Two days ago one good friend of mine showed me a link to another rendition of the famous ID’s Quake 2 — Jake2. What makes this reproduction stand out of a crowd is that it’s rewritten entirely in Java. An exciting side is that its last version is very close to the original in terms of performance. You can find their benchmarking reports amusing to look at. And now some spectacular moments…
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Microtechno
Have you ever heard Microtechno music? Everyone heard about Techno, Trance, Acid, Jazz, Classics etc etc, but I bet there are very few listeners aware of Microtechno, Microhouse and the whole family of micro-styles.
What’s the difference? The difference is in approach. While those traditional styles are mainly fighting for making music more powerful and rich with special effects, their Micro siblings are aimed to bring simplicity of sound and structure to the final listener, avoiding false complexity of representation. They keep it simple and that attracts. The simplicity of their world is somewhat different from what we are used to deal with. It lives, evolves and behaves as a living creature. The simplicity which absorbs you entirely, giving you a new sense, new motives to live and percept. OK, that was probably too deep, but it is what I actually think when listening to this amazing stuff.
I wouldn’t pretend to be your guide in this complex world of Micro-sound. What pushed me forward writing this small post was an unexpected discovery of one extremely typical and very tallented artist — AcidRain — and his album “Maridia”.
Have a good listening time!
Extended Desktop on iBook G4
Yesterday Kate asked me whether it’s possible to connect her professional Sony display to her iBook G4 to get a better picture and color representation or no. I answered, yes, without any hesitation and… it’s where the tricky part started.
Quake 2 on coffee beans
OPML Format Standard and BlogBridge
Nowdays there’s a big discussion is open about what is required to be added to the OPML standard and how it should be updated to cover most of today’s needs of feed aggregators, messangers and other OPML consumers and producers of all kinds. The community is actively discussing possible applications and required attributes to be added here and there to cover them. That is what I call “a lot of fun” when expressing my point of view on Open Standards.
Liquid Sculpture
Photographers never stop to surprise and creativity of some of them knows no limits. At that very moment when I start to believe that there’s nothing conceptually new one could create, I immediately find the proof of the opposite. This time it’s absolutely unbelievable pictures of liquids, forming amazing breathtaking sculpture. Take a break and spend some time with a natural beauty — visit Liquid Sculpture.
Google: Magic Tips
Something that I always missed in Google Search was the fexibility of expressions building. Sometimes those tricks mentioned in the advanced search facility is barely enough to fulfill my immediate needs and I have to make series of searches and combine them later. That’s what always bugged me. Yesterday I was doing some collocations searches for my English classes after my working day full of coding was over and unexpectedly typed in an expression looking more like something from a programming language. To my astonishment it worked finer than fine and returned lots of useful results.
Singleton Strategies
Often, when you are developing some application you wish it to run one instance at a time. If you are writing a native application, there’s no problem because the platform you are aiming on most probably already has everything for this kind of magic. When it comes to cross-platform approach it’s vitally important to choose something neutral. This post is about my experience in this area.
BlogBridge gets forum and public bug tracker
Yesterday we started the number of forums to help our users share their thoughts and worries with others. It’s exciting to see how people reacted to this innovation. We got our first ten users in a blink of an eye and most of them have been really active since the very first moments.
Another interesting tool we made public recently is our bug tracker software we used internally. From now on you can report anything you like by simply typing it into the simple form. It’s convenient both for you and us to have it done this way. So, enjoy!
Don’t hesitate to use either forum or bug tracket to share your thought and suggestions with us. We are always trying to be as responsive as possible.
Mac Week Is Over
The first exciting week of living with Mac is over and, I guess, it’s time to share my impressions. Although, I wasn’t using it too much (you might remember that it’s Kate’s personal workbench), I had several nice moments during this week when I was granted the permission to spend several hours wandering through the system and trying various applications. Overall, I’m very positive about Mac. All the way I was using it, I had a smile on my face. It was the smile of pleasure as I was thinking how intuitive and highly integrated things could be if they are done right.