twitter: Woot. New clutch! http://yfrog.com/4ruhp (updated 2 hours ago)
Making no apologies for one of the geekiest headlines ever.
If you know what it means, your pants just got a little bit moist - front or back, it's a personal choice.
The idea that the Battlestar Galactica universe could in fact be the background for a Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game is an idea so awesome that the greater percentage of Sci Fi fans have not even considered its possibility. However, it is an idea that stretches back through the mists of time - waaaay back to even 2007, even.
With Star Trek Online showing the way, and Stargate and Star Wars soon pushing the envelope, it looks like it's going to be even tougher than usual for the casual geek not only to see sunlight but to see reality. 
The Battlestar Galactica game is being published by Bigpoint, in which NBC Universal is co-owner of a majority stake. Bigpoint will be demonstrating Battlestar Galactica Online at the Game Developers Conference 2010, and teaser site will soon go up. The game will launch worldwide on Syfy.com for a 30 day period in the northern Autumn (September-ish). Co-developed by The Unity, the game will be able to be played directly in an Internet browser.
“Battlestar Galactica is a supremely gameable intellectual property, with compelling character classes, a fantastic array of ships and weaponry, multiple worlds, and a dramatic storyline,” said Bill Kispert, VP & GM, Digital Platforms, Universal Partnerships & Licensing. ” We are excited to work with Bigpoint – and our partners at Universal Cable Productions and Syfy – to bring an epic, accessible, and ‘always on’ BSG experience to fans of the franchise and online gamers alike.”
“Cooperation between Bigpoint and NBC Universal is a very important strategic step for us,” explains Heiko Hubertz, CEO and founder of Bigpoint. “Battlestar Galactica has a huge and passionate fan base. We are proud to be able to publish such an internationally famous title as one of our online games. For the first time ever, we’re relying completely on Unity in order to offer our users fantastic game graphics right in their browsers.”
The Unity platform engine makes it possible to produce real-time 3D applications such as MMO games with exceptionally high quality graphics without having to download a client.
Players will be able to choose to play as cylons or humans in a constant struggle to control the universe or just survive its perils. A blend of tactical space combat, exploration, and mission-based gameplay will provide a diverse experience. Missions will define the game’s overall storyline, enabling the player to delve into mysteries of the Battlestar universe.
The game is being developed by Artplant, a Norwegian development studio specialising in 3D MMO games.
"With a browser game, you just get started when you launch," said Nils-Holger Henning, chief communications officer of Bigpoint. "We can constantly add features and content for people who are playing."
You can get registered and updates at the teaser site, www.bgo.bigpoint.com/.
A number of people have asked me questions along the lines of "can I play my favorite Quake 3 mod with your package on Maemo?" The answer used to be that you could not, due to changes in the Client Game (cgame) module. I've now fixes these issues (mostly absolute vs. relative touchscreen events) so that an unmodified cgame will work correctly.
The short answer: yes, your favorite mod should now work.
I have done absolutely no testing other than checking that the vanilla, unmodified QVM's shipped on the Quake 3 CD work as expected. So your millage may vary.
There are still a couple of issues with UI interaction, but since this is a highly requested feature, and I have a flight to catch in some hours, I'm pushing ioquake3 (1558-maemo6) to extras-devel now.
Also, there are two cvar's you might like to tweak: sensitivity and accel_sensitivity.
Pro-tip: the key combination "Fn (Blue Arrow) + =" is Escape, and "Fn + Sym" is console up/down. Yes, eventually I will write some better release notes. :-)
Both day 1A and 1B at the World Poker Tour Bay 101 Shooting Star $10,000 no-limit hold’em main event have come to a close and the official size of the …
Mirk writes "Computer-science legend Edsger W. Dijkstra famously wrote: 'It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration'. The Reinvigorated Programmer argues that the world is full of excellent programmers who cut their teeth on BASIC, and suggests it could even be because they started out with BASIC."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I am currently visiting the Centre for Next Generation Localisation to work on a localisation guide for Amharic. It is part of the subproject for training in the African Network for Localisation. Hopefully we'll have our results on the ANLoc website soon.
I'm sure it's an enormous surprise to learn that I've spent a lot of time recently thinking about games and gaming, so I've found myself looking through old blog posts for research, inspiration, and to confirm or deny that strange "I think I've written about this idea before..." tingle that's recently set up camp in my brain.
So here's something I found today, which may or may not find portions of itself rewritten for my PAX East Keynote, but should zap some of you Gen X gamers squarely in the happy place...
There are all these video games that remind me of the happiness of my childhood: Journey, Riddle of the Sphinx, and Dodge-Em on Atari 2600. The robot gyroscope game, Excitebike, and Super Mario Brothers (the turtle trick!) on NES are just a few. Writing about those, I can feel the orange shag carpet at the house in Sunland, the blue berber carpet in La Crescenta, and I can see the little television in my friend's bedroom where we played RC Pro-Am until we had "NES Thumb."
Do you associate certain games with certain arcades or places?
Funny, just writing about those places I can almost conjure up sense-memories, like smells and other ephemeral things that I can't quite put into words but I can feel, but I can't quite make them out, like the boobie channel on cable in 1984 that was scrambled but would occasionally resove into view for two or three glorious seconds, which would be the subject of much discussion the next day at school.
Mmmmm... boobies.
Texas Linux Fest is pleased to announce the initial list of speakers and presentations for its inaugural event. Keynote speakers include Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier and Randal L. Schwartz, with additional presentations by Linux, free software, and open source experts such as Jon "maddog" Hall, Amber Graner, Bradley Kuhn, and Max Spevack. The event will take place on Saturday, April 10th, in Austin Texas. Registration is available online. The complete list of talks is available as well.
gollum123 writes "US regulators may dedicate spectrum to free wireless Internet service for some Americans to increase affordable broadband service nationwide, the Federal Communications Commission said on Tuesday. The FCC provided few details about how it would carry out such a plan and who would qualify, but will make a recommendation under the National Broadband Plan set for release next week. The agency will determine details later. One way of making broadband more affordable is to 'consider use of spectrum for a free or a very low-cost wireless broadband service,' the FCC said in a statement." Nobody has more than a couple of paragraphs on this story. None of the press coverage mentions the obvious likelihood that any such free network would be heavily filtered, censored, and monitored.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Just wanted to update everyone who showed interest in the new release of GNOME Developer Kit I announced yesterday. Based on some preliminary statistics I collected in the (less than) last 24 hours, it seems that the VMware image type got the most download, followed closely by the installable ISO format. I guess that was due to VirtualBox being able to use *.vmdk files and some people opting for the free virtualization tool.
Here are the preliminary results so far:
About GNOME 2.29.92
Due to the number of downloads and and comments I received, I felt that I should provide with some background on how to install/remove packages and update your system using the conary package management system. So here you go:
The package management system behind the GNOME Developer Kit is called conary and is considered by many as the next generation package management system when compared to some of the popular options out there. One of the reasons behind this claim is the fact that your entire system is actually completely maintained in a versioned state, and conary is always “aware” of what is installed on your system and what files and dependencies make up the entire “set”. This allows for some pretty nifty operations such as rolling back to a specific state of your system.
In order to check for new updates for your system, open a terminal and run the command sudo conary updateall. conary will then check for updates and prompt you to accept the update or not. Please keep in mind that the first time you run conary for the first time, you will experience a delay as your entire system gets analyzed in preparation for the changes that are to take place. All subsequent actions performed will be much faster, I promise. If after a while you don’t feel like waiting for the prompt, add –no-interactive to the update command to have your system updated automatically.
Now, let’s just say that you decided to install something new, such as Banshee. Easy, just run sudo conary update banshee (remember to add –no-interactive for no-hands updates) and voilá!
Want to know what was actually installed on your system? conary q banshee will tell you what version of banshee was installed. How about what files were installed? conary q –ls banshee will give you a list of all the files that were installed and conary q –lsl banshee will give you the long list with file permissions and modes.
Changed your mind and want to remove banshee from your system? sudo conary erase banshee will take care of that. Want to actually roll your system back to the state it was before you installed banshee instead? sudo conary rollback 1 will rollback your system exactly one transaction. Want to go further back? Just increase that number to represent how many transactions to roll back. Want to rollback but don’t remember what point in time you want to go? sudo conary rblist will display a list of all transactions and what was changed. Note that each transaction is preceded by the letter “r“, so if you want to rollback to the point r.15, then use sudo conary rollback r.15 (and don’t forget that “r” or you’ll rollback exactly 15 transactions instead).
How about searching for a package? If it is something that it is already installed on your system, then conary q [package name] will give you the information you want. If the package is not installed on your system yet, then conary rq [package name] is what you need, though since conary does not yet make use of metadata, you’ll need to know the exact name of what you’re looking for. Now, let’s say you want to find out what package provides the command /sbin/service? Use conary q –path /sbin/service to find out that initscripts:runtime=8.81.2-0.11-1 is responsible for providing it (use rq if you want to search the remote repository).
Well, I think this is enough to get you going. You’ll probably want to install Flash and media codecs to enjoy browsing some sites and listening to your media, so let’s apply what we’ve learned so far and run: sudo conary update flashplayer group-codecs
If you’ve stayed with me until now, you may want to read up on what else conary can do or even consider packaging for GNOME Developer Kit. Your help will be greatly appreciated!
Kinetically powered cell phones have been relegated to futuristic concepts..or have they? Nokia files a patent that could lead to the first real piezoelectric mobile phone.
Though the iPad has drawn some harsh reviews, it's hardly the first Apple product to get trashed (at first). A look back at 25 years of "flops"
Cisco Systems, has announced the launch of a super-fast and effeciency-focused router technology which will be at the heart of "the next generation of the Internet".
Imagine you tried to use the slow query log to debug a performance problem. Does the current format have enough details?
# Time: 100309 18:48:23 # User@Host: root[root] @ localhost [] # Query_time: 0 Lock_time: 0 Rows_sent: 1 Rows_examined: 1I have added Thread_id, Errno, Start and End. Thread_id can be used to find similar data from SHOW PROCESSLIST and the binlog. Errno is useful in many cases. Start and End are there for convenience. Can you suggest anything else that would be easy to add? Note that Rows_sent and Rows_examined are always zero for insert, update and delete statements. Feature request 49756 is open to change that. Maybe that is easy to fix.
# Query_time: 0 Lock_time: 0 Rows_sent: 1 Rows_examined: 1\
Thread_id: 3 Errno: 0 Start: 18:48:23 End: 18:48:23
In the GNOME beer event, I had a nice chat with ebassi about the problems around our build configuration system and how things like CMake, SCons and Waf do not get the full picture and do not cover some of the really strange corncercases that autotools supports and therefore, coming up with a solution would be a 1 year work with a team of really experienced engineers.
As stubborn as I am, I decided to prove him wrong so I give you BuilDj:
My main problem with our current Autotools situation are these:
We need a human+machine friendly project description format, that it's pleasant to the eye when you read it, that it's intuitive enough to let you understand what's going on even if you never saw it before.
A format that gets out of your way!
It should support all of the common tasks a GNOME maintainer does (in-line .pc and .desktop file definition, mkenums, gobject introspection support, cross-compilation support, pkg-config oriented, xdg mimetype registration/definition, integration with intltool), but it should suppor them in a meaningful and unobtrusive way.
It should not be a programming language, but support embedable programming extensions with a well documented API, so that IDEs can integrate it.
A JSON description format called BuilDj that is build-system agnostic (although its reference implementation is done with Waf)
{
"project":
{
"name": "BuilDj Test",
"version": "0.0.1",
"url": "http://www.codethink.co.uk"
},
"requires":
{
"gtk+-2.0":
{
"type": "package",
"version": "2.14",
"mandatory": "True"
}
},
"targets":
{
"my_shared_lib":
{
"type": "sharedlib",
"tool": "cc",
"input": ["lib.c"],
"version": "1.2.3"
},
"my_gtk_program":
{
"type": "program",
"tool": "cc",
"input": ["gtk_program.c"],
"uses": ["my_shared_lib"],
"packages": ["gtk+-2.0"]
},
"my_vala_program":
{
"type": "program",
"tool": "vala",
"input": ["vala_program.vala"],
"packages": ["gtk+-2.0"]
}
}
I don't even need to explain what that means right? By the way, this stuff already works, check the git repository.
Currently it is implemented as a waf wscript that parses the project.js json file, I'm not really interested in entering the build system wars but focuing on having a reference implementation of the format.
I choosed waf because it was the only one that offered most of the features I want as an approachable API and it only adds python as a dependency.
Implementations of the format in other systems are more than welcome, but current development will stick to waf in the foreseeable future.
I'm planning to propose and mentor this work as a Summer of Code project so that we can implement the missing basic features and support for a few GNOME apps.
There's a lot of work to do, support for C++, library and function checking, system type sizes, full cross compilation support. We already have some mockups and plans for those, and the waf maintainer has shown himself quite happy to accept patches upstream for the general purpose tools and that make things easier.
Despite the missing features, it surprisingly itches some of my own scratches already.
P.S. Anjuta and MonoDevelop guys, if you're listening, I'd love to get your feedback!
This blog entry represents the views of me, myself and I, and does not represent the views of my employer (Canonical) or System 76. While I have decided to write a review of this specific machine, there are many vendors out there who ship Ubuntu on their machines and this review does not favor System76 over these other vendors. Heck, I am happy to review their machines too if they want. 
Recently I got one of these new System 76 ultra-thin laptops, the Lemur:
System76 are well known in the Open Source community for shipping Ubuntu on their machines, being active community members and for helping LoCo teams with machines too. I have never owned a System76 box so I thought this was a good opportunity to give it a ride and share some feedback.
So first, the specs:
The machine I got has an Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 1.3 GHz 800 MHz FSB 3 MB L2 (10 Watt), 4GB RAM (DDR3 1066 MHz 1 DIMM) and a 80 GB Intel X25-M Solid State Drive.
Now, in the interests of full disclosure: I don’t really do reviews, so this is going to be a quick run through the details, not a 150-picture unboxing and War And Peace epic of every minor detail of the machine. I just wanted to get my experience down as quickly as possible so I could share my feedback with others.
OK, let’s zip through the summary:
The machine is a really sleek looking bit of kit. The first thing that struck me is how well designed it feels: it doesn’t feel like a randomly thrown together collection of components. It is thin and incredibly light, and has a very Apple-ish feel to it. It passed what I am calling the Lost Test: that is, when laid in bed at night watching Lost on Hulu with said laptop rested on your chest (for that IMAX effect), how many episodes can you get though before you feel like your heart is about to overheat and stop working. It’s lightness and lack of heat helped it pass with flying colors.
The screen looks great, doesn’t seem to smudge easily and is nice and bright. I like the fact it is a widescreen, something I miss with my current Thinkpad.
The keyboard is pretty much ok: it ain’t no Thinkpad keyboard, but of all the laptops I have owned and that are buried in my laptop graveyard, the Lemur’s keyboard feels better than most. The keys are wide enough and I love the fact that there is no Windows key, but instead an Ubuntu key. I want to see more of that, yes I do.
The trackpad is long and feels pretty good, and the buttons don’t look like buttons but instead areas on the trackpad near the bottom where you can push down: this makes it look really sleek. Unfortunately at first the buttons are a little hard to press, but I have noticed that they are getting easier, so I think they just need breaking in a little.
With the current configuration of processor and RAM, this thing is shit off a shovel fast. It zips along like no-ones business, and Ubuntu is up and running in a matter of seconds. While I didn’t test any hardcore 3D games on there, it runs Compiz great with the extra effects switched on.
Sounds works great, the speakers sound surprisingly good and the built-in webcam works well too. Finally, the battery life seems fine in terms of life, but not outstanding. Then again, I am used to my extra-long-life Thinkpad batteries.
My only real gripe believe it or not is the packaging the machine comes in: it visually looks cheap with a large generic “notebook” logo and doesn’t reflect the swishness of the machine encased inside it. I spoke to Carl Richell, founder of System76 about this and he has acknowledged it is an issue and they are keen to fix it: he said they really want every essence of the System76 experience to feel sleek. Good man.
It is just incredible driving back from picking up a computer from the UPS warehouse and knowing that it already has Ubuntu pre-installed. I have never bought a pre-installed Ubuntu computer before, so I was curious to see how it looked. I got it home, switched it on and it threw up the installer’s configuration settings: I entered my details and the system was ready to roll. I was left with pretty much a default installation of Ubuntu: there is not the horrible bundled collection of software you don’t want and ugly vendor wallpaper that you find if you buy a typical Windows pre-loaded machine. Good work System76 on shipping what I consider a great representation of Ubuntu.
Other than that, nothing much to say: everything just works as you would expect.
Being part of the Ubuntu development team, I was keen to get Lucid on there. I used Update Manager to update to Lucid and installation was smooth. Once again everything works: any bugs that I have found have not been specific to this machine, but replicated on my other Lucid machine. What is really noticeable is boot speed on the SSD: it is bonkers fast.
In conclusion, I think the Lemur is a beautiful machine, and combined with what I consider a beautiful Operating System, particularly with the new fit and finish of Lucid. When running the Lemur it really feels like great design in hardware and software meeting well. I would happily recommend this machine to others.
eldavojohn writes "A new report from Games Industry indicates that MMO gamers in the United States paid $3.8 billion to play last year, with an analysis of five European countries bringing the total close to $4.5 billion USD. In America, the report estimated that payments for boxed content and client downloads amounted to a measly $400 million, while the subscriptions came to $2.38 billion. Hopefully that will fund some developer budgets for bigger and better MMOs yet to come. The study also found that roughly a quarter of the US population plays some form of MMO. Surely MMOs are shaping up to be a juicy industry, and a market that can satisfy people of all walks of life."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hello, Geeks. Look at your phone. Now back to mine. Now back at your phone. Now back to mine. Sadly, yours isnt from Apple, but if you stopped buying those girly phones from Sprint and Tmobile and...
The first rule of the iPhone developer program is: You do not talk about the iPhone developer program...
In the GNOME beer event, I had a nice chat with ebassi about the problems around our build configuration system and how things like CMake, SCons and Waf do not get the full picture and do not cover some of the really strange corncercases that autotools supports and therefore, coming up with a solution would be a 1 year work with a team of really experienced engineers.
As stubborn as I am, I decided to prove him wrong so I give you BuilDj:
My main problem with our current Autotools situation are these:
We need a human+machine friendly project description format, that it's pleasant to the eye when you read it, that it's intuitive enough to let you understand what's going on even if you never saw it before.
A format that gets out of your way!
It should support all of the common tasks a GNOME maintainer does (in-line .pc and .desktop file definition, mkenums, gobject introspection support, cross-compilation support, pkg-config oriented, xdg mimetype registration/definition, integration with intltool), but it should suppor them in a meaningful and unobtrusive way.
It should not be a programming language, but support embedable programming extensions with a well documented API, so that IDEs can integrate it.
A JSON description format called BuilDj that is build-system agnostic (although its reference implementation is done with Waf)
{
"project":
{
"name": "BuilDj Test",
"version": "0.0.1",
"url": "http://www.codethink.co.uk"
},
"requires":
{
"gtk+-2.0":
{
"type": "package",
"version": "2.14",
"mandatory": "True"
}
},
"targets":
{
"my_shared_lib":
{
"type": "sharedlib",
"tool": "cc",
"input": ["lib.c"],
"version": "1.2.3"
},
"my_gtk_program":
{
"type": "program",
"tool": "cc",
"input": ["gtk_program.c"],
"uses": ["my_shared_lib"],
"packages": ["gtk+-2.0"]
},
"my_vala_program":
{
"type": "program",
"tool": "vala",
"input": ["vala_program.vala"],
"packages": ["gtk+-2.0"]
}
}
I don't even need to explain what that means right? By the way, this stuff already works, check the git repository.
Currently it is implemented as a waf wscript that parses the project.js json file, I'm not really interested in entering the build system wars but focuing on having a reference implementation of the format.
I choosed waf because it was the only one that offered most of the features I want as an approachable API and it only adds python as a dependency.
Implementations of the format in other systems are more than welcome, but current development will stick to waf in the foreseeable future.
I'm planning to propose and mentor this work as a Summer of Code project so that we can implement the missing basic features and support for a few GNOME apps.
There's a lot of work to do, support for C++, library and function checking, system type sizes, full cross compilation support. We already have some mockups and plans for those, and the waf maintainer has shown himself quite happy to accept patches upstream for the general purpose tools and that make things easier.
Despite the missing features, it surprisingly itches some of my own scratches already.
P.S. Anjuta and MonoDevelop guys, if you're listening, I'd love to get your feedback!