Google Video: Movers & Shakers

War ja klar, dass es in dem neuen Ranking bei Google Video eigentlich nur um Fußball geht.
Ich hab allerdings eine erfreuliche Anomalie entdeckt: Diablo 2 auf Platz 10.

How was your spam today?

As I checked my mail on sunday morning I saw something special - spam.
Okay, spam is not so special per se, but this one got through my spam filter.
Thunderbirds spamfilter is quite powerful, so I wondered how this mail landed in my inbox.
Looking more closely I saw that there is a quote from "The Hobbit" or some other book of the "Lord of the rings" saga below the usual \/!@GRA crap. Here is the complete text from the mail:

M E R " D i A
V A L " U M
V " A G R A
A M B " E N
L E V " T R A
X & N A X
P R 0 Z & C

all 50 % off - http://www.serromocca.com

---

astray sometimes when you are off on dangerous adventures over the Edge of the Wild; and Gandalf was a wise enough wizard to know it. He knew that something unexpected might happen, and he hardly dared to hope that they would pass without fearful adventure over those great tall mountains with lonely peaks and valleys where no king ruled. They did not. All was well, until one day they met a thunderstorm more than

As I skipped through my spam folder I found several other mails like this. Maybe I get the complete story if I wait long enough.

*Updated* comment collapser for Slashdot

The first thing I discovered in the morning was the new Slashdot layout. How ugly!
It's not the layout I'm complaining about, but my GreaseMonkey script to collapse the comments was broken and didn't look quite right.
It took me about half an hour to fix it, but the I saw how nice the menu to the left slides if you click on the small triangles.
To make a long story short, I spent half the day implementing this behaviour in my script.
Unfortunately UserScripts.org is down again, so I uploaded the script here.
Click here to see the script in action.

Chiptunes Jukebox

I'm currently listening to the jukebox from chiptune.com and you should too.
Get the required plugin here.

chiptunes and pixelart
almost as good as pc speaker and ascii

Rogelike fun

I am a big fan of NetHack for quite some time now and today I discovered the wonderful world of other Roguelike games.

The first game I tried was ADOM which has an overworld, unlike NetHack.
Then I found the 7DRL-Contest via Wikipedia, really great stuff.
Check out CastlevaniaRL and DiabloRL.

Here is some more stuff for you to read, I have to take a look at DoomRL now. :)

Steckdosen in vollen Zügen genießen

Dies ist mein erstes deutsches Posting auf diesem Blog und ich hoffe es werden noch viele folgen.
Leider kann ich aber keine schicken Tags verteilen, wie das Marian, der hiermit gegrüszt sei, bei seinem Wordpress Blog gerne macht.

Ich plane gerade eine Zugfahrt nach Kehl am Rhein, um mich dort für ein Praktikum vorzustellen. Da ich währenddessen noch an meiner Ausarbeitung für Computerspiele 1 arbeiten will, brauche ich eine Steckdose an meinem Sitzplatz.
Auf der Bahn-Seite hab ich nicht entsprechendes gefunden, also hab ich mich mal im Internet schlau gemacht, wo ich auch recht schnell fündig wurde.

Ich habe dann hier nachgesehen, mit welcher Ausgabe des ICEs ich denn Fahren werde. Enttäuscht musste ich feststellen, dass auf der Strecke nur ein ICE der ersten Generation verkehrt, der überhaupt keine Steckdosen besitzt. :(

Einen kleinen Lichtblick gibt es aber noch. Auf dieser Seite hab ich erfahren, dass die alten ICEs bis 2008 überholt werden, sodass, wie ab dem dritten üblich, jede Sitzbank unten in der Mitte eine Steckdose besitzt.
Hoffentlich habe ich Glück und fahre mit einem bereits umgerüsteten Zug...

Sister-Cities

Did you know that Magdeburg in Germany and Nashville/Tennesee in USA are Sister Cities?

Valentine's Day

Today I am celebrating Singles Awareness Day, also known by its acronym SAD. :(

ICQ problems with Miranda IM

Some time yesterday the guys at ICQ decided to break OpenSource clients by changing their protocol. Even if you use the official client you can't send any messages to clients who don't understand the new version, you just get a timeout.
To fix the problem install the latest version of the ICQ plugin and tell anybody else to do the same.

So this fixes Miranda, if you know how to fix the problem in other clients feel free to add a comment.

Three more any-keys

Finally there: the Optimus Keyboard mini.
Well it has only three keys but it's a start.
Costs $100 and can play animations at 5 fps.
Here is a review.
It's big brother could be available by end of the year.

[via Slashdot]

OGLE

OGLE is an interesting tool, it can capture 3d scenes from games.
It's like taking a screenshot, but instead of an image you get an ".obj" file which you can open in almost any 3d application.

It's not that easy to use, so here is a little description:

• Install GLIntercept
• Extract OGLE
• Move the extracted directory to the plugins directory of GLIntercept
  (eg. "C:\Program Files\GLIntercept0_5\Plugins\")
• Rename the directory to OGLE
• Add the following lines to your "gliConfig.ini" (found in "C:\Program Files\GLIntercept0_5"):
  

  OGLE = ("OGLE/OGLE.dll")
  {
  Scale = 1.0;
  CaptureNormals = False;
  LogFunctions = False;
  ObjFileName = "ogle";
  FilePerFrame = False;
  
  TRIANGLES = True;
  TRIANGLE_STRIP = True;
  TRIANGLE_FAN = True;
  QUADS = True;
  QUAD_STRIP = True;
  POLYGON = True;
  }

• Make sure you have these settings in the same file:
  

  LogEnabled = True;
  ...
  LogPerFrame
  {
  Enabled = True;
  ...
  OneFrameOnly = True;
  }

• Copy the files "OpenGL32.dll" and "gliConfig.ini" into the directory of the programs executable you want to use (here is a list of working programs)
• Start your Application
• Press the shortcut for single frame capture (normally Ctrl-Shift-f) in the scene you want to capture
  
• Quit the Application and load the file "ogle.obj" in your favorite 3d program

[via Raphs Website]

Slashdot Nightmare

Yesterday I postet my first comment to Slashdot (second from the top). Today I had a nightmare that it got the rating (Score: -1, Redundant).

I guess I should post more often to get used to it. :)

Casual Games

I just finished my 60 Minute trial of PopCap Games Chuzzle.
If you first take a look at it you probably think that it's just another "match-three-of-the-same-color" game (like Bejeweled 2), but this one is special.
I don't really feel like describing the game, just play for yourself.
The developers definately had too much fun making the game, left click on one of those furry balls multiple times or left click them a single time (deluxe only) to see what i mean.

Pandora

I just read this post on Raph Koster's Blog where he mentions Pandora, a great music discovery service.


You feed it with your favorite songs and it generates a playlist with similar tracks.
I currently enjoy listening to tracks described as

• "features disco influences, danceable beats, excellent vocal technique, a laid back female vocal and a high-pitched voice" (Lavaa - Wherever You Are)

or

• "features disco influences, a laid back female vocal, romantic lyrics, the heavy use of chordal patterning and melodic part writing" (Milk Inc. - The Sun Always Shines On TV).

And it all started with adding "4 Strings".

VMware Player "hacked"

A few days ago VMWare released "VMWare Player" which can run virtual machines but cannot create them.
Today I saw this how-to on hackaday.
I just installed Ubuntu and it works great!

Here is my modified how-to:

• install the VMWare Player
• download the "Browser Appliance" virtual machine
• make a test run of the virtual machine to verify that it works
• download the Ubuntu CD-Image
• replace these two lines in the file "Browser-Appliance.vmx":
  

  ide1:0.fileName = "auto detect"
  ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"

  by these:
  

  ide1:0.fileName= "ubuntu-5.10-install-i386.iso"
  ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"
  

• start the virtual machine and press ctrl-g to direct the
  input to the virtual machine
• press escape and boot from cd-rom
• install ubuntu
• revert the changes made above
• done (you may want to delete the iso which you don't need
  anymore)

SVG in Firefox

If you are running Windows 2000 and try to play SVG Tetris (or view some pictures), you may be wondering why the download dialog appears. This is because you are missing the file "gdiplus.dll".
Get it here from Microsoft.

Search Engines

At the moment all visitors of my blog come from the GreaseMonkey mailing list, to be more specific from this post.
To make my page more open to the public I decided to add it to some search engines.
Here are the links:

• http://www.google.com/addurl/
• http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html (requires yahoo id)

Slashdot - add mirrors

I have added an image to the description of my "Slashdot - add mirrors" script at Userscripts.org. As you probably already guessed it adds links to some mirrors to the articles and comments. Check it out here.

Greasemonkey UI

This post on the Greasemonkey mailing list inspired me to make a toolbar button for Greasemonkey.
It doesn't tell you if Greasemonkey did something but it allows you to disable individual scripts and Greasemonkey by the click of a button (the monkey greys out too).

Update:

After fixing some bugs I guess I should release this modification. Here are the modified files. Make sure that you are using Greasemonkey 0.5 beta and have made backups.

Userscripts.org

Here are my scripts.