“About Avatar. You know, back when he was a kid, was it right to take him home with me - or was I just being a spoilt brat … ?”

“Ah,” Raf smiled. “The what-if factor.”

Zara stared.

“For every action we take,” said Raf, “there’s probably a better one.’

So there you have it. Don’t worry and just try to optimize your further actions

Image by Zenat El3ain via Flickr

People tried it out, decided that it didn’t live up to the hype, and moved on to the other games. A typical life of a computer game.

Yet in case of spore, something more stayed behing - latest release of Cider technology, a portability engine that allows game developers to port their PC games using Wine-fork technologies to run on OS X. They say it so nicely with their buzzwords:

TransGaming’s Cider™ Portability Engine is a proprietary technology that allows PC games to be enabled on Apple’s Intel Macs without the traditionally expensive and arduous need to redevelop a game from the ground-up. Cider acts as a “wrapper” around the PC game dynamically translating PC API calls to the Mac OS X operating system. As such, games can be enabled with Cider in a matter of days to weeks as opposed to the typical man years that traditional development takes. Source

Image by manfred-hartmann via Flickr

Related articles by Zemanta

• TransGaming to support Sony’s SecuROM DRM for games
• Spore System Requirements Are Decidedly Sane [Hardware]
• City of Heroes MMO is Mac-bound
• Macintosh version of Spore really costs thousands of dollars
• Spore on WINE

It turns out it’s about 10 of them:

1. Easy Tube - Plugin to easliy place YouTube objects in Wordpress Content By Paul Bain.
2. FeedBurner FeedSmith - Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. By FeedBurner.
   
3. Flickr Manager - Handles uploading, modifying images on Flickr, and insertion into posts. By Trent Gardner.
   
4. flickrRSS - Allows you to integrate the photos from a flickr rss feed into your site. By Dave Kellam.
   
5. Future Calendar - A simple plugin that utalizes a modified get_calendar function that shows what dates have a future post scheduled in a calendar format, and makes it easy to change the current timestamp. Temperature Functionality and some tweaks by Flavio Jarabeck (www.InternetDrops.com.br) By Aaron Harun.
   
6. Google Analytics for WordPress - This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics with extra search engines and automatic clickout and download tracking to your WordPress blog. By Joost de Valk.
   
7. IntenseDebate - IntenseDebate Comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog or website. (it used to be DISQUS Comment System but we’ll see which one works better).
   
8. TypePad AntiSpam - TypePad AntiSpam is a free service from Six Apart that helps protect your blog from spam. (I know that previous commenting systems should protect me from spam, but in practice it helps to have a second line of protection)
   
9. Twitter Tools - A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. By Alex King.
   
10. Zemanta - Contextually relevant suggestions of links, pictures, related content and tags will make your blogging fun again.
    
11. (bonus one) - Lijit Search - Search Powered Web Applications for Publishers (I’m not using it at the moment as I have to modify my new theme a bit to add support for Lijit). It’s supposed to hijack my search, but as you can see, that part of their functionality doesn’t work for some reason with this theme.

The issue is that we have to choose carefully which peers we decide to listen and be influenced by. Stereotypical example of this would be bad company that influences you to start drinking, robbing old ladies and overall misbehave. But that’s taking it to negative (?) extreme.

Image by Sailing "Footprints: Real to Reel" (Ronn ashore) via Flickr

Then there is positive influence from your peers. The one that forces you to continue studying, take up new hobbies or just stop eating meat and cooked foods ;). There’s just only one problem with that. As much as your work peers (for example) are enthusiastic about you going vegan or something of that nature, they won’t be able to give you adequate support.

That why it’s important that when you’re choosing up new positive habits to also find a proper support group for it. Preferably within a group of people that already went through similar transformation and can advise and cheer you and will know that you’re going to be break, even before you do.

(Random thought: wouldn’t be a group called carrot chewers anonymous be a great place to talk about going meat free?)

Image by UniqueOo Mania via Flickr

There’s also an more interesting question - should we build a competing system? It doesn’t seem fair to the other guys who just started, and we’re so ahead. Well, it might not be fair by some strange standard of decency, but it’s definitely fair in this game.

Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say. Go out and compete in this dog eat dog world and don’t worry about fair, you’re allowed to do basically everything. The community will judge you against your actions, but as long as you can justify them and get away with it, why not?

Why write this?

Because of Comment spam problems with Disqus, I decided to change my commenting system to IntenseDebate. I’m not sure if it’s going to work better, but I’m willing to give it a try. Since I really like what Disqus is doing, I wanted to somehow justify breaking my virtual relationship with them, when I disabled the plugin.

It’s a fair game and I’m happy to switch back when they fix their spam problem.

Tools used: their API, Python scripts and Pajek to draw the results.

This is what I’ve got after a productive afternoon:

Koornk network (click on image for a bigger version)

I’ve only followed nodes that can be found by starting with Matija as initial node. Quick look at the resulted graph, we can see that their is a well connected group of people in a middle, with another group that is only partially connected to the first group. There are of course many others who are not well connected.

As this is only first prototype, there are a few more things to do on some other nice Saturday:

• figure out a way to get list of all nicknames (one way would be to just go through the list of messages)
• weight different connections, based on who’s talking to who
• interpret the data (but since that’s not my homework, I hope the recipient of data set will want to do a guest-blog about this)
• draw even prettier picture

Image by UniqueOo Mania via Flickr

The reason for this concept in the book is that the main character comes from USA, while living in middle-east and he has to adjust his behavior. He’s especially troubled by the fact how rank works and the fact that being of royal heritage, he is expected to not do anything all day and just sit around bars and drink cappuccinos.

Where’s the social media aspect?

Feeling pretty social today, I’d say that social media aspect of this is that each community that you form and participate in has different norms and ideas about how people should behave. Together with these, you also get emotional expectations that you have to follow, otherwise you won’t be able to fully feel part of that community.

You can also take an extra step. Once you think you figured out how the community works, locate the borderline community members that are just trying to figure it out. Be their friend and help them understand how it works. They’ll be forever grateful to you, while you’ll be able to fully appreciate the little subtleties that makes it so special to be with that group of people. 

Image by ecstaticist via Flickr

The issue here, as you might have guessed already, is that the service requires you to enter a password and is in this way essentially a phishing site.

As a solution to this problem, everyone in the debate is calling for an use of OAuth, authentication protocol that doesn’t require one to disclose authentication tokens.

So that’s what we already know and the industry essentially decided on - OAuth is good for breaking walled gardens. Yet there’s another point to this story, that I haven’t seen being presented - there is no real need for any authentication in this service.

Twitter has an excellent API, that allows you to see who a (public profile) person follows without any need for authentication. You can either parse microformats on the page or use their API. It’s even bidirectional as you can see both “friends” and “followers” depending on direction of connection you are interested in.

Oh, an that “viral” tweet, that service allows you to post after you’ve checked your Twitter rank? You can do it with a piece of Javascript.

The big point

So the issue we should be debating about here is how to build more services like Twitter that allow you to access information in computer readable formats using Microformats, RDFa or just RESTful API and not how to authenticate into overly closed gardens.

Image by ekai via Flickr

What is the Watson Fellowship?

Basically, you make up some crazy project that you’re really interested in, and they give you $28,000 to do it.

Examples of Watson projects:

• Spanish sports slang in South America
• Evolution of outrigger canoes in Polynesia
• The effect of four ant species’ behavior
• The culture of ultimate frisbee

Cool physical hacking places he visited:

• PUSCII, Utrecht, Netherlands - http://puscii.squat.net
• EU Data Retention Conference, Budapest
• Italian Hackmeeting, Palermo, Italiy - Ask 191
• http://noblogs.org/ - blog hosting provider for lots of activist blogs in Italy
• C-Base, Berlin, Germany
• Kiberpipa, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Image via Wikipedia

The types of people he met

Pure/’true’ hackers:

• Concerned with technology for its own sake
• Generally less-political
• Intuitive understand of “hack value” without the need for application

Tech Activists:

• “That’s great, but how does this bring about the revolution?”
• Generally way more paranoid and harder to get in touch with
• Tend to be narrowly focused: security, communication, organization

Image by ekai via Flickr

Artists:

• Also concerned with application of technology
• Generally the easiest group to get in touch with
• Usually are trying to say something, to communicate an idea

Future

Something along the lines of Croatia, Poland, France, back to Berlin, then Argentina, Chile, Mexico and maybe Brazil.

He’s looking for ideas for his future travels, so get in touch via his blog - http://www.withoutatraceroute.com/

Image by tomswift46 via Flickr

For reasons beyond me, it’s really foggy in Ljubljana in past few days. Some even commented that we could introduce our own version of Jack the Ripper, as the visibility is so low.

Having an opportunity to drive in this fog at 5am, I started to realize that driving school didn’t really prepare me for such environmental backslash, so I went online to dig up some resources and tips about driving.

I especially liked the article on Smart Motorist, that concludes:

The best advice we can give to drivers confronted with thick fog is to get off the road as soon as possible.

Essentially the point of this and many other articles on topic of driving in fog is that you can’t see and that in consequence also can’t be seen. As such you need to plan for that, use your fog lights, drive slower and keep your safety distance.

While this is actually common sense, it often helps to hear such obviousness several times, to really slip into your subconsciousness.