thanassis blog

Just Released! My christmas project - kilogames.com

Kilogames is an arcade site with online games. I used PHPArcadeScript to build kilogames. PHPArcadeScript seems to be one of the best and most popular scripts for making an arcade site. Installing PHPArcadeScript was very easy and did not take more than 20 minutes. Changing the look and feel and customising it with all the features I needed was also very easy -with some basic knowledge of PHP and CSS-. In total the whole project took about 2 to 3 days.

For hosting kilogames.com I followed a friend's advice and used Dreamhost. With Dreamhost I get 240Gig space -which is more than enough for kilogames-, pretty good speed and massive bandwith limits.

As there are many gaming sites out there, to make kilogames competitive, I've decided to give some edge by:

- Ommiting adds of any type

- Releasing 5 new top games every 8 hours

- Using large game icons throughout

- Presenting tooltips with game info to make the game selection easier

- Keeping the layout as clean as I could.

I hope you'll enjoy kilogames.com. Any feedback you care to give about the style or the mechanics of kilogames.com would be greatly appreciated!

I just finished the alpha implementation of the xoocle SU mashup. It's a mashup script that takes a stumbleupon name, fetches all the tags, and links them to the latest blog, bookmark & photo entries on technorati, delicious & flickr.

The script should help SU users to find the latest entries related to their interests. It should also help making popular SU discoveries.

Try the xoocle SU mash script with your SU name. if you dont have a SU name you need an SU account first. If you dont want a SU account but you still want to run the script, check my thanassis mashup page. By checking the about page you can find how and why I've wrote this mashup script.

You can use directly the xoocle SU mashup script by composing your url as:

xoocle.com/su/[su-username]/[tag-of-interest].html

The best documentary I've ever seen is available on google video. It is called "Century of the Self" and it's a real eye opener. Do yourself a favour and make the time to watch it

As it is 4 episodes of 1h each, you need to set aside 4h. Take notes if you can, and research further.

It is all hosted in google video and you can view it out by following the links below:

Part 1/4: Happiness Machines	Part 2/4: The Engineering of Consent
Part 3/4: Policeman Inside our Heads	Part 4/4: Eight People Sipping Wine

Just released my latest 7-day project at gameanatomy.com. It is a feed aggregator site that attempts to follow the steps of popurls.com and originalsignal.com but specializes in video games.

At the moment, gameanatomy.com displays 113 of the most popular gaming feeds in 11 categories: games buzz, news, latest online games, mmogs, pc games, xbox, xbox360, ps/2, ps/3, Nintendo Wii, & misc. It should help you find the latest game related links faster than ever...

read more | digg story

Instead of a static site you can install Wordpress, change it to look like a static site, and benefit by all its features and plugins. I just tried an example and it works wonderfully.

You can follow this simple 6 step guide to upgrade a static site with a wordpress based equivalent.

1: Download and install Wordpress
Download the latest Wordpress version and read the 5 minute install guide.
You will need to have an available mySQL database and to upload the Wordpress files to your webserver. Then you point your browser to the server, fill the installation form with the database details and click install.

2: Select and install a Wordpress theme.
There are hundreds of themes available. At themes.wordpress.net you can view the themes by thumbnail and test drive the ones you like. Once you locate the one you prefer you must download it and upload it on the webserver under the directory : /wp-content/themes
To enable the theme, use the Wordpress admin screen and go to Presentation->Themes. The new theme should be available to enable.

3: Install the plugin Filosofos.
Filosofos makes changing the normal Wordpress blog-based view to a static view very easy. Download the plugin, upload it to the plugins folder in wordpress, (/wp-content/plugins) and activate it by going to the plugins admin menu. Go to Options-> Home Page Control and change the home page to a static wordpress page. To make a Wordpress Page you select Write Page rather than Post.

Djangopedia started about 7 months ago indexing online resources related to the music of the famous jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. Today, djangopedia got its 206th entry, and I'm pretty sure that this makes it the largest online resource for tunes recorded by Django Reinhardt.

You can view the list of Django's most popular tunes by visiting Djangopedia's stats. I wondered what would be the list of the top 20 combining the popularity of djangopedia's tunes with that of youtube videos. So, I've compiled the "Top 20 Djangopedia Gypsy Jazz Tunes with Youtube videos". Check it out, it's djangopedia's top 20 with youtube's most popular videos for each tune.

As djangopedia gets larger it will get much harder to add to it. To pass the 300 mark may take sometime. As the total of unique django tunes approximates 500, there is a long way to go to complete the first round.

This is Bireli Lagrene's wonderful take on Django Reinhardt's standard tune "Si tu savais". "Si tu savais" translates from French to English to "If you knew" and was recorded by Django in december 1947. In the original recording, both Django's guitar and Grapelli's violin are very close to perfection. Every note is played with incredible tone, balance, and expressive elegance.

String Theory tells us we live in a 10 dimensional world. It's easy to understand the first four dimensions, three for space and one for time. However, it gets progressively harder to conceptualise each dimension above. It's tough enough to reach 10 and then why stop there?

Firefox has already more than 1200 extensions. Which ones are useful? After indulging in installing few hundred of them, I choose the 27 best, based on how much I use them every day. I've been impressed by many, but these 27 are the ones I use daily. The order is alphabetical.

King's quest 1 has been one of my favourite games. It was released by Sierra in 1984 and became one of the most popular PC-based adventure games. I got a copy of it when I was 11 years old. I remember playing whilst holding an English to Greek dictionary for all the words that I didn't know. After exchanging a few tips with friends, I almost managed to reach the end but was stuck on the final quest inside a cave.

After having spent some time stuck in the cave, I thought of using a hex editor to view the game data in chars and hex. Sure enough, after some searching I got to the text that was describing the piece of the puzzle I was missing. I subsequently finished King's Quest 1, and I'm very fond of it as it was excellent fun, brilliant education and prompted me on my first hacking experience.

AGD Interactive has made a modern PC version of the old Kings 's Quest I and King's Quest II. It brings back so many memories

The icon that you see when you make a bookmark or when you drag an address link to your desktop is made by a file called favicon.ico.

The favicon.ico file is of the "ico" type and typically contains two images. The first is a 16x16 pixel image and the second is 32x32.

To make your own favaicon.ico and relate it to your website you just need to go through these three simple steps:

1. Produce the 16x16 and the 32x32 images/logos of your site, save them as png images
2. Use the program png2ico to make the favicon.ico file. The command to use is : png2ico favicon.ico weblogo32.png weblogo6.png
3. Upload the favicon.ico file to your website's root. It will be available to all the pages that are under the root.

To see my flickr photos you can visit my flickr photo collection
or you could view a slideshow

.

Interesting article that compares ruby on rails with java. It gives away code to do the testing and claims 12x speed for Java.

read more | digg story

My first blog spam... I guess I had it comming. Very annoying to have to stop trackbacks because of an idiot that tries to flood my blog with links to his sites. All his sites, contain randomised text and adsense adds.
It's easy to report them to adsense. You just need to visit their site and click to "Ads By Google". This will give you the option of reporting Adsense fraud. I wonder how quickly google reacts to fraud reports.