STG's

(Posting in portuguese, as the referred drive is on sale on several local merchants) Estava para comprar um Seagate Expansion Drive 1.5 TB, externo. O preço é bem razoável. Aí fui olhar as reviews... Recomendo que se você estiver pensando em comprar, leia também antes. Muita gente, mas muita gente MESMO teve problemas com o drive morrer depois de comprar. O termo click-of-death infelizmente não morreu com a Iomega e o ZIP drive. Obviamente, algo que não é muito aceitável...

Another very late post. I downloaded Everyday Genius SquareLogic Demo because of a Steam weekend sale. Unfortunately, I didn't get around to playing it until way after the weekend, because the demo is very nice. It's a variation of Sudoku, which I really like, and will no doubt remind anyone who played Kakuro (also called Cross Sums) of it. Every puzzle is a grid of numbers, which has blocks where an operation (sum, equals, minus, etc) on those numbers must equal the specified result. As usual, you can't repeat numbers inside a grid. If you like Sudoku, definitely worth trying.

I read this one quite a few weeks ago, but was too lazy to get around to posting. :-) It's another military sci-fi book featuring the Bolos, sentient super tanks. This one is a collection of short stories about Bolos, with very different styles and situations. As usual for collections, the quality varies, but there were very nice stories in this bunch. Worth reading if you like this style of military sci-fi.

Debug it! was another nice book from Pragmatic Programmers. As in any technical book, what you take as useful information depends on what you didn't know in the first place. While I was familiar with many of the practices discussed in the book (and use a few, such as the excellent EurekaLog, which is a huge help when debugging user problems), I learned quite a few new things. There is quite a bit of recommendations for teams, which seemed very useful, although they don't apply in my case. Well worth the time, specially as it is not very long.

Dexter by Design, by Jeff Lindsay, is the 4th in the Dexter series. It was pretty good, and it was the better one in the series for me so far. The one point that felt strange was the whole Cuban expedition, due to the way it developed. The ending was cute enough, but the amount of setup for a null consequence part of the story seemed excessive.

Some Golden Harbor, by David Drake, was the previous book to my preview post, When the Tide Rises. I've read it quite a while ago, but didn't get around to posting here. It was pretty good, mostly due to the crazy, commando-like stunts of the captain. The hacker/assassin is quite interesting. Of course, the hacking is all off-scene - the one time they mentioned a method that I can recall, the vulnerability involved leaving a session logged - which seems a bit forced since it'd happen all the time given the importance of universe jumping...

Yet another military SF book - I really like them. In this case, it is quite deep into a series (courtesy of a Webscriptions package - it's nicely priced if you like a few of the books, and a great way to introduce readers to authors and series they don't know). The RCN universe seems nice, even when starting from the middle. It's a military space opera, which has a nicely contrived explanation to allow the author to put sails in the story - they are actually used to move the ships between bubble universes with different constants, thus getting around that pesky light speed limit. The whole theme reminds me of Honor Harrington, of course (two star alliances fighting each other, space battles with a very competent commander, etc). It was a nice, reasonably quick read, and I discovered I already had bought another of the books in the series (Some Golden Harbor), which I'm currently reading.

Bolo Brigade was another enjoyable military SF with a cool super vehicle. It does remind me of Knight Rider or Airwolf in that basic sense. In this case though, the vehicles are sentient, huge super-tanks, fighting alien dinosaurs that use MechWarrior-style exoskeletons. It does sound a lot of better in the actual book - put like this it sounds ridiculous. In the book, it plays reasonably well and was a fun and quick read, with lots of action.

I've just finished The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown. It was quite enjoyable, and with the usual cool symbolic explanations throw all around. As usual, a couple of silly technical misconceptions, but nothing new to Dan Brown books (a hacker surprised that a traceroute fails?!?!).

I've recently got my pre-order of Red Faction Guerrilla. The game looks wonderful, and the building demolition is awesome. Too bad it locks up constantly and has severe audio stuttering problems. I couldn't possibly recommend it as it is now. I'd give it a 2/10. I'm hoping there will be patches soon.

I just watched the new Star Trek movie, after a Trekkie friend mentioned how much she liked it. It was awesome! I liked pretty much everything about it, the new actors were great, the plot gimmick to create a new timeline where everything goes, the visuals... I particularly loved the new interfaces, it was wonderful to see them, after the silly 60s look from the original movie and the LCARS style of the later series. I'd love if it became a new TV series. I don't think it will though - it's much easier to get good returns on movies, AFAIK.

Looks awesome ! I understand that some Matrox cards had some support for this - but I seriously doubt they were capable of this kind of game performance at this resolution, and it's pretty hard to find good Matrox card at a reasonable price in Brazil.

QuantZ is an interesting take on match-3 - it is done on 3D on a cube, and the spheres are subject to physics, so that as you rotate the cube, they move around on their cube faces, to other cube faces or off the cube (just for an instant, they are attracted back). As usual, there is a launcher of other colored spheres, which you must try to match. Graphics and music are great. I wasn't crazy about the gameplay, but it's worth a try if you like match-3 games.

Nation Red is a 3D top-view, zombie killing fest. It is very similar to Crimsonland , which is clearly inspired by Robotron. The 3D graphics look awesome, but I have to say I still prefer Crimsonland. The movement doesn't feel as fluid, and I found the reduced field of view to be very, very annoying. The enemy variety of Crimsonland felt better.

Broken Angels, by Richard K. Morgan, was my latest read. It is, so to say, a sequel to Altered Carbon. As someone mentioned on my blog review of Altered Carbon , the style of the book is quite different, but it does take place in the same universe, and with the same main character, Kovacs. It wasn't a bad book, but it was nowhere as good as the first. The military hardware and the action was interesting, though. The extended exploration of the Martians theme was entertaining, but it feels like their part on the story wasn't as good as it could be.

As a software author, one way to expand your user base is getting your product and/or site translated into other languages. I have done that in the past by having users translate my language files, and also by getting my main program and help translated by a professional, as well as my web site. While hard data is hard to get - it's difficult to know if a German user would have bought my software if it was only available in english - I feel it was a great investment. Changes are small over time, so the translation I paid for years ago still helps sales now. However, getting it done was quite a bit of work, specially the help files, which are surprisingly brittle after exported out of my help authoring software of the time - Helpscribble. One interesting option is ICanLocalize, which has amazing tools to help. After reading about the release of a new Help & Manual importer tool, I got around to trying their tools to translate my web site to Spanish. I'm quite impressed. Whil...

Yesterday I finished Timeshift, for PC (as always). I got it at a discount at Steam - it looks like never got to be very popular. It's easy to see why - I think they terribly fumbled their presentation of the story, not to mention the weird way the story goes. The basic story is that you are using a Quantum Suit. It not only protects you, it also allows you to travel in time at the beginning of the game, and during the game, you can slow time, stop it, or travel slightly back (time rewind). And you are going to use it to fix the timeline, which was messed up by the guy with the other Quantum Suit who decided to use his advanced tech to rule the world in the past. The suit also has an AI that monitors your environment and gives you helpful hints when danger comes - a very nice plot device. It also chooses which of the functions will be the default, so that you know what you use to solve the time puzzles. That did make some puzzles look incredibly arbitrary, being clearly made so tha...

I've just finished Implementation Patterns, by Kent Beck. It covers how to create code that costs less, is easier to modify and clearer in many everyday situations. Of course, as a Delphi programmer not every suggestion seemed useful, but overall it was quite an interesting read.

Following my read of Cybermancy, I read MythOS, by Kelly McCullough. (anyone who knows the series might notice I jumped over the 3rd book - it was only available on Mobipocket format, which is much more restrictive than eReader) It continues the stories of Raven, except that this time all of the story passes on another universe, where the gods are from the Norse mythology. Again, a very enjoyable read.

I decided to read Darkly Dreaming Dexter - by Jeff Lindsay after a friend suggested it, since Dexter is one of my favorite TV series. The book was enjoyable, and certainly what happens to the brother on the ending is also an interesting option (although I enjoyed the irony and closing of the first season more). I will probably be reading the rest of the series, although I imagine that it must differ substantially from the TV series...

Cybermancy, by Kelly McCullough, was a very nice read. It's the sequel from Webmage, where Ravirn/Raven has to rescue his girlfriend's webgoblin from Hades, and solve the consequences of the rescue. Again, very nice expanded mythology references. I also enjoyed the discovery of the new powers as part of the name change to Raven.

I was surprised today to hear about a virus that targets Delphi. It's quite clever, really, since it gets huge distribution oportunities...

I've just finished reading Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan. It was very good - although in some points it does slow down a bit. The main item of tech that drives the story is the stack - a device that is implanted on every human after birth and that can contain their whole memories. Those memories can be transfered to other sleeves - bodies of criminals, clones, and synthetics. A similar tech was used in Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga, although an important difference is that on Altered Carbon, only the very rich can have their memories transmitted and remotely stored. Other have to count on their stack being retrievable. There are some VR tech and hacking - although I found the hacking terminology sounded silly. Plenty of fun violence with high-tech weapons, too. Overall, an excellent read. I'll certainly be getting the other books.

Cute. I've always been interested in Agents related AI topics. Unfortunately, giving their complexity most schemes never went anywhere - specially mobile agents, which started making less and less sense with the current availability and connection speeds. Maybe someday if we have a consumer level interplanetary web (instead of NASA's)

I've just finished WebMage, by Kelly McCullough , and it was a lot of fun. The book is based on a world where magic was updated from its early, less reliable beginnings to a new stage that involves computers, a magical web, and the like. There are many elements of traditional mythology woven in, such as the Fates, the Furies, Fairies' Rings, the Titans, etc. It was quite satisfying, and if I could, I'd be reading the sequels. However, eReader/Fictionwise started (presumably due to publisher pressure) to start restricting sales to Brazil a couple of months ago. Since then, I've been unable to buy something like 10 e-books - after I had selected and started the purchase process. Of course, anyone that was trying to buy an e-book is much less likely to want to buy the paper version, specially from aboard - which considerably adds to the price. Which ends up making the sole reasonable option to those users to use a P2P service. Truly genius work by those publishers and auth...

I've just finished Better to Beg Forgiveness... by Michael Z. Williamson. As the other books in the Freehold series, it was pretty good, and full of violent goodness. The second half - the crazy, against the odds, fight to move the president, reminded me quite a bit of David Weber's Prince Roger series. Prince Roger series was a lot better given its scope (and cooler weapons, tech, and big "recreating ancient weapons" parts), though. Williamson seems to be hugely against the press, to the point of being a bit annoying. All in all, a very nice book if you like military SF.

Now that is impressive - the guy dropped his iPhone on the pool while playing around around with the video recording and it kept working underwater... I wonder if it will survive long term, or get corroded...

I just finished Tumblebugs 2. It's a nice little casual game, of the "shoot-3-matching balls" genre. It was pretty good. The addition of a few extra special "balls" was ok, but what I enjoyed the most was the addition of several helpers. I felt it really added to the overall game "strategy". I did feel that it could benefit from a feel RPG elements, such as were added on Atlantis Sky Patrol and some of the Luxor titles - such as increasing special ball effects, helper powers, etc.

I just saw Eagle Eye on the local PPV. Very nice! (Spoiler Alert) Sure, a lot of the hacks of the evil computer are ridiculous. But that is pretty common on movies - personally I don't much care. It seems very likely that whoever designed the evil computer played Portal. At the very end, the resemblance was so obvious I kept expecting cake references... Some of the plot also reminded me of Daniel Suarez's Daemon - particularly how the various agents were coordinated.

Storm from the Shadows was pretty good - something that is common to most Honor Harrington novels and also most David Webber books I've read (some of his fantasy/alternate history stuff, I tried to start reading and then went on for another book). I have to confess that since it's been quite a while since the last novel, I was a bit lost at several points for the past story :-) There were also some long side discussions that kept me waiting anxiously for the rest of the action... The worst part, though, was the ending... The state of suspense, and then finding out how long it is going to take for the next book... Oh, well, I guess I have no choice but to wait. So far it's been well worth it.

Lately I've tried out a few SEO tools. My free favorites were: - Free Monitor for Google , which allows you to track your page rankings - PaRameter - from the same company - which very quickly looks up page rank for as many pages as you want. - Good Keywords has several tools for keyword look-up, PR/rank checks,etc.

Yesterday, a friend sent me Total Eclipse of the Heart: Literal Video Version . I don't think I ever laughed so hard. I was literally crying with laughter by the middle of the video. Of course, that was a great pick to make a literal video from, given how absurd it was... There are quite a few other literal videos out there, with a wide range of quality. Other I enjoyed were Head over Heels, White Wedding and Penny Lane.

Plants vs Zombies is quite silly - specially if you played a lot of the tower defense games, from which it clearly got inspiration. That said, it's still pretty cool. The variety of plants and zombie types is huge - and quite funny. The strategic choices of plants per level depending on the mode and related hazards is nice. And the many mini-games and puzzle modes give it a little more staying power. Garlic alone makes a replay fairly different: you can cheaply cut out the number of lanes using it. While it felt too slow and silly at the beginning, it really won me over. One final piece of advice - get Plants vs Zombies cheap at Steam . It's half the price of the official Popcap site.

My ability for procrastination is quite impressive. I finished Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware in December of 2008, but kept putting blogging about it since then. That's not as impressive as the book about avoiding procrastination I've started reading several years ago, though... I guess I should try reading it again. About Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware - it's pretty good. There are a number of suggestions on how to improve your learning abilities, your focus, problem solving, etc. All seems very well reasoned and well explained. I'll also try to post more. It's actually one of the ideas on the book, and over the past year I've had the urge to blog about dozens of little and large things, but kept putting them off.