Doom running in your browser

By Martin English | December 27, 2008

Christmas comes, but once a year…. Kongregate have recompiled Doom 1 in Flash, from the original source code. Since it’s from the original source, it plays just like the original, right down to the old cheat codes: in case you’ve forgotten, IDDQD activates “degreelessness” and IDKFA will enable all weapons, keys, and ammo, and boost your armor to 200%. Not that I’m saying you’ll need to cheat…..

You’ll need Flash 10 to play, and a non-PowerPC computer to run it.

Topics: Code, History, Web / Web 2.0, software | Comments

Greasefire Finds Greasemonkey Scripts for the Site You’re Visiting

By Martin English | December 17, 2008

One of the problems with using the Greasemonkey extension for firefox is knowing what scripts are available for the site you are visiting. Greasefire is a companion extension designed to help you customize your web browsing by finding user scripts for any page you’re currently visiting.
Once installed, the extension automatically searches the Greasemonkey script repository Userscripts.org for scripts related to the site you’re visiting. If a script is available, the Greasemonkey icon in your Firefox status bar will display a fiery background to indicate that it found matches.

Topics: Code, Open Source, Productivity, Technology, Web / Web 2.0, software | Comments

Time to bury the ‘clean coal’ myth

By Martin English | December 17, 2008

From The Guardian’s Greenwash series:

Is clean coal possible in future? Well, if you mean could we capture carbon dioxide emissions and bury them somewhere out of harm’s way – in old coal seams or oilfields or salt mines – yes, it is possible. The former British chief scientist Sir David King called it “the only hope for mankind”.

As the article goes on to state, the problem is that this phrase “clean coal” now has a life of its own thanks to the remorseless propaganda behind it. This year (2008) a coalition of US coal mining companies and electricity utilities called Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (and recently renamed the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity) is paying the advertising agency R&R Partners $US35m to promote “clean coal” through advertising and other promotional activity.

The campaign’s effect on the US Presidential election was chilling. Both John McCain and Barack Obama supported clean coal. After all, it allows them to oppose dirty coal without antagonising anyone. And the Americans for Balanced Energy Choices sponsored two early presidential debates, during which not one question was asked about global warming.

However, the most authoritative study, The Future of Coal, published last year (2007) by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), concluded that the first commercial carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant wouldn’t come on stream until 2030 at the earliest. In the same year, the Edison Electric Institute, which represents most US power generators, admitted to a House Select Committee in Washington DC that commercial deployment will require 25 years research costing at least $US20bn.

The mythology of clean coal has penetrated deep into political thinking around the world because it is so convenient. In Australia, the Labor Government of Kevin Rudd is keen on “clean coal” because they imagine it allows them to promise both to meet Australia’s Kyoto protocol pledges and to assuage the concerns of industry.

The bottom line is that generating significant amounts of low or no carbon energy from any source will take significant amounts of R&D and / or huge infrastructure changes. In turn, large amounts of time and money. Unfortunately, this is just as true of renewable energy as it is of clean coal technology.

This means you can make pretty compelling arguments against just about every technology anyone has proposed, but the fact remains that if we aren’t willing to return to pre 20th century conditions, we will use some energy generation technology whatever its climate change impact.

However, the biggest problem with Coal (and Oil) is that we can’t meet current emissions targets with a technology 20 years over the horizon. Which makes it impossible to meet the future emissions targets our politicians are happily signing up for (because they won’t be around to enforce them).

Topics: Australia, History, Personal, Politics, Technology | Comments

Google Friend Connect, Twitter and me

By Martin English | December 16, 2008

Google have announced today that users of Google Friend Connect are now able to connect their Twitter accounts to their Google accounts. This means that when you join a ‘Friend Connected’ site (like here, or BASIS of SAP, you’ll be able to connect with other Twitter friends that are members on that site.

I’m not a big fan of Facebook Connect, but I love the idea of being able to connect to other Twitter users on my favorite blogs. This seems like a great way to grow your network and start up conversations with like-minded individuals without sharing ALL of your personal details

A usefull feature for hardcore twitter fans is that Google Friend Connect lets you use your Twitter avatar and profile description. To add your Twitter friends, all you need to do is go to your Google Profile on a site that supports Google Friend Connect and click on “Add/Remove”.

You can add Friend Connect to your site by going to the Friend Connect home page.

Topics: Technology | Comments

Fixing IE6 CSS Support

By Martin English | December 16, 2008

From 24 ways to impress your firends:

It is the destiny of one browser to serve as the nemesis of web developers everywhere. At the birth of the Web Standards movement, that role was played by Netscape Navigator 4; an outdated browser that refused to die. Its tenacious existence hampered the adoption of modern standards. Today that role is played by Internet Explorer 6.

………

JavaScript genius Dean Edwards wrote a script called IE7. This amazing piece of code uses JavaScript to make Internet Explorer 5 and 6 behave like a standards-compliant browser. Dean used JavaScript to bootstrap IE’s CSS support.

Because the script is specifically targeted at Internet Explorer, there’s no point in serving it up to other browsers. Conditional comments to the rescue:

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<script src=”http://ie7-js.googlecode.com/svn/version/2.0(beta3)/IE7.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<![endif]–>

Standards-compliant browsers won’t fetch the script. Users of IE6, on the hand, will pay a kind of bad browser tax by having to download the JavaScript file.

Topics: Code, Microsoft, Productivity, Web / Web 2.0, Work, software | Comments

Madoff Fraud

By Martin English | December 15, 2008

The Wall St Journal has plenty of stories on what’s shaping up to be the largest fraud case of all time:

Bernard L. Madoff, a former chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market and a force in Wall Street trading for nearly 50 years, was arrested by federal agents Thursday, a day after his sons turned him in for running what they said their father called “a giant Ponzi scheme.”

The Securities and Exchange Commission, in a civil complaint, said it was an ongoing $50 billion swindle, and asked a judge to seize the firm and its assets. “Our complaint alleges a stunning fraud that appears to be of epic proportions,” said Andrew M. Calamari, associate director of enforcement in the SEC’s New York office.

This was a very simple fraud, as Madoff’s hedge fund was a straight-forward ponzi scheme: if you gave him a million dollars to invest he’d simply give the money away to existing clients telling them it was profit. As with all ponzi schemes the last people in are the losers. What kept this one going for so long was that most of Madoff’s investors recapitalised their profits and handed them back to him to invest (at 10% ROI why wouldn’t you?)

Two of his investors said that among his clients, Mr. Madoff was considered a money-management legend; they would joke that if Mr. Madoff was a fraud, he’d take down half the world with him.

A former securities analyst is quoted as having had about $11 million invested with Mr. Madoff. It’s one thing when high nett-worth individuals wake up to find they have lost everything: There’s the temptation to suggest they should have taken more car, or were greedy in th first place. However, whats really frightening about this fraud is that reputable hedge funds and banks also had large investments with Madoff. These organisations will have charged their customers large fees to carry out risk analysis and due diligence on their portfolios and then just handed all the cash to a con-man to invest on their behalf. Sounds like the making of a class-action suit…..

As Dim Post suggests, I’m starting to see why some people keep all their money in a mattress.

Topics: History, People, Security | Comments

Why Newspapers are Dying

By Martin English | December 12, 2008

It’s all about the numbers, according to this O’Reilly Network article, Why Are Newspapers Dying?.

As of April, 2008, only three newspapers had a subscriber base in excess of 1,000,000 readers - USA Today (2.3 million), The Wall Street Journal (2.1 million) and the New York Times (1.1 million). Most newspapers average approximately 300,000 subscribers. This of course doesn’t reflect total readership numbers - many papers sell a significant proportion of their subscriber levels in newsstand and library sales - but it does provide at least a basic metric for understanding the dynamics of newspaper publishing vs. the web.

Blogging guru Robert Scoble compiled a list in 2007 of Google Reader subscribers for a number of newspapers, individual bloggers, and online news providers. Keep in mind that these rates reflected the number of RSS feeds that were read through Google Reader, which represents perhaps five percent of the total news-feed consumers. Using that as a (very rough guide), organizations such as Tech Crunch had around 130,000 subscribers from this source alone, which equates to perhaps 2.5 million readers online either from direct site visitors, or increasingly due to RSS links. The New York Times, by comparison, had perhaps 40,000 such Google Reader subscribers (maybe 800,000 total readership). Significantly, Scoble himself had about 5,000 individual Google Reader subscribers.

These readers are not the main source of revenue. The main source of revenue for newspapers is advertising. However, both the startup costs and the running costs for a newspaper are getting higher and higher, while the credit crunch means advertising revenues are lower. For example, the Chicago Tribune is bankrupt, while the New York Times is losing money.

The good news, according to the article, is that while newspapers are dying, good journalism isn’t. As a rough metric, it quotes a report by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
University noted that in December 2008, for the first time, more online journalists were imprisoned than print journalists. In 2008, 48% of all journalists that were imprisoned by censoring governments were online journalists, while 45% were print journalists.

The reason this is important is that whether Newspapers survive or not, we as a society need to shine a light on the inner workings of both governments and corporations. The fact that bloggers are now doing this in sufficient numbers and with sufficient accuracy to be seen as “dangerous” enough to jail gives them a high degree of legitimacy.

Topics: History, People, Politics, Technology | Comments

Australian charged after reposting YouTube video

By Martin English | December 11, 2008

Any doubts I ever had about letting Government Officials decide what I can view over the internet have been completely erased. Apparently, reposting a video that shows a man swinging a baby by the arms (BTW, the baby is shown laughing and smiling at the end of the clip), that was broadcast on US television and has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people online, is a criminal act.

Chris Illingworth, 60, a father of four from Maroochydore, was charged after he posted the video, which he stumbled across on YouTube, on another internet site.

Queensland Police said it was a crime “to participate in the exploitation and abuse of children by seeking to view, possess, make or distribute child-abuse or child exploitation material”. The definition of “child-abuse material”, supplied by them, is any material that shows a person under the age of 18 who “is, or appears to be, a victim of torture, cruelty or physical abuse”.

“Task Force Argos are continuing to work with international law enforcement partners to identify the child depicted in the video clip to remove him or her from further harm,”

Topics: Australia, People, Politics | Comments

Midnight On The Coast Highway

By Martin English | November 25, 2008

This piece has become known by several names, including “Midnight On The Coast Highway” and “The Dope Cabala and a Wall of Fire”. This is due to it being being excerpetd and published out of context so many times. It’s actually most of the last chapter of Hunter S Thhompson’s 1967 book “Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga”.

“Later on I can look back at something like that thing about “the edge” which I wrote about twenty minutes after coming back from doing it. My face was still almost frozen, dark red and crusted with tears, not from crying but tears that start coming to your eyes just from the wind. I was so high on that-from coming back-that I sat and wrote the whole thing, right through, and never changed a word of it. It’s one of my favorite pieces of writing.”

Midnight on the Coast Highway

Months later, when I rarely saw the Angels, I still had the legacy of the big machine-four hundred pounds of chrome and deep red noise to take out on the Coast Highway and cut loose at three in the morning, when all the cops were lurking over on 101. My first crash had wrecked the bike completely and it took several months to have it rebuilt. After that I decided to ride it differently: I would stop pushing my luck on curves, always wear a helmet and try to keep within range of the nearest speed limit … my insurance had already been canceled and my driver’s license was hanging by a thread.

So it was always at night, like a werewolf, that I would take the thing out for an honest run down the coast. I would start in Golden Gate Park, thinking only to run a few long curves to clear my head … but in a matter of minutes I’d be out at the beach with the sound of the engine in my ears, the surf booming up on the sea wall and a fine empty road stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz … not even a gas station in the whole seventy miles; the only public light along the way is an all-night diner around Rockaway Reach.

There was no helmet on those nights, no speed limit, and no cooling it down on the curves. The momentary freedom of the park was like the one unlucky drink that shoves an alcoholic off the wagon. I would come out of the park near the soccer field and pause for a moment at the stop sign, wondering if I knew anyone parked out there on the midnight humping strip.

Then into first gear, forgetting the cars and letting the beast wind out … thirty-five, forty-five . . . then into second and wailing through the light at Lincoln Way, not worried about green or red signals, but only some other werewolf loony who might be pulling out, too slowly, to start his own run. Not many of these … and with three lanes on a wide curve, a bike coming hard has plenty of room to get around almost anything… then into third, the boomer gear, pushing seventy-five and the beginning of a windscream in the ears, a pressure on the eyeballs like diving into water off a high board.

Bent forward, far back on the seat, and a rigid grip on the handlebars as the bike starts jumping and wavering in the wind. Taillights far up ahead coming closer, faster, and suddenly—zaaapppp—going past and leaning down for a curve near the zoo where the road swings out to sea.

The dunes are flatter here, and on windy days sand blows across the highway, piling up in thick drifts as deadly as any oil slick … instant loss of control, a crashing, cartwheeling slide and maybe one of those two-inch notices in the paper the next day: “An unidentified motorcyclist was killed last night when he failed to negotiate a turn on Highway I.”

Indeed … but no sand this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and now there’s no sound except wind. Screw it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans down on a hundred, and wind-burned eyeballs strain to see down the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes.

But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right … and that’s when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it … howling