techniQal support

Just saw this over on Incase and I want one. What better way to cover all of those damn smudges. So if anyone wants to give this poor tech obsessed father $50, put it towards one of these bad boys. It will go nicely with my favorite laptop bag ever .

Check out the demo in the video–nice…

I was inspired to write a quick mini review of Army of Two since Derek mentioned it over on leftwise.com . I was compelled to buy this game as a content filler between releases of the games I really want ( GTA4, etc.) . This has usually been a moderately reliable strategy, and tends to result in at least a few hours of good gaming.I tend to enjoy FPS and TPS shooters.

It turns out that there are quite a few things about this game that end up overshadowing anything positive I could say.

1. The static(on rails) path the game takes you down is at times frustrating and un-imaginative. GOW, and many other shooters find ways to make level progression fluid, or interesting enough to distract you from the reality of what is going on. It is not really that fun to clear a map, and the only dynamic thing about it was that you got to hoist your coop partner up on a box. Goldeneye on Nintendo 64 had better map layout and level progression.
2. AI,AI,AI . I thought I would play the single player campaign before goading someone else into getting it( so I could have a coop partner). I know AI is hard, and there are a lot of developers/publishers doing interesting things with it, but those people didn’t work on this game. Your coop buddy likes to get stuck and run around in circles when you most need him. And the enemy units have two modes : “hide behind box and shoot”, and “run straight at you” . This means that you either setup up your buddy to give covering fire, and kill 50 dudes untouched, or you get killed by one guy because you can’t get your damn buddy to turn around, standup, or otherwise care about the bullets hitting him in the face.
3. Targeting system: This game employs some of the same targeting methods as other XB360 games, and in theory these usually work great. In this case, the controls are jumpy, and targeting is more about luck than accuracy. There is just a lack of precision there that grinds on me.

Full disclosure: I didn’t play any online yet or true coop. I judge games like this based on how good the one player experience is. Unless you tell me a game is only multi-player, there needs to be a solid single player experience. This game just didn’t do it for me. I found myself playing it not because I enjoyed it, but because EA stole another $60 out of my pocket, and I didn’t want to waste it. I have been taught this lesson many times, and usually just rent when I am unsure about a game. Maybe I will learn the lesson some day.

(Idiot, why don’t you learn…)

Antonio over at antoniocangiano.com has a great article about the effect the rise of Rails and Ruby has had on Python.

I totally agree with him regarding the meteoric rise in popularity of Rails buoying scripting languages such as python. I believe more and more businesses are choosing, or are open enough, to implement Rails and Django solutions for their webapps. On top of other MVC frameworks, both Django and Rails allow for fast and sometimes cheap development (the non-cheap comes in if you have to hire an over-priced rails consultant). The visibility is definitely changing the way businesses view scripting languages and allow them to be seen as a viable alternative to Java and other enterprise adopted technologies.

I have had a man-crush on python for quit some time, and try to spout off about it’s benefits whenever I can.
I have been so close to starting a series of blog posts surrounding Python and the ease of adoption for the non-programmer. As soon as I have more time…

This is almost too cool to describe. Put on some headphones for the full experience. The concept is really simple, but turns out some really cool results.

Large Flash (frontal view), ComicCon 2007, San Diego, CA.jpg

Originally uploaded by gruntzooki

A picture is worth a thousand words. A thousand sad, sad words.

That’s right. This is now the fastest blog in the entire world. Maybe…

Regardless, this is the new and improved techniQal support . I have finally made the giant leap from hosting my blog on an old webserver in the guest bedroom, which was served by my residential dsl, to an actual external VPS host.

After months of looking, and deciding what I really wanted out of a host, I decided on Linode .

The price point for what you get is really pretty good, and I get to have the flexibility of having my own server, with the performance that I can’t get by having my own server(at home).

Thus far, everything about their product is easy to use, and you can even choose to be part of their Xen beta when signing up.

So if you are looking for flexibility for your hosting, I highly recommend them.

ps.

checkout the list of distro’s they support out of the box:

Arch Linux
Centos 5.0
Debian 4.0
Fedora Core 8
Gentoo 2007.0
OpenSUSE 10.3
Slackware 12.0
Ubuntu 7.10
CentOS 4.0 (RHEL)
Fedora Core 6
Mandrake 9.1
Slackware 10
Ubuntu 6.06
Ubuntu 7.04

I hope everyone saw that we released two new wijits at lijit that I think are really cool.
Look to your right, then down a bit, and you should see our new map and list statistics widgets.

The map highlights the global locations of all of my recent page views, direct searches, and external search engine searches.
(Hover over the dots on the map to see the data related to that visit).

The list does the same thing, but displays in a more readable format.

Due to this new knowledge, I can happily say:
“Hey” to my reader from Pennsauken, New Jersey
“Willkommen und Hallo” to my reader from Bremen, Germany
“Willkumm” to my reader from Zurich, Switzerland
“Hola” to my reader from Buenos Aires, Argentina

To install this on your blog, follow the succinct and accurate instructions at my co-worker Tara’s blog.

I recently added a new use for my awesome Colorado Ski Report rss feed.
I am parsing the data, trimming it down, and posting it on twitter . You can receive ski and weather info via twitter every day, just by following http://twitter.com/snowing .
Be aware, that you will be getting ~17 updates a day around 6 am MT.
If that doesn’t scare you off, follow this twitter user for your daily dose of ski conditions and weather.
Each tweet features the resort name, snow in the last 24 hrs, mid-mountain depth, current weather, and the forecast for the next day.

Feel free to email with suggestions for how to make this better at techniblog at gmail dot com .

Todo:
Setup web interface to allow you to subscribe to “my” ski resorts,and just get DM’s for those results.

Just having some fun with the iSight, iStopMotion, and iMovie.

Here at Lijit we spend plenty of time testing stuff for new software releases . As anyone who has to test software knows, the monotony sets in, and you need to find novel ways to make the work fun. My favorite option involves using Lijit to search for ridiculous search terms, and then being amazed at what I find in my extended network. Example : “Monkey Pants”

Today, the search term was “beer”, and the end result is the awesome tool Kegulator.
It helps you by calculating your beer/ice/cups needs based on the number of people attending your “kegger”, and evaluating the drinking habits of those guests.
This may be an invaluable tool for those spring skiing expeditions, and summer barbecues.
I just think it’s a cool idea.