Short and simple: http://en.gravatar.com/avatar/<md5 hash of email address>?.
e.g. echo -e ‘bob@email.com’ | md5sum gives: c961431faea38ed65bfd982cf2e31bd0.
Optional add-ons are size (s=<Number of pixels>), content rating (r=<g, pg, r, or x>), and default (d=<escape encoded URI of an image or one of identicon, monsterid or wavatar>).
great place to do something akin to the ‘imitate a lotus notes password entry trick’.
Well the cut-scene to action ratio has improved
And when you get to the end of the first act there’s another 3 minute hard-drive install while the game chastises you for staying up too late. Nice of it to do that.
Is this a binary file or not???
This is a simple perl script that checks if the passed in input data is binary or not by checking if, within the first 8k the number of non-ascii characters exceeds the number of non-ascii characters by a factor of 2. It’s fundamental in that it doesn’t check for unicode files, so is probably broken in that case.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $buffer;
my $nread;
$nread = sysread(STDIN, $buffer, 8192);
my $nchars = 0;
my $nbinchars = 0;
foreach (split(/ */, $buffer)) {
my $value = ord;
if ($value < 32 || $value >= 127) {
$nbinchars++;
} else {
$nchars++;
}
}
exit ($nbinchars * 2 > $nchars);
Installers
I like the general way of installing applications on the apple. Drag program into Applications folder, and you’re done!
The only problem comes in when you actually have to use installers, as they want to put things in various locations in system-protected locations. 9 times out of 10 they don’t come with an uninstaller, so removing them can be a bit of a difficult task, especially if they spew themselves everywhere.
Another issue with the mac installers is that they’re shell scripts. People keep forgetting that the mac file system hierarchy contains loads of spaces. Don’t forget to trap filenames with quote marks “$foo”! It’s broken quite a few systems as a result of forgetting this fact.
I {entity} unicode too
Nerd commentary really.
If you heart unicode too, pass it on
Toolbox essentials
Well, I was reading ‘5 more essentials for your programming toolbox‘ and the first entry has my favourite – unfolded linked lists. It’s just that it’s broken in at least one way. You should embed the list of ‘void *’ pointers at the end of the entry using the magic of the zero length array at the end.
struct unrolled_listitem {
int num_elements;
struct unrolled_listitem *next;
void *pointers[0];
}
You get the size of a struct item from (sizeof(struct unrolled_listitem) + num_elements * sizeof(void *)). You need to min/max it to the size of a cache line.
The issue is that if you want to embed this structure in another one, you need to add padding after it to the max of the size of the structure that you are planning on allocating.
Several GSODs later…
Well, the mac doesn’t get BSODs it gets a slightly differently colored grey screen of death. Thankfully I had saved before yanking out the plug for the external monitor. It greyscreened on me with the multi-lingual press the power button for a few seconds message on-screen.
I mean really guys, this is grade-A simple stuff, people should be expected to plug these things in and out on a regular basis so it shouldn’t be a kernel panic level issue when something goes wrong in that case.
At least you get a ‘graceful’ video driver restart when things go horribly messy on that platform (unlike XP where you just have a brick).
repetitive, repetitive, you have no idea how repetitive it is
Ok, I ponied up a wodge of cash for a ps3 and a few games (and paid the tax for a few movies too). I got Uncharted:Drake’s Fortune and Assassins Creed (grammar note: this is a creed that covers all Assassins, so I think the apostrophe should come after the s).
Well, Uncharted is just fun. I’m still a newbie to controller based gaming, but over all, I am impressed. The puzzles and combat just seem to work well; mind you I’d be hard pressed to find that many mercs on any one island. You would need to pay them a hell of a lot of money to stay once they start getting killed with any degree of regularity. Reality aside, it just works as a game. The visuals are great and the game play is well paced and just combines to give us a good experience
Not so Assassins Creed. Booooring is probably the best expression for it. Boring in the same way that performing the same, repetitive missions time and time again gets really damned boring. You get to the city, save the person in distress and then sneak in in the company of a bunch of monks. That’s the only way in. Then once you get in you have to perform a minimal set of a handful of styles of missions in order to get to the real mission.
You can go everywhere…. so bloody what, it doesn’t help in the complete absence of variety in the missions.
The visuals are great… No, they’re good, put a few more pixels on Outcast and it would probably beat Assassins Creed hands down.
For a company like Ubisoft who have produced an excellent run of 3D games in the Prince of Persia series (which got boring, but made up for it in the puzzles) I am stunned that they could produce such a band title. I’m left wondering if they were just scared to produce something that had a bit of excitement in it due to the fact that they set it in a contentious time period (which even then is a huge cop-out, god how I have another rant stored about that).
Oh for another Beyond Good And Evil, Damn, that game is a milestone that needs to be shown to people as an example of how to make a game that reaches out to the player.
Where’s the SDK, huh?
I’m just wondering when Apple will be shipping the SDK for the ipod touch/iphone. Just being nosey really. I’ve veered away from jailbreaking it simply because I don’t want to end up with an expensive brick next firmware update.
They say February, but of course remembering that the Leopard launch being the end of the month it could be anywhere up to the 29th.
Another thing I’d like to see is the UI guidelines. I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to reading design guidelines, simply because there are a lot of good points in them. Mind yo, you should not be slavishly obeying them, as, after all, they are only guidelines, and not commandments.
On guidelines, I’m get miffed with applications that require the use of the mouse to accomplish things. Vista’s keyboard usable everywhere is a charm to use, even while it’s gobbling up all those cpu and disk resources with the indexer.
Stolen from SVGL
I enjoy reading SVGL, and the current article is no exception. Considering that I went and pre-ordered Devil May Cry 4, when I read this it made me almost want to cancel the pre-order (not!).
Devil May Cry 4 also has a part where these evil naked snow chicks make out with each other and kiss each other all over. Okay, okay, that was kind of awesome. But I also sternly raised my eyebrows! I did!