LOL – 300 meets Super Mario
Posted: April 17th, 2007All the king requires is a simple offering of earth and water.
Just Another Day On That Old Series Of Tubes We Call The Internets
Posted: April 10th, 2007The Internet is a funny place indeed. It’s filled with trolls and self righteous idiots who like to argue with each other pointlessly. Both of each often delusional to the point of thinking themselves important people…
Today on slashdot: Bloggers Propose Code of Conduct. Did I mention these people have a lot of free time on their hands? This has to be among the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard. In Internet speak: WTFLOLBBQ?!? Yeah I know it makes no sense but it is clearly called for.
David Maynor wrote about this and I agree with what he said.
Some people (or just one person, who knows) made a anonymous comments insulting and threatening some random blogger I never heard off. If you’ve been around The Internets for more than a couple of weeks you probably know that stuff like that happens very very often. In fact there are people who do this for fun on a daily basis, one could call them professional trolls if they were being paid. The blogger in question instead of doing what normal people do and ignore the nasty anonymous comments instead reasoned that if the Secret Service takes all threats against The President Of The United States Of America seriously, she should do likewise. Ahhh! Delusional paranoia – it feels good to know I’m important!
Enter the other half of the pointless Internet discussions: the self righteous idiots who think they can argue with trolls and defeat them thanks to their principles and moral superiority. These people decided to jump to the defense of the delusional blogger and a lot of pointless, boring blog posts ensued taking the signal-to-noise ratio of the Internet down another notch.
This would’ve been lame enough by itself but why stop the stupidity here? Know that the issue was hot, Tim O’Reilly had to jump in! I doubt Tim O’Reilly is dumb enough to think this lame Code of Conduct for bloggers would ever change anything so my own personal opinion is that he just wanted attention (or publicity, whatever you want to call it).
Jeff Jarvis already made a good post (though a bit too long for me to bother reading it in full) about this blogger code of conduct.
I have this to say: this is MY blog. You don’t like it? Don’t read it. I really don’t care. I’ll say what I want to say. You have a problem with it? Hint: comments are disabled.
That said, I always appreciate corrections (yeah, sometimes I’m wrong – hard to believe right?) and I’m usually willing to clarify any issue. For example, I often make comments about software I use(d). And sometimes the people who write it happen to be monitoring technorati or whatever. They are always welcome to email me asking me to elaborate on any comment I made or whatever.
Blogs are meant to express their writers opinions (etc). If blogger A wants to insult person B in his blog, that’s his prerogative. The rest of us can chose to read it or not. And after reading it, we can chose to ignore it if we want. Or take sides. Freedom is a wonderful thing and we should be very careful when we consider limiting it in any way – voluntarily or otherwise.
It will undoubtedly be fun to watch the “me too” blogs jump on the code of conduct bandwagon and display their stupidity with pride. It will become a sort of “lack of quality/personality/etc” banner to unite them.
feup tags
Posted: April 5th, 2007FEUP Tags is a bookmark sharing service (like del.icio.us) made available by NEACM to students, teachers and employees of the faculty.
During the past semester’s exam season, having found several links to useful information and software on the Internet (like JFLAP) I began to wonder what would be the best way to share them with my fellow students. The service now called “FEUP Tags” was my answer.
FEUP Tags follows the recent launch of FEUP Blogs (which already has some interesting blogs like procself). Both projects clearly complement each other and are part of a more ambicious goal: to create an online community at FEUP – one that everyone will find a useful resource in their academic and/or professional life. Something that brings the people of the faculty “closer” in a way and makes it a better place to study at and work in.
It’s not an easy goal at all. Software alone can’t do it but I for one believe that the people want the faculty to be more than just “a place”.
That said, a lot of work remains. Both Blogs & Tags are far from finished projects. In particular Tags was done mostly over the past couple of weeks which were rather busy for me and the next three weeks will be even worse. Not to mention that I need to get another project (a more work related service that will be quite useful) out of the door before devoting any more of my time to Tags. On top of that there’s some chefax-related stuff that needs to be taken care off.
Funny enough, I haven’t even had the chance to put my own bookmarks there. I’ll do it this weekend.
I still need to see if the scuttle project wants any of the small modifications (read hacks) I made (which probably need to be slightly cleaned up). Filipe will probably submit his Portuguese translation to the scuttle project sometime in the near future I think.
The point is, there’s a lot to be done but there’s something out there now.
Sleepless in Oporto
Posted: April 3rd, 2007Can’t sleep… sigh. The positive thing is that at least I’ve finally finished The Histories. I’m now going to start reading the History of the Peloponnesian War.
One of the things I like when reading history books is learning how little we have changed since… well… the dawn of history.
Bonus excerpt from the last paragraph of The History of Herodotus (the very last lines actually):
O Cyrus! come now, let us quit this land wherein we dwell—for it is a scant land and a rugged—and let us choose ourselves some other better country. Many such lie around us, some nearer, some further off: if we take one of these, men will admire us far more than they do now. Who that had the power would not so act? And when shall we have a fairer time than now, when we are lords of so many nations, and rule all Asia?” Then Cyrus, who did not greatly esteem the counsel, told them,—“they might do so, if they liked—but he warned them not to expect in that case to continue rulers, but to prepare for being ruled by others—soft countries gave birth to soft men—there was no region which produced very delightful fruits, and at the same time men of a warlike spirit.” So the Persians departed with altered minds, confessing that Cyrus was wiser than they; and chose rather to dwell in a churlish land, and exercise lordship, than to cultivate plains, and be the slaves of others.
New Toys: Part V – Samsung D900
Posted: April 2nd, 2007I mentioned the D900 before. I finally got one. It’s everything I expected and more… except for one little detail – some frikin retard at Samsung decided it was OK or even a good idea to cripple the phone by not allowing people to use their own message tone (instead you can only choose from one of the 10 that come with the phone and suck). Sigh I wanted to use an excerpt of Senator Ted Stevens “Series of Tubes“* speech as a message tone…
Anyway I’m extremely happy with this new toy – finally a phone I actually like and don’t find anoying (i.e. crippled by Nokia Crap OS TM and the brick-fetishism of their design team).
Seriously this phone pwns! Samsung has a clear technological (both in software and hardware) and design lead over it’s competitors in the cellphone market (at least Nokia, Motorolla and anything lame enough to use Windows – it’s bad on the desktop but it’s a lot worse on a phone).
And since today I feel like giving things “scores”, I give the Samsung D900 a 9.9/10 – not a 10/10 because of that retarded message tone thing I mentioned earlier.
*the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention another annoyingly stupid “feature” of the D900 – Samsung decided to include proprietary headphones – crappy, uncomfortable ones at that – instead of simply including an adapter. Fortunately there are adapters. I wonder if I can find them here in Portugal.
Jade Empire
Posted: April 2nd, 2007Last week I was looking for a game to play (cuz STALKER ain’t an option – it’s one of the worst games I’ve ever played, second only to a playstation game that featured a little ninja dude in “2D rainbow world” jumping at gold coins which could be described as old school Sonic meets Ninja in happy crayon land).
I was given Jade Empire (IGN Review) and told it’s “KOTOR in Ancient China” or something like that. I already knew the game from when it first came out as an xbox exclusive but I wasn’t sure what to expect.
I really liked it. I finished the game in under one week – mostly by cutting into my sleep time and playing it a few times till 3-4 AM. Hehehe. Anyway, I liked the story/plot, even if nowhere as good as KOTOR‘s. The game is an RPG but it’s my kind of RPG – items aren’t anoying (i.g. no boring inventory or weight system), talking to people is only a small, mostly optional part of the game, combat is fun and the style system keeps it from getting boring. The game achieves a decent level of “immersion” (that hard to quantify/define quality that I find so essential in a videogame).
I recommend Jade Empire (if you like the genre – kotor-like rpg) and give it a score of 7/10 (maybe even 8/10 – it has some kickass evil stuff like being able to kill all the anmoying NPCs in my that “help me” throughout the game and I really liked Death’s Hand, he’s one badass mothaf… a Kung Fu Darth Vader).