2007

2007 – What we have to show for it (besides Halo 3).

Game Of The Year 2007

For me, the game of year is without doubt:

Halo 3 (IGN Review)- the only truly epic game, complete with the best soundtrack I’ve heard so far in a video game.

Note that I wasn’t a Halo series fan. I thought Halo 1 was a mediocre game, Halo 2 was just “good”, mostly because of the energy sword being so much fun. But after playing Halo 3, I’m now a fan of the series. I even bought Halo 1 for Xbox (I had originally played it on the PC), would’ve bought Halo 2 too if it wasn’t way too expensive for an Xbox game even though a friend of mine has it and I could borrow it anytime, and will probably read at least Halo: The Fall of Reach [wikipedia].

Last time I played (sadly, more than a week ago) I got the Hayabusa armor. I’m definitively going for the Katana that requires 1000 GS (unlocking all achievements). Already setting a team to play through the campaign in legendary with me. Legendary is too hard for a casual gamer like me to play in single player.

Runner Up: there’s just nothing that comes even close to Halo 3! Sorry Bioshock.

Google Reader Went Social

In case you haven’t heard, Google Reader went Social.

Summary: Add people to your gmail chat/gtalk and you’ll be able to see their Reader’s shared items and they’ll be able to see yours. It’s a great way to not miss interesting blog posts (specially “niche posts” that don’t hit the digg frontpage) and to make sure you get the “news that matters” to you.

My contact, if you want to add me to is: luis.rei@gmail.com
My friends list is currently populated by a few fellow Prt.Sc bloggers and Robert Scoble and it’s already great! I hope I can get a few more people in.

This feature was added in a controversial manner: without informing the users that items they had shared with select people were about to be shared with all their contacts. If this happens to be a problem for you, google has posted some “fixes“.

How Not To Organize a Book

rant = “”"

Part 1: Algorithms

Part 2: Methodologies

Part 3: Applications

So for the first two parts I’m supposed to learn about something I dont know what it’s for?

“”"

Firefox 3 Beta 2 – Not so fast

Sadly, the most important addon I use, Google Browser Sync is still not compatible with Firefox 3b2. Google needs to stop slacking… or would need to if it had competition :/

Anyway a few other addons I use are also not compatible yet: Google Gears, DownThemAll, Adblock Plus and the Growl addon.

Oh well, guess I’ll have to wait in memory leak land for a while – at least until Google releases a compatible browser sync.

Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price

Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail speaking at Nokia World 2007.

(via Guy Kawasaki)

TED Talks – Secrets of movement, from geckos and roaches

Robert Full: Secrets of movement, from geckos and roaches

UC Berkeley biologist Robert Full shares his fascination with spiny cockroach legs that allow them to scuttle at full speed across loose mesh and gecko feet that have billions of nano-bristles to run straight up walls. His talk, complete with wonderful slow-mo video of cockroach, crab and gecko gaits, explains his goal of creating the perfect robotic “distributed foot.”

News From The Front Of The Second Browser War

* HTML5

* JS2

A List of Open Source Games

A List of Open Source Games (wikipedia)

Many of these games are lightweight multiplayer and multi-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows)

Personal Picks:
Assault Cube
Armagetron
BZflag
FreeCiv

Must try:
OpenArena
Nexuiz

Unicode and Unicode in Python

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

Unicode in Python
How to Use UTF-8 with Python
Unicode HOWTO

Updated: added more links