A Dolphin's Journal of Events

Politics

micksam7 — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 08:46:05 +0000

I hate them.

To see friends tear apart because of differences in party or choices, it tears bits from my soul and my heart.

Please, stop.

- Mick

PS: I’ve been fixing crud between close friends all day. It’s really no fun.

PPS: Whatever side you are on, and if you’re a friend of mine, do us all a favor and don’t let things get heated. Friendships shouldn’t be broken because of difference of opinion.

PPPS: I’m in several communities. If you see no political issues in your own, then I’m not talking about yours.

Phlix.TV

micksam7 — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:02:24 +0000

Mmmmm, thought I’d post this, get some feedback:

Phlix.TV basically will take any non-flash video file [AVI/MOV/WMV/MP4/Etc, as long as it's on a http server], and convert it to flash on the fly, without [too] much wait [5-15 seconds at most if the server containing the video is slow]. No need to download some random codec to watch videos, as long as you can stand [slightly higher quality than normal] flash video.

Randomly got the idea with a chat with my mate, and a few others who seemed to be interested in the idea. Basically it’s to bridge the gap in the online media world, where there’s still non-flash files laying around. [And if you don't like flash video quality, well then don't use this!]

A weekend’s worth of coding; yay ffmpeg having most of the support that I needed already in, only had to hack in a few things. Thanks to TJ for abusing it to death to iron out some odd bugs. Fun times had by all.

Anyway, try it out, tell me what you think, and if something doesn’t work right, let me know.

Todo:
- Idiot proof the url box
- Support FTP
- Properly detect live-streams so it won’t try to cache them
- Provide Embed code
- Impliment h.264 support [mmmm more ffmpeg editing]
- Provide some notice when the source server is being head-achingly slow

Donuts

micksam7 — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 05:08:14 +0000

Can’t get enough of this video.

NVScene 2008

micksam7 — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:46:57 +0000

So earlier this week, NVidia hosted a big convention called NVision, part of which was NVScene, a demoparty.

So, here’s a small taste of what was released there. The top 3 for each category at the party. Remember, normally these demos are generated in real time, and etc etc, just captured here for those without a powerful PC/don’t feel like downloading the binaries.

4kb - 1st

4kb - 2nd

4kb - 3rd

Demo - 1st

Demo - 2nd

Demo - 3rd

There’s actually two winners for 3rd:

Sadly, my Capped.TV Kiosk wasn’t used, but you can download and see it on Pouet.net

NVScene & Capped.TV

micksam7 — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 03:32:39 +0000

Capped.TV Kiosk. If you’re headed to NVScene or NVision, stop by the demoscene hall and check it out.

And that’s my work of the month.

Edit: Yes that’s my only bit to NVScene; was unable to get a demo together after working the past few weeks on the kiosk. I’m sure no one wants to see Rob is Jarig encapsulated in a time-delay fake prod anyway… [Hey, will someone release a 4k version of it already? ;)]

Demoscene Outreach Reel

micksam7 — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:04:56 +0000

Created by Scene.org:

And don’t forget to come to NVision ‘08! Demoscene stuff will be happening at the NVScene part of the convention.

Capped.TV will have a presence there, in the form of Capped.TV Authorized Juice Kiosks™. Which will include HD captures of many of the demos featured in the reel, plus many more.

Don’t forget to register.

IIS + PHP 404 hack for Wordpress

micksam7 — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 01:32:13 +0000

Finally decided to fix and re-release this little code snippet.

You can have fancy urls for wordpress in IIS without any need for a url rewriter. Then again, this is really the only way I know to do fancy urls in IIS..

Anyway, simply take this code:

//404 hack //by the mickelphin


//Get the end of the url

$urlstub = substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], strrpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],”:80/”)+4);

$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = $urlstub;

$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = $urlstub;
//Attempts to repair corrupted get data, iis bug

foreach ($_GET as $id => $data) {

  $_GET[substr($id, strpos($id,"?")===false?0:strpos($id,"?")+1)] = $data;

}
require “index.php”;

?>

And insert it in a file called 404.php in your blog directory.

Then open up IIS’s config and move to your blog directory. Open up properties for that, and go to the Custom Errors tab. Click on the first 404 entry [and only the first], press edit, change it to url, and put in ‘ /[your blog directory, if any]/404.php ‘.

Ok on out. In wordpress, change your permalink style to exclude index.php. ie simply: ‘ /%year%/%postname%/ ‘ or whatever.

And have fun. I’m using it now.

If you have any issues, feel free to leave a comment.

Amiga Demos

micksam7 — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:44:48 +0000

Let’s go back a bit shall we? Back to when I randomly posted Demoscene Demos on here.

Here’s a few demos by The Black Lotus, done for Amigas. Of course, the amiga they were using is fairly well modified with extra ram and etc, but meh.

Captured in WinUAE, so both have a fairly high framerate then on the real machine.

This one was ported to Atari Falcon. Here it is running on the machine [once again, fairly well modified]

Project Wonderful 1 Month Review

micksam7 — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:35:40 +0000

Finally, after 1 whole month I feel experienced enough to do a preliminary review.

The really short version: It sucks.
The lesser short version: Project Wonderful is not good for content providers, however, for advertisers it’s a great low-cost way to do ads.

Our site’s average CPD [Cost Per Day] for our adspot [a add on the bottom of T.RScript.org] was 33 cents. 33 freaking cents for 10k ad views. Click ratio was about 0.15%.
For comparison, our Google AdSense click ad ratio has been 0.17%, and it’s average CPD is $2.

Project Wonderful: $0.02 per click, $0.04 per 1k views, $0.33 a day [338 clicks, 252k views, 31 days]
AdSense: $0.13 per click, $0.23 per 1k views, $2.01 a day [448 clicks, 252k views, 31 days]
[Both costs are AFTER the ad services take their cut]

Quite a big different if you ask me. Project wonderful is great for advertisers who want cheap ads, but suckage for content owners, with the low return we’ve been experiencing. Personally, I don’t think Project Wonderful is that well balanced as they say it is.

At least, not for smaller sites like t.rscript.org with only 10k views a day.

But, even on larger sites like PVPonline.com, it doesn’t seem to get the full value out of Project Wonderful. $20/day for 120k+ page views of your ad. Not sure about clicks, but I imagine it’s fairly decent, I’ve found a few things interesting on their adspace anyway.

In Conclusion: Project Wonderful Sucks for Content Providers; But Awesome for Advertisers. With it’s super-low cost per click ratio, the ratio of fairness between Content Providers and Advertisers is leaned heavily toward Advertisers.

————————-

Anyway, the ad place on the bottom will be removed later today once we have finally cleared the cash withdraw point of $10. Google ads, on the other hand, are making us about $60 for t.rscript.org.

Hopefully, the removal of that ad will help lighten the visual load. Also will allow us to add site statistics in it’s place as per the original plan.

That’s all for now. Back to working on Capped. And job-hunting. [Anyone need a PHP Dev? Contact me and I'll send my resume]

Removal from Google’s Index

micksam7 — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:15:39 +0000

Dear site owner or webmaster of t.rscript.org,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently pages from t.rscript.org are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.

Specifically, we detected the following practices on your webpages:

* The following hidden text on t.rscript.org:

e.g.

RPG roleplaying game games mmorpg mmo runescape runescript game games mmorpg rpg mmo ok seriously GIVE US BETTER TARGETED ADS

[...]

We would prefer to have your pages in Google’s index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines.

Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

Just so you know, we’re changing ad services. Thanks google, your adsense cannot sense right, therefore me following a recommendation off your site to add keywords, which then you turn around and slap me with this. Thanks.