I love Ratchet & Clank. I really do. So far I've played every single game of the franchise (except for Secret Agent Clank and the new PSN title Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty) and absolutely loved every single one of them. The first installment of the franchise on the Playstation 3, Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction is no exception there ... at least for the most part.
Read more about "Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction" ...Archive for 2008/09
-
Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
-
TeXLive = (La)TeX + Batteries
One of the problems I had to fight for a long time when using TeX over the years was that I often found a snippet on the net that was supposed to do exactly what I've been looking for, but when I then tried to use it at least one .sty or some other kind of package was missing and it was once again Google-time. When I switched to the fruity side of computing MacPorts installed TeXLive for me. TeXLive is a TeX distribution by the TUG, the TeX User Groups, that's at least according to the German news-site heise.de the biggest TeX distribution out there.
So 2 days ago the TUG released this year's edition of the distribution that comes with tons of new stuff, most notably a package manager (
tlmgr) that lets you easily add, remove and update TeX packages. People using MiKTeX should know this whole idea of actually managing TeX packages ;-) For a complete listing of additions, checkout the relevant page in the docs.And perhaps, while working on my master thesis, I can finally dig a little deeper into TeX without having to google for packages every couple of seconds thanks to TeXLive :-)
-
Last preparations for PyCon UK
Well, tomorrow it's finally time for me to depart to the UK. After, I guess, around 15 years, I've finally found with this years PyCon UK an excuse to get up there again. Flights are booked, stuff nearly packed. Now all I have to manage is getting to the airport in time and getting a train when arriving at Stansted ;-) The first part is easy but I have absolutely no clue how part 2 will work out. I really hope that it will be as easy as getting a train from Amsterdam Airport to Amsterdam Central 3 years ago ;-) At least according to the Cross Country website there is a direct connection departing at 19:16 from Stansted Airport which hopefully won't be extremely expensive :-(
I'm really excited to be at the event this weekend with people like Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Simon Willison et al. giving Django-talks, Chris Withers explaining why Python Package Management sucks and much more. There will even be a Photo Competition held during the con. I've also planed to spend most of Friday for some sightseeing. Especially the ThinkTank and the Bothanical Gardens look like great places (to also take some great pictures at) :D The rest of the day should probably be spent finding my way around Birmingham as well as already showing up at the registration desk and taking a look at the local DVD stores ;-) Let's see, depending on how much fish'n chips I can take I might even spend the evening out, now that I've seen this ... I guess I really need more SD-Cards.
-
First day in Birmingham ... rain
OK, also the 2nd part of the journey to Birmingham was quite a success. About 15 minutes after landing in Stansted I managed to get a train ... and after about an hour even a seat with table :D But 43 pounds?! At least the train conductor was great, cracking one joke after another. At New Street Station I was greeted by Arne, Arthur, Fauke and Jannis and at least Arthur, Jannis and I enjoyed some beer at the social event later on thanks to Zeth ... although, I don't understand why they had to put extra sugar into that Monty Python beer ;-) The hotel is fine too. Nothing extra-ordinary but it's not like I was expecting much more when booking ETAP.
The plan for today originally was to check out the Birmingham Botanical Garden, but British weather struck and we are currently all sitting in the conference venue enjoying the Wifi. Hopefully the sun will show its face later today so we can at least enjoy the channels and the ThinkTank as well as Selfridges. Let's see if I can restraint myself enough to not buy an iPod Touch ;-)
-
PyCon UK 2008 - Day 2
So yesterday was the first day on the PyCon UK and it was great :D The mix of topics and personalities was simply astonishing. But let's look at it from start to finish: My day basically started (at least it's the first thing I can remember right now) with a great breakfast right next to the conference venue with something called a "Traditional Breakfast". I guess this has been the weirdest combination of great stuff I've ever had for breakfast. It was some eggs, a sausage, half a tomato, bacon, and beans. More than enough for a whole day :D
But now to the actual talks: First thing in the morning was a talk about using Python to facilitate working on embedded systems. Next came a talk about introducing students to Python as a first language. This was the time I was finally awakening for real and so I actually really enjoyed this one. "Now we are finally more popular than Maths courses" made my day :D
Read more about "PyCon UK 2008 - Day 2" ... -
PyCon UK - Day 3
Read more about "PyCon UK - Day 3" ...
Normally I've come to expect the last day of a conference to be more on the slow side. Only half of the people are there anymore and so on. But not in Birmingham, where the my 2nd conference day (3rd in total) was even more interesting than the first one, although all we could find on this not-so-sunny Sunday morning was some expensive McDonalds breakfast.
-
slotMusic - The best we could hope for?
Read more about "slotMusic - The best we could hope for?" ...
Take an old concept, put it onto a new medium ( ... OK, not really new) and think it is a great new idea. This WTF-moment was brought to me by SanDisk in association with this big 4 (SonyBMG, Universal, EMI, and Warner Music) this morning. slotMusic is that "new" idea and it's all about using microSD cards as replacement for the good old CDDAs. Honestly, the idea is in my opinion not completely bad, especially since -- probably thanks to some extra-terrestrial influence -- the music will be stored as 320Kbps MP3s without DRM. As Michael Arrington I'm totally baffled how SanDisk could convince the 4 labels to do that.
-
Flickr on a bike
You know the streetview-car, but do you already know the Flickrbike? Take a bike, bundle it with a GPS device, and a camera that takes a picture every 60 seconds and automatically geotags them and you can track the life of your bike, and where you've all been with it. Flickr now sent such a bike out to various cities in the USA, Europe, Asia and Oceania and you can follow them on Yahoo's new Start Wearing Purple-site.
Purple isn't exactly my color, but I'd definitely love to get my hands on such a bike ... as long as I don't have to pay the bandwidth bill for the automatic uploading ;-)
[Photo from Start Wearing Purple]
-
IntenseDebate acquired by Automattic
Today, Automattic announced that they have acquired the centralized commenting service IntenseDebate. Over the course of this year, 3rd party commenting systems have gained quite a bit of momentum for various reasons including having one place where to find all your discussions. With this move now, the centralized system gains even more momentum with virtually all new WordPress installations, hosted or self-installed, getting support for IntenseDebate out of the box according to Matt Mullenweg.
Read more about "IntenseDebate acquired by Automattic" ... -
DRM-fear slowly becoming mainstream?
At least that's what you should expect after reading this story on gizmodo about one of the biggest retail chains in the USA shutting down their DRM-based online music store (August 2006 - February 2008) since they're since February 2008 trying to be all-DRM-free. I have no idea how their system works, but in the e-mail published on gizmodo it is suggested by the support team that you burn your music to an audio CD. So I guess the music is somehow bound to a local software component and a server key, so you'd have to re-activate your music if you for example re-install your operating system.
It naturally should be the job of the user first to make sure everything of importance is properly backed up, but in the end most people rely on the service provider to at least act as 2nd tier in the backup-chain. This 2nd level is now dropped. At least they seem to offer a way to get the music out of the DRM-lock, but just think of other services that don't do that. In the end this case should finally shake quite a few people up who previously bought music online without really checking what rights they have on it. Many people always think "Hey, I can get this song online for cheap". Nope, you can get the rights to play it on a single (or 2 or 3) device with a bit of device-lock-in and only very limited ways to use this song for cheap. Congrats.
I at least hope that more people will finally start to get it and also recognize it in other systems; not only those of the music industry but in all parts of the content industry. In this regard (and only in this since I in general don't enjoy people having problems) I hope that many people have bought DRM'd music from Walmart.
