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Back on October 7th, 2007, I wrote that I was a judge over at Adrian Hon's newest project, Let's Change the Game, "a competition to fund development of an [alternate reality game (ARG)] that would raise money for Cancer Research UK". Besides building the Let's Change the Game site (in Drupal), I continued my involvement in the project by becoming an advisor to the winning team, Law 37. Now, a year later, the winner of that competition has just launched the alternate reality game Operation: Sleeper Cell, another Drupal site: "Operation: Sleeper Cell will see teams of players from around the world working together to solve 'puzzle cells' in a grid. By donating money...
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I've been a long-time fan of Warhammer, and preordered Warhammer Online months ago (yep, the sold-out Collector's Edition) too. Fiddled with the Open Beta a bit, but my real efforts are now being devoted to Morbulette, a Chaos Magus on the Ulthuan core server. Friend me and watch me strive for every achievement, every title, and every quest, in only 2 hours every week night. I estimate... 32 years to go. Woot!
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Zodiac, a serial killer whose identity still remains unknown, continues to make headlines, most recently in the murder of Megan Touma, when a newspaper received a letter from someone purporting to be the killer, who will "start using my role-model's signature". A friend on IRC noticed that the John F. Kennedy page on Wikipedia had been defaced with a message, purportedly from Zodiac. Within 30 minutes, the message had been decrypted: vandaljzing wikipedia is so fun it is funner than killing people or having sex because when you kill people you only destroy their bodys but when you vandalize this website you kill the soul of the poor queer pig slaves that devote their lives to...
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Over at Drupal Tough Love, chx and I just reviewed Signatures for Forums 5.x-2.3 which "provides user signatures that will be familiar to users of popular forum software" such as "the administrator can choose the input filter for signatures", conditional signatures that are hidden "if a post is under a particular length", and showing the signature only once per conversation.
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Friend and well-known cryptozoologist Loren Coleman writes that his International Cryptozoology Museum is in dire need of financial support, else it might be closed down due to an IRS audit: "The [IRS's] audit has gone to five or more levels of meetings and appeals, as I have attempted to explain what being a “cryptozoologist†is all about, that I do make my living this way, and that the museum is an essential part of the overall plan ... To the IRS, the museum verges on being a hobby ... and it needs more income (even if donations) to support itself ... The museum has to make money, or it ceases to exist ... I need to get donations...
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Friend Mark Bernstein promotes "software as craft" with the phrase NeoVictorian Computing. Jeremy recalls that "Part of his argument is that software creators have something to learn from the ideals of the arts and crafts movement: the software world is full of soulless bits and bytes, and maybe we would all be a little happier if we embraced handcraft ... During the talk, I remember Bernstein proposed that software creators should sign their work as a painter signs a painting, which is a lovely visual metaphor that I hope to keep around." And Greg Wilson has a book called Beautiful Code. Happily, I already agree - they're all echoes of my own belief in "code shui",...
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In the Drupal content management system, a "node teaser" is small bit of content used to encourage you to "read more" of the post. Drupal can set the teaser to the entire length of the post (typically used for blogs where you don't need extra click-through), or can automatically generate the teaser to a specific character length. In the past, you could also manually generate teasers by including <--break--> in the node's body. In Drupal 6, manual teaser definition has been improved with JavaScript wizardry, along with a new checkbox: "Show summary in full view". But there's a small problem with the use of the word "summary". Generally, when a Drupal teaser is included in the node's full view, it's...
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You're right: this didn't come any sooner than any of the others. A Comprehensive ARG Report from the PMs: "However despite the great critical success of MeiGeist the producers [of the ARG] have been left without anything to show financially for what was in effect a twelve-month project with global impact. Having said that, there is a postscript - the increased reputation gained from the game’s success has drawn in valuable commercial work for the producers." 10 Books That Began Your Journey Down the Rabbit-hole: "Maybe they were the books that sparked your search for the truth about JFK or some other world event, about yourself or about that whole elusive thing called Reality. Perhaps these are...
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My second daughter, Scarlett Emily, was born April 16th, 2008.  Julia meets her new sister.  Scarlett, wide awake and physical, is suspicious of the butterfly.
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All in all, the response to Drupal Tough Love, the new code reviewing blog from chx and I, has been quite favorable, and we've already got a queue of at least a dozen submitted modules to look over. I had a grande chuckle at Amy Stephen's post on it over at OpenSourceCommunity.org: I lift this service up because it's a perfect example of a functioning community ... What I am trying to say to those of you who are considering this service, but are not quite in touch with the inner geek inside, is this --> don't ask these guys if they think you are fat if you have your box of big clothes out and your skinny...
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We all make mistakes; that's how we learn. Sometimes, though, we need someone to point out our mistakes, to sift through the chaos that is Drupal's contributions repository. Inspired by jpoesen's comment on my code quality entry, chx and I have taken up the task of giving some tough love to Drupal's greatest strength: the army of developers using its APIs. Want your own code publicly reviewed at DrupalToughLove.com? Let us know!
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I'm pretty critical about code quality, be it for my own projects or those of others, and have become known as giving harsh code reviews for the Drupal community. Hearing "ask Morbus, but be prepared to cry" pleases me, and I have little impetus to stop doing things I enjoy, regardless of what people think. Recently, someone suggested the reason my reviews seem "assholish" is because I state "you" a lot. I agree with this, I think, and have made an attempt to lessen my usage, though not my anality. I define code quality via a number of different hard-to-describe metrics. In the case of Drupal, following the code style guidelines is certainly key, but also following Drupal...
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Oh, it has been so long since I've spewed some dumpages. Five Prescriptions for Viral Games: "Virality ... must be incorporated into a game while the rules are being designed and the technical architecture is being established. It is about making games that players feel invested in, that they want to share with friends--games they’ll go out of their way to show to others. When designing a game, developers should begin asking themselves not only "how will this make the game more fun?" but also "how will this encourage players to share the game with others?" The Forgotten Delicious: "The essence of the criticism boils down to two main issues: First, some (including myself) believe that these...
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This has been sitting on my desktop for a while. Just posting it for searchability. Use MacTheRipper to rip the DVD to your hard drive. This not only removes encryption that prevents you from using your purchased media as you'd like, but also allows faster encoding times since you're not reading from a slow(er) disc drive. Launch ffmpegX and "Open" the VIDEO_TS directory MacTheRipper created. Choose an ffmpegX "Quick Preset". I like "XviD mencoder". Under the Video tab, first choose the "Title" and "Chapter" of the DVD content to encode. The default is usually enough for the main feature (i.e., the entire movie), but you can choose bonus material by opening the DVD in Apple's DVD Player,...
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60 Blank White Cards is dead; long live Video Underbelly. It has taken me 11 years, I think, to come to a simple conclusion: I prefer building resources over services. I define a "resource" as content you may be able to interact with; a "service", on the other hand, is primarily something you interact with, with content as complementary. When Disobey first started in 1997, it was all resources: I held high the mantra of "content is king", and produced as much of it as I could. As I became a programmer, I moved closer to services, building software that re-purposed content in ways the user desired. Most of my modern-day Perl scripts continue to do this. While the...
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From NewScientist: The historical documents hint that the Hittites – whose empire stretched from modern-day Turkey to northern Syria – sent diseased rams to their enemies to weaken them with tularemia, a devastating bacterial infection that remains a potential bioterror threat even today, says the review. The Arzawans took the sheep to their villages and used them for livestock breeding. Soon after, though, they began to suspect a link between the appearance of the animals and the terrible disease ravaging their communities ... "They started wondering 'Why do these rams start showing up on the road?'" says Trevisanato. He believes that among the Hittites, "somebody must have had the bright idea" to send diseased rams over to their Arzawan...
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With Delicious Library 2 releasing sometime this holiday season, I may actually start using it for my library catalog. What has stopped me in the past was its lack of expandability - with no AppleScript support, I couldn't add in new data scraping functionality myself (though, if I were truly bothered, I'd've done custom imports). Thankfully, Delicious Library 2 fully supports AppleScript and I'm hoping I'll be able to hook into new item creation, as I'd love to store my comic and magazine collections (and maybe even weirder things like collectible card games, but that'd be ReAaALly stretchin' it). With the prospect of doing comic importing "the right way" (meaning "type in a title and have it Work" vs.
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I am a judge in Adrian Hon's newest project, Let's Change the Game. From his announcement: ... together with Cancer Research UK, I’m launching a new project, Let’s Change the Game, that will develop an ARG whose aim is to raise money for cancer research. Like other serious games, the ARG will also educate people about cancer and raise awareness of it, but unlike other serious games, its success will be measured directly on how much real change it can cause, through fundraising. Let’s Change the Game is a competition where teams from anywhere in the world can submit their own game designs. The team behind the winning design, as chosen by judges who include Sean Stewart,...
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Teaser 3 is up, previewing the 60BWC achievement system: An achievement whore is the moniker taken by those who strive to earn every Xbox 360 achievement possible. For those unaware, every Xbox 360 retail game ships with 1000 points that can be earned by mundane, impossible, odd, or merely random gameplay. These points accumulate into a total gamer score that represents all the games you've played. To "ace" a game means you've earned all the points possible: ace your first five games and you'll have a total of 5000 points. Achievement whores obsess for days and weeks over the smallest point value or most useless task, in an ever-deepening delirium to see their scores climb ever higher. Some receive...
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There's new teaser content over at my newest project 60 Blank White Cards, including ruminations about one (of four) inspirations for the game, as well as some very early sketches from our resident artist. Check it out! Perplex City was an alternate reality game (ARG) with purchasable, but optional, puzzle cards, as well as a cash prize for the first player to find the stolen Cube. While other ARGs have toyed with physical items earned or found by players, as well as "prizes" (like playing Halo 2 before anyone else), none have yet replicated Perplex City's particular approach. I tend to think this is for two reasons: the mystery and the money.
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NPR reports: Pirate ships exist mostly in legend, but a real one - the Whydah - was discovered off Cape Cod by Barry Clifford in 1984. It's the only authenticated pirate ship ever found, and just like in legends, it was laden with treasure. Clifford and his team have just recovered a new collection of artifacts from the ship ... "The pirates testified in court in Boston, and their testimonies were recorded," Clifford said. "They said that the treasure was laid in one heap, that the money was kept in bags, in chests, between decks. And there was about four to five tons just from the Whydah."
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The NewScientist reports: A fungus that is devastating amphibian populations around the world is a relatively new disease that is spreading rapidly ... Worse, not only is the fungus being spread by infected water, it may also be transmitted in the form of spores carried on the wind or birds' feathers ... B. dendrobatidis was formally identified as a frog-killer in 1998, though it has been found on museum specimens dating back to the 1930s. It affects frogs on every continent they are found and is considered one of the three major reasons - along with habitat destruction and trade - for the decline in global amphibian populations since the early 1980s.
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A new game entitled 60 Blank White Cards, coded in Drupal and by the well-known Morbus Iff, has just launched its teaser site which alludes to "cash prizes", "prize-winning points", and offers up the requisite word puzzle for those ready to learn more. Take a look-see, sign up for an account, solve the puzzle, and wait for the next update!
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The BBC reports: Researchers from St Andrews University have shown that the animals intentionally modify or repeat their signals to get their messages across ... [T]he researchers set up a situation where six captive orangutans were presented with a keeper who had treats, such as bananas, and blander food, such as leeks or celery. The animals gestured to attract the keeper's attention so the tasty treat would be passed to them. Professor Richard Byrne, author of the study, states: [W]hen the keeper pretended to fail to understand the original gesture and gave the wrong food, the orangutans stopped using the gestures they had used before and started using some different gestures ... And when the keeper half understood and...
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From the BBC: Dozens of figures from the Irish Republic's National Wax Museum have been damaged or stolen after a "rave" party at a warehouse, officials say. Models of famous children's characters, including Teletubbies and Bob the Builder, [as well as film villains Hannibal Lecter and Freddie Krueger,] were among those taken from the museum's collection in Dublin.
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