Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
Was just pointed to an article at Wired about this:
If millions of Christians suddenly disappear from the face of the Earth as the opening act for Armageddon, Threat Level thinks most nonbelievers will be too busy freaking the hell out to check their e-mail. But if they do log in, now they can be treated to some post-Rapture needling from their missing friends and loved ones, courtesy of web startup YouveBeenLeftBehind.com.
For just $40 a year, believers can arrange for up to 62 people to get a final message exactly six days after the Rapture, that day when — according to Christian end times dogma — Christians will be swept up to heaven, while doubters are left behind to suffer seven years of Tribulation under a global government headed by the Antichrist
Wow. There are no words to describe my complete and utter disbelief (aaaahhhh, a double entendre — see what I did there?).
Tags: link, stupid, web
Posted in Misc, internet | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
I have a strange love/hate relationship with our Wii.
On one hand, I love it for the few really great titles that have been released since it was introduced – Phantom Hourglass, Mario Galaxy, Guitar Hero 3, and the very latest in the Wii pantheon of “most favorite” … by a long shot … the new Mario Kart. All of these games have miraculously perfected (for the most part) what can be done on the hardware available to it. All provide hours, weeks even, of fun that can be had. Mario Kart alone has gotten me to break through the barrier of getting Sara’s entire family playing one game all at once. That’s a feat I would have never, ever, suspected to be overcome. For that alone, I give the folks at Nintendo mega props. Kudos for getting the non-gamer to enjoy sitting in front of a TV as a family, playing your console.
Which leads to this question – what about the non-casual gamer? The gamer who bought the Wii hoping to milk literal *months* of time paying for and playing your console’s games? What about the gamer with the wireless 80211G router sitting in the corner of the room beckoning for the flood of packets that will connect to the thousands, nay – millions, of other Wii owners also connected to the internet? What if you’re one of those gamers who dashed to your local store to purchase Mario Kart with hopes that you’ll finally get a chance to race your friends in Waluigi Stadium and Delfino Square with seemless internet support?
Guess what pal? You got screwed. This is where the “hate” part comes in, not necessarily for the Wii in general, but for one particular aspect of it.
I’ve been playing this version of Mario Kart for almost a month to the day now, and while it’s a fun game to play at home with a friend or two, it’s crystal clear that Nintendo dropped the ball on its internet game-play. Not only for Mario Kart, but for all of the internet enabled games. Why? Let’s run it down.
After a bunch of google’ing (most of which was completely fruitless. What are you going to come up with when searching for “Wii Message board Mario Kart”? That’s right – a few hundred ACTUAL wii message boards!) and copious cursing, I found it. In the WFC menu at the very bottom, not only inconspicuous, but also sharing the same menu button as other option. Why? Wouldn’t they suspect their users will want the fastest and easiest way to get connected with their friends? At the very least they could have documented how to do so, no?

So there you have it – “Invite Wii Friends”. Tonight it was only the second item it will have to cycle around to. Other nights it was the third, because a tournament was being featured in that same button. The kicker with this bit? After I sent invitations to about 5 or 6 friends, it would not show up anymore. That’s just perfect.
If I were a true nit-picker (contrary to this post, I really am not) I could probably come up with a handful of other gripes, but I won’t. These four points above are the tip of the Kart iceberg, and are enough to only get me to come to my semi-neglected website to vent about how Nintendo screwed the pooch on what might be the one most important part of their Mario Kart franchise.

Disconnect? I really don’t want to, but I guess I have no choice.
I’d like to know what you think. Leave a comment at the bottom of this post’s page and let me know if I’m off base or not.
Tags: console, gaming, mario kart, nintendo
Posted in Misc, Whining | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
Over at Thredded I am still using Rails 1.2.3 (I’m a little gun-shy to upgrade to 2.0) and, of course, felt that slugged links were necessary for both search engine optimization and making things like assessing site analytics a little easier. It doesn’t even need justification as it’s a matter of fact and necessity for any and all social platforms – blogging, forums, etc. With RoR 1.2.3 the best way to get your links slugging it out was to incorporate a plugin like acts_as_sluggable. It works like a charm, really, and I’ve never had any case where I needed extra functionality.
… Until now. I’ve started incorporating some auto-updating magic to Thredded and needed to grab a lot of data back from an AJAX call (sorry Steve – XHR) in the form of JSON. All well and good so far. But, when new links needed to be built on the client side, I didn’t have my handy built-in Rails ActiveRecord overrides to spit out my new slugged-up link! What to do?!
I dug through the plugin source and found the function that built the url’s slug -
def make_slug(string)
string.to_s.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z0-9]+/, '-').gsub(/-+$/, '').gsub(/^-+$/, '')
end
… And thought the quickest solution was just to rewrite it as a simple JS function.
function slug(id, title)
{
title = title.toLowerCase().replace(/[^a-z0-9]+/g,'-').replace(/-+$/g,'').replace(/^-+$/g,'');
return(id+'-'+title);
}
Tags: javascript, rails, ruby, seo
Posted in Misc, Site Work, Web Development, Work | No Comments »