At n.nfshost.com you’ll find a fun little challenge with numbers. It is really rather simple, you need to guess the filename for the next page. You get the first two pages for free (just click the 1 on the first page), but from then on out you need to guess the name from the clue you get. It gets real challenging very fast. The page from 13 to 14 was very difficult for me since it kind of breaks the theme, but also page 18 and 22 put me off for a while. I can recommend a search on google and especially wikipedia.org on their pages about numbers 🙂
Side 28 af 30
MIDP Zelda og perhaps Cell-da 🙂
joystiq.com has a post about a mobile version of the popular Zelda game. I’ve tried the game on my Nokia N70 and there’s an issue with the sound effects, but overall it plays quite well.
It’s not a direct conversion as far as I can tell or it’s simply because it’s a work-in-progress. The demo I tried was release in late june. There more information on this site as well as a download link, but the site is quite slow so I mirrored the jar file here.
Finally, I now own a domain name with my lastname. I would have preferred the .dk version, but .nu will do. I’ve been tracking the renewal status for the past couple of months and today was my lucky day where it had completely expired and was finally up for purchase.
I’m not really sure what I’ll use it for, other than the obvious e-mail address. We’ll see how it goes.
Yesterday was the big day a couple of us had been planning for a long time. The reunion of old classmates from ten years ago. Around 50 classmates and 10 teachers were invited, unfortunately less than half of those showed up.
We started off from our old school where we also met the teachers that showed up. We had hoped we could enter the school and see some of the stuff they have changed since we stopped. This was not possible, so we had to look through the windows. A pity, I would have liked to see some of the buildings from the inside again – it would have brought back a lot of memories. Oh well.
In the afternoon we moved on to a local sportscenter where we spent the rest of the day. First with physical activities and later on with a nice buffet and plenty of booze from the bar. The physical activities were mostly rundbold (I have no idea how to say this in english), but there were also time for a little soccer fun, etc.
Still with the lack of people and all, I think we had a very good day and I look forward to the next reunion, whenever that will be.
Oh yeah, the weather was amazing, which unfortunately my sore red body is a perfect example of this 😥
I put up some photos in the gallery. They are not the best quality, but still decent for a camera phone I guess.
Interesting read over here. It sure gave me a little to think about. And yes, I ride my bike to work as well 🙂
A little while ago I decided it was time to update the firmware in iPod. Not really sure why, I guess I didn’t have anything more exciting to do at that particular moment. While download the firmware updater I stumbled upon the Ipod Wizard site where you can download the software of the same name.
This piece of software enables you to patch the official Apple iPod firmware. It looked kinda cool, so I gave it a spin. I found a rather decent theme and applied the icons patch as well. Have a look in the gallery for the end result.
For a project at work we need some search engine like functionality. We’ve tried to do it ourselves, but usually our implementations were too slow, too memory intensive or too much work to maintain. I was recently recommend by one of my coworkers to have a look at the Apache Lucene project, so I’ve spent the last couple of nights studying it and doing a test implementation. Coincidentially, Lucene released the 2.0.0 version in late May. 🙂
First impressions are quite impressive – Lucene is a very easy to use search engine and it’s quite fast as well. It is possible to implement a fully working search engine with only a few lines of code. To do this you need two parts – an indexer and a searcher.
The indexer can be implemented with the following lines of java code.
IndexWriter indexWriter = new IndexWriter("/tmp/index", new StandardAnalyzer(), true);
Document document = new Document();
document.add(new Field("article", "This is a sample article to test the Apache Lucene search engine", Field.Store.YES, Field.Index.TOKENIZED));
indexWriter.addDocument(document);
indexWriter.close();
These lines of code creates the index for the Lucene’s searcher. Of course the index is rather small with just one document, but it’s easy to add more fields to a document and more documents to the index.
The searcher can also be implemented with a few lines of code.
IndexReader indexReader = IndexReader.open("/tmp/index");
Searcher searcher = new IndexSearcher(indexReader);
QueryParser parser = new QueryParser("", new StandardAnalyzer());
Hits hits = searcher.search(parser.parse("sample"));
System.out.println("First hit: score " + hits.score(1) + " - " + hits.doc(1).get("article"));
indexReader.close();
This code creates a Searcher that will search the index for the search word “sample” and print the first hit to System.out. This is really all that is required to build a basic search engine. You will of course need all the glue code to make it user friendly and customize it to your needs.
All classes are from the Lucene project, so all that is required is the lucene-core-2.0.0.jar file somewhere in your classpath. Oh.. yes.. you need to catch a few exceptions as well, so the above code won’t run directly. 😉
Yesterday afternoon I was in a car accident, but luckily there were no physical injuries, except for the soar neck – known as the whiplash syndrome. The accident happened in the rush hour traffic next to a bus stop. A bus had just left the stop and in their usual reckless behaviour forced it’s way back into traffic. The two cars ahead of us had to make a hard stop to avoid the bus and each other. My brother, which was driving the car I was in, just barely made it to a halt without hitting the car in front, but he did make it stop.
Unfortunately, the driver behind us payed more attention to the bus that the car directly in front of him, and hence smashed into us and my brother’s car and we were pushed into the car in front of us. I seriously don’t think the guy behind us pushed the brakes before he hit us. I guess safety distance is not in his dictionary.
My brother’s car got pretty smashed up at the rear and some at the front as well. He hasn’t looked to much at it yet, but he expects a lot of damage underneath the car. This is so unfortunate and sad. My brother have inherited the car from our father who passed away one and a half year ago. It’s a nice car and my brother is always afraid if something should happend to it, so he takes good care of it. These past months he spent a great deal of time fixing the car with lots of new parts, a new paint job, and with many custom parts and now all for nothing. Just because some jerk don’t know how to drive. It makes you wanna cry. 😥
Eventhough it was a relatively low speed crash, it was all that more shocking to us. We though we had made it to a halt without hitting the car infront, and then boom. We were all shaking for the next couple of hours and my brother’s girlfriend was a mess. Although none of us have any physical injuries, it will definitely leave a scar on the soul.
Now I really only hope the process with the insurance company is without any trouble. That would make healing the soul somewhat less painful.
I spend a lot of time designing websites, both a work and at home in my private time. I use the Firefox / Linux combo and try to stay as close to the W3C specifications as possible, but as we all know, that doesn’t necessarily mean a good end result in Internet Explorer. I still have access to Windows, but only as a dualboot option, so that would mean I would have to reboot my PC just to test a website, which isn’t a viable option in the long run.
Luckily, the nice guy Sérgio Lopes over at tatanka.com made a nice little script that makes installing Internet Explorer on linux a breeze. He calls it ies4linux and currently version 2.0 beta 6 is available. The scripts gives you the option to install 3 different versions of IE, and Macromedia Flash 8 is part of the package as well. Unfortunately, flash video flicker way too much to be usuable on my setup, but IE is working just fine. It glitched out on the first run though, but since then it’s been fine.
…or Burnout Revenge for the Xbox 360 in review.
I got hooked on the Burnout series with the third incarnation for the original Xbox, namely Burnout Takedown. It’s a killer game and the multiplayer part is great. (With only a little load time between each race if you use the Retry option to play the same track.) I never played much Burnout Revenge on the orignal Xbox, the graphics was too confusing for the low resolution especially in the multiplayer part and I really wanted to wait for the Xbox 360 version.
I got the 360 version a short while after the release and have played through most of the World Tour part by now. It sports addicting and fun gameplay but the load times is unfortunately taking away some of the fun.
In the single player part of the game it is somewhat bearable, since you’re just one person waiting and in theory you can do other stuff while waiting. The waiting is usually in the range of 30-40 seconds or at least that’s what it feels like. I can watch a bunch of commercials before the game has loaded. The load time is no different if you start a new game or restarts a track. This is very annoying when you are trying to beat the time in a Burning Lap event, since if you crash you have no chance at beating the clock, so you might as well restart and wait once again.
This is not acceptable, but all in all ok, the graphics are nice and stuff like that, but consider how much time you waste waiting on your console just loading stuff. It annoys me. At this time I have played around 15 hours of Burnout Revenge. How much time was spent waiting on the darn this loading? I seriously don’t want to know.
What’s even worse is during the multiplayer part and to some extend the single player part (if you achieve a higher rating) and this is the part I really hate! You are forced to return to the menu for the darn game to save in single player and for no apparent reason in a multiplayer game! This fucking blows! In single player there is the reason for saving the game, but in multiplayer there is no reason what-so-ever. There is absolute no excuse, this is purely bad UI design by the developer!
Anway, it easily takes 5-10 seconds to load the menu and save the game. Then you can start the process of selection your game type, choose vehicles, etc. and wait for the game to load once again. This quickly consumes two minutes between each game – compare this to the actual amount of time you play a track before you have to return to the menu. The ratio is fucked up – and it removes the fun in multiplayer gaming. For this sole reason I’ve only play around three multiplayer sessions. We just can’t the loading times.
I don’t understand why Criterion didn’t opt to use the harddrive in the 360. It must be able to speed up the load time significantly. I don’t accept the reason that the harddrive is not present in all console. As far as I know other games can do this, so why can’t Burnout Revenge. If Criterion doesn’t do at lot better with the next game in the Burnout series, they have certainly lost a supporter. The happy consumer in me they already lost…