tail -f carlo.log

Revelation, Twitter edition

Twittering mobile is like bringing your imaginary friends to a party.

escaloop v1.1 - Speedier, Facebookier, Diggier.

I’ve spent the last few hours bug testing, then deploying, then yelling at, then hotfixing, then re-deploying a new version of both escaloop site and badge. I didn’t include everything I was planning on initially, and instead decided to go for “release early, release often”.

A few highlights:

• Added some juice and stability — hopefully everything runs a bit faster more solid now.
• New feature: Source list, add a pretty list of all feeds in a badge to the end of the badge. Check the demo badge for an example and the badge builder for the new config option.
• Badge: added explicit support for Facebook, Digg, Newsvine and Vimeo feeds.
• Badge: Changes in served badge JS and CSS; if you use local hacks, take a closer look at your escaloop-served “originals”.
• Site: Restructured the site a bit.
• Site: Added exhaustive workflow diagram to frontpage.

• Site: Fix: Preview pages not cached anymore.

I hope you’ll like it. If you find bugs or have questions, let me know on the message boards, please! I’m all ears.

Deploying new version coming; ran into problems

Just a quick heads-up: I am currently working on deploying the new version of escaloop, and ran into problems while doing so. So, for the next minutes (or few hours, God forbid), your badges may appear a bit wonky.

Not to worry, I am on it!

Mini Review: Mass Effect, Xbox 360

Okay, yes, I’m late to the review party. In my defense, it has something to do with this and the fact that I wanted to finish Mass Effect twice before rendering my judgement.

So, my first playthrough on normal difficulty was very thorough. I’ve picked a male (Infiltrator class), took the “good guy” approach (“We have to save the galaxy! — Wait, what’s that, old lady? Your kitten is trapped in this death maze? We’ll help!”), also did pretty much every sidequest I could find, landed on every rock available, and ended up spending ~43 34 hours or so. Hey, my char even had freaky, slightly awkward (in the build-up) alien sex with that endlessly blabbering blueberry. Dynomite.

The second time around I rolled a female (Soldier class) and played the whole game on hardcore difficulty in a “I have a job to do, get out of my way” kind of way. Short-tempered, gun-in-your-face attitude, not afraid to leave a crater. In short, for the most part I tried to play it like time actually mattered. This time I clocked in around 20 14 hours. And this time, my leading lady ended up ripping the clothes off one of her male subordinates. Oh, and she had freaky, surprising lesbian alien sex with some random NPC, without meaning to.

Shiny.

The game’s not without flaws, tho. The sidequests on the planets are a wee bit repetitive. There are some rather frequent framerate drops and “Halo 2”-style texture pop-in issues after the loading screens. Background noises were sometimes awfully quiet, and it was really, really hard to make them out, which made some surroundings appear a bit sterile in the aural department. The squad NPC pathfinding took a short break from time to time, making me run back to show one of my compadres how to walk around the car. Oh, and Bioware? My wife asks whether for ME2 you could add some more samples to enemy NPCs, I think if she has to hear “I will destroy you!” or “Go! Go! Go!” one more time, she’ll be going postal.

But ultimately, in my book, it’s really a great game. Hey, it’s mostly “Knights of the Old Republic”, albeit with a lot of changes! It might not perfect, but it comes close. The player char’s gender does make a difference every now and then. I liked the majority of the voice acting, the stories and side-quests were mostly laid out well, and the presentation was usually top notch. Especially the last 1-2 hours were mighty fine. Cinematical, even. Wonderful, wonderful build up of tension.

All in all I’ve spent around 60-70 50-60 hours on Mass Effect, and enjoyed those. I recommend it.

Lieber Saturn Theresienwiese, #2

Ich war gestern beim Saturn, Plasma-TVs anschauen.

Nach einigem Rumrennen finde ich zwei Panasonic-Geräte, die direkt nebeneinander stehen. Beide sind 37”, sind aber in der Form voneinander abweichend, haben recht unterschiedliche Modellnummern und differieren im Preis um die 400€.

Ein männliches Fachverkäufer-Standin kommt auf mich zu. “Kann ich Ihnen behilflich sein?”

“Ja, die beiden TVs… Was sind da die Unterschiede?”

“Puh… Ja… Der eine ist silbern, der andere hat dieses schwarzes Glanzlack-Finish.”

Ich hab mich dann etwas irritiert bedankt und bin gegangen. Ich denke, beim nächsten Mal druck ich einfach die Bilder im Internet aus und lass mich fachkundiger von jemandem beraten, mit dem ich zufällig an der Fußgängerampel auf Grün warte.