waiting

I admit, I'm not the most patient person in the world but I think that I deserve at least a little sympathy. All I've been looking at for the past hour is variants of this:



I have ideas swimming around my head and rather than doing anything about them I've had to browse the web, drink beer or do any other rest related activity that I could think of. Knowing that you need to, can do, and want to work but not being able to, as I have discovered, is one of the most frustrating things you can imagine.

I'm not adverse to procrastinating, but having it forced upon you it just not right.

monsters in my closet

Picture it - the next time monsters leap out of your closet to eat you up, you can beat them to death with your bedside table. Genius.



Although this is just some arty thing by some bloke that insists all things should have 2 uses, I still don't like seeing products designed to reinforce paranoia. Perhaps I just feel for the dimwits that get taken for a ride. Perhaps I actually do care about people. Perhaps I do in fact have feelings and even sympathy! Then again, perhaps not.

little monkeys

Apparently both ben and I refer to small children as little monkeys.

Heh - small world

resolutions resolved

If you've ever wondered what the HDTV resolutions mean then I've found the site for you. It explains the difference between progressive and interlaced modes and offers an easy to read comic helping you decide which you think is better (depending on how racist you are)

Read here: Comic: 720p vs. 1080i - The Great HD TV Debate EXPLAINED and SOLVED

well documented

Online role playing games have become a very big thing. When mistakes like this happen, I don't want to be part of the backlash.

This evening, while restoring a character for a user who had apparently deleted it by accident, Andy accidentally deleted all the characters in the database. This would be kind of funny, if it wasn't for ALL OF OUR CHARACTERS BEING DELETED (!@#!@#). So, anyway, we've restored from a backup made at 4:00 AM (CST) this morning. Character changes made since then will not be reflected in the database, except for the handful of lucky people who happened to be online when Andy had his snafu, and had their characters preserved through activation on the server.

We sincerely, sincerely apologize for this. It's the first instance of a problem we've ever had like this, and it was a pretty bizarre event that caused it (not entirely Andy's fault.. partially mysqldump apparently acting in a way other than documented). To apologize, we've given all paying users a free week of gameplay.

"partially mysqldump apparently acting in a way other than documented" - oooh that smarts.

cotton armour

I find this very impressive. It's a soft hat that goes hard on impact; a soft-hardhat if you will.

It's designed by an ingenious company in bern. Apparently they're not all slow down there.

Now you too can look as cool as this guy.

serialisation

I just left a meeting that essentially described changing the development process at work to become more serial rather than parallel. The underlying idea is that completing 1 task at a time is better than all tasks at the same time, for a number of reasons. It was a little more in depth than that, but the general trend of moves from parallel to serial interests me.

Other moves from parallel to serial include:

• SATA vs PATA in hard disks
  
• Java's UI Libraries: Swing (Single threaded) vs. AWT (Multi threaded)
  
• Hyper threading: Multiple effective CPUs but the actual tasks are executed serially
  
• USB - Universal Serial Bus
  
• Firewire is serial
  

I had thought of more but I've since forgotten them; at 4pm my time is better spent working than blogging so I'll leave it at that ;)

Lets hope they don't extend the serial concept to christmas lights.

size matters

I just had a quick look down the front page of Kotaku and saw this rather amusing comparison.

To the left is a Gamecube, the current generation console offering from Nintendo. To the right is just the power supply unit of the next generation offering from Microsoft, the xbox 360.

Impressive stuff!

first impressions

I just came back from a 2 week holiday in the states. I'd like to blog about a few things over there, but here's a quick summary of the places I visited.

• Boston: Very European, balanced well.
  
• New York: Not all it's cracked up to be, but easy to cross the road
  
• Texas: Lots of malls; nice scenery
  
• The country as a whole: Nice people and not as fat as I expected.