Archive 3/2008

Sweet, Sony announced today, that a total redesign of the PSN Store interface will see the light of your PS3 this April (at least if you are in Europe) as reported earlier today by Kotaku.

And the store definitely needs it. I'm not really a big fan of the Xbox Live Marketplace either, but the current PLAYSTATION Store layout is just downright bad. For instance, if you access the "Games" category, you get a listing of sub-categories ... in chunks of 5 or so. The selection of a game when you've finally found your category is similarly complicated. Let's just hope, that the new design will make everything better.

Although I still don't understand, how a rollout can take 2 weeks ...

Vor ein paar Tagen hat mir Georg Twitterholic.com gezeigt und mich auch gleichzeitig mal gefragt, wie schwer es wäre, so etwas für Österreich zu machen. Und jetzt, ein paar Tage später, habe ich mal ein paar gesammelte Statistiken hier hochgeladen. Wie Twitterholic zeigt auch diese Seite jeweils die Top 100 Benutzer von Twitter an, jedoch nur diejenigen, die aus Österreich kommen und daraus auch kein Geheimnis machen. Oder zumindest versuche ich das hiermit zu erreichen

Sometimes you really start to wonder ... back when I moved this site over to a Blueprint-based stylesheet, everything was working file except naturally in good old sucker Internet Explorer 6. For some reason the sidebar ended up below the content. And no, it wasn't because of the usual box-model problems but because of a single line in the teaser of this post on the index ...

I have to admit it: I'm an Insomniac fanboy. I played every single Ratchet & Clank game (except the PS3 one) and loved them. So when I first learned about Resistance: Fall of Man it was clear to me, that I eventually had to have it. Now that I finally have a PS3, Resistance was the first game (not bundled with the system) that I got.

For the last year or so I've been more often than not looking over at the PlayStation 3 and though: "Damn, they have some really nice games over there". Back then the PS3 had a couple of problems for me. First The price. Paying 600 EUR for a console without a game packed in was simply not an option for me. And second: The AV-outputs. With my Xbox 360 I have the nice option to just hook it up to my 19" computer display and get nice 1280x1024. With the PS3 I'd have to go the HDMI or component route to get some HD and I neither have a new TV with HDMI or component, nor do I have an expensive enough computer display to support HDMI not to mention HDMI + HDCP. And spending around 800EUR to get any of these, was and still is not an option either.

Over the last couple of months mod_wsgi has become a very good alternative to mod_python and FastCGI if you want to deploy a Python-based web application on Apache. For the last 3 months, this site has been running on it and it's been a great experience. Today, Graham Dumpleton released version 2.0 which comes with tons of nice new features.

Is there perhaps some space left between complex authentication systems like OAuth and the bare minimum like HTTP Basic Auth? Basically everyone uses cookies for normal user connections, why not also support them for application developers?

OK, this was definitely the Huh-moment of the week. I just read an article on Betanews about an interview with Acer's senior vice president James T. Wong, where he announced some obscure PC-based gaming machine (I guess he means a console ). The big selling point compared to established players in the market like Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony some obscure "open standards" are mentioned.

Mercurial is (as probably all decentralized version control systems) specialized in support multi-branch development. Here you have basically 2 options: Separate branches physically by just cloning a branch to a different folder and then working on it there, or using the hg branch $name command to create a new branch right within the same repository and give it a name (hence "named branch").

Since a couple of months I've been now looking over at the Blueprint project (among other CSS frameworks) and have been wanting to write something with it. It's a nice little set of generic CSS definitions, that just makes life so much easier while not really restricting you in any way if you want to have a fixed with layout. Sure, there is the initial restriction of the 950 pixels for the overall container, but since it's easy to get around this, it doesn't count IMO.