Thursday 13 June 2002

categories: Computationally Minded

P2P Roaming Chat from the snowcrash-anyone dept. Commander Taco posts: fexter writes "A coder called Brendan Reville has released BrendanLand, which he claims is "the world's first peer2peer application where each participant serves their own piece of geography in the overall world." Basically, everyone walks around and chats. But each person gets to design their own piece of land, and everyone roams between these lands. It's all free, and the website has lots of technical notes and a developer diary." Oviously this is hugely basic stuff, but conceptually there is a lot of potential cool ideas. But for now it looks just silly ;) [by way of Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters] To connect to the larger world, your piece of land has to connect to a master computer, in a Napster-like configuration, where each is a peer, but discovery depends on a centralized mechanism. I remember an ambitious game that had a similar concept, where client/servers would connect to each other to serve up various parts of an astrography, rather than a geography, and you would fly spaceships and shoot others or team up as appropriate. It was supposed to be an open project for Mac OS, Windows, and Linux machines, but I don’t remember anything coming of it. I think I saw it in MacAddict three years ago? Hm. Brendanland is for Windows only, so, eh. No source, either, so, eh. Depends on DirectX, so it might be portable to Mac OS X using a DirectX translator that I think I heard about somewhere.... This might serve as a platform for file sharing, if persistent objects could be strewn over the landscape, such as books and such. Of course, this would have to allow for peers with lower hard drive capacity. 1:51:09 PM    comment []

categories: Regrets; Things that are Gone

Commute this morning sucked. Details? Forgot Storm of Swords rushing out of the house. Got a callback stating that I did not have to rush out of the house. Realized that if I had paid attention yesterday, I would have known this and slept longer. Arrived at train station at just the right time to wait the longest period between trains that is possible in the rush hour. Since I was so early, decided to see if I can get to work cheaper by taking the PATH, which I had not taken since... Stood all the way to Newark. PATH: had to stand; without GRRMartin, had to read boring tech papers. Gorgeous Filipina and a guy friend got on at Harrison. As I am reading, she rather slowly takes off her jacket—unnecessarily, I thought. While talking to him, her hand flies all over the pole, grazing my hand several times—Aargh—making me rather uncomfortable, to say the least. I am reminded of several things: I am not not not that kind of person, really I amn’t. A lingering touch is not an invitation to jump someone. A boyfriend twice my mass could provide several hearty disincentives to my doing so in the future. Finding a seat to disguise visible signs of um, “discomfort” is very very hard to do at eight in the morning. Did not realize that I could take any of the two 1 trains that passed me instead of waiting for the 2 until I was standing in the car, faced with a map slapping the fact in my face every time the rocking action of the subway ride knocked me round the pole. Realized that several of yesterday’s work products were folded up neatly in the Storm of Swords book. Toted it up: an extra hour for about three dollars a day. 1:17:49 PM    comment []