Wednesday, June 27, 2007

WoW test warrior build

Wacky warrior build to try out. Should play like stunlok, but be a little more agressive.

Edit: wasn't agressive enough and I rarely used devastate, so I'm going to try going even deeper into frenzy. At 61 this means I get both concussion blow and bloodthirst, although it won't change too much by the time I'm 70. Might have to respec by then anyway.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Heirarchical Temporal Memory

Jeff and the team at numenta have released a free platform for developing applications with Heirarchical Temporal Memory. Going to have to look closely at it to se if it fits in with temporal ROAM.

Monday, June 25, 2007

Feelings in games?

After reading a great article about the feeling of achievement in Eve Online, the original GameSetWatch question that started it all up made me reminisce about the time I saw a big 'D' that scared the pants off me.

I'd been playing Roguelike games almost since their inception and had picked up a new variant of Moria that had colour! (most of us poo poo'd the idea as it felt all too graphicky, but we played it anyway because it actually did have better gameplay).

I'm down at ~level 20, when I turn the corner to see an out-of-depth 'D' only a couple of paces away. OMG. 'D's are ancient dragons, one of the more tougher critters in the game and usually down near the level 50 mark.

I turned to Andrew playing next to me and we both freak out a little before looking at all the options and strategizing how to run away without getting eaten or dare we attack?

After 15 minutes we've come up with a semi-decent strategy to take him on (there's no going back) so we take another step and the 'D' changes to red.
"O.M.G"!
Ancient multi-hued dragon! Biggest, baddest dragon around and NO chance of escaping now. We're both screaming at the screen and then, catching ourselves, laughing at each other getting so worked up about one little ASCII character ...


Imagination, the best graphics card bar none.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

This individual has been taken for repairs

Bret headed off on his Tassie holiday yesterday and Iain marked his absence by placing a sign on his desk.


Saturday, June 16, 2007

e65

My phone contract has finally run its course and it's time to get a new one. I've been without my k750i for almost 2 years after it was pinched on my way over to San Fransisco, and my old t610 is great, but the charger doesn't fit well anymore and 1Mb onboard just doesn't cut it nowadays.

The N95 is certainly drawing the plaudits at the moment, but including a GPS that I won't use and a 5megapixel camera that stil doesn't beat our current digital, it's looking like overkill. I like the fact that it has a 3.5mm headphone jack, as there's lots of different things I could do with that (earbuds for on the move, headphone/mic for talking here at home, and output tospeakers for music).

I've settled on an e65 with a $49 cap plan at Optus and I must say. B. E. A.utiful!
Just about all the features I was after came a neat little package. Actually, the size wasn't an issue to start with as I've used the K-JAM at work and it seemed an Ok form factor, but taking the e65 out of the box I was surprised how thin it was for what it could do. Fits in the hand well and even with a somewhat bulky hard case protector it's still thinner than I was expecting.

WiFi is awesome. Never going back. My mobo had wifi built in, but there was no real reason to install it as the system was flaky enough without running stuff I didn' need. It took 5 mins to get it up an running as an access point, most of the time finding the antenna and downloading the latest driver. With it up and running it was a cinch to start browsing straight from the phone. At work it was a tad bit harder to get past the proxy server, and entering the authentication each time I need to get out is painful and certainly going to make it all but a novelty. Connectivity brings all sorts of goodness though. I'm still getting the exchange setup at work to transfer over wifi, but once that's in it'll mean I can receive emails anywhere in the school.



Wifi also brings fring. When I was looking at whether skype could be put onto the e65, I stumbled upon fring as a solution for all voip apps that I use! amazing! Can't wait to test it out. In essence that could mean virtually $0 spent on calls as 95% of them will be within wifi zones. I'm going to be pushing it to get close to the $300 cap anyway, so it's probably a moot point. Hopefully wifi will help me out in Seattle too.

Setting ringtones was pissing me off, but Sandy finally found it hidden in profiles. Makes sense once you find it, but it seemed strange not being able to do a simple mobile task. Sandy was claiming that not understanding how a mobile works is a sign of old age. Pffft.

Contacts needed a bit of a shuffle as the t610 just brought them all over as individual numbers. I brought them into Outlook where it was a bit easier to organise them. You can't seem to set contacts in groups that translate from outlook into the phone though. I later found out that my St Luke's Outlook also had my contacts from a previous sync with the t610, so now I have doubleups too :/

Friday, June 15, 2007

I'm an Expert!

It's official, Experts Exchange have marked me as an expert after a couple of days answering questions. Now I'm able to ask the
hard questions that I've been trying to solve here at St Luke's.

I recall having an EE account earlier in their incarnation as a free service, but they must have shut down old accounts once the paid service came in. Not entirely sure whether it's a workable model with paid membership as it is competing with many other free sites, but the quality of answers is certainly there.

Saturday, June 09, 2007

World Builder Projects

Another good link for lots of world builer projects