Ian Benedict

Guitar practice is going pretty well. I’ve been working on my improvisational skills to be able to come up with my own solos, rather than just playing the same one over and over. It’s working out all right so far, but constantly working on scales is very dull. I picked up a slide as well, have been noodling around with it and haven’t really started practicing much with it. Also guitar-related I guess, but in another 19 days, I will be seeing Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton at the ACC from row 23 right at the stage.

I finally fixed my Macbook. It turned out to be a corrupt hard drive and not BIOS-related (phew!). Just about done installing the millions of apps I need to operate on a daily basis. It’s only yet another reason why I need to start shifting more of my data to the cloud (which I’ve been doing a lot thanks to Google). Also, I need to get into the habit of writing smaller, more frequent blog posts rather than giant word heavy ones once every few months. I guess I’ll make that a New Year’s resolution.

Upgrading this site to Wordpress 2.9 was an incredible pain. But I finally set it up with Google Analytics, since the regular stats plugin seems to have been borked.

MMORPGs are unsurpassed at giving you an overwhelming sense of achievement. Being able to show off your character’s pimped out gear and abilities has been one of the draws of this genre, in addition to persistent awards for your achievements. The Xbox 360 has mastered this formula as well with the achievement system, even going so far as bringing out the dormant “achievement whores” in all of us. It’s a fact of life these days: we just like having markers for our gaming progress and love showing them off to friends. Enter Kongregate, a flash gaming website with integrated achievements in their flash games.

Kongregate has a great collection of flash games from around the internet, as well as some very high quality original games. It has popular games like Desktop Tower Defence, Portal: The Flash Version, Johnny Rocketfingers, and a ton more all with integrated achievements. My personal favourite of these is Kongai, an online collectible card game where you can gain cards by playing other games on Kongregate. It is surprisingly very well-balanced and deep for a flash card game, and quite addictive with online battling gameplay. I recently found out that it was created by David Sirlin, who is a high level SSF2: Turbo player and Capcom employee. He wrote a pretty interesting book called Playing To Win, which is available for free on his website, on the attitudes and mindsets that are common in all top players in competitive games. It’s a pretty good length and is an interesting read.

Overall, Kongregate is a great flash gaming site with games for just about anyone. It’s an excellent way to waste time and yet still track your achievements with most games.

I finally got my invite for the web 2.0 application BrightKite, so here are my initial impressions.

BrightKite is very much like Twitter, where you can post little notes to people on your friends list as well as the general public. Its main feature is the ability to also encode ‘where’ your posts are coming from. For example, if I had a GPS-enabled phone and I sent an update to BrightKite, not only will my post show up on the site but it will also show where I posted it from. Of course there are several privacy issues here (beware the stalkers!), but the site does provide a good amount of privacy features. What’s also pretty neat is you can view the public stream based on where you are, so you can see recent posts that originated from your area. For those of us without GPS-enabled devices, the option to add places manually on the site is there so we’re not completely left in the dark.

I can definitely see the coolness of using an application like this, especially when a lot of your friends get into it (with this being a social networking site and all…). You can set it to automatically update your Twitter with your BrightKite posts as well as add locational information to it, so you won’t need to message two different places if you have Twitter account too. Unfortunately, you can’t text message updates yet if you’re not in the US, but I imagine this will be rectified when it comes out of beta. I guess I have even more motivation to upgrade my phone now…

Check out my BrightKite profile here.

I’ve gotten a bit of time to try out Dropbox and so here’s my little review of it.

For the uninitiated, Dropbox is a web 2.0 application that lets you sync files between multiple computers quickly and painlessly. It also comes with a nifty web interface to organize your folders and content. Although this sort of technology isn’t exactly new (to those of us in computer science or just in the know with code repositories general), it certainly manages to be easy enough to use and maintains a good amount of flexibility.

Basically, after installing the Dropbox application, it creates a little folder where any file inside it will be automatically synced to folders on other computers that are linked to the same Dropbox account. The install process itself very straightforward and fast, and the application itself seems very lightweight and memory-friendly.

I’ve been using it for the past couple of weeks now, mainly for keeping things like photos, documents and guitar tabs synced across both my laptops. It excels at syncing your content very quickly between all linked Dropbox folders and updating the web interface. Since the Dropbox application (which runs constantly in the background) is set to check your folder at very frequent intervals, dropping your file in the folder results in an almost instantaneous sync between the folders on other computers. A neat little feature I’ve used a bit is that any file you put into the public section of the folder gets a download link associated with it, so that you can share links directly with friends to the content in that folder.

One of the features I’ve yet to fully investigate is the “shared” folder, where you can share a folder between multiple Dropbox users and have it set to sync to all of their folders. As well, I haven’t played around too much with revisioning changes to files, but I imagine it works just fine.

Ultimately, it’s a very neat little application to have and is a godsend to those of us who find repositories such as Subversion a little too complicated to set up. Much like Twitter, I think it becomes much more handy to have around when more of your friends are using it, however it is very usable if you just want to share files across multiple computers. Dropbox is currently in private beta and is invite only.

PS. I’ve written this entire entry using the Qumana blog editor, which is a pretty neat free Mac blog editor. Here’s hoping it looks good on the site!

Exam week has started. My first exam is this Wednesday, with the rest not far behind. Studying is going well, though I’ll admit I’ve had a lot on my mind and therefore the studying isn’t as efficient as it could be. As well, I have a Kendo grading coming up in a few weeks. If I pass, I’ll be granted the 5th kyu rank, which is the lowest one. Ah well, gotta start small I guess.

I finally got myself to create a Twitter account, which you can view here. For the uninitiated, Twitter is a micro-blogging service. Basically, you can post really bite-sized blog posts fairly quickly from any cell phone or computer. Some of the common uses for this service are to post things you’ve been doing on a daily basis and to keep in frequent touch with people that you are following as well as your own followers. This is what I intend to use it for, so I hope I can keep at it. You may also notice that there’s now a Twitter widget on the sidebar of this site. If you happen to have an account, please feel free to follow me (don’t worry, it’s not as stalker-ish as it sounds). For those who don’t, try it out!

The school semester is slowly drawing to a close. Sadly though, the snow isn’t.

I’m really happy with my guitar playing. All those days of chord progressions and scales are finally starting to pay off. I’ve been practicing this one particular song which happens to be from Megaman 2 (Yeah yeah I know, it’s a good lick though), and can pretty much play it thoroughly. In addition to the recommendation I made last time for beginner guitarists, I’d also recommend checking out the Metal Method series of instructional dvds. They’re made for the absolute beginner to around intermediate/advanced players. Here’s a video of the song I’ve been practicing (But it’s not me that’s playing, obviously).

In this next section, I’d like to take a bit to talk about a couple of web applications.

First up is Mozilla Firefox, a web browser. Yes I do realize this isn’t something new, however there was a beta released recently for the upcoming Firefox 3. I just installed this yesterday on my home Vista laptop, and so I wanted to talk about it a bit. The biggest feature here has to be the huge cut in memory usage. There have been reports that it uses around 60% less memory as you keep the browser open. This is a huge deal for me because I sometimes leave my browser on overnight and it can just be downright unusable in the morning. That and the fact that I haven’t had the need to use the task manager to kill its process yet is what sold me.

Finally, the other application I wanted to talk about is the not so well-known IM client known as Digsby. What makes it better than the standard MSN or Trillian clients? Well, not only does it support a plethora of IM protocols, it also can track your different email accounts as well as social networking applications! That’s right, this client offers a more connected experience to your social networking platforms like Facebook, for those of you who aren’t already addicted enough as it is. I’ve only just set this client up yesterday on my Vista laptop and it tracks my MSN, GMail, and Facebook accounts. So for example, if someone posts on my wall or sends me a message via Facebook, I’d get a little notification on the bottom right corner of my screen much in the same way as MSN. This client offers just about the closest experience I can get to Adium on OSX (Which I am in love with) while offering features that even Adium doesn’t have. It is currently in beta and only available on Windows so far, however Mac OSX and Linux versions are in the works.