Due to an increasing workload from IB, and the author’s laziness, I sincerely apologize for the sparse number posts during the past week(s) and for the weeks to come.

Three hilarious reviews by Zero Punctuation:

H.A.W.X.

Modern Warfare 2:

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Summarizes my thoughts:

Hacker:

[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe]

1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.
2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.
3. A person capable of appreciating hack value.
4. A person who is good at programming quickly.
5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in `a UNIX hacker’. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.)
6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.
7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence “password hacker”, “network hacker”. The correct term is cracker.

The term `hacker’ also tends to connote membership in the global community defined by the net. It also implies that the person described is seen to subscribe to some version of the hacker ethic.

It is better to be described as a hacker by others than to describe oneself that way. Hackers consider themselves something of an elite (a meritocracy based on ability), though one to which new members are gladly welcome. There is thus a certain ego satisfaction to be had in identifying yourself as a hacker (but if you claim to be one and are not, you’ll quickly be labeled bogus).

Things hackers detest and avoid:

IBM mainframes. Smurfs, Ewoks, and other forms of offensive cuteness. Bureaucracies. Stupid people. Easy listening music. Television (except for cartoons, movies, the old “Star Trek”, and the new “Simpsons”). Business suits. Dishonesty. Incompetence. Boredom. COBOL. BASIC. Character-based menu interfaces. Anything Microsoft.

- From the Jargon file (more or less).

http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/hacker.html

PS. Yeah. “Hacker” DOESN’T mean a malicious meddler who tries to get into your system. Gottit?

For the uninformed, here’s the other side of the argument:

The Scourge of Arial

Arial is everywhere. If you don’t know what it is, you don’t use
a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to
anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has
spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and
illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft’s influence in the
world.

Arial’s ubiquity is not due to its beauty. It’s actually rather
homely. Not that homeliness is necessarily a bad thing for a
typeface. With typefaces, character and history are just as
important. Arial, however, has a rather dubious history and not much
character. In fact, Arial is little more than a shameless impostor.

[...]

I can almost hear young designers now
saying, “Helvetica? That’s that font that looks kinda like
Arial, right?”

From Mark Simpson Studio

And now, don’t ever ask about how Arial became infamous. Being used as a font that used as a substitute because Microsoft was being cheap doesn’t make the font any better, does it?

Not that Arial cannot be used in a nice way; there have been some websites that looked good with Arial—maybe because there isn’t another web-safe font out there that is half-decent—even Arial barely qualifies. I don’t have anything against Arial—but what I have a problem with is the fact that Arial didn’t rise into fame through it’s sheer beauty but through Microsoft being a cheapskate and mass distribution.

From CodeLemur

[...]

• Google is obviously the 900-pound gorilla in this space, so they’re a logical place to start. When you ask Google “How big is the Sun?” Big Brother Google replies, right at the top “Mass: 1.9891 ×1030 KG 332 946 Earths,” with most of the results relevant to the question at hand. In fact, all but two of the results were directly relevant to the question asked.
• Yahoo didn’t return a nice little piece of math like Google did, but all but one of the search results is directly relevant to the question asked. The only result that wasn’t relevant was that VH1 has some videos by a band called Big Sun, but that was torwards the bottom of the SERP.
• The newcomer Wolfram Alpha, which bills itself as a “knowledge engine” gives you a simple result, 432,200 miles, along with a handy formula for conversion. Not a traditional search engine, but closer to a “decision engine” than Bing …
• And finally, the “decision engine” Bing. So how does the vaunted “decision engine” handle knowing how big the sun is? It doesn’t.

  The first result is a garden furniture store in Austin, Texas. The second result is an Equine Product Store in Florida. The third was pictures of the sun from the Boston Globe – okay, that one was close. The next results are a realty company in Florida and an athletic conference. Only then, six results down, do we get into the meat of the question.

[...]

With these observations and my experience I must say, I concur with Lemur that Bing doesn’t provide anything useful. I can’t help but draw the premature conclusion that they spent more money advertising it than developing it.

Best explanation if the Euler constant:

An Intuitive Guide To Exponential Functions & e

Definitely impressive. But in my experience there it slowed down too.

From MacRumors:

In the past, we’ve speculated that Apple’s resistance to supporting Adobe’s Flash on the iPhone and their efforts to add new features to HTML/CSS is, in part, to reduce their long term dependence on Flash.

Ajaxian points to an impressive demo by Charles Ying which shows off hardware accelerated 3D CSS Visual Effects that are now supported in Snow Leopard’s Safari builds as well as the latest Webkit nightly builds. If you have either of these versions installed, you can view a live version yourself here. Otherwise, you can watch this video of the demo:

These new 3D effects have been proposed for standards inclusion. If successful, future browsers will also adopt these effects.

While these will help provide standards-based tools for accomplishing visual effects that have been the realm of Flash in the past, there has recently been a setback on efforts to standardize on a specific video playback format for HTML5. Video remains the most popular use for Flash on the web. Due to ongoing disagreements between Apple, Google and other web browser developers, the acceptance of a single video codec standard for HTML5 has been indefinitely delayed.

“After an inordinate amount of discussions, both in public and privately, on the situation regarding codecs for video and audio in HTML5, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship,” Hickson wrote. “I have therefore removed the two subsections in the HTML5 spec in which codecs would have been required, and have instead left the matter undefined.”

Apple, of course, has been pushing H.264 and opposes the Ogg Theora alternative due to the potential patent claims in the future. Mozilla and Opera have their own issues with cost and licensing issues with H.264 and prefer Ogg Theora. The inability to come to an agreement means that there will be no accepted standard format for HTML5. As a result, Flash will likely remain the dominant format for online video for the time being.

From satine.org via MacRumors.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome finally goes into alpha after so many preview builds…

Download here.

Excuse me, but isn’t search and seizures without warrants against the law? (even in Spain?)… That can only mean two things; SGAE’s getting desperate, or they’re going dirty. Either way, everyone suffers.

(PS. those who would argue that it’s he consented to the search, I wish you luck. ‘”Consent” under duress’ hardly constitutes what “consent” means here.)

“Ever since it became clear that running a P2P links site is not a crime in Spain, music anti-piracy group SGAE have threatened civil action. Yesterday the admin of two P2P sites had a home visit by members of SGAE, who took advantage of the admin’s legal naivety and conducted a search of his property without a suitable warrant.“

via Torrentfreak

More Wood.

Download

More Wood icon set by Wikinerd

Expansion of the “Now Wooden” icon set; 5 ICNS and PNG files.

Wood-themed icons and sets:
Made of Wood ~by Thvg [link]
Wooden Slick Drives ~by Thvg [link]
Wooden Wall (wallpaper) ~by kano89 [link]
Wooden Finder ~by kano89 [link]
Wooden Dashboard ~by kano89 [link]
Wooden Safari ~by kano89 [link]
Now Wooden ~by Wikinerd [link]

5 icons that you can add to the Now Wooden collection of fifty icons.

Now in Wood set: 32 icons for 23 Apps
Now Wooden set: 19 icons for 15 Apps w/ revisions for apps in the original set

More Wood set: 3 new icons for 3 apps with 2 revisions of originals

Applications:
Revisions:
⁃ 1Password
⁃ Activity Monitor

New:
⁃ Automator
⁃ Chromium
⁃ VMWare Fusion

Please read the disclaimer at [link]

PS. Please take a look at Thvg’s and kano89’s icons, they are just as awesome.

PPS. Yes, the icon set is quite inconsistent; I’ll improve on it when I have the time. (If you’re making derivations of it just make sure that you contact me.)

PPS. Anywayz enjoy. Any comments welcome.