July 2010 Archives

These are all the Twinkie Denial Conditions described in my “Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!” Designer’s Notebook columns. Each one is an egregious design error, although many of them have appeared in otherwise great games. I’ve organized them into general categories. If you want to learn more about one, just click on it and it will take you directly to the place in the column in which I discuss it. And if you have suggestions for more, by all means send me E-mail and tell me about them! Most of these were contributed by frustrated gamers.

On my daily 25-minute ferry ride to Central, there is a point midway through this journey where the signal bars on any mobile phone simply vanish for a moment and then instantly reappear. Using the iPhone 4, there was no instance when the bars disappeared for an extended time.

Serious question: Is anyone in the [Microsoft] MacBU old enough to buy beer?

Are you a case vendor looking to design a carrying case for iPod, iPhone or iPad? You don't need to be in the MFi Program, simply use the following dimensional drawings to get started with all the measurements you need for current and past products.

While Cork certainly was not immune from the frenzied over-development of the Celtic Tiger period, the fact that to a certain extent this development followed a coherent plan means that in the long-run this may not be as destructive as in other counties, where development has left run amok without rhyme or reason. Furthermore, it speaks more fundamentally about the difficulty of implementing a strategic approach to planning in the Irish context. Because of the vagaries of planning structures and the lack of statutory regional policies, strategic planning is constantly challenged and undermined.

An Improved Liberal, Accurate Regex Pattern for Matching URLs

The following are suggestions for the best magazine articles (in English) ever. Arranged in chronological order. Stars denote how many times a correspondent has suggested it. For a great way to read long-form magazine articles on a tablet device see my review here.

AppleTV just got realllllllllly interesting. Existing AppleTVs — the one Apple product you’ve forgotten about, the one that sits at the back of the class and never raises its hand — are MacOS devices. They’re controlled via IR remotes and thus they require line-of-site between the device and the operator. With the Magic Trackpad in the product lineup, Apple could completely reinvent the AppleTV as a device that hides somewhere behind your TV, runs a new flavor of iOS, and ships with a Magic Trackpad instead of a clickybutton remote.

On a visit to meet fans at the annual Book Fair, Horowitz says that as an outsider, he found Hong Kong intriguing because it struck him as a "bubble" environment. "How do you leave it?" he ponders. "You can fly and get on a boat, but still there's a feeling of it being like a prison.''

...is a simple application that can be used to read, write, update, delete and backup your sim card contacts. It open and save also some format files to manage your contacts also in a text files. To connect monosim to your smartcard you need use a standard PCSC smartcard reader as towitoko, acs, athena, blutronics, etc.

...is a simple application that can be used to read, write, update, delete and backup your sim card contacts. It open and save also some format files to manage your contacts also in a text files. To connect monosim to your smartcard you need use a standard PCSC smartcard reader as towitoko, acs, athena, blutronics, etc.

(Link Fixed!) Have you ever watched a lightning storm in awe? Join the crowd. Oddly, nobody knows exactly how lightning is produced. What is known is that charges slowly separate in some clouds causing rapid electrical discharges (lightning), but how electrical charges get separated in clouds remains a topic of much research. Lightning usually takes a jagged course, rapidly heating a thin column of air to about three times the surface temperature of the Sun. The resulting shock wave starts supersonically and decays into the loud sound known as thunder. Lightning bolts are common in clouds during rainstorms, and on average 6,000 lightning bolts occur between clouds and the Earth every minute. Pictured above, an active lightning storm was recorded over Athens, Greece earlier this month.

Have you ever watched a lightning storm in awe? Join the crowd. Oddly, nobody knows exactly how lightning is produced. What is known is that charges slowly separate in some clouds causing rapid electrical discharges (lightning), but how electrical charges get separated in clouds remains a topic of much research. Lightning usually takes a jagged course, rapidly heating a thin column of air to about three times the surface temperature of the Sun. The resulting shock wave starts supersonically and decays into the loud sound known as thunder. Lightning bolts are common in clouds during rainstorms, and on average 6,000 lightning bolts occur between clouds and the Earth every minute. Pictured above, an active lightning storm was recorded over Athens, Greece earlier this month.

All that's missing is the 20 misspelled tags -- Gene Weingarten, Gene Wiengarten, Gene Weingarden, Jean Weingarten, Gene Wine Garden, etc. -- for true Master Douche-level SEO.

The Time-Lapse Photography FAQ: An Introduction to Time-Lapse Photography

The interval mode of all of the cameras listed above starts at 5 seconds (it is the shortest possible interval), and it is also a basic increment of this mode (you can set the interval to 5, 10, 15, 20, ... seconds, up to 1 or 3 hours, depending on the model). There is no software limit for the total number of images you can take in the interval mode (at full camera resolution). These features make the Ricoh cameras unique on the present market, no other compact camera manufacturer offers such combination of parameters in the time-lapse mode.

How to set up DNSSEC validation with BIND-9.7

This HOWTO is intended for those people who want to deploy DNSSEC and are seeking a document that lives between a typical high level description of the topic (see the excellent Surfnet White Paper on DNSSEC for that (http://www.surfnet.nl/Documents/DNSSSEC-web.pdf ), the typical out of the box recipe, and an in depth description of the technology.

If you'd love to back up all your Nintendo DS games and carry them around on a single and inexpensive game cartridge you can play on any DS, DS Lite, DSi, DSi XL, this guide is for you.

You can build just about any app you can imagine with App Inventor. Often people begin by building games like WhackAMole or games that let you draw funny pictures on your friend's faces. You can even make use of the phone's sensors to move a ball through a maze based on tilting the phone. But app building is not limited to simple games. You can also build apps that inform and educate. You can create a quiz app to help you and your classmates study for a test. With Android's text-to-speech capabilities, you can even have the phone ask the questions aloud. To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app's behavior.

No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains: Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bailout should be free, small and risk-bearing. We got ourselves into the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France, in the 1980s, the Socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

The components and functions of the SCL are:- * Tai Wai to Hung Hom (11km long) : Extension of Ma On Shan Line from Tai Wai to Hung Hom, via South East Kowloon and then connect to Kowloon Southern Link and West Rail Line. This railway line will significantly increase the Shatin-Kowloon capacity and provide railway service to the new developments in South East Kowloon. * Fourth Rail Harbour Crossing (6km long) : Extension of the East Rail Line across the harbour to Hong Kong Island. This railway line will increase the cross-harbour rail capacity and enhance the connectivity between the new territories and Hong Kong Island.

Muppets Studio MuppetsStudio's Channel Subscribe

A space elevator is a proposed structure designed to transport material from a celestial body's surface into space. Many variants have been suggested, all of which involve travelling along a fixed structure instead of using rocket powered space launch. The concept most often refers to a structure that reaches from the surface of the Earth on or near the Equator to geostationary orbit (GSO) and a counter-mass beyond.

The statistic that stands out most for me, however, is the prediction that 120,000 people will emigrate: 70,000 in the year ending April 2010 and 50,000 in the year ending April 2011. This will take us back to the kinds of numbers emigrating at the end of 1980s. Such emigration wi’ll provide a little bit of a safety valve on welfare payments, but the country will also lose a cohort of relatively young workers, many of them well skilled.

Ex-IMF economists predicts gloom for China property Reuters in Beijing 12:28pm, Jul 06, 2010 The mainland’s property market is beginning a collapse that will hit the banking system, Harvard University economics Kenneth Rogoff told Bloomberg Television. Property transactions have dropped and prices are stagnating in the wake of steps in recent months by the central government to cool the market. Xu Shaoshi, minister of land and resources, said at the weekend that he expected prices to start falling within a few months. “You’re starting to see that collapse in property and it’s going to hit the banking system,” Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, told the agency. Not everyone agrees. Because home owners must make a downpayment of at least 20 per cent and many pay entirely in cash, there is relatively little leverage in the mainland’s property market. ...

Communism and the financial crisis, cartoon edition

(Look at the author photo)

I, Sam the Eagle, present a musical salute to America. (c) 2009 The Muppets Studio, LLC

Version 0.9.3.20 June 29, 2010 Beta expiration extended to September 1st, 2010 Version 0.9.3.19 April 30, 2010 Beta expiration extended to July 1st, 2010