d-log

It must have been one of those days…

It was one of those days I must have felt a bit overconfident. When you read why I think so, I’m sure you’ll all agree. Surfing on the forums of the GarageGames web site, I came across some posts by artists that wanted to share their work with the world. To do that, they were using free hosting sites, among them GeoCities, that impose restrictions on the daily amount of data your site sends over the network. I can understand the GeoCities decision, as they don’t want to host half of the world’s pirated software on free sites. Limiting the distribution of files in this way is a very efficient way for GeoCities, but it kind of limits the usefulness of the service for people wanting to distribute their assets.

I recently changed hosting company, and they provide me with next to unlimited storage space, and tens of gigabytes of data traffic each month. At the moment, my usage doesn’t even come up to 0,1 percent. One could state I still have some capacity left. So, I decided to contact some people and propose them to host their files, and to build a site around it. I figured it would take me a few hours and I would be done.

Oh boy, was I wrong…

Continue reading ‘Building an art website in Xoops’ »

The Xoops foundation announced on October 22nd that the stable release version of Xoops 2.3 had been made available for download.

Even though this blog is running on Wordpress, the Linux philosophy dictates that you need the right tool for the job. Blogging is done using Wordpress, and site building is done, in my case, using the excellent Xoops. After some period of internal turmoil at the end of 2007, development seems to have picked up again, with some founding members returning to the community.

It shows. Instead of just updating the looks on some modules, the changelog is listing a lot of impressive and useful additions to the core system, both visible to end-users and some invisible ones that are there to ease module development. I’ve been trying to get the hang of module development for some weeks now (to get this DIF and DTS art site going), and I can see the additions and improvements will make my life easier, and shorten my development cycle considerably.

My verdict: Xoops is back. Development is going forward at a brisk pace, and the community seems to have stabilised. Now all that is needed are some more finished and well-maintained modules, and this will be again a system to be reckoned with.

Firefox

Firefox 3 has just been released! I subscribed for Download Day, where Mozilla tries to establish a world record of downloads in the 24 hours after release. And as I pledged, I’m currently downloading the file from Mozillas download servers. No Dutch version at launch, contrary to the previous release though. This download is coming from Brazil, but as long as it’ll install, I don’t have a problem with that. Nice download speeds too, considering the mass of people currently downloading.

The download is in. Let’s have a look at FF 3.0 now…

read more | digg story

I guess it’s their way of wishing us ‘Happy Easter’, as the guys and gals from Linspire are doing a special promotion tomorrow (not much time, I know). This is the mail I received to announce the promo:

Continue reading ‘Linspire 22% discount for 22 hours on march 22nd’ »

Xara has been acquired by Magix AG, a leading German software distributor for video and music applications. Xara, once distributed by Corel, has been in the news for its open source version of Xara Xtreme which was struggling to gain momentum, and then eventually stopped due to lack of developer interest.
It seems the acquisition by MAGIX will provide them with more funds to further development and to make distribution of their software easier.
MAGIX is distributor of MAGIX Music Maker and MAGIX Video Deluxe 2008.

read more | digg story

It seems there is an exploit in the XML-RPC functionality of the Wordpress we’re using at the moment. It has been patched. More information can be found at the Wordpress site.

On a post on the website, Tom Spinner announces that Stage6, the DivX initiated web platform for DivX encoded movie playing online, will cease operations at the end of this month. Well, they even didn’t take into consideration that we have 29 days in february this year.

The reason is a simple one : it became the casualty of its own success. I am a DivX user and even though I didn’t produce anything worth showing the world, I remember being routed to Stage6 many times when looking at trailers and teasers for Video games. Starcraft 2 is one that comes to mind.

Of course, many sites on the net are offering downloads, but you will be hard pressed to find a site offering the same video quality at the moment. Youtube isn’t even considered, the quality of most movies there is laughable, given the fact that most of the movies are re-encoded to Flash video from other formats, without the special tweaking the DivX publisher could do when preparing his own movie on his own computer in the format that would be distributed.

A sad evolution, but I guess some other sites will take over. When looking around, many video sites are stopping, due to high bandwidth costs, which are directly related to their popularity, or due to the fact that they can’t compete with the best-known ones (Google Video comes to mind). We’ll see what the future may bring, as the last sentence is fairly promising in the post:

We remain committed to empowering content creators to deliver high-quality video to a
wide audience, and we’ll continue to offer services that will make it easy to find videos online in the DivX format.

It’s been a wild ride, and none of it would have been possible without the support of our users. Thank you for making Stage6 everything that it was.

And now for something totally different: adventure games. I’ve been introduced to computer gaming, like an entire generation, by the means of the adventure games made at that time by Sierra Inc and LucasArts. Many will have fond memories of The Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and the likes.

Several different Adventure engines have seen the light of day, among which the most known are Sludge, MAD, AGS, The Wintermute Engine and Agast. Continue reading ‘Indie Adventurers’ »

Garagegames seems to be very active at the moment, as only a few months after the 1.6 release, we are spoiled with the 1.7 release.
Looking at the changelog below, I notice the Collision Polygon and the Linkpoint editors, which are the only reasons this is a new release. If it had been only bugfixes, I would have expected a 1.6.1 version.
Continue reading ‘Torque Game Builder (TGB) 1.7 released’ »

I read this nice news on the FON newsletter. Seems Belgium isn’t that behind after all. Now let’s hope Leuven follows suit, so that we can alle enjoy free Wifi in the library.

FONTASTIC FON SPOTS

The City Library of Izegem in Belgium is our first FONtastic public library in Europe. The library’s visitors can bring their laptops, surf the net and send emails for free. The FON WiFi signal covers the library’s lobby, Reading Room, Meeting Room and Exhibit Hall.

“Since we added FON WiFi, our visitors no longer need to wait to use one of the few available computers we keep for accessing the internet. They can bring along their own laptops and save online research directly onto their computers. We’re also doing something innovative and are the first public place in Izegem to offer free wireless internet access. FON WiFi makes using our facilities so much more comfortable and an even more ideal place to work and study for everyone!”

– Nicolas Cappelle, Head Librarian