Archive 12/2006

Yet another probably for most people out there quite useless Greasemonkey script. It simply adds "n" as accesskey to navigate to the next comic strip and "b" to navigate to the previous comic strip on Penny Arcade as soon as you're viewing a strip.

According to CNET this virtual CC should be compatible with every website that supports Mastercard. Sounds actually like a pretty neat idea, esp. since there seems to be no additional fee.

It's not like there is a shortage on PDF support on MacOSX. First of all, you get a quite good PDF viewer with Preview.app bundled with MacOSX and there is also the Acrobat Reader series by Adobe ... although Acrobat Reader 8 is the slowest app I've ever seen.

First of all I want to apologize for all the gaming-related posts recently. This will end right here and right now. Meaning, I've now reactivated gamerslog.com and will once again try to post there at least sometimes. I also have once again some additional ideas for that site so it might end up as my playground for new stuff, which isn't a bad thing per-se, since it will bring back some activity at least by me over there.

Just a small note for people trying to use MediaWiki on Dreamhost. I first made a local installation which had this as $wgArticlePath:

   $wgArticlePath      = "$wgScript/$1";
   

Opera Software just released version 9.10 of their Qt-based browser suite. The major new feature in this release seems to be some kind of fraud detection system which appears to make an assynchronous check of the URL of a website against a central blacklist and shows a big red icon when you visit a page that is known to be for example a phishing pond.

Well, back from inactivity ... at least I hope so. Finally Xmas holidays so I really might find the time to do something else but work for university stuff (although there is enough to do on that front as well). I guess half of my free time will be spent on playing games like "Burnout Revenge" or "Viva Pinata" for the Xbox360. But I guess I will keep the rest to do some work with Ruby On Rails.

For the last couple of months I've been scouting a little bit around to find the web-framework that fits my needs the most. Well, I guess, something like this doesn't really exist. I've done a little bit with Django and now I've finally some useful web-project to work on again and I will use this opportunity and write the same page in Django and Ruby On Rails (and perhaps also in Symfony).

OK, it's not like "Gears of War" is crashing all the time ... in fact this was the first crash I've noticed so far, but this one was definitely at a quite inconvenient time I was just fighting the berserker and actually bet it, but the orbital laser also hit me on its way through the beast ... so I died. But at the same time, the mission objective of killing the berserker was accomplished which was perhaps to much for Gears' application logic

I was kind of funny: Yeeeey, she's dead .... meeeeh, me too.

Finally something about coding here I've just started working on a little project for a friend and I guess in the days to come I will probably write a little bit about things I learned about Django and also describe fixes for problems I faced.

So on to the first problem: If you ever get something like this with Django:

   "<PREFIX>/django/utils/translation/trans_real.py", line 167, in _fetch
       app = getattr(import(appname[:p], {}, {}, [appname[p+1:]]), appname[p+1:])
   AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute '<APP_IN_PROJ>'
 [more ...]

Ok, it's been quite quiet for the last couple of days. But contrary to all the rumors that I've been playing Xbox360 all day and all night, I had quite a lot of stuff to do for University so actually not all the much gaming for me so far. But this weekend I finally changed that and first of all, finally restored my previous savegame for Kameo (for some reason when you first create an account on your Xbox and then try to import a Gamertag from Xbox Live you end up with 2 different accounts ). I've also got some achievements for Geometry Wars , but first things first.

So far I really enjoy Kameo. It's basically exactly what I've expected of it: A fun action adventure with some cute little animal friends. I think it was in the EGM review that someone criticized it for more or less just emulating what made games from Nintendo great, for example the Morphball in the Metroid series. Actually, I don't see the similarity there. The ball in Kameo for me doesn't feel like the Morphball at all. It's very similar to the dash movements of Sonic in the Sonic Adventure series, but absolutely no Metroid in there ... Btw.: I loved the dashes in Sonic Adventure 1 and 2, so I also enjoy Major Ruin in Kameo