If anybody finds themselves bored this holiday season and wants to relive some marginal gameplay from years past, Rockstar has released Grand Theft Auto 2 for free on their website; http://www.rockstargames.com/classics/.
And because laziness is the word of the day, I'll copy-paste their text and pawn it off as my own:
Respect is everything.In 1999, Rockstar Games and Rockstar North (then known as DMA Design) furthered the groundbreaking gameplay concepts established just two years prior in the original Grand Theft Auto - with the release of GTA2. GTA2 expanded on the top-down, open-ended crime world gameplay formula with a host of new features including the advent of multiple rival gangs – seven, to be exact, including the Yakuza, Scientists, Looneys, Rednecks, Zaibatsu, the Russian Mob and Hare Krishnas. Earn your respect with each gang. Reap the benefits with all manner of shady work-for-hire gigs contracted your way. And climb your way to the top of the criminal pile.
Now, longtime Grand Theft Auto fans can revisit this classic entry in the series - and new jacks who missed out on this early franchise title can further discover Grand Theft Auto’s roots - absolutely free. GTA2 has been completely optimized for play on modern PCs and is available gratis for all registrants to the Rockstar Games mailing list (rest assured your information will not be shared with any third parties, you will only receive information from Rockstar). Simply fill out the form below and check your email for a direct link to the file (353 MB .zip file, includes install .exe, readme .txt file, and a .pdf of the original PC game manual).
While the game definitely looked better than its predecessor (GTA 1, of course) it still was a top-down game, and not the free roaming, whore punching fest that it has matured into today. But you can still run around and shoot people, carjack some people and get yourself into some trouble.
For those of you unfamiliar with GTA 2, I offer this page of screenshots, located over at firingsquad.com.
And while we're on the subject of Grand Theft Auto (or GTA), the latest news is that Rockstar will be releasing their latest GTA incarnation, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, simultaneously on the Xbox and PC in North America on June 7th, 2005 and in Europe on June 10th, 2005. (via TeamXbox.com)
Or, if you want something a bit more recent, I highly encourage you to download the demo for Half-Life 2, which is winning awards left, right and center.
Yeah OK, another Gmail post after I promised to never speak of the dark beast again.
I checked today and Google has blessed me with ten invites, so they're all available on a first come basis. Rather than bore everybody with "click here to email me" links, I'll just post all the links below and ask that you all obey the "one per customer" honor system.
Without further adieu,
[All gone]
If you haven't already heard about Gmail, it's a new search-based webmail service that offers:
Update (2005-01-09 @ 4:49pm PST):
We've managed to give away all 61 Gmail invites so far. Will add more as I get them.
OK, it seems like we're having a bit of a "hosting issue" at the moment. Currently, our sites are hosted with two different companies. Flash-MX is hosted at a reliable ColdFusion hosting company and is completely unaffected (yay), but our other sites (mostly book or blog related) are on a reseller account on PHP based sites. Well, it seems that at some point over the weekend, this PHP hosting company had a hardware failure and had some downtime. "How much downtime", you ask? Well, at the time of writing this, we're sitting at 16 hrs, 13 mins, 4 secs (and climbing). What seems to be the problem? They don't really seem to know.
Needless to say we're going to be looking for a new hosting provider rather shortly. Since Flash-MX is the only site that absolutely requires ColdFusion the new servers don't have a strong need for ColdFusion (but it would be nice). One place that has been recommended to me by a good buddy of mine is Server Matrix. While it is more expensive than I'm paying now, it also offers exponentially more bandwidth, which would allow me to host videos or whatever else I may need down the road. The contract is also month-to-month, so that's nice since I typically hate longer-term contracts. Basically at Server Matrix I could get 1200 GB of bandwidth a month for only $109 US.
Super Server 2.4
- Intel Pentium 4 – 2.4Ghz
- 1024 MB Ram
- 80GB ATA 100 7200 RPM HDD
- 1,200 GB Bandwidth
- 99.9% SLA Guarantee
- RedHat Linux, Windows 2000, 2003
Anybody out there ever use these guys or hear any horror stories? If I could find a ColdFusion shop, that would be preferrable since it would allow me to move all my sites to one single account and pay less money. But I've had a really tough time of finding anybody who has reseller accounts and ColdFusion and doesn't charge and arm and a leg. But hey, somebody prove me wrong [please!].
Here's a cool (blogged) list of TV shows that are done in Flash. Check it out - there are a lot out there:
(good work at compiling them - it's hard to keep track!) Question for those in the know - is it pretty typical for studios to work with Flash + After Effects when working on broadcast Flash stuff? (I know Flash isn't the most common - but to reprhase - what is it typically paired with when studios do choose to use Flash?).
OK, I was reading a blog entry on Jesse Warden's site yesterday (Link: Blogspam == DNS Attack) and thought I'd try and post a couple links and scripts that have helped me try and reduce spam on Flash-MX.com. I'm sure that our little site gets nowhere near the traffic of more successful blogs and we've never been bombed by spammers [yet] but maybe these will help somebody else out there using Movable Type.
Let's get started!
The first link I came across a couple months ago was this page on Learning Movable Type; Concerning Spam. It covers several useful techniques and methods for trying to foil filthy spammers. Now, not all techniques work for both MT 2.6 and the newer MT 3.1, but definitely worth checking out and applying a few techniques.
My favorite method for fighting spam is renaming the default blog comment posting script from mt-comments.cgi to, well, anything but that name. It is important to understand that this really is a temporary solution though. Once Google has indexed your pages, spammers will be able to get the name of your new comment posting page and hammer that. So ideally you'd need to rename this script monthly or so. Not only do you need to rename that CGI file, but you also need to modify a single line in your mt.cfg file and then rebuild your site (or usually just your individual entry pages). If you have a large site with lots of entries this can definitely be a pain in the ass and a bit time consuming, but definitely easier than dealing with dozens of spam messages a day. For detailed instructions on renaming the comment script check out the link above on the Learning Movable Type site.
Don't believe me on how easy it is to find a person's comment posting script? Try the following search in the world famous google: "inurl:cgi-bin site:flash-mx.com filetype:cgi". Yeah. One simple Google search tells you the exact name of this site's comment posting script with a minimal amount of effort.
Now, a second technique that has proven extremely successful is closing comments after a set number of days. For example, I've found that comments posted after about 14 days after a news entry has been posted tend to be spam. Obviously that isn't always true, but seems to be a fairly accurate rule of thumb. This pretty much boils down to the fact that once Google has indexed your sites and latest entries, you'll probably be spammed. That's just a fact of life. There are several ways to close comments after a set number of days. I've found a couple Movable Type plugins that actually do this, although I was only able to get one of the two to work. The script I got working was MT-Close by David Raynes (Link: Closing comments on old entries). The only real problem I found with this script is that there wasn't a dead simple way to automate it. I would have assumed that the script would have automatically closed comments after a set number of days, but it appears that you have to run the page manually and use the user interface. Sure, I'm sure that with 10 minutes worth of ColdFusion and a scheduled task (or 10 minutes PHP and a cron job) you could do this yourself, but that isn't the point), but the real drawback I saw to this method was that you still have to rebuild your individual entries after running this script. Being a generally lazy person, I instead spent about 5 seconds and wrote the following bit of CF which should close comments automatically after 30 days, and not require any interaction from me, or any sort of template rebuilding. And it only uses one single line of code which I placed in my Individual Entry Archive template.
<MTEntryIfCommentsOpen>
<CFIF DateDiff("d", ParseDateTime( "<$MTEntryDate$>" ), Now()) LTE 30>
<div class="comments-head">Post a comment</div>
This simple code runs every time the page is displayed and says "if the current entries posted date is less than or equal to 30 days, display the comment entry form". I didn't bother putting in a CFELSE tag, but you could easily add a friendly note saying that the thread has been closed. This has worked pretty well for me but you may want to tweak the dates based on how much spam you're receiving. If you tend to get a lot of spam after 10 or 15 days, try dropping the days from 30 down to 10 or whatever number you want.
That about does it. Obviously the first step I take in installing any Movable Type blog is to install MT-Blacklist by Jay Allen. Whether you're using MT 2.661 or MT 3.1, you should definitely be using MT-Blacklist to try and filter out unwanted keywords or domains. If you find that a lot of spam comes from the same IP, then you can start blocking IP addresses from Movable Type's Weblog Config > IP Banning interface. Or if you get a lot of spam from places advertising Poker, Gambling, Drugs or whatnot, start entering really vague keywords/domains into MT-Blacklist's regular expression engine. If you happen to be using MT 3, you can even enable comment moderation so that comments aren't visible on the site until you approve them. While this can make your site not display spam messages, they still may clog up your database and back end quite quickly, so moderation shouldn't be used as an only line of defense.
I'm sure there are dozens of other methods out there for fighting spam, everything from having to decypher an image and type it in (similar to how many domain registry places use when you try and do a whois search) or I've even seen some complex Bayesian filter for MT methods kicking around.
So this list isn't any sort of definitive guide by any means. I'm constantly tweaking my blacklist rules and downloading the latest entries from the spam clearinghouse site's master list. I'm also constantly monitoring the comments which get emailed to my gmail account so I am notified when a user posts. I'm also constantly trying new plugins and techniques trying to fine tune the whole process.
If I find any other resources I'll post them in the comments below.
AppleInsider is reporting that Canada *finally* has access to Apple's wildly successful iTunes store. I guess it was only a matter of time. Canada seems to be 14th in line, after Austria, Belgium, Deutschland, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom and of course United States.
As we're no longer in Canada, I can't really verify the existance of the store one way or the other, although it was nice to see Apple finally acknowledge that they did miss their November estimate (albeit ever so slightly). Then again, acknowledging on December 1st that you missed a November 30th deadline isn't a huge step up to the plate. ;)
One thing I do have to say though, is that I checked out the US iTunes store last night and was extremely impressed. Especially with the celebrity playlist idea. I saw a bunch of songs that looked really interesting. Maybe I didn't see the option, but I think it would be really nice if you could preview tracks before downloading them. Sure, at only $1 US per track I guess it isn't a huge investment, but I know how quickly you can burn through money when you start buying CDs 2 and 3 at a time.
iTunes for Canada now accessible [via AppleInsider]
Update: I guess we CAN confirm Canada has a store as they seem to be listed when you click on the Choose Store link in the upper left corner. Congrats, eh!