Leon Atkinson's Blog, page 19

Mega launches

The battle over freedom of use of digital files sure is dramatic. Kim Dotcom is back, but will he win in the end? It scares me to think about these battles being the start of a global war in cyberspace. If it’s Dotcom, Assange and Anonymous on one side versus the RIAA, MPAA and FBI on the other, who will win and who will be collateral damage?

Dotcom’s Mega Launches To Unprecedented Demand | TorrentFreak

The much anticipated rebirth of Megaupload took place in the last few hours with interest living up to expectations. In less than one hour the site picked up 100,000 new registrations, going on to 500,000 and beyond just a few hours later. As the site struggled to cope with demand it became unresponsive in the face of an unprecedented flood of users eager to test out the new file-hosting site. Just a few minutes ago the launch party at Kim Dotcom’s mansion began, with some interesting reveals.

Related articles

Everything You Need to Know About Kim Dotcom’s Mega

Ten bucks gets you the whole LSL series

Sweet.

Leisure Suit Larry ‘Greatest Hits and Misses’ collection now on GOG

Classic PC adventure gaming examples of how not to pick up women have been spritzed with horrendous cologne and dressed up as GOG’s Leisure Suit Larry “Greatest Hits and Misses” collection. The $10 pack includes the first five Larry jams, the oldest of which (Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards) comes in both Original and VGA flavors.

Secret messages in game ROMs

Great read, and a gold star for mentioning Dani Bunten.

Message in a Binary Bottle | cabel.me

It’s 20 or 30 years ago. You’re working on a videogame. You don’t get any credit for your work, blogs don’t exist, there’s no internet and no fanboys. It’s just you, a crusty old terminal, and got a few spare bytes left in the ROM. What now?

> Type Secret Message

OK. You’ve hidden a secret message in the ROM, to be uncovered many, many years later, and posted on the incredible website, The Cutting Room Floor.

 

ADD Drugs Don’t Work Long-Term

This lines up with Whitaker’s investigative reporting in Anatomy of an Epidemic.

Children’s A.D.D. Drugs Don’t Work Long-Term – NYTimes.com

THREE million children in this country take drugs for problems in focusing. Toward the end of last year, many of their parents were deeply alarmed because there was a shortage of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that they considered absolutely essential to their children’s functioning.

But are these drugs really helping children? Should we really keep expanding the number of prescriptions filled?

In 30 years there has been a twentyfold increase in the consumption of drugs for attention-deficit disorder.

As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs.

It reminds me of this comic. There’s a follow-up if it makes you too sad.

Calvin and Hobbes — Now with Ritalin!
by JOEY DEVILLA on JANUARY 8, 2008

“Black Flag” to perform at Hevy Fest

Even more news about Black Flag.

“Black Flag” to perform at Hevy Fest

The organizers of Hevy Fest in the UK have announced that Black Flag will perform at this year’s festival. The band is to feature Black Flag members Greg Ginn and singer Ron Reyes. No word on who else will be in the lineup. The performance is being billed as the band’s “only UK show in 2013,” indicating that other shows with this lineup are in the works.

voxel.js

Click through and test the demos. They run really fast on in Chrome.

voxel.js * blocks in yo browser

voxel.js is a collection of projects that make it easier than ever to create 3D voxel games like Minecraft all in the browser.

It was written by @maxogden and @substack, two non-game developers that want to make voxel games easy, fun and modular. If you find bugs it is because we don’t really know what we are doing. The good news is that 100% of the code is on Github so we hope you will fork it.

Chordify

Have you ever wanted to play Lysine by Freex? Chordify will tell you the chords. The results aren’t perfect, but they will do.

 

How to use Chordify | Blog | Chordify | Tune Into Chords

Chordify is a free online music service – made for and by music enthusiasts – that transforms music, from YouTube, SoundCloud or your private collection, into chords. Our service automatically recognises chords from the audio signal, and aligns them to the music in a simple and intuitive player. Chordify is a cutting edge service that helps both novice and trained musicians to play the music they want to play, making state-of-the-art music technology available to the public at large.

New tools for Web programmers

Here are a few new tools that intersect with stuff I’m usually working on. Parsely looks to be an interesting alternative to JQuery’s validation plugin. Sass isn’t new, but the blog post below was quite handy for getting me up to speed quickly. Amazon’s Clustrix is a cloudified version of MySQL.

Parsley.js

Never write a single javascript line anymore to validate your forms FrontEnd. Parsley will do that for you and do it right, thanks to its powerful DOM-API !

Amazon’s Clustrix

Clustrix is an SQL database built from ground-up for scale, performance, and fault tolerance in the cloud. Clustrix offers fast transactional query performance at virtually any data set size and concurrency. With Clustrix, you never have to worry about database scalability again.

The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Sass – Treehouse Blog

Using Sass for your CSS preprocessing is a useful tool for executing responsive web design. Andrew takes us through the absolute beginner’s guide to Sass.

 

Riddles have no place in job interviews

Indeed.

I have been presented with these riddles, even after I was a best-selling author. The last time it happened to (years ago), I told the interviewer it was a ridiculous question I refused to answer. However, I heard a story last night of what must be the worst interview hazing I’ve heard about. For an employee being interviewed for a promotion, the company arranged for a three-way conference call. By design, one of the attendees did not call into meeting. The test was to see if the employee being interviewed would speak poorly of the jerk who was bailing on an important meeting with no notice.

I wonder if these pranksters understand they’ve made a clear invitation to dishonesty at the crucial beginning of a working relationship.

assertTrue( ): Riddles have no place in job interviews

I’ve seen “tech recruitment” from both sides of the desk. I have been a job applicant, and I have been a hiring manager. Neither role is pretty.

One of the unprettier sides of the hiring process in R&D is the on-site-interview stage, when the hiring manager (or one of his peers) gets to ask the applicant highly technical domain-knowledge questions. This can be done skillfully or poorly. It gets ugly fast when it becomes a hazing ritual based on riddle-solving.

Your brain imagines everyone nude

Interesting effect.

The Lurking Pornographer: Why Your Brain Turns Bubbles Into Nude Bodies

There is a pornographer lurking in some corner of your mind. He peeks out from behind the curtains of your consciousness without warning, and almost never at an acceptable time.

The lurking pornographer in your brain is ever vigilant, looking for patterns, for signs of nudity, and sometimes generating them out of nowhere. He is exceedingly good at what he does, and isn’t afraid to prove his power over your perception. Just like that, he can take a picture of Daniel Craig in a bathing suit and turn it obscene.