Cody Taylor

It seems that the guys at valve are finally going to allow community content to be played by the mainstream user. Along with a non beta version of the sdk that is said to release next week the l4d devs are also going to be overhauling the matchmaking system to support “Add-on Campaigns” which will allow you to select campaigns that you have installed.

Because of the recent announcement of Left 4 Dead 2, a lot of fans are wondering whether it’s worth the trouble creating any custom content because the it may not work with the new game. I found this quote from one of the writers for most of Valve’s games which addresses the issue.

Chet_Faliszek wrote:One thing we do know for sure is we want to make sure that everyone making a Left 4 Dead 1 map now or campaign now it’s still going to work in Left 4 Dead 2. You will be able to start Left 4 Dead 2 up, you will have the new creatures automatically, you’ll have the new weapons you will have all of that in the world, if you want to do some of the new director stuff or some of the new ways we control item placement you can go re-do it and add that, but you can also just leave it the exact same way and it will work.

When I was first reading about this on the Left 4 Dead Blog I started thinking of playing de_dust with hordes of zombies which was apparently done in the demo but never released. But then I remembered that I only have the game for XBOX 360. In the few news reports that I’ve read I haven’t seen any mention at all of XBOX changes. If you read that blog Yasser Malaika talks about how easy it will be to install the add-on by double clicking the VPK file. More than likely Microsoft will make me pay for every custom map that is freely available for the PC version.

Last week the Public Safety Minister, Peter Van Loan, introduced a bill that could force ISP’s to allow police access to all our network data without a warrant. If this were to pass then all the internet service providers would save all our private data and give it up anytime the cops want to have a look at it. This seems to be pretty common practice in many other countries but I was always proud to live in a place where your every action isn’t logged and processed.

Read More

http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/media/nr/2009/nr20090618-eng.aspx?rss=true

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4069/125/

With the unveiling of Microsofts new search engine Bing I was curious to see which site uses more bandwidth per load and query. These results are taken from the firefox plugin firebug’s Net feature. This plugin will tell you what files were downloaded and how big they were along with how long they took. It’s a great way to see how fast your site is going to be.

Google Main Page 20 KB
Search for Cody Taylor 38 KB
Search for asdf asdf 10 KB

The search for Cody Taylor was so large because of images displayed at the top of the pages.

Bing Main Page 109 KB
Search for Cody Taylor 22 KB

Over 5 times the data of Google. The search for Cody Taylor on Bing didn’t show any pictures but was still twice the size of a normal Google seearch. If we take into account the New Ajax onMouseOver event on Bing for each search result it becomes 27 KB still without any images. Remember those articles that went off about how much energy every google query uses? Looks like Bing more than triples that amount.

Of course both these sites are much more effecient when we take into account that after the first visit most of the large data is already cached in our browser. For this test I was clearing all my cache between each transaction.

Bing does have quite a few redeeming features and for a first impression it looks like it may be a serious contender but it still lacks the simplicity and speed of google.

Google Search and Google News performance slowed to a crawl, while an outage seemed to spread from Gmail to Google Maps and Google Reader. Comments about the failure were flying on Twitter, with “googlefail” quickly became one of the most searched terms on the popular micro-blogging site.

Ink toner cartridges are expensive, wasteful, and energy-intensive. That’s why Xerox’s new ColorQube 9200 printers are so innovative. Instead of using traditional cartridges, the printers use solid blocks of ink that melt when heated. Xerox claims that its ,500 machine–meant squarely for corporate customers

In this Photoshop web design tutorial, you’ll learn about creating dynamic and high-impact backgrounds that you can use on your own web layouts. We’ll go over color/gradient techniques, lighting effects, and using textures and patterns.

While it’d be great to have a spare 10k to drop on a nice lighting setup – you don’t really need it to get some pretty good results.