The Switchboard is Under Enemy Control

The other day a security bulletin was published and patches released for a vulnerability in DNS — essentially the switchboard protocol of the Internet. This is an interesting case because the exact details of the vulnerability have not yet been released (but are scheduled to be in about a month or so). There’s an article …

Noel Gallagher Sudden Expertism*

Oasis frontman links videogames to knife violence: "If kids are sitting up all night smoking super skunk [cannabis] and they come so desensitised to crime because they’re playing these videogames, it’s really, really scary." * "sudden expertism" being a bit of Ticket lingo describing people who insist that they are an authority on any subject …

1-9

We bought Ticket to Ride on XBLA the other day, and Sandy has pretty much owned me in our (decidedly non-combative) matches. I was 0-9 before I eked out a victory last night. I feel like I have a pretty decent grasp on appropriate strategy for the game (card and route selection), but it never …

The Gawker Media Style Guide

Succinct, and hilarious. It actually applies to pretty much all Web-exclusive content, unfortunately. Sprinkle in useless metaphors and orthogonal pop-cultural references. This is pretty much why I don’t really like Bill Simmons’ writing very much — it feels like he’s just following a recipe for writing, and useless metaphors and/or movie references are his punchline …

Catching Up on the Backlog: Phoenix Wright

When I haven’t been playing GTA IV, I’ve been trying to whack another game off of my backlog — the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. I finished it today, having played the series somewhat out of order — 2, 3, 4 (aka Apollo Justice), then finally the first game. While having played the series out-of-order …

The NBA Donaghy scandal grows…

Read this TrueHoop blog entry, which is an interview with a professional NBA gambler. The Tim Donaghy scandal has gotten pretty interesting over the last couple of days, with public allegations of game-fixing (including the playoffs) coming from the "rogue referee" camp. The timing of this, during the NBA Finals, is, naturally, very embarrassing to …

InstallShield Wastes My Valuable Time (Which I Could Be Using To Play a Game)

I’ve had to use InstallShield to create installers a couple of times. These were fairly unpleasant experiences — while InstallShield is indeed a pretty flexible tool, it also takes a lot of work to get anything accomplished. Their habit of releasing new versions of the package every year (and completely abandoning the previous versions) makes …