I recently made my first purchase from Direct2Drive, IGNs digital game distribution system. So far it’s been a bad first use experience. A couple of days before COD: Black Ops came out I was able to download a “preload” file, a file that wouldn’t install until I got my activation code which was due to be released at 7 am on release day. I got up around 9:30 am. I went to their website to get my activation code. Once I had it I tried installing Black Ops by clicking the “Install” button in Comrade (their download manager/instant messenger). Everything was going fine until it prompted me for disc 2.

Being a digital download there is no “disc 2″. I pressed the “OK” button in the hope that it would realize the rest of the install files were there and continue installing. Unfortunately I just received another prompt to insert disc 2.

After finally canceling the install in defeat, I noticed that Steam reported that 5 Gb had been “downloaded”. The installer I had downloaded was over a 7 Gb file. Luckily it seems that it aws partially installed and Steam is downloading the rest of the game, we’ll see if the install is corrupt or not in a few hours when it finishes. I was hoping on playing first thing this morning but now I must wait. Not a good first use experience. I’m regretting not just directly buying it from Steam, the $8.99 discount was not worth this kind of hassle.

A while back Google released a JavaScript API for YouTube which allows you to build your own custom players for YouTube content. It lets you do some neat things, such as completely changing the look of the YouTube player, including making a completely “chromeless” player.

I recently (finally) signed up for a YouTube account for use with a future project. I know it makes me a member of a rare breed, but I actually read the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me that use of the API conflicts with section 4-F of the TOS:

If you use the YouTube Embeddable Player on your website, you must include a prominent link back to the YouTube website on the pages containing the Embeddable Player and you may not modify, build upon, or block any portion of the Embeddable Player in any way.

Maybe it is time to update that part of the TOS?

Until today I had never heard of the Conficker worm. Suddenly today there seems to be a lot of media hysteria about it because tomorrow it is apparently going to cause the world to come to an end. Or at least that’s what the local news would have you think. Just like Y2K, and the other big virus scares we’ve had over the years this will not cause the catastrophe everyone seems to be predicting. Like any other virus it is easily avoidable by letting Windows auto-update itself and having an anti-virus and keeping it up to date. F-Secure makes it clear in their Conficker Q & A that their is nothing uniquely magical about the April 1st date. Conficker could do bad things to your computer before and after as well as on April 1st.

I’m of course not saying that Conficker is harmless, if your computer is infected with it, it could very well do bad things to your computer and your data. It is however being blown out of proportion. If you would like to know more about Conficker, how it works and what it does (short answer: “we don’t know yet”) F-Secure has also posted a couple of videos about it on YouTube: Case Conficker - Part 1
Case Conficker - Part 2

From the dawn of dynamic web pages people have been devising ways to feed different content to different browsers. Instead of coding to the standards and using progressive enhancement, they would create different versions of pages that catered to specific browsers, different versions of those browsers and the respective bells, whistles and bugs of each. Having multiple versions of everything inevitably leads to a maintenance nightmare. Even worse some sites will block visitors who do not use a browser the site doesn’t recognize, even though it may be perfectly capable of viewing the site. Most sniffing scripts are also notoriously in accurate and often detect the wrong browser.

For these reasons I’ve always been against using browser sniffing. Some sites still haven’t learned their lesson. Now with the advent of Opera 10 we are seeing another problem with browser sniffing, some scripts assume that a browser’s version number can only be one digit and are detecting Opera 10 as Opera 1.0!

Apparently a new spammer has found my blog and decided to hit it hard. It’s not visible on the blog since I have Wordpress set to hide comments until I approve them, but I had more than 700 comment spam messages in my queue. For now I am going to try to mitigate the spam by disabling commenting by non-registered users on my blog. This might change in the future after I get this mess cleaned up, but seeing as I have few readers and even fewer commenters I don’t think this new restriction will bother anyone (aside from the spammers).

I had briefly looked at Yahoo’s third version of the YUI library back when they announced Preview Release 1, but didn’t spend too much time on it since it’s still a bit in the future. After watching Eric Miraglia and Matt Sweeney’s presentation “YUI 3: A Look Ahead”, I’m quite excited about some of the things the YUI team is doing with the new version of YUI and can’t wait to play around with the final release next year.

In the past I’ve written about some of PETA’s outragous and offensive publicity stunts. Their at it again, now PETA wants Ben & Jerry to use human breast milk to make their ice cream. Why anyone takes PETA seriously is beyond me.

Last Saturday a friend had an extra ticket to see Nine Inch Nails and invited me along. It was at Key Arena in Seattle, my first big arena show, I usually stick to seeing bands in small clubs. It was the first “official” stop on the Lights in the Sky tour, and despite a couple of technical problems, Mr. Reznor and his band put on a great show. I usually wouldn’t pay $35+ for a concert, but if any concert is worth it, this one was. NIN played many old favorites including Closer, Head like a hole, some selected songs from the “With Teeth” album, a few from “Ghosts I-IV” and plenty of songs from their newest album, “The Slip” (the tour name “Lights in the Sky” comes from the title of track 7 on The Slip).

Along with the great music, there was a wonderful visual show too. Along with the bright flashing and colored lights you’d expect from any concert, there were other effects including 3 walls made of LEDs which formed a 3 layer TV screen surrounding the various members of the band. Lots of neat things were done with that. Along with providing vocals, the multi-talented Mr. Reznor played guitar, keyboards, tambourine and did some amazing work on a xylophone at various points throughout the show.

If you haven’t already, you can download The Slip completely free from NIN’s website!

“It is just wonderful to be back in Oregon and over the last 15 months we’ve traveled uh to every corner of the United States, uh I’ve now been in 57 states, I think, one left to go. One left to go, uh Alaska and Hawaii I was not allowed to go even though I really wanted to visit but my staff would not uh justify it.”

May 9, 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, speaking in Beaverton, Oregon.

If you are reading this on April 9th, you might notice that the site looks a little plain today. That is because I am participating in the third annual CSS Naked Day.

My newest website (which I haven’t mentioned here until now), Countdown To Anything is also participating.