XGenStudios

I apologize in advance for the pop-ups and wasted productivity, but here's my Halloween gift to you - XGenStudios, home of obnoxiously addictive web browser-based games, all made with Flash MX.

Currently, I am playing the sadistic yet oddly compelling Castle, based on a tip from Mark and Zack (thanks guys... I think).

Diablo II v1.10 patch released

Blizzard has finally released the official v1.10 patch for Diablo II, the greatest co-op game ever made (in my opinion). (You can get the patch for the expansion, Lord of Destruction, here.)

This patch changes a lot of gameplay mechanics and could breathe more life into this game if you've got it in your library (and since it was one of the best-selling games of all-time, it's a safe bet that you do). Definitely worth a look.

David Cross on video games

David Cross, of HBO's Mr. Show with Bob and David, has written an article for Wired that's part social satire and part good old-fashioned mocking of video game hype. Funny stuff.

Call of Duty redux

There's a new Call of Duty demo featuring a new level. The full retail version of the game is slated for release this week.

Loving your geek

Found at Gravity Lens - a mildly tongue-in-cheek article about how to love your geek and tolerate his/her hobbies.

Bad technology

Bruce Sterling's take on 10 technologies that deserve to die.

Oddly, Bruce only wants three of the ten techs he lists - nuclear weapons, land mines, and lie detectors - to die utterly; the other seven he would merely like to see replaced with better alternatives.

I'm not sure that I agree with all of his notions - eliminating prisons in favor of just simply preventing people from doing anything interesting seems a bit absurd as a punishment for violent criminals - but it's an interesting read nonetheless.

Happy Birthday, Bob

Bob Kane, the creator of Batman, would have been 88 years old today.

Animation World on B:MotB

Animation World Magazine has a nice feature on the process behind making the Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman direct-to-video animated film that was released this past Tuesday.

Recent downloads of note

Some gaming dowloads for your perusal:

Age of Mythology: The Titans expansion pack demo (full game NOT required)
Halo PC demo
Updated Silent Storm demo
UFO: Aftermath demo and v1.2 retail patch

But does this mean less pop-ups?

You know the ads - infuriating pop-ups or pop-unders for radio-controlled devices like cameras that had vaguely sexual overtones, not-so-subtly implying that you could secretly record yourself or others during "intimate" moments.

Well, the perpetrators of these annoyances, X10, has filed for bankruptcy protection... since they claim to be the world's largest online advertiser, maybe this will help make the Web a slightly nicer place to browse (but I doubt it).

Detonator == Forceware

The unified GeForce drivers from NVidia formerly known as Detonator are now called Forceware - go get version 52.16 now.

Wild science

A trio of articles from the BBC leaves me wondering which of the following is more outrageous - a purple frog that (until recently) no one knew existed, the possibility that Robin Hood's remains were discovered and displaced by a lead pipe 250 years ago, or the idea that a company called Archaeoptics can exist - they used lasers to detect nearly eroded carvings in Stonehenge.

Tarantino interview

The Tarantino interview at Japattack about Kill Bill actually makes me like the movie more in retrospect. Tarantino knows films - period.

2 week blackhole

Work's been extremely demanding on my time, which is why I haven't posted in 2 weeks. Quite honestly, I had time to post this weekend, but ended up fighting the good fight in UFO: Aftermath instead.

More content to follow.

Thanks for the hard learned lesson

Dan and I first came across this story while watching the news Monday night. We thought we were hearing things when the newscaster said that the roommate would be receiving six charges for murder for one actual murder. Then we found out why...the murder was so brutal that it warranted six charges.

I followed up yesterday by reading the above, and I was really struck by the last two paragraphs.

A man came to the house for a garage sale and found the body. He ran to a neighbors asking for help because a man was dead or dying. The neighbor, in her infinite wisdom, sent her 11 YEAR OLD SON TO CHECK IT OUT. I'm speechless. Why the hell would you send your 11 year old to check out:
1) a scene that, regardless of how nasty a death, would include a dead or dying person...something he would have to witness alone for the first time.
2) a place that hasn't exactly been cleared FOR FUCKING SAFETY!!!

Christ. A crazy murderer might have been sitting in the garage waiting for more people.

She needs to get her son taken away from her the careless, thoughless bitch.

HL2 source code stolen

Wired has probably the best summary, but you can check out Gamers With Jobs to see the news as it broke, or any of the various Halflife2.net forum threads for bizzare conspiracy theories and just plain ignorance of the software development process and network security.

The scenario that's been confirmed by Valve's own Managing Director, Gabe Newell, is that the some or all of the Half-Life 2 source code was stolen from Valve's computing environment via the Internet, and that this theft was made possible by a total compromise of nearly all of Valve's systems. The likely initial vector of compromise was a Microsoft Outlook exploit, although Valve can't say for sure at this time.

Read more to get my thoughts on the whole mess.

In my opinion, the theft of the intellectual property from Valve exposes them in three main ways:

• Some of Valve's technology may have been licensed from other technology vendors (the original Half-Life was based on a licensed version of the Quake 2 engine) and not taking all of the "customary" measures to protect that information could result in their defaulting on some contractual obligations, which in turn could result in fines.
  
• The potential for Valve to license the Half-Life 2 engine is moderately diminished. Of course, no one will steal the Half-Life 2 source code wholesale, but by copying individual functions or (even less provable) general approaches to problems might encourage development shops sitting on the fence regarding "build vs. buy" decisions that they have enough information to build their own game engine and don't need to license. In short, the leak educates potential competitors and reduces the number of potential customers.
  
• Enterprising cheaters now have a leg up on how to develop exploits. Knowing exactly how the engine interprets inputs and how it delivers its output could lead to a whole new level of cheating; but on the other hand, plenty of devestating exploits for games have been developed via good ol' reverse engineering so the impact of this is really code-dependant and unknown at this time.
  

Especially potent, widespread exploits may hurt the game's residual sales, but (especially since no graphics or sound resources appear to be stolen and therefore the source can't be compiled into a working build of the game) the leak is unlikely to have an effect on initial sales.

Of course, there's the issue of how and why this happened in the first place. Through the course of my career, I've held various jobs that have put me in the position to see this problem occur over and over again - software development companies whose management believes in the myth of the "computer person". Simply put, this is the widely held misconception that all "computer people" are created equal; i.e. programmer == server admin == storage admin == network admin == deskside support == security expert. As a result, management ends up with programmers to maintain server/storage/network infrastructure as a way to limit operating costs.

This myth is sometimes perpetuated by the rare "computer person" who really is a jack of all trades and is good at several, but the real damage is done by programmers who don't know what they don't know and believe they can design and manage infrastructure implementations or they can figure it out on the fly because "it can't be harder than programming".

This problem is compounded by game programmers with legions of adoring fanboys who have rock star-sized egos. I don't know if this was a contributing factor to what must've been horrible host and network security at Valve, but it does seem to be an industry-wide trend - this op-ed piece at gamesindustry.biz states that:

"[M]any online games companies assume that [developing an infrastructure] can be done with a couple of cracker jack programmers and 3 weeks of effort... but it should occupy your attention for more than ten days and cost more than a thousand dollars."

I'll be interested to see how much more is publicly disclosed by Valve about the compromise, and even more interested to see if/to what extent this serves as a wake-up call to other developers, regardless of the type of software they're developing.

Motivational parodies

Jeff has posted yet another page of motivational poster parodies featuring comic book characters, and I have to admit that the idea was just too damn good to pass up.

So, after some brainstorming between Desiree and I, we came up with our own batch of posters. We hope you like them, and thanks again to Jeff for such a thoroughly hysterical idea.

Nobel Prize for Literature

JM Coetzee, a South African writer, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I read some of his work, particularly Dusklands, in a Fiction of Africa course I took in college. I can't remember this book exactly, but everything we read was incredible.

There is some amazing world literature out there, just waiting to be appreciated. Many of us know Achebe, but he's just the tip of the iceberg. Go visit your library and check out some of the fiction coming out of Africa and India.

Motivational Superlithos

Gravity Lens has supplied yet another great link - this time, to motivational posters featuring Marvel Comics characters. (Sorry Jeff, I've got to disagree with you - the Magneto poster is far creepier than the Punisher poster.)

Even better are Jeff's own parodies - if I wasn't so swamped at work (hence the lack of recent posting) I'd be inspired to add a few of my own...

Stuart Murdoch interview

The Onion's AV Club has an interview with Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian.