01.30.04
Posted in miscellaneous at 12:17 am by
Any post that starts with a Bowie lyric must be insightful, right? Well maybe not. Just wanted to post what work I hope to be getting to soon on sites that fall under the Vox Pop Design umbrella.
Short Term:
1. Vox Pop Design Redesign. Ok while starting up, the more I surfed over there the more I found the interface a bit drab, even for a business. The new design is actually in the can and servable from my test servers, but I still need to spell checking and some final debugging before it goes live. Mind you, I’m not jumping to neon green backgrounds…just yet…
Mid Term:
1. Redesign the mutednoise.com front page. As you can see, the article interviews last week helped pull in a lot of traffic. However, there seemed to be very little spill over; that is, people didn’t seem to explore after they got here. Part of the problem, I think, is that the front page is pretty cluttered. If you’re new the front page is full of tiny links and little text. I’m not talking about radical – just reducing the volume on the front and take more time emphasizing the carmel goodness in what does appear.
2. Incorporate article and interview summaries as part of the BB. I had started this process when I hacked the phpbb code so Wendy could make her lovely appearance (<-). I just need to finish what I started and get the summaries over there for those people who drill directly to the forums (*cough* nato *cough* 
).
3. Finish music for Bloodaxe Realms Age 3 hack packs. I’ve been asked to score for the 3 version of this excellent NWN persistant module. I do have some compositional ideas down but they seriously need to be fleshed out. Now that I’ve finished HOU and am all RPG played out I’ll actually have time to compose. 
Long Term:
1. Coding on Music Mogul has been stopped while I evaluate different application frameworks. If I’m going to build this think I’m going to do it right the first time – and that means having a framework in place to reduce confusion, document the plan, and make maintenance and feature addition a snap. Currently I’m leaning toward the MVC (Model View Controller) heavy Mach-II. Good stuff; if dry, technically dense computational theory documents are your definition of good. If I didn’t think there was something worthwhile here I wouldn’t be investing so much time into pursuing it first; Rolling Stone reading, it is not.
2. RSS feeds of mutednoise changes directly to you… Why?Because, all the kids are doing it.
If you’ve got some thoughts about how any of these projects could be made better, features you’d like to see, articles you like done, etc. just let me know.
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01.29.04
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:46 pm by
All right – a big old brain dump. Reading long documents in one long post can be a pain so I’ve posted a Word Doc online.
It starts strong with some DB structures that I think make a lot of sense, and then sort of peters out when we get to the part about scripting actions based on those DB values. I see another database table that defines a set of english logical operators (<,>,=,AND,OR,NOT) and their language specific counterparts (in ColdFusion, for example, it would be LT, GT, EQ, AND, OR, NOT). A world builder would be given a form to select from the various database attributes, linking them with the plain english logical operators. The world builder then designates actions based on whether those statements passed (Boolean True) or failed (Boolean False).
I’d love to hear your thoughts on just how to implement such a thing…
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Posted in Uncategorized at 11:30 pm by
Currently all work with music mogul is on standby. For the past month I’ve been steeped in OO methodologies and frameworks. The scattershot approach to design and coding that had thus far built some of the info parsing and Amazon gathering worried me more and more. Even if the application was completed the ability to maintain it was doubtful.
To this point I have been impressed by the Mach-II framework. It is a purer, more object orientated evolution of the Fusebox framework and FLiP methodology (and a direct decendent of MVC principles). Through this Monday I hope to develop several quick spikes (short demos demonstrating functionality) just to make myself aware of the ins and outs of how it works in a ColdFusion environment.
With the UML layouts and (hopefully) future support by the Adalon suite, the project (at that point) will be self documenting. Anyway… I’ll post when I know more.
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Posted in forum archive at 8:49 am by
Gamespy goes great humor pieces, but this one had me laughing out loud (a brief bit):
And on a nearby hillock a Bard sung a song with only his drums as an accompaniment:
That’s great it starts with an earthquake
Birds and drakes and players slain
Lenny Bruce is not afraid;
Wizards going PK, listen to yourself say
“Gimmie buffs” it’s not enough
Knights are shucking armored stuff
Preachers casting cure light wounds
Lining up the two moons, wetting in their pantaloons
Less leet, dead meat, cast flight, bright light,
Going down you level up it’s allright … right?
It’s the end of the world as we know it!
It’s the end of the world as we know it!
It’s the end of the world as we know it…
At least online.
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01.28.04
Posted in forum archive at 9:39 am by
Several Independent record labels are fighting the merger of Sony Music and BMG.
“Our main point is access. We want to avoid a situation where a combined entity makes it impossible for smaller independent labels and artists to get access to broadcasters and retailers,” said Philippe Kern, secretary general for IMPALA.
That makes sense in a way. However, I have a hard time seeing any corporation that lists Justin Guarini as a ’star’ as threatening.
I also tend to think that a merged Sony/BMG would be good for artists. Realistically, they would drop some of their lower performing artists and focus on their Beyonce’s and Justin Timberlakes. That would mean a whole new crop of lower-selling artists (but high volume by indie standards) would go looking for representation. :unsure:
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Posted in forum archive at 9:23 am by
While probably old hat to redbaron by now, here’s some info on the MyDoom virus (also known as Mimail.R):
Brief Description
Mydoom.A is a worm that spreads via e-mail in a message with
variable characteristics and through the peer-to-peer (P2P )
file sharing program KaZaA.
Mydoom.A launches DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks
against the website www.sco.com if the system date is between
February 1 and February 12, 2004. It does this by launching
GET/ HTTP/ 1.1 requests every 1,024 milliseconds. On February
12, 2004, the worm finishes its payload, ending its execution
whenever it is activated.
Mydoom.A drops the DLL (Dynamic Link Library) SHIMGAPI.DLL,
which creates a backdoor, opening the first available TCP port
in the range from 3127 to 3198. This backdoor component allows
to download and run an executable file, and acts as a TCP proxy
server, allowing a hacker to gain remote access to network
resources.
More info here.
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01.25.04
Posted in forum archive at 12:38 am by
Arrrrgh! Pepsi be the choice of the new file-swapping generation! Or at least that’s what ads that will run during the SuperBowl will attempt to convey.
Some 20 teen music downloaders nailed by RIAA lawyers will be featured in Pepsi’s Super Bowl ads, according to a USA Today report.
The spot will promote a Pepsi limited-time offer of up to 100 million free, legal downloads from the Apple’s online iTunes music store.
So let me get this straight; these people broke the law, got caught, and subsequently get paid to appear in a nationally syndicated commercial? No wonder the kids are confused: they’re getting mixed messages. 
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Posted in forum archive at 12:32 am by
Bill Gates always makes lots of future looking statements. But this one even made me sit up and take notice:
“Two years from now, spam will be solved,” he told a select group of World Economic Forum participants in Davis, Switzerland. Gates said his company is working on a “magic solution” based on the concept of “proof” – identifying the sender of the e-mail.
Oh yeah, he is also recieving an honorary knighthood. Guess the pressure was on to impress the Queen with somekind of bold statement.
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Posted in forum archive at 12:12 am by
If you’ve already read mutednoise’s interview with Gaming Open Market, or would just like a different perspective, check out Wired’s take.
There is something disturbing that came up in the course of the Wired article, however:
“I feel like I am above the players of these games. They are toiling and investing hours and hours into creating wealth and building empires and here I am, no virtual avatar running around and no virtual real estate, just skimming money off the top.”
I think they really need to be careful here. If there is one thing that gamers can detect, it is contempt (a few stray comments from Infinium Labs at a low key college presentation turned a nation of people off of their Phantom console). It’s true, this may be what’s happening. But a ‘better-than-thou’ attitude will win one few fans and fewer customers.
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01.20.04
Posted in miscellaneous at 9:13 am by
I think I can say that I’ve never seen Team Bit Rot so high in the ratings as today (341). A large part of our sudden spurt has to belong to Nato. Out of nowhere he’s putting up numbers that are just astonishing – 30,31, even 33 WU’s for the week.
Dude, what’s your secret??? 
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