If WWII was an MMORPG

By akie

This is brilliant.

*Hitler[AoE] has joined the game.*
*Eisenhower has joined the game.*
*paTTon has joined the game.*
*Churchill has joined the game.*
*benny-tow has joined the game.*
*T0J0 has joined the game.*
*Roosevelt has joined the game.*
*Stalin has joined the game.*
*deGaulle has joined the game.*
Roosevelt: hey sup
T0J0: y0
Stalin: hi
Churchill: hi
Hitler[AoE]: cool, i start with panzer tanks!
paTTon: lol more like panzy tanks
T0J0: lol
Roosevelt: o this fockin sucks i got a depression!
benny-tow: haha america sux
Stalin: hey hitler you dont fight me i dont fight u, cool?
Hitler[AoE]: sure whatever
Stalin: cool

… more

What could have been done with the money spent on the Iraq war?

By akie

I found this interesting piece on what else could have been done with the money spent on the Iraq war:

 ”Charlie Stross is hosting an open conversation on other things we could have bought with the money wasted in Iraq: for example, we could have sent a colony of over 500 astronauts to Mars, provided modern nuclear power to the USA and shut down its coal plants, built modern cities for 600,000,000 Chinese people to live in, and so on.” 

Link on Boing Boing

Spectacular time-lapse video

By akie

Chad Pugh has taken a screenshot every 5 seconds, for 40 hours straight, while he was working on a project in Illustrator. The result is spectacular.

Link to hi-res version.

“I will derive”

By akie

Oh boy, a nerd adaptation of Gloria Gaynor’s classic “I will survive”! Hilarious.

Link to YouTube.

Great site for developers

By akie

WebAppers is a great site for web application developers - like me. It highlights great open source web application projects, like the AtMail project I blogged about earlier.

New & flashy open source webmail

By akie

I really like this new & open source webmail project called AtMail:

10 crazy HOW TO books

By akie

I like this collection of strange HOW TO books

How to hack a password

By akie

How to crack a password? Bruce Scheier, of Wired Magazine, has some inside info on how to do it.

“According to Eric Thompson of AccessData, a typical password consists of a root plus an appendage. A root isn’t necessarily a dictionary word, but it’s something pronounceable. An appendage is either a suffix (90 percent of the time) or a prefix (10 percent of the time).

So the first attack PRTK performs is to test a dictionary of about 1,000 common passwords, things like “letmein,” “password1,” “123456″ and so on. Then it tests them each with about 100 common suffix appendages: “1,” “4u,” “69,” “abc,” “!” and so on. Believe it or not, it recovers about 24 percent of all passwords with these 100,000 combinations.“

But wait, there’s more.

Guinness book of Computer Games

By akie

You can view the Guinness book of Records - Gamer’s Edition online, for free.

Thunderstorm in Chile

By akie

I really like this picture of a thunderstorm near the volcano eruption in Chile. The pictures were taken by Carlos Gutierrez, and there’s a page over on Flickr that has a whole set his pictures.

“How I Built a Working Poker Bot”

By akie

Someone has written a working poker bot, and has decided to tell how to build one yourself. Below is a screenshot of what must be the strategy editor.

Apparently he’s using a rule based expert system, which is a logical choice (imho) given the problem at hand. In the comments I found a link about breaking the random number generator in online poker, which makes the outcome of any poker hand completely predictable. Fascinating stuff.

13 tips for building a successful online product

By akie

“Much of the online literature about starting up is focused on how to create some fantastic product which will gather millions of visitors and make you a billionaire, and the “new wave”, so to speak, proposes that rather than taking a 1 in 10’000 bet that you can make billions, it is better to take a 1 in 10 bet that you can make millions.

Since I have started two such businesses already, here are thirteen tips from my own experience.”

Link - very worth a read

15 great examples of web typography

By akie

Take a look at this beautiful text-only website.

More examples here.

Terrible dialog

By akie

This is what happens when you let a developer design your user interface:

Link

This one is even worse:

Link

Unicode

By akie

So true You can buy it on a t-shirt via CafePress.