Archive 11/2006

Well, now it finally happened. I'm fed up enough with the Nintendo Wii launch lineup to simply get something else. The Xbox360 to be more precise. Why? For me one single interesting game (Twilight Princess) with the next few to be released in ... 5 months (Mario Galaxy) is simply not worth 250 EUR for me. This doesn't mean that I won't get it at all. It just means, that I will probably wait until March when there are at least 3 games out there that I want.

Ok, I guess this means now the end of a good month playing _Ratchet & Clank_ games. Tonight I now finished the unofficial 4th part of the series: "Ratchet: Gladiator" (German title).

Unofficial simply because this isn't really a platformer-shooter like the first 3 titles are, but more ... a shooter Short story short: Ratchet, Clank and Al are kidnapped by an entertainment mogul and Ratchet is forced to participate in arena fights. These fights go from normal arena matches to challenges known from RC3 where you basically have to reach certain checkpoints of kill a boss.

While this might sound boring if it's all the game has to offer, this was actually not the case. Insomniac managed to rotate the challenges well and so kept the game throughout entertaining. There are also some challenges, where you have to use a hoverbike, hovercraft, land stalker etc. Nothing special, but it keeps the game fresh.

I'm currently in the process of porting over the theme here to Drupal 5.0 and noticed a slight difference between 4.7 and 5.0. While I was able to use something like this in my template.php before:

   function mytheme_menu_item_link($item, $link_item) {
       static $menu;
       $attribs = isset($item['description']) ? 
           array('title' => $item['description']) : array();
       if ('<front>' == $link_item['path'] &&
           (
               arg(0)=='node' && (
                   (is_numeric(arg(1)) && arg(1) != 213)
                   || arg(1)==''
               )
           )
       ){
           $attribs['class'] = 'active';
       }
       return l($item['title'], $link_item['path'], $attribs);
   }
   

Sometimes I really wonder, if companies shouldn't simply use me as some kind of product scout for crap. For example: When I switched my mobile phone provider a week ago and got my new Sony Ericsson K608i for 3EUR, I decided to at least get a small bag for it.

This Monday I then went to another store and finally found a bag for this mobile phone for 16.90EUR. Not all that bad and the bag looked quite solid from the outside, so I bought it.

It's somehow strange. Whenever I participate in an web Reboot contest, I tend to not like the resulting theme after just a few weeks. This time I simply couldn't get used to the white-on-black color scheme so I started playing around with the stylesheet and the result is more like the old design again, but with all the influence of the new one

I just hope that I will like this design longer than then original But judging from my luck for the last week I guess that would be close to a miracle.

Seems like Flickr has added some new features. One of them is a way to share also private photos with other people who are not necessarily members of Flickr and therefor can't be added to your friendslist etc.

The whole beast is URL based, so whoever gets this URL has access to these private photos. But this isn't really a problem IMO since you can always expire those so-called "Guest Passes".

This feature could really come in handy for me every time there is some family party and people want to get the photos I made but are too lazy to register and account on Flickr

Last weekend I finally finished _Ratchet & Clank 3_ and so here is a small review of it As with _Ratchet & Clank 2_, Insomniac simply took the predecessor and made it better.

For example: While I loved the weapons system in RC2, there were too few upgrades available for my taste. So now you can upgrade your weapons (in the normal mode) to level 5. But this also comes with a downside. While in RC2 the update actually sometimes felt like a totally new weapon, in RC3 most of the upgrade are just marginal updates like higher frequency or simply stronger. Only I think 2 out of those 5 are complete upgrades. For example the Shield you might know from RC2 is more or less the same up to level 4. All you get is, that it perhaps holds up enemies a little longer each time and you get more "ammo". But at least level 5 is once again the shooting shield

Is it just me or is JMF yet another example why Java isn't really platform independent? Or actually another example of Sun really making it useful no matter what platform you're on. For example: I now have to write a small program using JMF. I thought: Great, should be no problem using a normal MPEG-1 stream as input source. Yeah, right ... According to the list of supported formats the really platform independent JMF package doesn't support even MPEG-1. This feature is reserved for the platform-dependent binaries. I also tried to register the MP3 plugin and failed there too, so perhaps I understood something the wrong way (but at least I also read about other people having the same problem).

For the last couple of days I'm now using Del.icou.us exclusively for managing my bookmarks thanks to the new and improved Del.icio.us extension directly by Yahoo! which is available on the Firefox Add-ons page. For now I'm quite happy with it since I only had a handful of bookmarks outside of Del.icio.us anyway

In case you were wondering, why this photo showed up on my Flickr page: For quite some time I was having an eye on the EyeTV product series by Elgato. OK, I already have a TV card .... but only lying around here somewhere simply because I could never get it to work properly with my Linux machine.