Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Fedcon 2011 – Day 3

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Saturday 30.04.2011

The “main” day of the convention, but did not do anything worth mentioning until the Guinnes world record in number of people in star trek uniforms from Las Vegas was broken. Previous record was 550 people, new one is almost 700.
Star trek uniforms fedcon 2011

 

After that I went to the Nicole de Boer panel, followed by the Seaon Maher panel, both which where fun. At 16:00 I missed the Paul McGillion & Kate Hewlett panel, to get my picture taken with Scott Bakula, and at 17:30 I took a picture with Marina Sirtis.

Sean maher

And like ALL the times when I got my picture taken, the weirdo German photographer kept yelling out ZZ Top :)
At 17:30 There was a dinner at the Maritim with Gameforge (the developers of Startrek Infinite space), which incidentally was the first time on the convetion where I ate something that resembeled normal food. This was very fun as I got ot talk to some of the developers and the guys at Gameforge, but unfortunately this meant I missed the photoshoot with Sean Maher :(
But did get to take lots of pictures of people in costumes, I’ll upload many more of them to picasa when I get them organized

 

The dinner finished at 20:00, just in time for the Nicole de Boer photoshoot, which was 20 minutes delayed. After that I hit the bar, drank some Jägermeister and got back to catch the end of the Scott Bakula Panel.. At the very end he promoted Garrett Wang to Lt. :D

Got to talk to lots of nice people today, and had lots of fun =)

I think this guy might have been selling droids with bad motivators:

Jawa

Fedcon 2011 – Day 2

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Fridaaay fridaaaay… aw crap >:(  29.04.2011

Up early, eating my sliced German bread with nutella and coke (maintaining a healthy diet while at a convention is always my top priority).

I arrived at the convention in time for the photoshoot with Kate Hewlet at 10:00, and she was really nice to everyone who had their picture taken.

I listened to the Robert Duncan McNeill panel, which was very funny and included alot of humor between Robert and Garret Wang.

For some reason I missed the Scott Bakula fotosession at noon, and the 13:30 photoshoot with garret wang was cancelled, as was the 14:30 photoshoot with Paul Watson. From 12 to 18 there was mainly the autograph sessions, but I did not bother getting any this year.

I did however meet some nice people at the Sea Shepherd booth, and got to have my picture taken with captain Watson, after all he doesn’t have that many Norwegian fans. I also took a weirdly posed picture with Paul McGillion which I’m curious how will turn out, I guess the Indiana Jones hat will be the recurring themes from this years Fedcon pictures of me.

I walked around alot, and ran into Zach again, and ended up being his photographer for a little while.

At the infinite space both, I got to play another mission, where you defend a space station against 3 waves of klingon attacks. I also got to study the game on a HD tv and the graphics again managed to amaze me, considering it’s a browser game (I might even have to stop using the term “browser game” as an insult).

The controls also seemed better today, and I got to see a bit of the lobby, and menus (crew, items, ships, etc..) and I’m now looking even more forward until the game is released (sometime this summer a very loose rumor said, but I kinda doubt it.. I’d guess no earlier than the last quarter for 2011).

For dinner I had nelsquick chocolate milk and cold pancakes from the airport grocery store :) a substantial nutritional improvement from last nights dinner, which shall remain nameless. I actually considered heating up vegetarian bratwursts with the hair dryer in my hotel room, but ultimately decided against it :)

After all that walking around it was great to sit down in the main convention hall at 18:00 to take in the interviews. Richard Dean Anderson was a lot more fun than I was expecting (never seen him live or doing panels before), and lots of people in Stargate uniforms got on stage and gave him a gift or award or something like that

Paul McGillion followed and was also great. Same goes for Scott Bakula who was really funny, and did a surprising amount of singing. This is only my second convention so haven’t seen Marina Sirtis before (think she’s been to Fedcon like 6-7 times), she was very funny and told all sorts of interesting stories, it’s funny how she’s the complete opposite of Troi :)

Fedcon 2011 – Day 1

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Thursday 28.04.2011

First day of the convention, up “early” for a shower and breakfast. Got to the convention hotel around 11. but kept walking between several places to get those sponsor tickets I won from GameForge (the  makers of Star Trek Infinite Space).

Gameforge infinite space

Having used 1 hour to finally get my badge (and being sent back and forth between about 10 of the Fedcon crew), I went to the Infinite Space booth, and got to test a development build of the game. I liked the game, the graphics is very nice, the controls were OK but some features were obviously missing. The mission you played in that particular development build was a bit disappointing story wise, and seemed a bit rushed (but what can you expect from a developer build?), but it showed off a bit of the mission system, and it seems pretty good. All in all, I think it may turn out very good, and I’m looking forward to follow the game progress to alpha/beta testing.

I kept walking around the convetion area, looking at booths, etc.. And then this Indiana Jones hat literally begged me to buy it (and by literally I mean figuretively), and by begged I mean “it was there” and by buy I mean “to exchange a common currency for goods or services”.
I met a few people from Fedcon 2 years ago, which was nice, and some people from the German star trek forum said hi (or guten tag) :) Also I ran into Zach from Hailing Frequency and Trek Radio at the infinite space booth, which was fun.

I waited over an hour to get my photo taken with RDA (and if you don’t know who RDA is, you should really be ashamed of yourself).

Garret Wang did a really good job of being MC, and was alot of fun at his own panel and the Opening Ceremony.

Garret Wang and Wil Wheaton

At 21:00 it was time for the Wil Wheaton Panel, and at the time of writing I’m 90% sure it was the highlight of the entire Fedcon Trip. Wil Wheaton is just amazing (not just because he’s a fellow geek, gamer, skeptic, sci-fi fan, etc..) He’s always funny, intelligent and entertaining. A few quotes: “I’m a skeptic” (for posterity), and in regard to the recent Sony fuck up: “Sony put’s DRM on EVERYTHING, but store your personal information in a text file.. Genius!” :) Also he talked alot about his roles on TNG and the Big Bang theory (Eureka was never mentioned, but he did mention The Guild in passing a few times :) )

After that I was pretty tired, so I opted out of whatever happens at the maritim after closing, and took a cab back to my hotel.

Fedcon 2011 – Day 0

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Wednesday 27.04.2011

Today was the day before the convention. I got on the train from Amsterdam 14:30, and spent 2 hours looking at the Dutch and German countryside wooshing by backwards. Lots of cows, trees, windmills, a lama, some sheeps, grass, trains, etc…

Amsterdam

When I changed trains in Drüisburg, I was pretty sure I had gone on the wrong train (I think it left earlier than it should according to my ticket), but was positively surprised to find myself at the same train station I had been at 2 years earlier when taking the train to from Düsseldorf to Bonn.

Avidon Hotel room

I arrived at my hotel (which had a rocking chair… yay!) around 6 , chilled a bit, and made my way to the supermarket to get some soft drinks and food. Ended the night by watching Arrested Development and an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force (which is total rubbish, seriously? people actually enjoy that show? where did the world go so horribly wrong?).

Convention food

Toodledo API (simple java version)

Sunday, June 5th, 2011

Wanted to get a list of all the bugs for my Star Trek game, that I have registered at Toodledo and have them listed on the Trekwar wiki.

Toodledo offers a nicely done API, but there was no java implementation, there were a couple of unofficial ones, but I decided to write my own very simple basic program for connecting to Toodledo and getting all the tasks as XML, and parsing them into a simple Java object. So if you’re doing something similar, this program might be a nice place to start. To keep it as short as possible, comments and exception handling is pretty much not there :)

download the file: Toodledo2html.java

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.StringReader;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;
import java.net.URLConnection;
import java.security.MessageDigest;
import java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.logging.Level;
import java.util.logging.Logger;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.Element;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;
import org.xml.sax.InputSource;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;
 
class Task {
    String id;
    String title;
    String modified;
    String completed;
 
    String folder;
    String context;
    String tag;
    String status;
    String priority;
    String length;
    String note;
}
 
public class Toodledoo2html {
    // TODO you must get the 4 values below from Toodledo
    private static String appID = "x";
    private static String userID = "x";
    private static String userPW = "x";
    private static String applicationToken = "x";
 
    private static String fields = "folder,context,tag,status,priority,length,note"; // get these fields when downloading tasks
 
    private static String sessionToken;
    private static String key;
 
    private static String toodledoTokenURL = "https://api.toodledo.com/2/account/token.php";
    private static String toodledoGetTaskURL = "https://api.toodledo.com/2/tasks/get.php";
 
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        sessionToken = getSessionToken(md5(userID+applicationToken));
        key = md5(md5(userPW)+applicationToken+sessionToken);
        ArrayList<Task> tasks = getTasks();
        // do whatever to tasks
    }
 
    private static ArrayList<Task> getTasks() {
        try {
            String data = "?key=" + key + ";fields=" + fields + ";f=xml";
 
            System.out.println("Getting tasks: " + toodledoGetTaskURL + data);
 
            URL url = new URL(toodledoGetTaskURL + data);
            URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
            connection.setDoOutput(true);
 
            BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(connection.getInputStream()));
            StringBuilder xml = new StringBuilder();
            String line = in.readLine();
            while( line != null) {
                System.out.println(line);
                xml.append(line);
                line = in.readLine();
            }
            in.close();
 
            ArrayList<Task> tasks = xmlToTasks(xml.toString());
 
            for(Task t : tasks) {
                System.out.println(t.id + " " + t.title);
            }
            return tasks;
 
        } catch (MalformedURLException ex) {
            System.out.println(ex);
        } catch (IOException ioe) {
            System.out.println(ioe);
        }
        return null;
    }
 
    private static ArrayList<Task> xmlToTasks(String xml) {
        ArrayList<Task> taskList = new ArrayList<Task>();
 
        try {
            DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
            DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
            Document doc = db.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(xml)));
 
            Element root = doc.getDocumentElement();
 
            NodeList tasks = root.getElementsByTagName("task");
            for (int i = 0; i < tasks.getLength(); i++) {
                Element task = (Element) tasks.item(i);
 
                Task t = new Task();
                t.id = getDomTextValue(task, "id");
                t.title = getDomTextValue(task, "title");
                t.modified = getDomTextValue(task, "modified");
                t.completed = getDomTextValue(task, "completed");
 
                t.folder = getDomTextValue(task, "folder");
                t.context = getDomTextValue(task, "context");
                t.tag = getDomTextValue(task, "tag");
                t.status = getDomTextValue(task, "status");
                t.priority = getDomTextValue(task, "priority");
                t.length = getDomTextValue(task, "length");
                t.note = getDomTextValue(task, "note");
                taskList.add(t);
            }
 
        } catch (ParserConfigurationException ex) {
            Logger.getLogger(Toodledoo2html.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
        }
        catch(SAXException se) {
 
        }
        catch(IOException ioe) {
 
        }
 
        System.out.println("xmlToTasks got " + taskList.size() + " tasks");
        return taskList;
    }
 
    private static String getSessionToken(String signature) {
        try {
            String data = "?userid=" + userID + ";appid=" + appID + ";sig=" + signature + ";f=xml";
 
            System.out.println("Getting session token: " + toodledoTokenURL+data);
 
            URL url = new URL(toodledoTokenURL + data);
            URLConnection connection = url.openConnection();
            connection.setDoOutput(true);
 
            BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(connection.getInputStream()));
            String xml = in.readLine();
            in.close();
            String token = xml.substring(xml.indexOf("<token>")+7, xml.indexOf("</token>"));
            return token;
        } catch (MalformedURLException ex) {
            System.out.println(ex);
        }
        catch(IOException ioe) {
            System.out.println(ioe);
        }
        return "";
    }
 
    private static String md5(String input) {
        try {
            MessageDigest md = MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5");
            md.update(input.getBytes());
 
            byte byteData[] = md.digest();
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            for (int i = 0; i < byteData.length; i++) {
                sb.append(Integer.toString((byteData[i] & 0xff) + 0x100, 16).substring(1));
            }
            return sb.toString();
        } catch (NoSuchAlgorithmException nse) {
            System.err.println("ERROR. MD5 ALGORITHM NOT FOUND");
            return "";
        }
    }
 
    public static String getDomTextValue(Element element, String tag) {
        if (element != null) {
            NodeList nl = element.getElementsByTagName(tag);
            if (nl != null && nl.getLength() > 0) {
                Element el = (Element) nl.item(0);
                if(el != null && el.getFirstChild() != null) {
                    return el.getFirstChild().getNodeValue();
                }
            }
        }
        return "";
    }
}

Note: This program was made to run once per hour.. running this program many times in a row will cause Toodledo to ban you for about 1 hour. When that happens there will be a IndexOutOfBoundsException -7 from the method that gets the session token. This can be fixed by saving the token you get between requests, and not asking for a new one each time (which is what causes the short ban).

Looking forward to E3 2011

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

It’s almost time for E3, where the Gaming studios release lots of new info, screenshots and videos from the games they are working on.

This year I only got a few games I’m following:

X-Com (2K Games/Take-Two):
Huge fan of the original X-Com games, but so far I’ve been unimpressed by the video (the black blob being chased around). But hopefully some more interesting gameplay footage will be released.

Battlefield 3 (Electronic Arts):
Not really a huge FPS gamer, but I enjoyed Bad Company 2 alot, and Battlefield 3 looks awesome.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda):
Never finished Oblivion (was not a huge fan of the combat system), but if time permits I might play Skyrim.

Dead Island (Deep Silver):
Got noticed for their really awesome trailer, but not so sure about the game itself. Seems like Left 4 Dead with minor RPG elements added. And it seems to focus very much on melee combat, and afraid it will be to much of a hack and slash game (not a fan).

Star Wars: The Old Republic (Electronic Arts):
Saved the best piece for last.. I hope they will provide LOTS of new information, and gameplay from the latest builds. This is the game I’m looking the most forward to as of 2011, and I’m definitely going to play it when it’s released.

Google calendar update

Sunday, May 29th, 2011

Google Calendar got a really REALLY nice feature last week (I think):

Google calendar Even Color

Now you can set a color for each event (individual or recurring). Previously you had to have several calendars to do color coding, and that made it awkward for sharing.

Yay!

Double Rainbow Illusion

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

Richard Wiseman just put up a rainbow illusion on his blog, the only problem with it: It wasn’t double :/

I added a second rainbow, and it works great.. Also there is an added effect (for me at least) where the outer rainbow appear to shake after staring at the dot for about 15 seconds.


Click for larger image!

Wiseman is a psychologist, and if you like illusions and other psychological optical effects, you should definitely follow his blog http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/ and on twitter: @RichardWiseman

Double rainbow: If double rainbow means nothing to you, click here :)

Update:

I just copied the colors of the original rainbow, but of course for each new layer of rainbows, the new layer has the color ordering reversed. (thanks to Pepijn for pointing out my mistake)
Double Rainbow
Click for larger image!

No Judgement day: Me? Psychic?

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

So May 21. came and went without any judgement day… Or did it?

Instead of earthquakes and fire and hell on earth, Harold Camping is now saying it was “a spiritual judgement day” (source) and the end of the world is still coming October 21.

This probably just means God really really wants me to go to Comic Con in July =)

I tapped into the mysterious energies of the netherworld and made two predictions for October 21 about a week ago. And the fact that both of these have sort of already come true (and will come true again in October) must mean I’m the most awesome psychic in the world! I did these predictions for Armageddon, but both seems to fit to Judgement day as well :)

Prediction 1 (90%) : Misread bible, Armageddon delayed.
Prediction 2 (9.99%) : Armageddon Judgement Day happened, nobody noticed

I really hope Armageddon will be “spiritual” as well, so that nobody actually notice it :)

This is it!

Saturday, May 21st, 2011

This is it guys!

Hold on to your keyboards!

May 21 2011 Judgement Day
Screenshot from FamilyRadio.com May 21. 2011

I just hope it will say -1 days left tomorrow :)