Lillesvin Networks

Politiken has an article about how the EU wants to develop an emulator — KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable — in order to preserve video game history. (Original article in danish; Google translation.) According to the project description it should be able to handle pretty much any data from any platform and while I’m all for preserving video game history, I think €4.02 million ($5.05 million; £3.55 million) is a bit of a hefty price to pay, considering that there’s plenty of Open Source software out there that does exactly that.

So will KEEP actually be written from scratch? Or will they simply bundle whatever Open Source software they find into one neat package? The project description doesn’t say anything about it. The first is stupid, because a lot of the Open Source emulators available are of high quality, are quite portable, have been developed for many years now and are still maintained. Some shiny new software is likely to be less stable and compatible, and the project description doesn’t give any promise of the software being maintained in the future. The latter is simply too expensive. €4.02 million for bundling some Open Source software?

Also, while preserving the games is all well and good, there’s more to preserving video game history than just preserving the software. Playing Super Mario Bros. on the Wii with the Wiimote is NOT the same as playing it with the good old, unhandy NES controller (even though the Wiimote is quite unhandy for that purpose).

Just overheard this. And I must admit, I adore such blankness. P1 and P2 is two people talking in front of a computer.

P1: It this also the internet?

P2: Yes.

P1: I always go down there (pointing to some other place of the screen). That’s also an internet.

Seams there is multiple internets all over the place. That’s very fortunate, eh.

During my recent contact with an English company, I’ve had to use the pound sign (£) a lot, which has uncovered a bug in Firefox 3 — at least I think it is… Using the danish keyboard layout the pound sign has to be made by pressing alt-4, but doing so in Firefox 3 will just result in switching to tab no. 4 if a such exists. If not, the shortcut will merely do nothing. Either way, no pound sign for me.

Effectively this means that all combinations from alt-1 – alt-9 are useless, which means that the following characters can’t be written in Firefox 3 on OS X with a danish keyboard layout: ¡, “, §, £, ∞, ™, ¶, [ and ]. I find it especially troublesome that the hard brackets doesn’t work, since they’re extensibly used in BBTags, as replacements for < and > when writing HTML examples in a place that doesn’t handle < and > well, it’s used as scope delimiter in Functional Grammar notation and in a ton of other places.

I’ve scoured the web for a solution (as well as about:config) but to no avail.

It’s around 9 months since it was discovered that MSN had implemented some pretty retarded keyword blocking rules on messages sent through MSN Messenger (aka. Live Messenger; not the client, the protocol). Now — according to Slashdot — they’ve added at least one more keyword to the list: “youtube.com”. I guess it’s only fair to speculate if this has something to do with the recent launch of Messenger TV in 20 countries.

allocinit has a more comprehensive list of blocked sub-strings and now you can add at least “youtube\.com” to it. Has anybody tested if links to Google Video gets through?

Now, this is just one reason that I don’t use MSN more than what is absolutely necessary…

UPDATE (May 12, 2008): I’ve tossed Adium into the trash can on my dock and am no longer using MSN. Try Google Talk instead, if you want to reach me via IM. It may not be open source or that far from MSN, but at least they don’t censor one’s messages and it’s based on Jabber (at least the protocol is open), so pretty much any Jabber client will work with it, hence everyone can join in without relying on a reverse engineered protocol. My Google Talk name is: lillesvin@gmail.com.

I just saw this on the DK-TUG mail list. I seam to be the tool I’ve been wanting for years but been to slack to find. “Slack” since i couldn’t imagine that such tool should not exist. It’s ‘iconv‘ [0] and works like this:

% iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1 old-utf8-file.txt > new-iso88591-file.txt

[0] http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/documentation/libiconv/iconv.1.html