This guy is making a port of Grand Theft Auto for the NES, yes the NES. He is one dedicated guy, considering he had to make: an assembler, graphics editor, map editor and a host of other tools all from scratch just to make this game!
archive for 2005
Another super-cool use of Google maps here. Chicago Crime plots all the crime data made available from the Chicago Police Department. Check out all crimes reported in the 3 a.m. hour on May 5, 2005 in Chicago. You can even map out all the prostitution busts. Excellent combination of the two technologies. Needless to say I’m working on something very similar at the moment for Google Sightseeing.
I just updated the site to WordPress 1.5.1 and being the numpty that I am lost all my images and themes. Stupid ‘replace’ and ‘merge’ buttons in ftp client….
Anyway, I dug through the backups and manged to extract all the bits I lost. All should be good now. If you spy any problems leave me a comment here.
Mutt is awesome. It’s a super hardcore console email client that I’ve been using for my personal mail at work. Not that I’m trying to be sneaky, but it keeps the personal mail out of the way in a terminal, and stops me getting distracted by it all the time. It supports IMAP nicely and has an insane level of customisation. I’ve got it colouring my inbox mails differently depending on the status of them and what their subjects/senders are. Its pretty neat. It also does threading, threading! I can’t live without it now and it drives me insane when I see people reading their mail in the wrong order through something like hotmail.
Great article by John Oxton on the current web design fashions. I was toying with using some of those “special offer” stars on the site here somewhere :).
These paintings by Robert LaDuke in the Mendenhall Sobieski Gallery are aces. They remind me a bit of those old British Railways posters saying ‘Skegness is Great’ and ‘Come see Blackpool’.
Wow, that was a great weekend. I am absolutely knackered, bruised, battered and still slightly hungover. But it was all fun! We were staying in some nice log cabins in the Yorkshire Dales for Friday and Saturday night. We got take-away from the nearest town on Friday and then drank and played poker for the rest of the night. When I say ‘played’ I really mean ‘bumbled along’. As only three of the ten of us knew how to play properly. They, of course, gave us a 2 second introduction and then launched into a full game of texas hold ’em. Good job we were only playing for chips 🙂
Saturday was spent getting covered in mud and paint at Go Ballistic paintballing in Dishforth. It was the first time I’d been paintballing and it was great fun. Wish I’d taken some gloves though as shots in the knuckles really sting. We had booked for a whole day and to be honest we could have just done with half. We were all knackered and out of paint (£6 for 100 shots!) by the afternoon. All fun though, and we had a game of ‘Hunt the Stag’ at the end 🙂 After a hard day fooling around with paint we collapsed back to the cabins got some dinner and then went on the ‘pub crawl’. There were only two pubs in the nearby village so it only just qualifies. After having a couple of jars in the first pub we go searching for the next one, only to find its not there. We stumble around in the dark for half an hour or so before giving up and going back to the cabins for more drink.
The next day we go to the (first) pub for a cracking Sunday lunch. The bar man has a good laugh at our expense as the mystical second pub had been demolished about three months ago. Oh and sunday lunch really was good, I’d heartily recommend it to anyone in their direction.
Stacks of photos for your viewing pleasure in our collective gallery.
I’m away from tonight for a long weekend of Stag paintball shenanigans with Rick and the lads. Should have some good stories and photos on Monday 🙂
Kerry and I went to the see TES tonight at the Film House. He was showing a re-editing of the ‘The Warriors‘ with a live hip-hop soundtrack. It was prety damn cool. I’d never seen the film before but Kerry loves it, and now I want to see the full version. He was powering everything off a powerbook aswell, which added to the geek factor 🙂
Lately the boys and I over at Google Sightseeing have been conversing with Brad Stone, a journalist from Newsweek. His article about the whole thing is now up online to read and gives us a nice write-up along with lots of quotes from Alex. Annoyingly, he initially spelt my name as “Ollie” which drives me nuts (I always spell it “Olly”) so I dropped him a polite email and he changed it pronto :). Brad even gets in some cheeky digs at our quaint Brit view of the world and the wacky way we pronounce things (it was a telephone interview).
Unsure of which party has promised what for the upcoming elections? Who Should I Vote For is for you.
According to them I’m a raving Lib Dem, closely followed by the Greens. Sounds about right to me.
The avatar making website Stor Troopers is back after being offline for ages. So, here is me and kerry:
Totally jumping on the bandwagon I’ve coded up a tag cloud.
Wahey, I have a yellow star on ebay:
go me.
Wahey! At last Google have released Google Maps UK. I’m honoured that we’re the first European country to get the maps treatment. Now they just need to integrate the UK satellite data from keyhole 🙂
I think their map rendering algorithm must have struggled a bit with our wacky non-grid like roads. I still like the style of the maps and the interface is just genius. I atttempted to use multimap the other day and was totally stuck when I couldn’t drag the map around. Google must have some mighty clever DOM gurus working for them.
This guy has constructed his own comics using screen shots from Half-Life 2 for all of the artwork. It is very, very well done. This guy has some skills! http://www.phwcomics.com/
Great idea! Creative Commons licensed samples: http://freesound.iua.upf.edu
Amazing “future-Russia” designs for uber communist buildings. A strange look at what could have been had it not all fallen apart: http://www.muar.ru/ve/2003/moscow/.
Neat front onto amazon for charities to generate revenue: http://www.givezilla.com
“Lorem Ipsum” is dummy text that designers use to fill text spaces on a page. It looks like pseudo-latin and allows you to layout a page with instant realistic content. Here’s an example:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Vestibulum hendrerit, felis nec rhoncus ultrices, velit purus scelerisque ligula, a mattis quam risus eget elit. Proin nec purus sit amet leo fringilla mattis. Nam pede lacus, lacinia et, mollis a, bibendum et, sapien. Mauris sagittis tempus arcu. Nullam cursus metus a sem. Mauris eros nisl, imperdiet eget, nonummy ut, suscipit ut, lectus. Nunc sit amet dolor nec orci volutpat porta. Quisque rutrum lectus at purus. Mauris nulla lacus, imperdiet et, faucibus ut, consectetuer sed, leo.
From lipsum.com. Someone has come up with a few alternatives, including “techno babble” which is just great 🙂
In August the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival has loads of free (I think) screenings of upcoming game footage and talks by industry types. I missed it last year for some reason but heard good things about it. More info here.
James, Alex and I have started up a collaborative blog spotting cool stuff in the satellite photos on google maps. Go take a look.
Update: Well, that was massively more successful than we initially thought. We’ve had over eight hundred submissions and apparently we are using up to much of the server’s resources. We’re currently relocating to a friendlier host.
Update, update: Woo-hoo, we’re back!
Great articles on the New York Times about Japanese convenience stores:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03EAT.html
Reminds of the ‘Lucky Dragon’ chain in William Gibson’s books.
I picked up the latest Banksy book on Saturday and it’s great! It covers all his latest ‘installations’ and his gallery targetting that I blogged about earlier.
Picturesonwalls.com which sells lots of his stuff has unfortunately sold out, but you can still get it on amazon.
I was just cleaning out my camera memory and came across this beauty:
I saw it roughly sprayed on a wall on the promenade down at Portabello in July last year. Someone certainly has a sense of humour.
Amazing story from Moscow News:
Stanislav Petrov was a Soviet army officer monitoring the satellite system for signs of a U.S. attack, the year was 1983, and his instructions, if he detected missiles targeting the Soviet Union, were to push the button and launch a counter-offensive.
He didn’t. Minutes later, no missiles came; months later, the frightening data across his monitor was determined to have been a system glitch. Today, the Association of World Citizens is calling him “the forgotten hero of our time,” a title befitting the man whose responsibility had been to start World War III.
http://www.mosnews.com/feature/2004/05/21/petrov.shtml
Really, really cute and well designed pixel and tiling pattern website. It even calls the pattern section ‘table cloths’ on the site, very cute.
I’ve been thinking about some adding some kind of background pattern on here and some of those would be ideal.
Some really creepy urban exploration pics of the abandoned Russian embassy in Bangkok.
Kerry and I went to the cinema last night for the first time in ages. Constantine was the only thing on that we both wanted to see and to be honest: we weren’t expecting much. I was expecting something on the sillyness level of Van Hellsing but Constantine was actually quite good! It was very much in the same vein as HellBoy (though not as good), lots of religious/occult overtones, a decent main character but with less nazis. It was quite quite noir-ish in places, with Keanu chain smoking throughout the film and his dusty offices above a bowling alley seemingly always at night. They also covered a lot of ground in the film using quite a few characters that felt as though they had a lot of back story behind them. I wanted to know more about all of these characters. I’m tempted to go read some of the Hellraiser comics that it is based on now. Peter Stormare was excellent as ‘Lou’ and Tilda Swinton as Gabriel (yes, the angel) was disturbingly deranged.
We also saw a trailer for Sin City which looks excellent and has Jessica Alba (remember her) looking extremely hot with blond hair. A bit of IMDB later and I find that she is also in the Fantastic Four as The Invisible Woman. The studios do like their comic book adaptations at the moment.
I found this interesting site on current Edinburgh architecture and future planning for new buildings. The image above is of the new “Connery” filmhouse which is re-locating to Festival Square. It will certainly be very different once that is built.
Lately I’ve been wondering if I need to put some kind of CC license on my photos and words on the site. Thankfully I see that they are working on Scottish version of the license. It’s only a draft at the moment but its good to see one being actively worked on.
This is pretty amazing.
A while ago in my role as “webmonkey” for GameSoc I thought that we were due a re-design. The site design had been unchanged for atleast a year and was starting to look rather dated. It was based around a horrendous table layout with a huge banner graphic. Really old-skool stuff. So, I’ve updated the colour scheme and stripped out some of the table layouts. A lot of the table stuff is still there but I really don’t fancy digging around in 30+ files changing <td>s and <tr></tr>s to <div>s and <span>s. The original site back-end code was written before CSS layouts were vogue. I think I’ll phase out the tables gradually.
I’ve also managed to crowbar in some nifty png image trickery. The shadows on the sides of the page content are actually pngs with variable transparency. This means the background image can change and the shadow will still ‘make sense’. Neato stuff, except that is totally breaks in IE (surprise). One hack later and IE is atleast displaying the image properly. But now you can’t click on any of the page! Slight flaw there microsoft… Another google later and I find this life-saving page. Apparently your image has to be really small in one of it’s dimensions. That’s one nasty bug.
Anyway, I like the new look and I’ll continue squashing those nasty tables. What do you think?
Some snaps of paintings that (the genius that is) Banksy snuck into various New York art galleries. Great stuff 🙂
I finally fixed up the footer over the weekend to display properly in IE & Safari. It had been bugging me for a while but displayed perfectly in everything else. Giving the right footer div a width property seemed to fix it. For some reason IE & Safari were collapsing it down to the width of the link images.
I also managed to fit in a ton of work on the GameSoc re-design. It’s all top secret at the moment but I’m sure I’ll be blabbing about it once it’s finished 🙂
I was wandering around John Lewis last week and I noticed the really cool coasters:
A little bit periodic-table-like. They were rather expensive though so I thought I’d check online.
Unfortunately Half Moon Bay only do trade sales over the ‘net. While I was browsing their online catalogue I did notice this really funky NYC door mat:
…and this “lollertastic” pack of chewing gum which Kerry actually got me last christmas! (So thats where she got them from…)
Threadless have one of their fantastic $10 annual sales on at the moment. So Kerry and I have stocked up with a mega-order:
Even with $25 of postage it still works out so much better than buying shirts in the UK. Gotta love the current $ to £ exchange rate!
I finally got to have a game of the super-new version of Natural Selection last night. I haven’t gamed online for ages. With my non-student working lifestyle it’s often hard to find the time. There have been some nice improvements and it is looking more polished than ever. It is probably the most professionally done mod I’ve played in a while. You completely forget that you’re playing a community-built free add-on for a game seven years old. Cracking stuff.
Yay, I’ve been spidered by the XFN bot thing: (http://rubhub.com/) that I set up last week.
MSN Sandbox, an awful lot like Google Labs.
“Principal Associate Director for Nuclear Weapons Programs”: washingtonpost.com: Jobs
Update: Looks like the ad was pulled. Click below for the text.