Link Dumpage: Fighting Vipers
Zomg, the list grows! IT LEAVES ME NOT BE!
- For a while I've been trying to find the best way of putting my videos online in an easily accessible format. I knew it'd be Flash Video (.flv), but it was just a matter of finding the proper way of converting to that format. After a month of random and bored searching, I settled on FFmpeg to convert the files (save WMV) and FLVTool2 to add the metadata necessary for fast forwarding and seeking. Gallery recently added a flashvideo plugin to its development branch, which saved me the effort of deciding between FlowPlayer and the aptly named Flash Video Player. As fate would have it, the day I eureka'd I found Video Blogging using Django and Flash(tm) Video (FLV), which covers nearly all the same corners I was peering into.
- Video Games are Dead: A Chat with Storytronics Guru Chris Crawford: "I haven't even seen any new ideas pop up. The industry is so completely inbred that the people working in it aren’t even capable of coming up with new ideas anymore. I was appalled, for example, at the recent GDC. I looked over the games at the Independent Games Festival and they all looked completely derivative to me. Just copies of the same ideas being recycled. I didn't see anything I'd call innovative, and this was from people not even interested in doing anything... in making money. It was just straight amateurs trying to be innovative and even they couldn't be innovative."
- How to cheat good: "It is particularly irksome when their cheating implies (reminds?) that I am a fool. So, to help students across the country cheat better, saving themselves both from easy detection and from incurring the wrath of insulted faculty, and leading to a much more harmonious school environment, I offer the following tips, based on recent experience."
- Literatronica: The next generation of hypertext authoring: "Literatronic is a dynamic hypertext authoring system which instead of relying solely on static hypertext links (for the system allows these as well), uses an AI engine to recommend the 3 best next lexias based on what you have already read. ... Out of these "distances," the system creates a map. To help the reader traverse the map, the system runs a "shortest distance" algorithm to suggest paths. Because the system is dynamic, it can change paths according to the lexias the reader has already encountered."
- bud: "bud.com is an experiment to turn our personal data trails into a playfield for a web-based massively-multiplayer online game. Call it passively multiplayer - the reality of communication networks. Already, Web 2.0 and social networking sites keep track of our relationships and communications. bud.com proposes to make that web more engaging through surveillance with non-threatening stakes: browser-based multiplayer play."
