always), and while it's fairly linear it does have a couple of branches, double-backs and efficient use of architecture. It's definitely not a long, solitary corridor with no turning back...
The book review is interesting because the book sounds like it's managing to focus on things which I've never really thought about - I've never decided to build ' Also in my eyes, parts of the list are the wrong way round - don't take the chapters' ordering as some kind of specified route as to how things must be constructed, rather than aspects to the whole process. Theirs:
My utterly awkward route: