Entertaining Code » Blog

Game On

slicedlime — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:33:22 +0000

I’m not dead. First of all, we’ve moved into a house and have spent a great deal of time sorting out things and selling my old apartment. And then, just as I thought I would have some more time for the blog again, we launched into crunch mode.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to write more again soon.

For now, I urge you to try the Playstation 3 beta of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which opened yesterday. I have a couple of beta codes laying around (EU ones), so drop a comment here if you’ve got a PS3 and haven’t been able to get one.

Downtime

slicedlime — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 07:49:36 +0000

Due to some technical problems with a router that sadly went undiscovered for some time, the blog was down during most of the weekend. I’m sorry about the delay in fixing this — we should be up and running as normal again now.

No More Rants

slicedlime — Sat, 23 May 2009 14:44:14 +0000

Steve Yeggie has decided to end his blog, Stevey’s Blog Rants. I’ve been preparing a post about what blogs I read, and his rants was certainly on that list — it’s one of those few rare blogs that puts quality over quantity. One one side of the blog spectrum you have the churn-out-posts blogs like coding horror, who’s single advice to budding bloggers is to measure only quantity — he told himself he had to write six posts a week and then went about and did it, succeeded and thus everyone should do it.

In the age of information overload, I find myself less and less inclined to subscribe to blogs like that — too few of the posts are actually interesting. I’ve seen many people take Atwood’s advice and manage nothing else than to spam me with uninteresting posts with a few nuggets hidden in the constant stream.

I subscribe to a few blogs like that, but those would round up the bottom of the list. The best ones, however, are the ones like Stevey’s Blog Rants — they post anywhere between rarely and not-crazily-often, and they always post good content — whenever a new post shows up from some blogs, you know it’ll be worth reading.

It’s clear that Steve intends to go out with a bang, however. His latest post is part three in his series on “A Programmer’s View of the Universe”. Long-time readers may recall one of my early posts was a reply to his second entry in that series.

The latest part, The Death of Richard Dawkins, takes the shape of a Sci-Fi short story worthy of any master in the field of Sci-Fi, and I recommend it to anyone with as much as a slight interest in Sci-Fi.

I’ll be awaiting the last parts of the series eagerly, and mourning the death of a seriously good blog.

Casino Bonus Slot Machine!

slicedlime — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:48:17 +0000

I just started getting a complete flood of spam trackbacks on the blog. I’ve installed a spam filter now which seems to be blocking them… Please let me know if you have any problems with it when trying to post a comment.

Potentially Damaging Content

slicedlime — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:11:03 +0000

My blog has been blocked by the websense blocker software my employer uses. Which means I can’t access my own blog from work, which is sort of funny… especially considering I’m publishing many of the same posts on the internal blogging system as well.

My opinions are obviously to be considered “damaging”.

I guess that just shows the inherently bad idea with filtering in various forms, going from silly but annoying or harmless to the downright dangerous and anti-democratic (happened again in the latest election, it seems).

That’s what you get for buying blocking software from a company that likes to list porn sites on its web pages while selling easily circumventable blocker software. It makes me wonder what wacky filter grepped on to the site, and what exactly it disliked… but then again, I just posted this criticism of blocking software, so now I’m bound to be censored until the end of time.

Update:

Potentially Damaging Content

I’m still blocked. I’ve attempted to contact Websense through their nifty “contact us” web form — it just sent me back to their starting page. I’ve now sent an email instead, which apparently has been ignored or put on hold in some forgotten inbox.