Link-a-licious time!

Humor Item: Most time the Daily WTF is fairly programmer-centric. I think almost anybody can enjoy this collection of message boxes.

Pimping the music item: Weird Al's new album Straight Outta Lynwood releases next week - and it's a DualDisc with music videos on the DVD side. Sweet! You can see some of the videos here - I recommend "White & Nerdy" myself.

Pimping the book item: Time Spiral - the first book in this block's trilogy is out. If you really want to read my book next year you'll need to read this one first. Speaking of which Amazon has mine listed - although it should list Scott and I as co-authors. I assume that will get fixed as we get closer to release day.

I can also point out now that this story is not entirely independent of previous stories. (When people asked before that was a super-secret covered-by-NDA detail. But since book one is now out, that's no longer a secret tidbit.) While we did our best to make sure new readers would enjoy the story it does build on previous novels. If you're not current on the Magic storyline you may want to read this recap.

technorati tags:music, Weird_Al, Magic:_The_Gathering, fiction

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technorati tags:Star_Wars, humor, flash

Blogged with Flock

Last August I tallied up the "Xbox 360 experience" on Kotaku. The idea at the time was that while the Xbox 360 was as little as $300, that didn't really deliver the full experience and even $400 didn't give you everything you really needed to fully appreciate the Xbox 360.With a little more than two months before the PS3 launch I think it's time to put Sony's next-gen console through the same ringer. Unfortunately, there are a few key numbers missing, so right not this is just a comparison based on a few best guesses. Please keep that in mind while reading.

Price Check: Xbox 360 Vs. PS3 - Kotaku

Kotaku did an interesting attempt to figure out if you bought the same features for both consoles what the final cost is. Their conclusion is that if you try to match feature for feature the 360 is more expensive than the PS3! $839.94 versus $688.97

Now the real slight of hand here is that to make the 360 match the feature set they buy a wireless adapter and the HD-DVD add-on. They also presume the HD-DVD add-on will cost $200 but that's a reasonable guess. So somebody can argue "I don't want the HD video playback so lop off the $200", and that's a reasonable argument - although it's still really close unless you argue that the WiFi adapter is a stupid addition - and it clearly isn't.

I'll put my new disclaimer on this post. If you're somebody who hates all discussion of HD and you're convinced that all of America still loves themselves some NTSC and you are preparing to froth at the mouth about how DVD is so good that we don't need a replacement format - don't. I'm tired of that discussion. Now, there are some major flaws with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, and the format war is stupid. I'd love to have rational discussion about those issues, but I'm barring the gate to people who have a reasonably informed opinion about HDTV - and that means having seen real HDTV in action, that means being aware of the numbers in terms of HDTV sales and US market penetration. If your "research" will be anecdotal evidence about who you know who doesn't have a HD set I'm not interested.

technorati tags:Xbox, PS3, HDTV, gaming

Blogged with Flock

Flickr RSS's support is slightly uneven. The first problem (which appears intractable) is that the RSS feed for pictures from your contacts is not the same content as the web page. The RSS feeds don't show you anything marked as "only for family" or "only for friends". The short form is that you aren't logged into Flickr, so you don't get to see anything locked, just public stuff. Fair enough, but I wish they supported something like the LiveJournal trick I discussed here to allow your RSS reader to login and pull the full list.

Another thing that bugged me is that I can subscibe to comments on my photos, but not to comments on say Karin's photos. (I should note here that apparently this suffers from the same problem as the first paragraph - if you lock a picture you won't see comments on it in your comment thread.) However, I got to thinking about it and realized that doesn't make sense. If I wasn't logged in then there is no way for Flickr to know what comments came from "my account". So I poked around. Sure enough, if you do some judicious URL editing you can create a comment stream RSS for any Flickr user. Here's the scoop.

If you click the link that says "Feed – Subscribe to recent activity on your photos" from your Flickr page you get a URL that looks something like this:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/activity.gne?id=35766250@N00&format=rss_200

(This is my own activity feed.)

That id=xxxxxxxx is the interesting part. From any Flickr user you can click "subscribe to photos" at the bottom of the page and you'll get a URL that looks like this:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=35766250@N00&format=rss_200

(Again, that's a RSS feed for my photostream. All six photos.)

Now, you have a URL for comments for a given user, and you know how to extract the ID for any given User. So if you want to see the comments for some other user what you have to do is extract the id=xxxxxxxx field from their photo feed and paste it into the activity URL above and voila - that other user's recent comments!

All the usual disclaimers apply - this might not work for everybody, Flickr might break it at any time, yadda, yadda. I didn't get into the significance of the format= part (although Flickr does document that here.) I'm also not sure about the @N00 part. In my small sampling everybody has that, but that might change for Pro users or something. In general I'd suggest taking everything from the id= part and pasting it across.

technorati tags:flickr, RSS, software, web

Blogged with Flock