Myst game proposal
December 14th, 2007While exploring the blog of Robyn Miller, co creator of Myst, I came across the original Myst sketches, drawn somewhere back in 1991, when the web was merely a few hundred lines of code on a NeXTCube somewhere.
 see all
Admittedly I haven’t paid a huge amount of attention to game design over the intervening years, but I have yet to find a game which is quite like Myst.
Firefox slow?
November 11th, 2007My firefox in Ubuntu Gutsy was so unbearably slow, I started blaming the kernel, the display driver, all sorts. However, this fixes it.
Google owns my soul
November 10th, 2007While writing about moving domains to google apps, I got a little worried when I realised that Google owns my soul.
For example, yesterday I noticed that google had recorded 8,600 web searches performed by myself, going back who know how many months or years. I must have ticked a box somewhere and forgotten about it. It not only had the searches from home, it had all my work related searches. They know which links I choose out of the search results, they know which blogs I read, they know what newsgroups I like, and now, with email, they know who I write to, who writes to me, and what we say. They know who I work for, whether I’m looking for a new job, what I drive, what I eat and where I live. They could literally SEE YOU right now, especially if you live in a Street View area.
Given that the company was founded on data mining algorithms (also known as ’search’), it would seem safe to assume that Google are using some of their 500,000 + servers to map out people’s innermost thoughts and desires in a way which the most ambitious megalomaniac - or marketer could scarcely imagine, outside of a fictional 1984 esque dystopia where the government enforces monitoring and surveillance on its citizens, allowing them to flag up subversive tendencies.
The task is made immeasurably easier by providing their own neatly organised databases for us to populate. A conspiracy theorist might say that realising that coercion is far too messy, voluntary surveillance has been found to be far easier for Those In Charge, who created the shady organisation known as google in order to carry out their sinister plans. Indeed, users flock to google in droves, all too eager to hand over yet more control to the big G, myself included. Not a big deal, you may say. Perhaps, until the Thousand-year Military Reich of New America (est. 2020) nationalizes Google and rebrands it the World Ministry of Information and Knowledge.
Privacy
Whoops, I drifted into a little dramatised fiction there. As anyone with any sense knows, to fully maintain your online ‘privacy’, if I may use that twee term, you need to build everything from the ground up. No cheating by using a server hosting company, either. I’m talking about getting your own routers and your own AS and your own cables if need be, and hosting everything privately, preferably in a country without a history of cooperating with foreign armies. Full crypto, booby trapped filesystems, the works.
I might have just convinced myself to keep at least a few email domains off the G. Their motto may be ‘Don’t be evil’, but I don’t think you’d like Google as an enemy.
Google conquers another front
November 10th, 2007Over the last week I have started migrating my domains to Google Apps.
Google Apps is google’s package of services to essentially host an organisation’s entire IT setup. This is a completely full service offering, from email hosting, to webhosting, including office apps like word processor, spreadsheet and shared calendaring, which are of course all (nearly) perfectly integrated with each other. Did I also mention that it’s free?
You can sign up for them as different types of organisation (school, small business, corporate, family/groups) and each is free for up to a certain number of users, and with a certain level of features However, unlike most free versions, they haven’t been greedy and made the free versions a crippled, broken version that no one is expected to actually use.
Paying extra will let you access their API to integrate your existing databases with the google apps.
Why switch?
For me, email is the only real compelling reason to use google apps. I run my own mail servers, and have done so for many years. It’s not a bad setup, with multiple domains, mailboxes, antispam, etc. A number of my friends have accounts on them. The reason I set up the mail system in the first place was the same as why I set up a lot of other things, to figure out how it worked, and for the novelty. After running them for over half a decade and looking after an isp’s email too, the novelty had decidedly worn off. Now, they are merely a liability. Cost is an issue, but I also have to worry about backups, security, performance, etc. Losing everyone’s email is not really an option. Having said all that, Postfix has been faultless as ever, and together with MySQL, amavis, spamassassin, postgrey (for greylisting) and courier-imap, the system has the same level of features as any I could mention, and I never really need to worry about it. I haven’t had to do any maintenance at all in the last 6 months.
The switch
I switched a test domain first. You sign up and you get given a list of MX servers to put into your DNS records for that domain. That done, you have to verify your domain, by putting a magically named CNAME record in the zone file too. For me this was straightforward but I can imagine that someone who doesn’t spend all day working with dns and email might find this bit tricky. Google has a bit of a difficult situation here, in that people who register a domain tend to leave it with the registrar and this kind of thing is generally not done. Not sure what they can do to smooth the process. If you don’t have a domain, those smart hordes at google have a solution. You buy your domain through google, via godaddy.com. After signing up with the strangely named dns registrar, they will take care of all of that.
After that dns faff, it went extremely smoothly. You can set up the users you want, you set up aliases, etc. You can even make one domain mirror the setup of another, so user@foo is also user@bar. That’s pretty useful. After you switch the MX records, the email starts flowing into google instantly, without any fuss. Having never really used gmail before, it took me a couple of days to get used to it’s approach to email, but its growing on me. With IMAP access too, I could simply use it as I have used my previous email system. Nice.
Moved this site to www.ivixor.net
November 8th, 2007I just copied the wordpress junk over, so all the old ivixor.net links *should* work. What’s the point? Not sure. Is it going to be just me who posts here? Depends whether anyone else wants to. What will be posted? That depends on the last question. We’ll see.
Using the Microsoft® .NET Framework in Windows Server® 2003..
November 7th, 2007.. and the Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database, the new Infolect® system has been built to achieve unprecedented levels of performance, availability, and business agility.
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/getthefacts/lse.mspx vs http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7083851.stm
Starlings
November 7th, 2007The guardian wonders where to find them. Everyone from Aber knows you simply have to hang around near the pier or the hill above town, and then you can watch them swoop in from across mid wales every evening in the winter. The swarms are equally as impressive as those in the below picture.
Kenilworth fireworks
November 4th, 2007
Apparently the fireworks were not as good as the free Birmingham uni ones. Organisation was quite poor and the show was bizarrely started with a mp3 of the “24″ intro, with the remainder of the music being a jumbled up combination of James Bond tunes and misc pop songs. Still, was a good evening.
Fixing stuff up
November 4th, 2007I’m reorganising my websites.
www.ivixor.net has been broken and neglected for way too long. I’m going to take it back, and move this wordpress site to that URL, and perhaps make other changes too.
