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Monthly Archives: May 2008
Morrowind Mods
By request I’m once again posting a list of Morrowind mods which I’m currently using. Before you start installing mods however, a quick caveat emptor. If you install a mod, then play for few days, decide you hate it and … Continue reading
Posted in video games
23 Comments
Cylons don’t know about SPOF
Back to my BSG complaints. Once again, I wanted to preface this post by saying that I’m bashing this show ONLY because I love it to death. I am a big BSG fan and as such I am allowed to … Continue reading
Simultaneous Inventions and Patents
Kevin Kelly recently wrote an interesting article he titled Simultaneous Invention. I highly recommend that you read it and draw your own conclusions, but if you are to lazy for that, I’m going to give you short summary and my … Continue reading
Metaprogramming in PHP
Not so long ago I wrote about few meta programming tricks in Javascript. These are really powerful programming techniques that let you create elegant frameworks with generic code that adapts to your needs at runtime. But Javascript is not the … Continue reading
It’s just a model…
There is one thing that totally kills my immersion in a video game – it is the Monty Phythonesque realization that “it’s just a model”. In other words, if I see a piece of scenery – such as a house, … Continue reading
Magic the Gathering Joke Revisited
I noticed that some blogs I read routinely close comments on old posts, supposedly to avoid spam. There is even a WordPress plugin that does this for you. I find that practice silly. I keep spam at bay via filtering, … Continue reading
Sexuality in Video Games
The other day Shamus posted about the self imposed censorship of Indigo Prophecy also known to Fahrenheit outside the US. I played this game in it’s original form with all the sex scenes a while ago. Because of the paths … Continue reading
Clothing in Computer RPG Games
I have fallen off the wagon, and I’m fully addicted to Morrowind once again. Every 5 or 6 months I reinstall this game, mod it up to the point where it looks presentable (I’m currently using a complete re-texturing mod, … Continue reading
Will Conscious Machines Spam Us?
Is it possible to create a self conscious, self learning AI that would be able to think autonomously? This question still remains to be answered, but everything that we know about technology suggests that the answer is yes. It’s only … Continue reading
Posted in technology
9 Comments
Making Websites Without Serverside Scripting
Here is an interesting task: make a semi decent website, which is pretty, and maintainable without using any server side scripting or server side includes. In other words, we want a website that has a header, footer, a navigation sidebar … Continue reading
Using Email as Online Storage
I previously wrote about two of my observations regarding use of email among the young and technologically clueless college students. First observation was that none of my students ever had a straight POP3 or IMAP email account in their life. … Continue reading
My MSU Email Debacle
For like a week or two now, I noticed something strange and yet not entirely unpleasant happening to my inbox. There were no angry emails from students complaining that I didn’t grade their homework submitted 3 weeks late the very … Continue reading
Since the 1800′s…
I wanted to share with you a final slide from a presentation made by one of my students. I wish I was making this up, but I’m not. You can judge whether this is funny or very sad by yourself: … Continue reading
Posted in school and teaching
20 Comments
Loading Startup Applications… Please Wait…
This is going to be a quick rant about usability. Recently I noticed that a lot of Windows XP and Vista users get very frustrated with their machine at boot time. This frustration stems from the fact that while their … Continue reading
Sandman: First Impression
I grew up on comic books. However, since I was growing up in post communist Poland my first comic book fascinations were stuff like Capitan Kloss, Funky Koval, and Thorgal. Especially the last two titles were bit more serious titles, … Continue reading
Why Software DRM Doesn’t Work
I talk about DRM a lot, but I never really found a perfect way to explain it to people who are clueless about technology. When I teach a class on digital media, and go over DRM I usually briefly cover … Continue reading
Few Words on LaTex Fonts
LaTex documents have a very distinctive look. First of all, they do look very pretty in print since they actually use professional typesetting techniques to make the text flow nicely on the page which makes them stand out when juxtaposed … Continue reading
On Linux Hardware Compatibility
I love how anti-linux advocates and windows fanbois always pick on Linux for hardware compatibility or rather lack of thereof. Just about every rant about Linux I have seen so far includes a gripe about it not supporting new or … Continue reading
The Twitter Threading Problem
I love Twitter, but ever since I started using it I felt that the way it implemented the reply system was a bit lacking. On one hand they made it very simple to reply to people. Simply start your message … Continue reading
Send a HTTPS POST request with C#
The other day I wrote about my little Drag and Drop application and mentioned I wanted it to send HTTPS POST requests to an existing PHP web application. I thought it would be a relatively trivial task, but it turned … Continue reading
No More Excuses for Booting into Windows Partiton
I said it before, and I’ll say it again – Linux is not for everyone. Convincing people to switch their primary OS is a little bit like trying to convince someone to change their religion, or political views. It’s possible, … Continue reading
Comcast Cosed my Outbound Port 25 Yesterday
I’m posting this a day late because it took me a whole morning to figure this one out. It appears that Comcast has completely blocked both inbound and outbound traffic on port 25 for my company. For a few years … Continue reading
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