Plaidophile

Now that I know about (and have fixed) that little teeny tiny hole in phpBB, I've gone back and looked at the logs... it looks more like there have been a fuckton of people abusing trikuare.cx in that way, going all the way back to November 18 when the exploit was first announced. Whee. Lots of it is going through open proxies which appear to have been installed on other systems, too.

I managed to pull myself out of the pit of ennui and despair, by just starting to code the new prototype character animation system without getting caught up in the little details.

I find I work faster and more effectively when I don't think about how important it is, or how quickly it needs to be finished. When I can see it as being something fun, I actually have fun. Go figure.

It's fun when people don't get probability.

So, here's a quick and dirty analysis. (Matt doesn't have any way to send him comments directly so I'm hoping he'll read this trackback.)

We need

• longer deadlines
• more programmers
• less suck

Upgrade to 2.0.11 now. trikuare.cx was just hit by a pretty evil little exploit and was serving up lots and lots of warez, unknown to me until the admin asked me what was with all the rogue httpd processes which were running under my account.

Also, make sure you're not running a bunch of bogus httpds, and that you don't have things like "tmp.php" and "forumload.php" in your forum directory. If you do, there's a bunch of other fun crap to get rid of, like a hidden directory called .cache, and you'll probably also have a bunch of xfs processes running as well.

Dear Warez puppies: haven't you guys ever heard of bittorrent? Jeeze.

Nothing kills a happiness buzz like coming across a thoroughly vile and disgusting excuse for a human being on that wonderful melting-pot of experience that is the New York subway.

Woo, we got our holiday bonuses today. It was a nice little chunk of change... conveniently, I'm in the market for a digital camera right about now anyway.

Does anyone have any recommendations? I'd like something with a small form factor, at least 3.1MP (but preferably 4 or more), which takes SD since I already have some large SD and MMC cards laying around for my Zaurus and N-Gage. Mac compatibility is a must, USB2 would be nice, good image quality is vital. I don't care about digital zoom, but would like to have a decent level of optical zoom.

As I've long suspected, Benihana will be the death of us all.

I just finished The Salmon of Doubt, the posthumous collection of Douglas Adams' best essays, articles, and short stories, as well as the seed for what was to be the sixth Hitchhiker novel, tentatively titled The Salmon of Doubt.

It is really good, which makes it all the more gut-wrenching that there will never be another piece of writing by Douglas Adams.

Lots of people (or at least, a lot of the people whose weblogs I read) are linking to and talking about Google Scholar, which is like Citeseer for the rest of the world.

The index is pretty comprehensive, and goes back quite a ways. With it I can read the papers of the grandfather I never met. (Well, except that most of them seem to be hosted on for-pay sites even though they were written in the 30s and 40s and should be in the public domain by now...)

Today on my way home I stopped at Barnes and Noble, and picked up an anthology of American Splendor, having thoroughly enjoyed the movie.

I started to read it on the train, and nearly missed my stop. I got home, and read some more, and then before I knew it I'd read the whole thing, and it is now quite a bit past my bedtime.

Damn you, Harvey Pekar. Damn you to hell.

Gamespot probably doesn't realize how quickly the game was done, and is probably so used to seeing simple 3D animation that he doesn't realize how difficult good 2D animation is to do, especially on a small ROM and shoestring budget.

The GameDaily guy really needs to take his Ritalin.

Oh well. Bad publicity is better than no publicity, right? And it's not like we were going for the hardcore gamer market anyway.

In the future, computers will operate on and produce HUMAN BEINGS.

(source)

Any 2D artists with a background in comic book character art, or animation (both foreground and background), who would like to work for a video game company in New York City, should send a résumé and link to an online portfolio to me. Also, feel free to post a link to your portfolio as a comment here.

Preference will be given to those who are already in or near the NYC metro area.

Also, we're still looking for programmers, preferably with experience in embedded and cellphone programming (Brew, Java/MIDP, Mophun, etc.). Again, preference will be given to those in the NYC area, though truly stellar candidates from elsewhere will also be considered.

I finally got rid of the damn animations in the stupid smileys on the forum.

Safari and Konqueror users (including me) may now rejoice in not having their CPU pegged at 100% while viewing any of my weblog entries or forum pages.

Skaven is still releasing songs in IT format. How retro.

It also turns out he did the music for the downloadable version of a bunch of Popcap games. Go figure.

Anyone have any insight regarding embeddable scripting languages? I'm trying to find out if there's any useful ones which I've missed.

Sprung is available for preorder, for those of you who are afraid of having to fight your way to the front of the line at Best Buy at 5AM when it first hits stores and just must have this vital piece of fluffy memorabilia.

We are looking to hire at least two new game developers, with an emphasis on game logic and tools programming. Candidates should be familiar with development on limited-memory platforms, and show good algorithm development ability.

Our two main projects right now are bringing the Sprung game engine to cellphones (with emphasis on Brew and Symbian) and developing a story-oriented game for the PSP, with some of the same concepts as Sprung.

It is much easier to de-parchment an onion which is at room temperature than one which is refrigerated. Also, onions keep for quite some time at room temperature; so, if you use onions a lot, always keep one or two on your counter. It will make the preparation step that much easier.

...but does everyone really have to spend all their effort trying to spell the word "fuck?"