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QuakeCon's Photoshopping

Friday, August 24, 2007

I can’t believe I missed this a couple of weeks ago… QuakeCon is a major computer gaming event held anually in Texas since 1996. This year’s event had over 7,000 attendees, and dished out $100,000 in prize money.

What do you think of this:

To promote the event, the organisers posted some pictures from the previous year on their website. One of them showed idle.ee, the Estonian team who won Enemy Territory competition, on stage holding their cheque.

This caused a buzz on some of the gaming community sites (eSReality, xfire) for the wrong reasons. It turns out that someone, probably the QuakeCon webmaster, didn’t think that the original photo projected the right image for Quakecon:

Eventually, the Photoshopped image was removed from the front page, and the original was put in its place, without any explanation from the Quakecon staff. Apparently, the guy who was removed is a German Enemy Territory player called Urtier. I think he has a right to be fairly pissed off.

Filed in Games | | Comments (4)

100 Oldest Domains

Monday, August 20, 2007

The Forrester has compiled a list of the 100 oldest .com domain names.

1.15-Mar-1985SYMBOLICS.COM
2.24-Apr-1985BBN.COM
3.24-May-1985THINK.COM
4.11-Jul-1985MCC.COM
5.30-Sep-1985DEC.COM
6.07-Nov-1985NORTHROP.COM
7.09-Jan-1986XEROX.COM
8.17-Jan-1986SRI.COM
9.03-Mar-1986HP.COM
10.05-Mar-1986BELLCORE.COM
…
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Another All-Ireland Final

Sunday, August 19, 2007

I have to apologise to the Cork football team for dismissing any chance of them reaching the final in this year’s championship. True, the route could have been more difficult, but as Dublin fans have often stressed in the past, you can only beat what’s in front of you. Now the big question is: would we prefer to meet Dublin or Kerry in the final?

Filed in Sport | | Comments (1)

Review of LouderVoice

Sunday, August 19, 2007

A lot done, more to do.

Today I was properly introduced to LouderVoice – a website for reading and writing reviews on just about anything. I’ve seen a couple of LouderVoice reviews popping up around the place, and I can see why so many Irish bloggers have chosen to use the site. The site was launched a few months ago, so perhaps I’m a bit late with this feedback – forgive me if its all been done before.

Firstly the positive stuff:

  • Great logo
  • Lovely colours
  • Nice, clean design.
  • The site is fast and easy to use.
  • TinyMCE?

Now the nitpicking:

ALLCAPS
On the top right hand corner of the page, it says “Welcome James Galvin”. That would be fine, but for the fact that this is rendered by the CSS as “WELCOME JAMES GALVIN”. Loudervoice, why are you shouting? What did I do to deserve this??? All caps are bad, especially when it’s my name – I’m sure there are plenty of web psychologists who can give you the reasons.

Navigation
We have a list of the top seven Loud Reviewers and another list of the top Loud Reviews. What would it take to add a little ‘more’ button down the bottom so that I could peruse the top 25 if I felt like it? Perhaps I’m just old fashioned, but I refuse to resort to tag clouds for navigation. And the search box is no good if I’m just browsing. In my opinion, you need pages and pages of lists. I would browse through review titles all day long. The first time I accessed this site, I went straight for the non-existent ‘more’ button under the Loud Reviewers so that I could browse and find people that I know and read their reviews.

Profile
Profile could be better. These days the web is all about vanity. People want to you to know what’s on the mp3 player, via Last.fm. They tell the world what they’re reading at the moment, through Shelfari and Library Thing. They detail their every move on Twitter and Facebook. More than anything else, people like to write about themselves, and they love filling out profiles. They like a big juicy avatar and they like their buddy list too. I don’t know if the buddy list is necessary, perhaps it would just amount to bloat, but the profile picture is a must. Even newspapers have a little picture of the author on top of the column.

A Louder Voice?
My review of Peel was not added to the main page of any aggregator, like irishblogs.ie, which would normally give me a few readers. It is buried in a website without a weak navigation structure, most likely never to be seen again. How can you make my reviews more visible?

Drafts!
There is one glaring absence – the inability to save a review as a draft. Surely every Wordpress user queues their posts, leaves some of them half written, and likes to double-check before blitzing hundreds of subscribers. At the very least, the lack of a ‘preview’ feature is unforgivable – for all the fancy JavaScript, they could at least give us a lightbox with standard HTML formatting. But all is forgiven when I click on the stars rating. Whoever is responsible for those lovely 30px stars deserves a pat on the back.

In summary
Despite a couple of minor shortcomings, which I’m sure will be fixed in a future version, LouderVoice is a pleasure to use. I look forward to when it has thousands of users, and I’m sure it will be the place to go if you want to get the verdict on some restaurant/movie/book. I’ll dock two stars because there’s a typo in the readme for the Wordpress plugin, but I’ll give one back because the site is made by a Cork company.

Rated 4/5 on Aug 19 2007 by James Galvin
LouderVoice Review Tags:
Vote on this review or write your own at LouderVoice
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Peel

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Stay in the loop with Peel – a user-friendly MP3 blog reader for the Mac.

Review of Peel
Rated as 5/5 on Aug 19 2007 by James

5/5

When I started using Last.fm about a year and a half ago, I thought that was the only playlist I would ever need. I was very happy to scrobble my life away listening to recommendations from my neighbours. I don’t like organizing my music – I go into a frenzy about once a year where every single tag must be perfect, and I usually spend about eight hours capitalising song titles and adding in album information. The rest of the year, I like to just click ‘play’ and leave it at that. The greatest thing about Last.fm is that it knows exactly the kind of music I like, and it finds me more of the same. On the other hand, the downside of Last.fm is that it knows exactly the music I like, and always finds me more of the same. I’m not sure exactly why I overlooked the existence of MP3 Blogs, but I know that extreme laziness is at least partly to blame.

Now I have found Peel, named after the man. It is basically just a music blog feed-reader for the Mac, really nice and simple and easy to use. I have it set to auto-download new tracks from my favourite music blogs, and I will manually play the latest music from the for blogs that I don’t trust quite as much (I don’t want to accidentally auto-download any Sean Bán Breathnach tracks). The best thing about Peel is that it automatically creates a playlist for each blog, and adds the downloaded tracks to iTunes. For some reason, I really hate making playlists.

Now that I’m sold on the product and will happily fork out $15 on a licence, I need to find my favourite music blogs. I was very pleased with the ones that came with Peel.

I know of a couple of music blogs from Ireland which I visit occasionally (please let me know which ones I’m missing, because I’d like to check them out):

I’m working my way through this list to find some sites that I like – please let me know if you have any recommendations.

My feature requests:

  1. A maximum file-size limit for auto-downloading, so that I don’t waste my bandwidth downloading 100mb+ podcasts which happen to be in mp3 form.
  2. The ability to view the title and description of the post accompanying the song. I’m probably missing out on interesting trivia here, or possibly even some important note left by the blogger. I might subscribe to a music blog that I don’t really like, if I felt that it produces the occasional gem, and it would be handy to see the title of the post, just the bogger refers to it as “the greatest song of all time” or something.

It is a great app though, I would advise all you Mac users to check it out. Windows people, I’m sure there is something very similar that you can use. Linux guys, you could probably write a script that does this without the need for a fancy GUI anyway.

LouderVoice Review Tags: , , ,
Rate this review at LouderVoice
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You Don't Snipe in Carentan!

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Call of Duty 2 in the Office (U.S.):

Filed in Games, Humour, TV | | Comments (0)

Best Airport in the World

Sunday, August 5, 2007

I’m in Kuala Lumpur International Airport – named as the best airport in the world in its class. Free wi-fi, lots of shops, reclined seating, loads of space, so clean you could eat off the floor… it is definitely the best airport I’ve ever been in. Although… once upon a time there was a cosy little airport with fish tanks, video games, and old heroes who blissfully indulged their sporting passions in a relaxed atmosphere where everybody knows your name. That was a long time ago, all that remains of this magical place is the effigy of a lonely hurler, dumped on the side of the road like a lump of metal. Where once there dwelt kind old men who sometimes glanced at passports, now there are big wild-eyed security guys who shout at you if you make the metal detector beep. I would mourn its loss, but I’m too tired at the moment and I have a 14 hour flight ahead of me.

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This is not Bowling, this is Nam.

Sunday, July 29, 2007

I’m out in Vietnam for the week… in Saigon / Ho Chi Minh City at the moment, and will probably be heading up to Hanoi and Sapa next weekend. I visited the Cu Chi tunnels today; it was simply unbelievable. The network of cramped underground tunnels was started in 1948 when the Vietnamese were fighting the French. By the time the Americans were involved, the tunnels extended for 200km, with levels as deep as 30m underground. The design was ingenious – booby traps everywhere, tiny air holes every 10m (sometimes reached through a hollow bamboo cane), secret entrances, underground conference rooms, deeper tunnels with flaps to protect from poisonous gas and flame throwers, too deep to be reached by bombs. The American B52 bombers decimated the forest but most of the tunnels are still in tact. The Vietnamese recycled shrapnel from the American bombs, turning it into surgical instruments and spikes for traps.

Although I’ve heard about the tunnels so often in history and in the movies, the magnitude of it had never fully sunk in before. I was nearly sick just from crawling through a 20m stretch which has been widened to allow tourists to fit through… I don’t even want to consider what life was like for the thousands of soldiers who occupied the tunnels together. Saigon is great – I will write some more when I have time and will get some proper photos up too. The photograph on the left is of a hidden entrance to the Cu Chi tunnels. The guide is very small (only about 5 feet tall) but this does give an idea of how tight the tunnels were.

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Glass Art by Xia Xiaowan

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

I’ve spent some today time browsing the website that posted about Tilt Scream Pong: Future Feeder. It’s a bit like BoingBoing but without all the Steampunk. There’s lots of good stuff there… one item that I thought was particularly interesting is this post about a Chinese artist called Xia Xiaowan and his peculiar glass art. Using many layers of thin panes of glass, his art has a unique, ethereal quality… see for yourself here.

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Tilt Scream Pong

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Here is another reason why my MacBook Pro is better than your Thinkpad.

The gameplay revolves around two core principles:

  • Tilt your macbook from side to side to move paddle
  • Scream at your macbook to increase paddle size

This has to be the greatest invention since the seed drill, and it is open source.

Filed in Apple, Games | | Comments (0)