September 26, 2005
World of Warcraft Virus
Wired has an interesting article about a virtual virus that killed numerous virtual characters in the World of Warcraft game made by blizzard. The virus started as a spell that was created for a new area of the virtual world and was created to spread to nearby players. However when the characters who visited this new area returned to the normal game map the spell hitched a ride and started to spread like a virus throughout the game until Blizzard released a counter-spell to remove the original spell.
This virtual computer virus does create for some very interesting thinking as it means that even virtual worlds have a type of balance that if tipped in the wrong direction can have serious repercussions. What happens if these virtual worlds become more real and we start to create the bridges between virtual and reality via some undefined hardware in the future. Will this be the complete downfall for the human race... got you thinking now.
Anyway World of Warcraft is still a really fun game and stories like these just make it even more interesting.
Links
Wired: World of Warcraft Virus
September 25, 2005
High Speed Video Clips
Here is a brilliant site with a bunch of high speed video clips of everyday items. There is lots of balloon popping, blowing up things, smashing everyday items and even animal motion. Have a look it really is quite facinating.
Links
High Speed Videos
September 11, 2005
Mozilla Development Centre
Mozilla foundation has released a beta of their Mozilla Development Centre site. This site contains documentation and links for everything to do with the Mozilla platform and includes such core features as Documentation Wikis, Developer News and a Webwatch weblog. If you are interested in the Mozilla Platform of products (Firefox, Thunderbird, Camino, etc) then get on over to the Mozilla Development Centre.
Links
Mozilla Developer Center (MDC) Beta
Completely flat Cables
This is a great idea, flat cables. These cables are completely flat so that you can stick them to surfaces and they do not get in the way or place them under carpet without having a bump in the way. One of my friends would have loved this as instead of spending days and days cutting channels into his brick walls to lay cable conduits he could have just run this cable around the place and then simply paint over the top.
Links
DeCorp FlatWire Products
September 04, 2005
VideoCasts: The next craze
So we have PodCasts, which has not become mainstream with the introduction of iTunes' inbuilt podcasting feature which makes it extremely easy to subscribe, download and transfer PodCasts to your iPod. The next craze are VideoCasts, which instead of MP3 files the RSS feeds contain videos. This allows people to subscribe to a VideoCast RSS feed and download videos. There are some people out there calling this Internet TV where you are essentially watching video on demand over the Internet, in some ways this is true.
If you are using a Mac, and I know most of the people who read my blog do, then you can download an open source program called DTV. DTV allows you to quickly and easily subscribe to VideoCast feeds, download and play the video files. The software is still Beta and they have warnings all over the application but I have not had any problems using the application. Give it a go and be one of the first in the VideoCast craze.
Links
Download DTV
September 02, 2005
Complexification - Gallery of Computation
Here is a brilliant site that uses mathematics and programming to create some of the most interesting pieces of “art”. It is even possible to run Java Applets to generate the art work yourself. If you are really keen you can also download the sourcecode used to create the artifacts.
Links
Complexification - Gallery of Computation
TokyoPlastic
This is a great site with lots of flash animations with sound to delight you. Essentially it is just a collection of short animation showing off the skills and capabilities of the design house but for us mere mortals on the Internet it creates for one entertaining site. An audio visual spectacular.
Links
TokyoPlastic
