Category: Geekery

Firefox Boosts World Population by Factor of Thousands

Your daily dose of Pedantry

I had reason to visit the Firefox download site the other day (http://www.getfirefox.net/) and was most impressed at their current usage statistics…

Firefox the award winning Web browser is absolutely free and easy to use. Join the over 500,000,000 million people worldwide enjoying a better and faster web browsing.

500,000,000 million people? If my maths is correct that’s about 77,000 times the entire population of the planet. I knew Firefox market penetration was good, but I didn’t realise it was that good!

Also, what the heck is a “web browsing”, and how can it be better and faster? 🙂

(Once I pointed out these issues my colleague Bevan sent Mozilla an email, so they’ll probably be fixed up soon. Probably.)

Late 2010

Actually it turns out that getfirefox.net has nothing to do with Mozilla at all and (as discussed by New Scientist’s “Feedback” section when I alerted them to it)  they were/are actually collecting data on people visiting the page. Interesting….

A Poor Attempt at Mimicry

An attempt at channelling the style and spirit of Warren Ellis

In reference to this monstrosity…

Fabes: I am surprised they could afford the materials for this project, after getting ripped off $15/month for playing WoW to begin with….

Me: Well it looks like they’re university students so their government is probably paying them all sorts of grants to get up late, play Warcraft into the early hours of the morning then occasionally stumble into class where their lecturer asks “What are you doing for your big design project?” and they mutter out “… uh.. design… project… raid… caverns of num-yabisc… Warcraft….” and they then have no choice but to build some crappy hut with $12.50 worth of plywood claiming that the shitty design and finishing is so it resembles structures in the game and isn’t because they had zero time to work on it between carrying out mass raids and shovelling microwaved mac and cheese into their drooping maws while ogling at 3D models of elf maidens in armour so skimpy that it wouldn’t stop a mosquito let alone the axe of an orc on wolfback who probably carries mosquitoes with him anyway as a consequence of bad hygiene and all the blood he wears as war paint the bastard.

(This is an attempt at sounding like Warren Ellis. If he ever finds out about it he may well hunt me down and kill me 🙂

(Oh, and the guys who built the thing obviously put a great deal of thought and effort into it – I’m just being evil for humourous effect)

Another Status Update

Games, Trains and Toilet Fame

The game on Sunday went pretty well. The players floundered around like freshly landed fish until I gave them some fairly hefty shoves in the right direction, but they seemed to enjoy it. I finally got to play out the big climactic scene that’s been in my head for a good seven years (ever since I came up with the adventure in the first place) and it seemed to go over fairly well – even if it was consistently interrupted by Fabian’s character threatening to shoot everyone ;D

I also managed to score a mention on Worst of Perth with my infamous tale of the Fasta Pasta toilet DVD (definitely NSFW). It seems to have been accepted fairly well by the community, even getting a few songs composed about it in the comments.

Finally I stumbled over this site last week and have to say that it’s one of the best designed (in a visual sense) sites I’ve seen in a long while. If I wasn’t happy with the hideous visual hodge-podge of Wyrmworld I’d seriously consider appropriating the colour scheme, if not actually stealing the layout wholesale. Well done fellows! Well done!

OK, that’s it.

Late 2010

Um, yes. N-Scale Limited’s layout. Um. Nothing to see here, move along… 😉

If All Else Fails, Your Coworkers Are Edible

Status updates and more on the Quornimal

I’m probably not going to have much time to blog over the next few weeks as I’m preparing for the next session of my infinitely prolonged Wild Southwest roleplaying campaign (there you go Helen – a chance to catch up! :). In the meantime however I’m finding The Worst of Perth highly amusing – it’s well worth a read (if you live in Perth, don’t know if anyone else would enjoy it).

News of the Quornimal continues!

The Laughter of Mr Rose

A tale from my disreputable past

I was thinking the other day of an incident that happened to me in high school. Not a hugely important or earth-shattering incident, just one that sort of illustrates a point about how you can sometimes be too intelligent for your own good.

The incident occurred in year eight maths. My teacher was Mr Rose (not his real name by the way), a youngish and slightly arrogant fellow with the looks of someone who’d much rather be strutting up and down the beach in a speedo than stuck inside forcing mathematics down the throats of a bunch of unwilling thirteen year olds. This particular day, towards the end of the school year he posed us a problem to do with a clock face.

He gave us an angle, and claimed that at only one time of the day did the hour and minute hands of the clock form said angle. Our job was to determine what time of day that was.

A simple question you might think. But for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out! I did all the maths I could, and even resorted to rigging up a crude clock face with a protractor and a couple of pencils, but I couldn’t for the life of me find the answer. What was particularly disturbing was that all around me my classmates – even the particularly thick ones – were apparently figuring it out and going up to Mr Rose to be marked. The best I could do was a rough estimate (around 5:42 I seem to recall) which Mr Rose totally rejected. How were they doing it!?

The class finished without my finding an answer, and I got 0 marks on that particular exercise.

It was some years later – after I’d left high school – that I figured out what I’d been doing wrong.

You see, there was an unspoken assumption about the exercise. The hands were assumed to instantaneously jump between set points on the clock face without crossing the space in between. Much like electrons jumping between valence shells within an atom, they just plain didn’t exist between these points. This meant that the minute hand could only occupy 60 positions on the clock face, and the hour hand only 720 – a fairly manageable number of angles to account for with a well structured mathematical relationship between them.

I on the other hand was assuming an analogue clock face where every division of every angle counted and hence – although I didn’t realise it at the time – the positions and angles of the hands were infinite. The problem as I understood it was unsolvable without inventing differential calculus, which was a bit beyond me at the time as I was only thirteen years old and wasn’t Sir Isaac Newton.

So yeah, that’s the story. If I’d been a bit dumber I would have assumed that the hands could only point to round minutes from the start and would have solved the problem in no time. As it was I outwitted myself by thinking the problem was about a real clock face, and not the numbers represented by one.

Mr Rose is probably still laughing at me.

Foolish Ideas: The Return

Getting other people to do all the hard work…

I’ve been boning up lately (oh stop laughing, that’s a perfectly legitimate phrase!) on the world of Hellboy, having used some tax return money and birthday book vouchers to buy Darkness Calls, Abe Sapien: The Drowning, BPRD: Killing Ground, The Hellboy Companion and the special edition of The Golden Army. As a result the nebulous mental space I use to store details of whatever fictional world I’m currently mainlining is stuffed to the gills with the big red guy and his colleagues.

This explains why when I read that an open source version of that old classic Wolfenstein 3D has been ported to the iPhone my immediate thought was “Hey! A Wolfenstein mod would make a pretty good Hellboy game!”

(Here comes the madness…)

You see, the history of Hellboy computer games has been plagued with bug ridden piles of garbage and adequate though hardly inspired beat-em-ups. So how better to fix the problem than to make some modifications to one of the most consistently popular and influential games of all time?

I mean think about it. Wolfenstein is all about running around a mysterious castle, shooting Nazis and stopping their fiendish attempts to raise a robotic zombie army. Could you come up with a more archetypal Hellboy adventure? All you need to do is swap out some of the graphics and bingo!

As for the plot? Well the BPRD sends Hellboy in to investigate reports of strange activity in the ruins of Castle Wolfenstein – rumoured to have been the site of experiments associated with Project Ragna-Rok back in World War II. He discovers an abandoned laboratory full strange equipment and inadvertently activates a primitive time travel device which throws him back to 1943. He has to fight his way through the castle back to the laboratory and get back to the present day.

Replace the faces in the health meter, add the Right Hand of Doom as a weapon, make the zombies look like the ones in the basement of Hunte Castle, swap out the bosses with Rasputin, Von Klempt and Kroenen and there you go! Hours of Nazi-smashing fun!

(You’d leave robo-Hitler in there untouched, obviously)

If I had the time I’d take a shot at it myself. Of course I don’t have the time, so I’m releasing the idea into the wild in the hopes someone out there is similarly enthused. Which they probably won’t be. But hey, at least I’m making an effort 😀

Hellboy in Wolfenstein? (Click to Enlarge)

Reminisces

Don’t talk to me about the Kings of Leon!

The Kings of Leon. The Kings of Leon were a pack of bastards. Obsessed with reconquering Iberia from the Moors. “Hey” I’d say to them “The Moors aren’t that bad. They’re people just like you”. “But they’re evil!” they’d say “The Pope says so!” and how can you really argue against the Pope?

The Kings of Aragon were just as bad, with the added complication of an appalling amount of inbreeding. Knock-kneed, hump-backed dwarves the lot of them. And the lisps! A five minute conversation with one of them and you’d need a shower and change of clothes. And believe me, showering facilities in 12th century Zaragoza weren’t exactly up to scratch.

The food was great though – Aragon had the best cooks in the whole of Iberia. A meal at the royal court was almost worth all the spit. Some people will tell you the palace of Cordova was the place for fine cuisine, but the Umayyads had nothing on the cooks of Aragon. The things they could do with a duck, some cloves and some oranges would make you weep.

Charlemagne, he was a decent sort. Great company – the stories he could tell! I remember one time he had the whole Synod of Frankfurt in hysterics with a story about a gluttonous donkey. His one big regret was never learning to write properly. “Charlie” I’d say “You’ve got scribes to handle that for you”, but he was always embarrassed about it. “Even Abul can write better than I!” he’d exclaim and throw his quill (or when drunk – as he often was – his flagon) across the room, and his wife would have to talk him down and remind him that Abul was an elephant and hence couldn’t write at all. But apart from that he was a great bloke.

Can’t say the same about Pippin, but that’s another story.

Apparently he was on the Enclave payroll all along…

Change the world a little bit.

Anyone who visits this blog regularly (not that I necessarily believe such a curious beast to exist) will have noticed a lot of activity lately. This is because I am “Making an Effort”. I’m trying my best to write something every night just to keep my hand in, and to try and catch up to Helen who recently hit 600 posts despite her blog being younger than mine. Such a discrepancy cannot be allowed to stand! *grin*

That being said, I am extremely tired after a hard week’s work trying to interpret the heavily accented mumblings of a man who looks uncannily like the Vault Overseer from the original Fallout (I keep expecting him to ask me to find a water chip), and have very little stomach for writing. So this entry will be short, if not necessarily sweet.

I will say before going however that if you have any money spare (a rare occurrence in this time of economic crisis I know) or you just feel like being charitable, there are a lot worse causes to send your money to than that of Hollis Hawthorne. Rather than try and compose an explanation in my own words I shall liberally quote from the post on Whitechapel (by one Theremina) that alerted me and many others to her plight…

[Hollis Hawthorne] is a performer, cyclist, and activist who lives in SF. I only kinda sorta barely know her through mutual friends, but by all accounts, she’s just the most radiant, beautiful person. She moves in many of the same circles I do, and has donated her time to many of the same nonprofit events.

Late last month, Hollis was traveling by motor scooter in Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, India when something terrible happened. Some sort of freak hit-and-run accident that wasn’t her fault left her bleeding out on the side of the road with her boyfriend Harrison frantically performing CPR for 20 minutes before a van of German tourists picked them up and drove them to a hospital. According to her best pal Eliza, Hollis was wearing her helmet and driving very slowly at the time of the accident. Now she’s in a coma in a rural hospital with a serious brain stem injury.

According to Harrison, who has been with her from the moment it happened, “there are huge rats scurrying around on the [hospital] floor. I am sleeping on the ant-covered floor outside her room as I am not allowed in and the water they have used for many procedures is not even purified.” When Hollis’s mom flew in from Tennessee a couple of days ago with emergency support from the US consulate to see her own daughter, the orderlies were dismissive and curt. “They are not observing her brain pressure and have done nothing to alleviate the swelling in her brain. These are things that can make or break her early on in her recovery and healing process.”

Through a series of fortuitous connections, her case has been reviewed and accepted by Stanford Medical; one of the best hospitals in the world … All we need to do is get her there. The friends and family of Hollis are reaching out to everyone they can to raise funds to get her on an I.C.U. plane (aka air ambulance) to fly her back to California.

Before that can happen, Friends of Hollis must raise $150,000 dollars. They’ve already raised approximately $40,000, and more is pouring in all the time, mostly in small denominations. Can you spare a dollar, or five, or ten? It adds up more quickly than you’d think!

Yes, I know, life is risk, and life is uncertain. Life is also precious. If, in some small way, we can help someone in our community to come back from the brink, we really should. Click here to help, and please spread the word, if you can. This is what the internet is for.

Now yes, that all sounds like some kind of more creative than normal Nigerian mail scam, but it’s all on the level and – while her situation has improved with movement to a much better hospital and she’s starting to show signs of recovery – money to get her home is still desperately needed. So, if you feel like doing something good for the world and helping out a stranger – not to mention being part of a growing group of helpers and well-wishers scattered all around the world, click on the link above. If not, whatever.

That’s my good deed for the week. Denys sleep now.

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