zerokspot.com :: Entries (en)

FriendFeed and new users

2009-01-04T23:01:07+01:00

It's really sad to see such a great service as FriendFeed not really taking off. As has been said, the service is probably a bit overwhelming for new users simply because of the amount of data coming in from each of your friends and rooms (even if you follow just one or two people). I also have to agree with most of the points Lewis Gray wrote about how to improve FriendFeed to open it up to new users. I especially have to agree with "FriendFeed Needs to Better Define What It Is and How People Use It". It has tons of features but every time you hear "FriendFeed", someone else mentions Twitter and a comparison starts. Even if the two of them are not really comparable, in my opinion. For example, I registered on FF soon after it went live and all I used it for was content aggregation. I knew that I could also use it for commenting on stuff and much more but never really used it that way.

But then in early November it got an XMPP Gateway service and I was completely hooked up again ... although, I guess, this is just yet another pro-level feature new users won't really be interested in right way. On the other hand, this was at least the point, where I could see myself using it more That said, I'm not really convinced that FF needs a desktop app. I think it was the right way to go with XMPP for delivery and hopefully in the future more clients will support XHTML-IM, so you could end up with some real nice frontends on top of XMPP and FF if you need to. But for now, the focus should be to make the core experience via the website more (new-)user-friendly.

Having the whole help-section compressed into just a single (yet huge) page doesn't help here, either. Especially if it only contains a single screenshot (about cookie settings of all things). If nothing else, the tutorial videos produced by Ross Miller should get a more prominent place on the site.

There are also a handful of other things I'd really love to see improved there (OpenID support, tagging etc.) but these won't really help making the whole service more accessible to new users.

2008 in Gaming

2008-12-30T23:12:27+01:00

2008 was quite an exciting year for me when it came to games. First of all: In March I got my PS3 mostly for Resistance, Uncharted and Super Stardust HD ... and after enjoying them pretty much stopped using it while moving back to the Xbox360. Back then I had no HDTV so I could only play PS3 games in SD which was kind of a bummer. My Xbox360 on the other side was hooked up to my 19" LCD-display on my work-desk, so at least there I had some kind of HD-experience which I shamelessly used as an excuse to get Burnout Paradise for Microsoft's white noisy thingy.

The summer was pretty much dominated by Burnout Paradise and not even GTA4 could keep me away from it for long. In the end downloadable games like Geometry Wars 2 and Pixeljunk Monsters ended up being more important for me than GTA4 altogether (but perhaps next year). But the latest gangster-simulation was not their only victim: I think I haven't turned on my DS for at least 6 months by now and my PSP only saw a short comeback when I gave the Patapon-demo and echochrome a shot. So perhaps I should replace the "exciting" from up there with "weird" (More after the break)

Last month I then finally made a decision on what HDTV I should get (a 1080p 42" by Samsung) which brought the PS3 back into my life. A few days later I got Little Big Planet for my birthday which sadly caused some time-conflicts with my master thesis (and LBP pretty much lost that battle). After getting MGS4 for X-mas and finally having some time for gaming again (at least for a week or so), the year ends like it has begun: With me playing some really fun games. But this time: On the PS3

On the online-front there was the whole aftermath of the Gerstmann-gate and the birth of Giantbomb.com last summer, by now my #1 site when I'm looking for information about a game. It replaced for me mostly Eurogamer (except for their absolutely great reviews ) and 1UP.com. Still, it could be faster

Speaking of 1UP. This year the whole 1UP Network some some heavy shifting with veterans like Dan Hsu and Crispin Boyer (just to name those two) leaving and starting their own blog. With Ziff Davis considering discontinuing the print edition of EGM and GfW having gone online-only last April, not to mention the ongoing story about 1UP maybe being acquired by UGO, I'm just glad that this all hasn't yet affected their Podcasts 1UP Yours and Retronauts as well as the 1UP Show, all of which are still pretty high on my weekly media-list.

I guess, all I can wish for in this department is that 1UP survives all this, that new players will make the scene even more interesting and that 2009 will see some great games (and that I'll still be able to afford them) ... and if you thought you could get such a post without the usual GotY-pick, sorry to disappoint you:

Game of the Year

Nominees

Burnout Paradise: For personally one of the best racing games of all times simply because it manages to combine two great concepts: racing cars faster-than-life and exploring a whole city doing so.
Uncharted - Drake's Fortune: Every time I read some Tomb Raider-article I know that I've grown tired of that whole genre quite a while ago. That "going around a stupid jungle avoid traps and shooting tigers"-genre, I mean. But I couldn't really get around getting Uncharted with my PS3 and was absolutely surprised by it. Zombies, Submarines on islands, presentation like a big-budget-movie, great characters? How could I not love it?!
Pixeljunk Monsters: I admit it: I'm a DTD-junkie. That combined with cute characters, great weapons and tons of levels got me stuck with my PS3 for evenings and evening and evenings. And it is definitely also a candidate for the "Best game while listening to podcasts"-category.
Geometry Wars 2: Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved with more modes, more achievements and more friends-focus and a great soundtrack. This all combined makes it for me the best dual-stick-shooter on the Xbox360 so far and it competes also in that other category that PJM is in
Little Big Planet: LBP is just one of those games, that does everything right for me (well, perhaps except for the savepoint-system). Cute characters, great music, stunning graphics, open-ended gameplay. Plus: It's the first game that I really want to experience online.
Super Stardust HD: This game was one of the reasons why I got the PS3 in the first place and I still love it. While I don't love the modes as much compared to Geometry Wars 2, the variety in weapons and levels is just great. Not to mention it having been one of the first games to also have Trophies
Metal Gear Solid 4: I just got it for X-mas but couldn't stop playing it ever since (except for me 3 days ago I fell back into LBP :-P). For me this is one of the few games out there, that truly offers an HD-experience. I'm just glad that I don't have to go all sneaky with this one, otherwise I'd probably have the same problems ad with any other MGS (except AC!D) so far :-/

And the winner is ...

Sorry ... but there is a tie: Burnout Paradise and Little Big Planet are the two games I enjoyed the most this year. With one I spent tons of hours, with the other I'm about to. Let's hope that 2009 will see also such great games

Making OWL files readable

2008-12-28T15:51:36+01:00

While working on some projects I started also looking into transforming ontology files (and OWL/XML in particular) into something more pleasing to the eye -- such as HTML.

I guess, the obvious first choice here is XSL(T) simply because it's what you want to use if you need to transform one XML file into another (or something different). So I looked around and found among tons of other people doing it some really great work ) by Masahide Kanzaki (whose Exif ontology I absolutely love) as well as some other XSL-stylesheets. Since I hadn't worked with XSLT in ages I also started tinkering around with a stylesheet on my own. The result of that is nothing really great, so far, but if you absolutely have to take a look you can find it within my owltools repository on github. I've only tried it with the OWL-files that Protégé 4.0.x produces and also with Masahide Kanzaki's Exif ontology, so I can at least be fairly sure, that it works

There still remains the problem, though, that XSLT might not be the ideal tool to render OWL or any kind of RDF application for that matter given the syntax-independence there. For now this XSLT does what I want it to do but eventually the repository might also see some Jena/Pellet-based tool that will treat OWL files more like RDF graphs. I guess that's again something for my life after the final exam

Twittering via XMPP via tweet.IM

2008-12-17T22:01:22+01:00

During the last couple of days I started experimenting a little bit with XMPP (again) and also installed my own little ejabberd server. Right when I was finished with that, another project by ProcessOne popped up on my radar: Tweet.IM. Remember when Twitter still had that nice XMPP-gateway where you could post using your Jabber client? Yeah, that one ... a long time ago. Since November there is with Tweet.IM an alternative for that non-existant service which actually works pretty well.

You can post messages, send direct messages (although to all the people I want to talk to in private, I'd simply use their IM-account, to be honest) and receive the latest posts in an interval of, I guess, 5 minutes.

So far I've noticed just one problem with it: If you're using Adium, the IM client tries a little bit too hard to interpret some of the data tweet.im sends it. The gateway sends some avatar information as XHTML-IM, to show you also the avatar of the user you received a tweet from. Adium doesn't really support XHTML-IM to that extent and shows you a broken image with each update. Not a big problem, but it becomes really annoying when it forwards that data to Growl There is currently a discussion going on about this, so if you have this problem on the support forums. So, I guess, the more people thinking it's worth changing, the more likely something will change there.

But otherwise, big thanks to ProcessOne for this service.

Pownce export and files

2008-12-10T00:31:25+01:00

It took a little bit over a week not tonight I finally got my export of my Pownce data, an API-dump of all my posts (or if I want all my posts combined with all the posts I've seen from all the other people I've followed). But the dump does not include the actual files uploaded to the service. They are still on their S3 account (or on the server they used prior to using S3) and only the links to those files are included in the export.

If you move over to Vox, their importer also seems to at least do some importing of the files but only of thumbnails. The original-size images, for example, only seem to be linked to Pownce's servers -- as can be seen for example here -- which is kind of ... useless. Esp. if it's obvious that the file is stored on one of Pownce's old servers the importer should try to really copy them over.

Don't get me wrong, though: I totally see why they don't offer one big n GB-download for all your posts including files, but at least the importer to Vox should be smart enough to do that for you. Or for people out there who actually don't want to move to Vox a small tool for extracting all the files would be pretty nice. It's also kind of weird to see that some of the competition actually promotes that they will also also import all your files ...

For myself I created a small Python-script that simply downloads all the files mentioned in the XML dump and stores them according to their internal name. Maybe it's also useful to others, so here's the link. Use at your own risk.

PULSE ... the browser-only show for PSN

2008-12-08T20:46:41+01:00

Sony seems to be trying really hard to get some original content onto their PSN service. Last summer they launched the Qore magazine for paying subscribers and on the 5th a new show on PSN called "PULSE". It's basically a small preview of what's about to get released in the near future combined with some nice charts, so actually not bad for a corporate advertisement show.

There are some bummers for me, though, as far as I can tell: Not downloadable (just in the browser, I think), no RSS/Atom-feed and not on iTunes. The last one is kind of redundant but the first two really annoy me. I simply don't really enjoy watching shows in a browser but on my iPod on the go or in Quicktime/VLC when on the laptop. So eventually it will probably go the way of Gametrailers for me: Every now and then, but probably not regularly (GT has at least downloadable views but only the smallest versions in the feed).

Slideshare now supports Keynote files

2008-12-05T18:49:30+01:00

Something great for all you Keynote users out there: No longer will you have to convert your slides to PDFs or Powerpoint files whenever you want to upload them to Slideshare; they finally support your files natively. There is one small catch, though: You will have to zip them since Keynote "files" are bundles which in turn are nothing more than folders on steroids.

[via Daring Fireball]

Git branches and PS1

2008-12-04T16:20:45+01:00

With the release of Mercurial 1.1 yesterday and me more and more getting into it again I complained on IRC that as much as I love git's named branches, they make it kind of easy to just do something to the wrong branch. If you have a branch per folder it's kind of more obvious in what branch you're operating all the time, in my opinion.

But there is a simple solution for this: Martin today posted a quick guide on how to get the current branch name into your shell's $PS1.

For this to work you need to source git's autocompletion which can be found in the contrib/completion-folder of the source distribution. After you've sourced it (through your .bashrc, .bash_profile, ...) you get some additional functions and esp. __git_ps1 which gives you the current branch name in nice brackets. If you take a look into the git-completion.bash file, also look at this paragraph:

#    4) Consider changing your PS1 to also show the current branch:
#        PS1='[\u@\h \W$(__git_ps1 " (%s)")]\$ '
#
#       The argument to __git_ps1 will be displayed only if you
#       are currently in a git repository.  The %s token will be
#       the name of the current branch.

So add $(__git_ps1 " (%s)") to your PS1 and you should all be set. It's also sweet in this regard, that it also works when you're some folders within a git repository. Thanks Martin for this trick

Python 3.0 released

2008-12-04T13:12:07+01:00

When I read yesterday night that Python 3.0 was imminent, I looked in awe at my calendar and thought "Is it already that late in the year"? This morning I then woke up, checked the newsfeeds and realized: Yes. Naturally this doesn't mean that everyone will just leave 2.x behind and move over to 3.x right away but this public release hopefully makes it way more attractive to people to finally look into it then was the case with all these preview-builds And there's much to look into, indeed:

A whole new way to handle strings (no longer do you distinguish between unicode strings and normal strings)
print is now a function and no longer a statement (which ended up in quite an ugly construct if you used it for printing to a specific IO-object)
There is now only one integer type anymore. So long got dropped (and int is the new long)
sets and dict now also have their own *-comprehension shortcuts

and much much more. There are also some syntax changes, but from what I've seen so far Python stays Python

I'm not going to dive into it right away, but Graham Dumpleton also just wrote that mod_wsgi should already work with Python 3.0 with some tweaks if you're using trunk.

Mercurial 1.1 is out

2008-12-03T08:40:12+01:00

Finally. Mercurial 1.1 is out with a tons of great new features and fixes and finally without deprecation warnings if you're using Python 2.6 Also most of the extensions got some new features like the pager-extension finally having an option to use it only on a subset of the available commands using the attend-flag in the configuration:

[pager]
attend = diff,log

On the web-front there are some new and improved themes as well as improved WSGI support, which I really have to give a try again after all these months with git In general, this release looks really great and it (as well as bitbucket.org) will probably make me want to use Mercurial a little bit more again in the future.