Hal's Blogs

Slashdot has an article about a Vivendi Universal games programmer suing the company for unpaid overtime. Not a very good case for Vivendi, especially after numerous layoffs, and then asking them to lie about their timecards.

Wired has an article that the EFF has decided to fight 10 unfair patents that companies have managed to patent. One of them includes Nintendo's emulator patent!

Altoids has a game that is remarkably similar to Wario Warez...

Here's a transcript of a speech made by Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to Microsoft on June 17, 2004. The gist of the lengthy speech is to persuade MSFT to drop plans to use DRM in their media players and media formats. But the speech is much more than that, and shares many interesting facts about copyright throughout history and how attempts to control media has always failed.

What's particularly amazing is that the speaker makes his case without resorting to any of the cliches we've heard over and over.

http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

Some elementary kids were asked to photograph the alphabet with a disposable camera.

This guy has a HUGE collection of videos from Universal Studios in Orlando.

Here are some very cool industrial design awards. I've always thought of these people as an elite crowd. A little pretentious sometimes, because they force people like me (engineers) to be forced to fit a pink cadillac in a closet. Regardless, can't help but admire some of the designs. Perticularly the bike I'd like to eventually get (although, the 650 version). I'm not too crazy about the three cars in there, though.

Yet another pretty interesting Flash game.

Tetris TV game by Radica: http://spong.com/news/r%5C/e%5C/retropluga138457.jpg

Here's an interesting pictorial of a trail of drunk driving destruction. The Xterra held up pretty well, didn't it?

Interesting, I know that the big current thing for body building is to take a protein inhibitor that blocks myostatin.This toddler has a genetic mutation that does this naturally.

Don't know how legit the article is, but here are some leaked specs of the Xbox 2.

An article in the register implies that newer CDs will DRM software onto the unsuspecting user.

ZeldaClassic.com remakes Zelda, but with better graphics, and user created maps and quests.

Google will reveals some of it's code to give back to the community.

Following the previous three posts, we have success of the first private rocket plane to punches into space atmosphere.

Here's a review of the new Nokia N-Gage QD. Too bad, I don't understand why Nokia is still pushing this thing. It's dead! They should cut their losses now!

As previously mentioned in the previous post, the X-Prize is most likely to be claimed by this team, Scaled Composites, with a historic flight scheduled for June 21st!

As reported by Space.com, Armadillo Aerospace had a successful test launch of their orbital launcher prototype.

I've been checking on Armadillo's progress now and then (the videos are interesting), and it kind of surprises me the level of trial and error they are using to achieve their target. Once they're carrying human cargo, they really won;t have this luxury anymore. Do they have what it takes to plan the best engineering solutions without too many failed tests?

From the register, comes an article that the PSX may be released on 1 July. Gee, I haven't heard much from this thing since the unfortunate debacle when it got released minus a lot of it's features.

From Slashdot, comes what could be the largest Japanese video game system auction ever.

Some amazing Full Screen QuickTime VR Pictures.

If you're a webmaster and a PC gamer as well, VisitorVille is the ultimate website traffic analysis tool out there. VisitorVille does a great job of doing what most traffic analysis tools do. It reports who visited what, for how long, where they clicked next, etc, etc, etc.

But the coolest part is that VisitorVille comes with a completely graphical display of a site's traffic, shown as a Sim City style city (or suburb, if your site isn't very popular). Visitors to your site are depicted in real-time, as little people moving about from building to building. Building height is determined by the page popularity, and the amount of lights on indicates the amount of visitors there "right now".

When a visitor moves from one page to another, he or she is depicted calling a taxi, getting in and riding to the new page (which graphically, is another building in the neighborhood). Arriving visitors are shown coming in by bus, and if that visitor found your page through a search engine, that bus will be shown with that search engine's logo on it!

The features of VisitorVille go much deeper, and include the usual traffic reports capabilities that one would expect from a quality traffic analysis tool, along with extras like the ability to watch what pages a particular visitor is viewing in real time, live chat with the visitors, and more.

VisitorVille makes something as boring as stats fun to watch! It's not cheap though. They no longer offer their $9.95 monthly subscription rate. The cheapest is $29.95us per month, with a 1000 visitor a day cap. Which is unfortunate, as it's too cost prohibitive to use on a site like www.LilGames.com, where the traffic levels are such that I'd have to pay upwards of $89.95 to $169.95 per month!

Gamesindustry.biz has an article on the arrests of people related to the theft of the Half Life source code.

There's a cool little japanese robot kit that you can buy and assemble (for the low low price of about $4500us!). It has no A.I. but can be programmed to perform countless agile and graceful movements. If you can't afford one, then make sure to watch the movies.

http://www.vstone.co.jp/e/rt01e.htm

If you guys ever get the "45 facts" email will enjoy these answers from Google Answers page.

Ahhh, remember when we used to play Mario Bros., deathmatch style on the NES? This gy has done Super Mario War, a deathmatch version of the game. Apparently, he is working on an online version of it.

An interesting article on the effects of alcohol on motorcycles. I would never drink if I was riding!

Scientists have removed huge chunks of DNA from experimental mice, with seemingly no ill effects.

Wow, a web site compiling trailers of Movie Classics!

Hmmm, this new product allows you to load an entire PS2 disk onto a hard drive!

From Slashdot, these guys, so desperately wanting to play FF:CC, managed to make it work with 5 Gamecubes, and 5 seperate TVs.

With the release of the new Harry Potter film, every single movie outlet in Britain, will be issued night vision goggles.