Rabid Family Blog

Good ol' Microsoft

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 19:28:51 GMT

The new ad on Messenger is "Download Internet Explorer 8 and we'll donate 8 meals to Feeding America!"

That's pretty desperate, I wonder if they ever thought about making their browser not suck instead?

Dungeon Diver open-source

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 12:28:00 GMT

Come 'n get it -

http://www.byond.com/games/Kunark/DungeonDiver

Be sure to thank Shades for allowing it.

Thanks for the membership!

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 11:56:09 GMT

Well, somebody anonymously donated to me a membership. Not sure why they would want to, but thanks!

So what do I post about? Might as well show off my new monitor setup as of yesterday:

Dual 23" Dell monitors, along with a new dual DVI output NVidia card. Woot! They barely fit on my desk.

Detecting Chrome vs. Safari in JavaScript

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:33:55 GMT

The past two days I've been straining to figure out a way to detect a difference between Chrome's V8 and Safari's JavaScriptCore.

Unfortunately, V8 appears to be a carbon copy of JavaScriptCore with JIT compilation, making it extremely difficult to detect. The internet was no help, with everybody using either navigator.userAgent or navigator.vendor.

Why shouldn't you use such things? Here's just an example:

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/tips/2009/01/30/ google_chrome_accesses_hotmail_by_pretending_its_safari-2.ht ml

Websites often block certain browsers because they don't want to deal with cross-browser compatibility, so browsers will often spoof the userAgent/etc. to appear as another browser. userAgents are also subject to spyware which can severely corrupt them.

So after many headaches, I finally found a subtle difference between the two browsers that can be used for browser detection:

if (window.devicePixelRatio)  //If WebKit browser
{
   if (escape(navigator.javaEnabled.toString()) == 'function%20javaEnabled%28%29%20%7B%20%5Bnative%20code%5D%20%7D')
   {
      alert('Chrome');
   }
   else if (escape(navigator.javaEnabled.toString()) != 'function%20javaEnabled%28%29%20%7B%20%5Bnative%20code%5D%20%7D')
   {
      alert('Safari');
   }
}

This works by the fact that Function.toString() in Safari preserves whitespace while Chrome's does not. This is not likely to change unless Google considers it a bug; I'm thinking they did it on purpose, and I don't see Safari changing their ways.

Urge to kill.... Rising.... trembles

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:09:20 GMT

Who else here is absolutely annoyed and disgusted with these stupid Acai Berry ads?

If you don't know what I'm talking about, just open up some random website, or heck, even MSN Messenger, and see the "1 Flat Stomach Rule: Obey" ads and similar.

Okay:

1. They like to put disgusting, distorted blobs of fat on the ads; one even made the fat jiggle!

2. They are all scams. This is nothing new, but it adds up.

3. They lead to fake "blogs". These stupid blogs are made to look like it wasn't an overpaid marketing executive who made them.

4. They are low quality. Again, nothing new, but ew.

5. They currently are spamming e-mail boxes worse than other pharmaceutical brands, which is silly considering there's no reason they should have to invest in spam.

6. The gif looped ads are made in a distracting, half-complete manner, so it draws your attention, and then loops over only the middle part, making obsessive-compulsives like myself want to rip their eyes out.

And the worse part....

7. They bought the advertising space of the entire freaking internet! Annoying scamming ad agencies are one thing when they show a little variety in their ad campaigns, but when the same stupid, disgusting ads are shown on every website (I can't even comprehend how many websites have this crap on it), all day long, every day, and then on MSN and other IMs, they've crossed the line. I seriously just want to see their buildings get pulverized with everybody inside.

I don't think any other ad campaign on the internet, ever, no matter how shady, has infuriated me as much as these ads.

Somebody needs to take them to court and slap an anti-trust lawsuit against them. Nobody can compete with them and they've abused their power far too long.

ARRRRRGGGGGGGG!!!

*casts magic missile on a box full of cute puppies*

A Blast from the Past

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:01:04 GMT

By some strange stroke of luck, I was able to find some old CDs I threw into a box when I moved that I had kept backups of my games, code, and art on. I also found a really REALLY old backup that was from my computer that would format all the CDs I burned into an unreadable format by everything but that computer.

One good thing about vista: It was able to read this legacy format and I was able to recover some ancient games I thought I'd never see again. About the only game I couldn't find was the original Fenris' Apocalypse, which was on even older CDs that are probably long gone by now.

I've recovered the sources to the following games:

Drugwars
Fate
Dungeon Diver
Forgotten Memories
Playing with Roses
Surreal Dreams
Veteran
31
Arrow Maze
BYOND Poker
BYOND Trivia
DBZ BINGO NIGHT
Dementophobia
Fenris' Apocalypse II
Hearts
Ruthless Empires
Takayen

I'm really hoping that Fate is the latest version, because I need to edit it and release it again to get rid of the subscriber crap and fix the hub problem.

If anybody is interested in any of these sources (excluding Dungeon Diver, which you'd have to ask Shades if you wanted it), let me know and I'll see if I can't send them your way.

Steve Ballmer is Coo-Coo for Microsoft

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 10:54:48 GMT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsboPUjrGc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UG6Q1inAqs

hahaha

Why bother voting for McCain

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:26:38 GMT

Bush already paved the way for Obama's victory.

Honestly I didn't like either of them, so I would have been happy (er?) either way.

At least with Obama we'll see change in many of the neglected areas we truly need it when we probably wouldn't have seen anything new from McCain in those areas. Even if a lot of his other ideas are ludicrous.

McCain would have been a lot better than Bush, but really still, maybe even if McCain is better than Obama, we really might need the Anti-Bush to fix everything Bush has broken. I'll deal with Obama's crap if he will fix Bush's crap :)

Anybody with Fate images?

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 22:13:27 GMT

I found some old Surreal Dreams images thanks to phantom_merlock, but I can't find the old Fate banner or button image (and the sources on my site are corrupt). Does anybody else have them cached somewhere or something?

VP Debate

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 03:29:43 GMT

Now Joe Biden was doing fairly well, and as an experienced politician, that is what I would have expected.

Until around the very end, when he started talking about the role of the vice president.

Basically, what he said is this:

The vice president's role is to support the president. There should be a line for the vice president and he should adhere to that line.

In contrast to what Palin was saying:

Give me even more POWER!

In other words, Biden is going to do nothing with his vice presidency while Palin would probably kick McCain's head in if she disagreed with him.

I am very surprised how strong Palin was in the debate. She proved the media wrong, she showed she wasn't just a proxy of McCain's words (while Biden proved he was Obama's), and she showed that her inexperience with Washington politics is actually a good thing.

She started off a little shaky, especially one question where it sounded like she was avoiding it, which is what the media accused her of, but after that she really exceeded my expectations and kicked some ass.