Some Links

Via Kottke: find out the sex of your brain. I'm a perfect average male. Also: take a look at these 10 kick ass opening sequences.

Another fun test: the super hero and super villain test. I'm Dr. Doom. (Blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity.) And Green Lantarn. (Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.)

01.01.2007

That means happy new year everyone!

Had a great party last night and a hangover now? Check out The 86 Rules of Boozing (via Digg).

9. Get the bartender's attention with eye contact and a smile.

22. Never talk to someone in the restroom unless you're doing the same thing—urinating, waiting in line or washing your hands.

24. After your sixth drink, do not look at yourself in the mirror. It will shake your confidence.

35. Learn to appreciate hangovers. If it was all good times every jackass would be doing it.

39. Never tip with coins that have touched you. If your change is $1.50, you can tell the barmaid to keep the change, but once she has handed it to you, you cannot give it back. To a bartender or cocktail waitress, small change has no
value.

43. A bar is a college, not a nursery. If you spill a beer, clean it up. If you break a glass, wait for a staff member to clean it up, then blame it on someone else.

54. Never lie in a bar. You may, however, grossly exaggerate and lean.

65. Before you die, single-handedly make one decent martini.

69. If there is ever any confusion, the fuller beer is yours.

80. Anyone with three or more drinks in his hands has the right of way.

I wish you all the best for 2007!

Google Code Search (And Other) Fun

Google Code Search has been providing bloggers with a lot of searching-fun. Most talked about? Winzip key generation code. There are also a lot of passwords floating around. Just as potential buffer overflows. Some geek jokes and a lot of things which need to be fixed or need to be done.

On a side note: be sure to watch the South Park World Of Warcraft episode ;).

Grinding Windows (To A Halt?)

Some of you have probably read this post on Digg. Someone apperantly made a video about Edgy Eft running 40 processes without crashing.

Some people basically replied "Windows [and Linux] can do this for ages!" or like "This is really neat!".

It is really cool though that the Ubuntu team has managed to quickly open Openoffice (around 3 seconds now), I am really looking forward to see that running on my laptop.

However, I wanted to prove that Windows will also not crash when doing this (not a recent version that is). So here it is: my video response, using the following amazing batch script:

:loopit
start sol
start mspaint
start calc
start notepad
goto loopit

It's the loop of doom! Sorry for the bad quality, but it's better than YouTube. When I close the command line window, Windows was running around 140 instances of Notepad
, Paint, Solitaire and Calculator each (screenshots maybe later). However: during all this, it did slow down, but is was still quite manageable afterwards. I had to stop the loop because Paint was starting to spit out error messages (as you can see in the video).

Then, I closed the four groups from the taskbar. Windows seems to have a bug here: it doesn't close all programs and some had to be closed manually (ah the fun!).

On which system was all this done: on my main Desktop/beast machine: two Opterons and 4GB of RAM, so I agree that this is in fact not really fair towards that first Linux-video, but it was a fun thing to do (I was surprised that Camtasia could survive the heavy load).

In conclusion: I do not want to flame Ubuntu or Linux in general (I am running it myself so...), but running 40 processes at once is not such a formidable feat. Also: Windows is more stable than Mac/Linux/Whatever-zealots tend to believe[1].

A, those lazy Sundays...

[1]: Except for Windows 3.1. And 95. And 98. 98SE too, a little. And ME. Especially ME. Stay away from ME... 2000 might work I think. Windows XP 32 bit too (I was running 64bit). And 2003 probably too.

Linux Games

I've been checking out some games for my Linux machine recently (that almost sounds like an oxymoron). I'm not going to go all whiny on you with a "Linux does have games!"-post, but will just review a few of them (the most popular ones).

• Planet Penguin Racer (a fork of Tux Racer): I never wanted this game, when all those Linux-sites/posts/magazines said: "hey look we have a racing game with a penguin" it just looked too kidish. However: it is quite entertainable, and making some maps is quite fun. This is a nice quickie-game for the people with direct 3d rendering enabled ;).
• Neverball: a game where you tilt the play field to make a ball roll and pick up coins. It's fun and looks quite nice but I suck at it.
• Freecraft: it's an RTS, with poor graphics (sorry), I didn't like it that much and wish there was a good RTS game for Linux. I don't have anything against sprites (I loved Age of Empires 1 and 2, Age of Wonders, Starcraft, Kohan, etc...), but this can look better.
  
• Globulation 2: also an RTS. Also not bad but I don't like it that much.
• Tuxkart: fun for a while but not fantastic.
• Frozen Bubble: the game everyone knows, and still great fun too!
• Pingus: a Lemmings clone. Well done game, will keep the oldskool puzzlers really entertained!
• Rocks And Diamonds: an all-in-one Boulderdash clone. Which I absolutely love because I can even play the Supaplex levels.
• Wesnoth: another instant-classic, hexgrid fantasy strategy game, well done graphics and great tactical fun both online and offline.
• Crimson Fields: Battle Isle clone, not bad but the graphics aren't that great.
• Advanced Strategic Command: also a Battle Isle clone: better (traditional) graphics and AI, but the interface/polishing could be better.
• SCUMMVM: absolute favorite. Grab this program together with some fat old-Lucasarts-adventures torrents and relive all those classics... A fantastic game for those long train-trips. Ah... the memories of playing Broken Sword 2 and really diggin' the characters and story. They don't make such games anymore since Grim Fandago[1].

That's it. It's not F.E.A.R., no Civilization 4, no GTA and no Age of Empires 3, but it is enough to kill a few minutes. After all, my Linux computer is my work machine, so the less I play, the more work I get done...

[1]: Actually I'm lying: Dreamfall, Fahrenheit (a.k.a. Indigo Prophecy) and others are great recent adventure games.