Posted in Web on February 25th, 2010 by David – Be the first to comment
Thunderbird has gotten some more visible momentum now that Thunderbird 3 has seen the light. Project lead David Asher has some more details on organisational topics for the year 2010:
- field-testing new functionalities in plugins
- New upgrade options for users coming from TB2
- making the organisation financially sustainable on its own
Just like Matt, I would love to see an official Gravatar plugin this year.
Posted in Web on February 24th, 2010 by David – Be the first to comment
Recently, jQuery 1.4 was released, with a maintenance release 1.4.2 a few days ago. In a move comparable to what we are doing with ImpressCMS release 1.3, the jQuery developers chose the jQuery 1.4 release to be a release focused on speed and cleanup of the codebase. Mostly, just cleaning up the codebase results in quite some speed advancements, so those two efforts are frequently combined.
The changelog for this latest release of the Javascript library mentions performance improvements in many areas : CSS methods, Attributes and many of the most-used functions. However, the changelog also details some backward incompatible changes with previous versions. These incompatibilities can be countered by installing this specific plugin. read more »
Posted in Web on February 22nd, 2010 by David – Be the first to comment
Some time ago, I found this cool plugin for Thunderbird (2.x at the time) : MessageFaces (or on Mozilla Addons). It made email conversations much less impersonal by showing images of the persons that I was having an email conversation with. The beauty of the system was that I didn’t have to do anything: images were gathered from gravatar.com, X-faces, or embedded PNG images.
Then Thunderbird 3 came along, and busted quite a bit of plugins. Sadly for me, both MessageFaces and Lightning, the calendar plugin, ceased to work. read more »
Posted in Game Development on February 19th, 2010 by Administrator – Be the first to comment
There is an interview with Brett Seyler at Gamasutra. He discusses why he left GarageGames to go to Unity3d, and what he would have done if the opportunity to work with them wouldn’t have been available. An interesting read.
Brett still posts on the GarageGames forums (or TorquePowered, depending whether the new name catches on). Keeping tabs on the competition I guess 
Posted in Games on February 3rd, 2010 by David – Be the first to comment
Eurogamer has a gameplay video of C&C4 on their website, along with a screenshot gallery of what is to be the final part of the Kane story arc. The video shows the game in action, from both sides, both with offence and defence gameplay. How this is going to be implemented in the game itself is of course the important point.
I do hope that the video was sped up a bit, as the game speed shown in the video made me think of one of those nervous coin-up arcade machines, where your only goal is to slap the buttons as hard and as fast as possible.
read more »
Posted in Web on January 17th, 2010 by David – 1 Comment
A month or two ago, I came to the conclusion that I was sinning against one of the basic rules of modern communication by having a multitude of blogs, without a very clear distinction between them. I posted family-related news on this blog, along with news about my upcoming 3Mension.com site.
Of course, that’s wrong.
If your goal is to build a brand, you need distinct and clear communication. You can be certain different people will want different types of information when coming to your site. People going to karekiet39 will do so because of family- or home related stuff. People going to the 3mension blog will want to know the latest facts about 3mension, but couldn’t care less if we redecorated the garden last weekend.
read more »
Posted in Game Development, Technology on January 16th, 2010 by David – Be the first to comment
After the merger/takeover between Daz 3d and Gizmoz, many expressed their reservations that the combined companies would continue in the direction the Daz3d community was used to, and was expecting.
Some had doubts about the reason for the merger, specifically because it was indicated that the founder of daz3d would step down after the merger. That, according to them could be seen as a move that Gizmoz was calling the shots, and that Gizmoz only wanted to take over the Daz3d webshop. read more »
Posted in Game Development, Technology, Work on January 7th, 2010 by David – Be the first to comment
Unity Technologies has hired Brett Seyler, who oversaw Torque engine development for InstantAction and GarageGames, to serve as its VP of strategy. After Brett Seyler announced that he was leaving TorquePowered (former GarageGames), nobody thought he was leaving for a direct competitor.
In the torrent of comments following his blog, Brett indicated indirectly that he already had a next challenge in mind, but he didn’t specify. It was assumed throughout the Torque community that he would follow in the footsteps of his former GarageGames colleagues now at Pushbutton Labs. That company was founded by the former GarageGames owners, after the sale to Interactive corp. In fact, it was at that time that Brett took over daily operations at GarageGames.
The move to Unity3d is both a surprise and a read more »
Posted in Web on January 6th, 2010 by Administrator – Be the first to comment
In this post, I’ll try to describe the steps I had to make to get a working Trac installation on Dreamhost. A few months back, Dreamhost started providing a one-click advanced installation package for trac 0.11.1 . With this package, you can get a working trac installation in a few simple steps. You can even use the Dreamhost panel to upgrade to the latest version, if a new release is made.
Trac is a very powerful package, but installing it (and getting it to work) on Dreamhost hasn’t been easy. Several shell scripts exist that provide a Trac installation, but they all need some manual tinkering.
In theory, the one-click installers at Dreamhost are just that : one click, and you have a ready-to-go setup. In the case of Trac, the installation you obtain by simply using the one-click install is not quite usable nor complete. read more »
Posted in Blender on January 6th, 2010 by David – 1 Comment
Het huidige nummer van Linux magazine (#111) bevat een artikel over hoe onderzoekers Blender 3D gebruiken om te berekenen en te simuleren wat er gebeurt met het zand wanneer je over een strand loopt. Dit toont de extreme flexibiliteit aan van Blender, en geeft ook aan dat die mogelijkheden meer en meer worden geapprecieerd door de academische wereld.
Dit academisch gebruik wordt ook elke keer duidelijk in de verf gezet op de Blender conferences, waar elk jaar meer en meer indrukwekkende en interessante onderzoeken worden voorgesteld.
