Dead Island
2011-09-22
Dead Island was one of the games that I really was looking up to. It all started with the cinematic trailer. It gave the zombie apocalypse a human touch; these are real families that are torn apart. It was a hart shattering experience, that made you mad at those zombies!
As Yahtzee very nicely pointed out, there is actually no use in getting hyped up in a game. So I laid back and waited, without much aspirations and now the game is out. I am not fully through the game, but here is what I think about it.
Passphrases are Stronger then Passwords.
2011-09-09
What is a good password? We all know the answer to this question. A good and thus safe password is long, has mixed case characters, number, special characters and is not a word in any language. On first glance this seems always like a password that is hard to remember. If you want to check how good your password is, there is a nifty website for this.
If you follow these guidelines "dKmeoD2!kkdpoqaEs5" sounds like a good password, but can you remember it? These "safe" passwords are really hard to remember. But there are long passwords or rather passphrases that are easy to remember, such as "Oh no! 2 nuns on the mountain.". Yes, this is a real sentence. But it fulfills all the requirements, mixed case, numbers, special characters and is not a word.
Working Around Jekyll's Safe Mode
2011-08-21
github has this nifty service github pages and under the hood they use jekyll. The concept is quite simple, you maintain a jekyll site lives in a special reopsitory and they transform it to plain HTML using jekyll.
The biggest problem I have with jekyll is that it is quite limited. To combat this jekyll has a plugin system, where you add extensions and modifications under the _plugin folder in your jekyll site. A feature that I kind of "need" to operatre this site.
The problem with github pages is that they operate jekyll with the "safe mode". This disables the plugin feature and renders github pages unsuable for me.
Since I am a cheap sod, I still want to use the service. The trick is that you don't need to have a jekyll site and can just put plain HTML pages in the service. The simple solution, tha master branch only contains the processed HTML files and the actual jekyll site is stored under the branch raw. You can see my current stup.
libxml-0.5 released
2011-08-21
libxmlmm is an effort by me to maintain a C++ wrapper for libxml2 that only depends on libxml2 and standard C++. It features a full XML DOM with XPath queries and the whole shebang offered by libxml2 (validation, DTD, etc.)
I am proud to anounce the release of version 0.5 of libxmlmm. Only minor fixes where applied to the code and so marks the heigh stability of the code. Check out the version 0.5 of libxmlmm.
Age of Empires Online
2011-08-17
It totally passes by me that Microsoft had developed a new Age of Empires title, but a colleague of mine told me. I kind of though that the Age of Empires franchise kind of died with Ensemble Studios closing doors. Being an avid Age of Empires fan, I decided to give the free to play variation a spin. Yesterday the game went public and I quickly installed to game.
The installation procedure was kind of awkward, since you only install the launcher and any missing frameworks. The actual game is downloaded and installed though the launcher, so it lets you wait a good while. The full installation procedure took around half an hour, though it might be that lots of people downloaded the game at the same time.
The first impression I got from the trailer and art was that the art direction of the game wanted to make the entire thing more friendly. Although quite funny, the trailer has difficulty of selling the game to me. But you should not judge the game by its first impression; I liked and played lots of Plant vs Zombies and that is cartoony and cute.
What Cloud?
2011-08-05
Cloud computing is now becoming mainstream. But what is cloud computing? Actually it is noting, it's just a buzzword that is used for different concepts.
Code Reviews
2011-07-14
I will take a bold stance, experienced and dedicated programmers do not need code reviews. The reason is simple, they produce the cleanest and safest code you can imagine by pure virtue of caring for their craft and taking pride in their work.
I recently read a not so good opinion on the subject. The line that most struck me was when it mockingly states that the original Unix developers did not do code reviews. But to me, the bold statement "We were all pretty good coders." rings so true. I have seen great developers produce great code that no amount of code review could make better. But there must be some truth to all those quality improving precipices handed to us over the decades?
Section 8
2011-07-05
... almost perfect.
Section 8: Prejudice is a real breath of fresh air in the shooter scene. The game is a SciFi shooter where you are playing as a space marine in the distant future. The game is intended as a multiplayer game but has a 6 hour "tutorial" campaign. The campaign is fun an the narrative makes sense but still keeps to the core of the multiplayer gameplay.
Duke was fun...
2011-06-30
Everybody agrees, Duke Nukem Forever got really bad reviews. You can basically put the reviews into two categories, those that complained that Duke Nukem Forever was not enough like Call of Duty and those that complained that Duke Nukem Forever was not enough like the original Duke Nukem 3D. But I tend to disagree and I think they kind of miss the point. Sure the game is not perfect, but the game was fun!
How to retain your sanity
2011-06-08
... while writing software.
Over the years I have keep a set of functions that moved from one project to the next. These where small functions that served the sole process of retaining my own sanity. After feeling the need to use these functions in two of my free software projects, I decided to encapsulate them in a small library called sanity.
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