kometbomb

Programming and stuff.

Category Archives: Nonsense

19 Mar

Ideas for Blogs

Here are some ideas for writing for a blog that I came up when brainstorming for ideas for my blog. It may or may not be helpful for a writer’s block.

A Numbers List

A numbers list, e.g. “10 Bestest Games Evar”, “20 Weirdest Science Facts of 2004”, is an easy and lazy way to write. It requires an paragraph of text per each thing, at best. A lot of these are basically link lists — something that wasn’t too useful even back in 1996.

Worst case scenario: You essentially need to come up with a generic title (be sure to include “best” and “you’ve never heard of” somewhere in the post title) and then a template in which you fill in the blanks for each bullet point in the post. It’s like doing Madlibs with yourself. Just put the game/movie/social networking site in the template, repeat 20 times and you’re go.

Best case scenario: You come up with an idea, which is original. Even if the actual idea wasn’t too original, you will balance that with quality reviews of each thing you include. Or, you could try to narrow your scope so you will provide at least a somewhat useful list for a certain topic. In practice, your goal is to create original content even if it merely described other content.

How to improve: If you are writing about best games you saw last year, you include images or even better a video on YouTube. I find it very convenient if I can instantly view footage of a game and changes are I’ll revisit the post just because all the videos are in the same place. Even if you are writing of a subject everyone has an opinion about, you could try to entertain with your opinion.

Blog Dialogue

Many blogs quote other blogs and then continue on the subject or critique the original quote. This is easy, as long as you keep in mind you need to have something to add and that you need to provide something more to read. Simply paraphrasing someone else’s text to give a heads-up to your readers about some other blog can be acceptable in some sense but it is rarely captivating enough in its own right. Obviously, the dark side of this is blatant stealing of content, links and ideas.

Worst case scenario: Your blog consists of a stream of links to other blogs. The readers will be bored of filtering through all the random stuff. Unless they are clones of you — in which case they will be very interested of everything.

Best case scenario: You disagree or agree with someone’s blog. You quote the parts of the original post and include your own thoughts (“Sucks!” and “Ditto!” is not acceptable). Generally, after reading your post the discussion has advanced. Or, in case you are just posting a heads-up to your readers about another blog, after reading your blog your readers don’t have to refer to the original blog to keep on track.

How to improve: Even if it’s only your opinion, you need to have a solid base of your argument (well, duh). Your content needs to be interesting and entertaining in its own right — otherwise your blog will be a a mishmash of random links to other blogs.

Write about a Hobby

You could try to educate the masses about something you already know about. Everyone has a hobby, which means everyone knows about something that is interesting enough to keep as a hobby. Obviously, not everyone has the skill of teaching. Nonetheless, most people can provide a bit of help to people who wish to know more about, say, programming or guitar playing.

Worst case scenario: You write about a trivial subject everyone with half a brain knows. Or, you write about something you don’t quite get. And the writing is sloppy, your goal is just to bash the keyboard until you have created any content at all for your blog. In addition, you just copy other people’s content.

Best case scenario: You write about something cool you came up with, tell how you did it and are ready to answer questions. Your goal is to share your knowledge or at least the end product.

How to improve: Again, more content is better. Provide images or videos. A lot of tutorials and instructions on the ‘Net are good enough for their writing alone, but it is quite rare to see good illustration for a geometry problem or a good video of some handicraft technique. One thing I have noticed are videos of someone doing something trivial on the computer — for a computer-illiterate this can be very helpful. It requires a bit of effort to produce good visual aids but for the reader it’s worth its weight in anything he or she considers valuable.

Write about Your Day

This is the archetype of all blogs, writing about what you did today. It is acceptable to the readers only if you are very good at writing — or are ready to expose interesting details of your life. Don’t be alerted, exposing those interesting details can be as easy as reviewing a movie you saw last night.

Worst case scenario: Twitter. Livejournal.

Best case scenario: Your writing is extremely good, humorous or you simply pour your heart into your writing. Or, you provide a honest opinion on a movie, a warning on a brand of bad hardware you bought or give useful information about living with a rare disease.

More Ideas and Examples

13 Mar

SEO Is Bullshit

Sorry for the characteristic blog post with the quote and the link but I thought this article was a good read:

Two weeks ago I said that SEO is bullshit and the SEO community promptly got their knickers in a twist. The post was labelled everything from “sensationalist crap” to “linkbait”, but I was still left searching for a solid counter-argument. Even Richard Hearne, one of Ireland’s better known SEOs, decided not to engage in the discussion because my post was “so wide of the mark”. But then why the hype? Why the anger? Don’t tell me there might be some truth to my argument? SEO is bullshit and the SEOs know it too.

I get a lot of SEO pages on StumbleUpon which really riles me up for two reasons: I’m literally drowning in SEO stumbles and, most importantly, because I agree wholeheartedly with this article. I hope the right people will read it.

Sometimes, after reading one of those stumble out of boredom, I can’t but think the line between actual SEO advice and the content (crap) SE spammers spew out is blurred. I guess anything connected to SEO is so little about actual valuable content and advice (outside of best practices), it taints the little good there possibly could be. It very much reminds me of all those self-help gurus with their painfully obvious advice (and painfully inflated prices). Sometimes, it feels like the whole SEO inner circle is something Louis Theroux should investigate.

I am quite sure the only people who benefit of the whole SEO phenomenon are those who sell snake oil consult other spammers optimizers.

“SEO, for lack of a better word, is bullshit” — though, I guess it sadly “captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit”.

11 Mar

Software Improvements That Made Hardware Better

Here is a 100% subjective list of remarkable software that made existing hardware better, more useful or simply extended its shelf life without any hardware modifications, purchases or upgrades.

The Playstation 3 Supercomputer

As already reported by millions of blogs since 2006, a Playstation 3 seems to find use in a scientific project than in a living room. A cluster of a dozen or so PS3’s provides more computational prowess for scientific research than is available by the usual means for the same amount of money. In fact, there are resellers specialized in selling PS3 clusters. As a collective supercomputer, Playstation 3 users dominate the Folding@home project.

Basically, this means even if the PS3 finally bombed as a video game console, the unsold units could find purposeful life as a cheap supercomputer. This easily meets the criteria for making existing hardware more useful via software.

C64 fast loaders

Back in the 1980s, having a quick few minutes game of, say, Pitstop 2 (OK, I know any respectable player would not settle for a few minutes game of this gem) on the Commodore 64 was a relatively impossible task thanks to long loading times. You could have to wait minutes for a game to load — when loading from a cassette or from a floppy. Some loader routines even had a tiny game built-in to waste your time with while the game loaded in the background. To experience this ritual, watch the below video before proceeding to the next paragraph. Do not skip forward. It’ll make you respect fast loaders more.

Then, someone realized that the original routines for transferring data from the disk drive were in fact crap and wrote much more efficient routines. Thus, fast loaders were born. For example, the disk turbo on Action Replay VI reduced loading times tenfold (while the mentioned turbo was delivered on a cartridge, it was still purely a software affair — in fact the loader could be saved on disk from the cartridge). A game would load in a few seconds.

Subpixel rendering

With the advent of LCD screens, subpixel rendering has become commonplace. This is mostly thanks to ClearType, Microsoft’s implementation of subpixel rendering shipped with Windows XP. This technique implementable purely by software triples the vertical screen resolution. Kind of.

Subpixel rendering exploits the fact most displays have each screen pixel represented as set of a red, a green and a blue pixel (as you can remember from school, white consists of those three base colors). By slightly changing the color of neighboring RGB triplets, the human eye can be fooled to think a pixel is slightly towards the neighboring pixels (thanks to the fact our eyes sense color intensity much better than the actual shade of the color). Think of it as something similar to anti-aliasing.

This works best — or rather is more easily implemented by lazy programmers — on most LCD screens, thanks to the fact the triplet is usually arranged horizontally. A typical CRT screen doesn’t have a similar symmetric pixel geometry.

Alternative keyboard layouts

The QWERTY layout is the most common arrangement of keys on a keyboard. There are alternative layouts that are much faster for typing, as QWERTY was developed to slow down typists who were faster than the technology was back in the stone age. By ordering the keys in a different order, typing can be sped up because the fingers are closer to the keys that are used the most often.

A popular alternative layout is the Dvorak layout. A Dvorak keyboard can look intimidating a first (it looks like someone has vandalized a perfectly good keyboard) but in theory, it should be faster to type. It even takes into account that most people are right-handed — therefore the right hand should do most of the typing. Since it is the most common non-QWERTY layout, it is well supported. For example, Windows has shipped with it since Windows 95.

There is no single layout that was as good for any language as QWERTY is bad. The Dvorak layout has a downside that it is mainly for English — other languages have slightly different typing profile and thus have modified Dvorak layouts. For programmers and other people who frequently need special characters, there also exists a version of Dvorak.

The best potential feature of non-QWERTY layouts is the fact it is less likely you’ll injure yourself. Although, this is subject to debate considering a serious wrist injure comes from quite bad typing habits. People do however mention increased comfort when using e.g. Dvorak.

Turning a $60 router into a $600 router

Something comparable to the PS3 upgrade above, the hardware of some cheap routers can be better harnessed by changing the firmware. This is mostly because companies love to overprice their products (after all, a higher price is the only factor making some things “professional” — *cough* Vista). They simply sell a software downgraded version of a router with a lower price. Lifehacker explains in detail how to upgrade your router, in case it is suitable for the operation.

Also of note is that many wireless routers are capable of more transmitting power than they are allowed to. To put it short, the wireless connection does not work as reliably as it could. Even if the above firmware upgrade was not available for your router, it is very possible that there exists ways to increase the transmitting power. However, the legality of it is a gray area — the power is usually limited for a reason.

09 Mar

Dev Stories from the Past

A bit of nostalgy can never hurt anyone. To me, weird tales about old software are a source of inspiration — they are essentially war stories for nerds. Here are some cool software stories from the past told by the developers themselves.

Donkey Kong and Me

The aptly named DadHacker writes about his past at Atari Corp. and more specifically about his experiences on porting the Donkey Kong coin-op on Atari. Includes gory descriptions of 8-bit graphics modes.

… most of the game sources I saw in the consumer division were crap, just absolute garbage: almost no comments, no insight as to what was going on, just pages of LDA/STA/ADD and alphabet soup, and maybe the occasional label that was meaningful. But otherwise, totally unmaintainable code.

Sounds familiar…

Tim Follin Interview about Video Game Music

Here is a great video interview with Tim Follin, a composer of game music on the Commodore 64, Atari ST and many other platforms. Wikipedia has a surprisingly extensive biography but the below video has the same information told much better.

Be sure to watch the second part as well.

Macintosh Stories

The development of the Apple Macintosh is the source of many mythical stories. This site dedicated to Macintosh folklore contains probably most of them. I like the fact there is a lot of stories about both the people and the inner workings of the Mac.

Llamasoft

Jeff Minter is a legendary character with the distinctive style of his games. Personally, Minter is in my all time Top 5. One of my first memories about computers is not understanding Colourspace at all back when I was about 8. Below is a really interesting and funny presentation by the man itself including game footage from his old games (I think the presentation is promotion for his latest effort, Space Giraffe). He has written an extensive history of his company Llamasoft.

An Interview with Rob Northen

Rob Northen was responsible for copy protecting many games on the Amiga and Atari ST platforms. Considering publisher giants like Ocean, Microprose and US Gold used his services, I’d say a majority of games used a version of his protection. This interview gives some insight into how he came up with his software Copylock and how it worked.

29 Feb

Travis Bickle, Superhero

When talking about modern, more realistic, gritty superheroes, people most often mention Batman as the definitive example. When compared to more archetypal superheroes such as Superman, Batman is clearly a more realistic character. He has a past. In addition, he does not have any superhuman abilities — all he has is dedication, skill and wealth.

However, since the concept of a superhero can be bent to include characters that are less cartoony and in theory could exist in the real world, people often forget classic films that also could be seen as superhero movies. One whole genre full of potential overlooked “superhero” films is the 1970s vigilante genre with such classics as Death Wish with Charles Bronson and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

Taxi Driver is an interesting example for a variety of reasons. The movie exhibits extreme realism. The characters are everyday people — albeit from the seedy underbelly of life. There is a story of a hero single-handedly fighting evil.

The story could be thought as an origin story for the character of Travis Bickle, whose character shares common superhero traits: strong moral values, vigilantism and heroism. Origin stories, such as the graphic novel Batman: Year One or the movie Spider-man, are an important part of superhero mythos: it usually is the single defining reason why someone becomes a superhero. For Batman, this would be the death of his parents by a street punk (motivation) and later, him being an extremely wealthy industrialist (resources — skills).

Holy Bat-gun, Travis!

For Travis, the motivation is much more complex: in part, he is either just disgusted by the dark aspects of city life, he’s going insane or it could be that he tries to prove his manhood to his love-interest. In any case, he takes it as his duty to clean the city of all the filth. Even if it is just a single street at a time.

Travis’ resources obviously are limited compared to that of a millionaire’s. He does however have combat experience. He obtains weapons and routinely practices with them. In a feat comparable to a Bat-device, he builds a special device for quickly wielding his backup gun from his jacket sleeve.

Travis 2.0

At the same time Travis is preparing both mentally and physically for whatever he will do, he still maintains a facade of sorts by going to work. While his second persona clearly bleeds into public, it could be thought as a double identity — maybe just for himself. He is both a taxi driver and a killing machine. As if to differentiate his two sides, he shaves his head before going to work as a vigilante hero. Maybe as a logo of sorts, Travis adopts he catchphrase of presidential candidate Palantine and is seen sporting a pin carrying the slogan even when he makes an attempt at the candidate’s life.

One important feature of a superhero is that he or she continually fights crime and evil. When Taxi Driver comes to an end, it is not implied in any way Travis won’t do something similar in the future. In fact, his treatment as a hero probably just feeds his ambition of becoming a person of importance — a hero.