I figured any effort to get back to regular posting would only be helped by starting on today of all days…
XBMC have announced a new partership with Sony. It will include the assimilation of the XBMC team into Sony’s Home Theatre and Console division and the closing of the XBMC source.
Presumably a PS3 port will be forthcoming…
Since the switch to Amazon EC2 I cancelled hosting with my previous provider Site5. Now due to unfortunate timing I cancelled a day after being invoiced for (and paying) a months hosting. But in an unexpected move, in the email confirming my cancellation I also got a full refund for my last payment.
So if anyone needs web hosting, consider Site5.
I’ve just moved the blog over to Amazon EC2 and so far everything seems to be going well.
I’d been considering the move for a while and a new feature (well I’m not sure how new it is but I only just noticed it) is a new smaller instance type. The virtual servers Amazon offer used to come in three sizes, small medium and large starting at $0.10*. Pretty quickly they added some bigger sizes (going all the way up to $2.00 per hour for quadruple extra large) as well as some more specialized types like GPU clusters. But it still meant the minimum price per month for a server always on was about $74/month which is expensive for simple web hosting.
Now however, their new micro instances are available at a pretty cool $0.02/hour (about $15 a month). For the performance you’re likely to get it’s still probably not the most cost effective solution for plain web hosting, but for having complete access to a server with high availability (and the extra features hosting on Amazon’s infrastructure provides like being able to clone a whole server with one click) it’s pretty good.
One final note is to remember that these numbers are not the final costs you’ll have to pay. You still pay for storage and data transfer which in my case look like they’ll be about an extra 10% extra.
* Since then the price of the small instance has come down to $0.085/hour or about $63/month.
A version of Gravitas available to play right in your browser using Silverlight is now available.
I’ve had a few things recently I’ve thought of posting but didn’t quite have enough enthusiasm to actually do it. Now I’ve found something I do have enthusiasm about.
Minecraft is a clever indie game that has developed something of a cult following of late. It’s an odd sandbox game of building random stuff and surviving attacks by skeletons. Or something. To be honest I’m not really sure (except for the building) since I haven’t actually played it. The reason I bought it (and would like you to buy it) is largely unrelated to the game itself.
Apparently a group of self righteous players are unhappy with the progress the game has made recently and have issued an ultimatum that they will launch a DDoS attack at the games servers until there are signs that development is continuing at a speed more to their liking. The assumption is that with the game down the developer will have a lower income and no choice to give in to their demands.
A few blogs (and even the Escapist) have a more detailed account of the situation:
Living Worlds – Don’t Let Terrorists Win
Tradeskill Perspectives – Gamer Entitlement Going Too Far
Escapist – Minecraft Brought Down by DDoS Attack
There is a small part of me that is worried that this is a clever conspiracy to gain attention and sympathy, but since the game is only 10€ anyway I figured it was worth the risk.
A few days ago Facebook announced their new Open Graph Protocol. It’s basically a way for people to interact with pages on the internet (in theory pages representing real world items, but it will be hard to moderate) in basically the same way as they do with existing Facebook pages.
For a page to be eligible all you need to do is add a few meta tags to it specifying it’s name and type (film, book, actor, product, game etc.). To actually do anything useful, you then add a Facebook “like” button. Once some people have liked it, it appears in their Facebook news feed like any other item (with the data you added in the meta tags). One of the optional meta tags you can add specifies user IDs of Facebook users who can administrate the page. If you do, you can get access to the same sort of admin page you get with any traditional Facebook page.
Conveniently I just developed a use for this sort of thing so I added support to my blog. A few edits to the theme and cunning use of WordPress’s custom fields and now any page or post on my site can support Open Graph. Currently the only support is on the Gravitas page.
I received a Google Wave invite this morning. I’ll post more after I’ve had a play.
This also means I have invites available…
Google Wave went live yesterday but it still invite only. It seems the people with access are the people who previously had sandbox access (everyone who went to Google I/O and a few others), another 100,000 people who applied early on and select paying Google Apps users.
That number will grow slowly however as they also revealed that existing users will be able to invite others (similar to when GMail launched).
So if anyone has an invite… 😛
The biggest news in the EVE Online World recently (and in my opinion, some of the biggest news in gaming) is the announcement of DUST 514, a console FPS/RTS being developed by CCP and based in the EVE Universe.
On the surface DUST looks a lot like a slightly grittier Halo 3. Basically a futuristic first person shooter with a strong focus on vehicles. The big point comes from it’s interaction with the EVE Online universe. The combat in DUST will take place on the surface of planets in EVE. As a consequence the result of battles will effect EVE. How big this effect will be (and in exact nature is not yet known). What we do know is that it will tie in with the upcoming changes to sovereignty in the Dominion expansion to EVE.
A few people have responded with horror to this, worried that control of their systems will now be at the mercy of some crazy twelve year old console dude. Although it’s probably wise to have a little concern, DUST has been in development for two years and EVE Online is CCPs flagship product – I don’t think they began this endeavour without some serious thought.
Personally I think it’s an amazing idea, creating a universe that can entertain two rather disparate audiences (PC MMO players and console FPS players) at the same time and hopefully make them both more fun because of it.
More info should be forthcoming at EVE Fest, on October 1st.
Google released a new plugin for Internet Explorer today called Google Chrome Frame. It’s a simple but clever idea to bring the latest HTML 5 technologies to IE by simply embedding the Webkit based Google Chrome rendering engine.
It’s opt-in per site. You have to add a specific meta tag to your pages to make it take advantage of the plugin if it’s installed. There is also a Javascript way of detecting if the plugin is installed and inviting users to install it if isn’t.
They aren’t just doing this to help IE users out however. Google Wave makes use of HTML 5 stuff that doesn’t work in IE and the beta will go public on September 30th. And however good Google Wave may be, if IE users can’t use it, it won’t be a success…
Oliver Brown 