3D Realms shuts down – millions of Duke fans weep

Duke – Smug as always,
unaware of his fate.

Update 1: There’s great coverage on the history of Duke Nukem: Forever here, a fantastic read.
Update 2: An insider story about the life and death of Duke Nukem: Forever, check it out!

It felt almost unreal reading this article and realizing that Duke Nukem Forever might actually never be released. This holy grail of vaporware has been in the making for over twelve years, which in perspective is more than half my current life length! The game has gone through a number of 3D-engine changes and a cascade of other issues.

I was one of the people that always believed. I believed when the game first became notorious for its long release cycle back around the millennium shift. I even discussed DN: Forever with Per just a week ago or so, where he proclaimed that the game would never be released, following Broussard bold claims that DN:Forever would hit the shelves this very year.

Now it sadly looks like he was right.

To be perfectly honest I shouldn’t even be sad over this, I rarely play games nowadays, even though I have fond memories of the series, especially DN: Land Of The Babes which kept me company for what probably was an entire summer vacation. But this was one of those games – the ones that you just had to at least try because of the hype. If it was a great game or a disappointment came in second.

Take-Two still holds the rights to the Duke Nukem franchise, but has declined to make a comment on the situation. Who knows, maybe they’ll continue development and actually release it, although the chances are slim. But I’ll never stop believing… R.I.P for now, Duke.

The game back in 2001, when it looked almost finished, and still cool by todays standards according to me.

In other news…

Rawr!

I’ve finally started to teach myself Apache Tomcat – a fascinating (albeit sometimes confusing)  implementation of Java for the web. If you’re a Java programmer and wish to develop dynamic applications for the web, this is where to start!

A trip to London

Greetings everyone! As promised, here are my notes on the journey to London! Most of these were scribbled down on the plane home.

The culture
Under this section I’ll mention some of the sights and attractions visited and give my personal take on them. After writing all of them I notice a generally negative tone, but it isn’t really my intention. I liked most of what I saw… Maybe I just like to complain. (My friends will probably agree on that one. xD)

– The Phantom of The Opera

I didn’t really know what to expect as I walked into the theatre for this performance. I’ve seen my fair share of musicals, and sometimes I’ve been really blown away. I remember seeing a Swedish rendition of “The Producers” and really liking it. Sadly, I wasn’t as amazed about The Phantom Of The Opera. The music was sort of repetitive, we were treated to half a dozen renditions of the signature track and another half dozen of “Angel Of Music” with other songs in the intermissions between the two giants. The lyrics were sometimes pretty laughable (Not a compliment!) and any “funny lines” seemed more likely to be a mistake than an actual attempt at comedy by Mr. Webber. I can’t complain about the story though. It was interesting, beautiful and captivating. All and all, I was satisfied with the show.

– The Salvador Dali Exhibition

A famous portrait of the master.

I’ve seen a few paintings by this Spanish prodigy, but it was great to see some of his lesser famous works. Over 500 of his works are available for viewing, everything from giant paintings to quick sketches. All and all, a fantastic man, who had an extremely wacky imagination. (Compliment!)

– The Science Museum

The two great arts… or something.

Now this is my cup of tea. A great museum (which incredibly enough was free with the exclusion of a couple special exhibitions) and an IMAX theatre under the same roof. The 3D technology used wasn’t the red-blue-based Anaglyph type, but rather some sort of polarization-based technology (although still using glasses) which was better, but still not perfect. The high-point was definitely the Computer Science exhibition, which showed a lot of old-age computer memorabilia. (Although I’d love to have an ERNIE-I in the closet connected to a server for use as a dice over 3G!)

Who says you can’t find practical uses for old computer today?

– The Kensington Palace

That’s got to be a pain to wear! But talk about child-bearing hips.

A look at the clothing of the royal family throughout the ages. Not really my kind of thing, although with the extreme care, talent and creativiy that goes in to creating these fantastic garments is really something to admire.

– Madame Tussauds

Overheard in the waiting queue:
“- Who’s that?
– Oh, that’s Angelina Jolie and MacGyver.”

I was excited to visit Madame Tussauds because of the extreme care and talent that goes into making one of these dolls. After seeing a few, the rest of the museum wasn’t as spectacular, although the Chamber Of Horrors cheered me up a bit!

PS. The dolls were harder than I had imagined. DS.

Observations

Look at me, daddy!

I really must say that England as a country was quite fantastic. I noticed an incredible mix of nationalities and races. It really is a multi-cultural country. Women and men were dressed handsomely and seemed to be generally very patriotic of their country and the royal family. The drug culture seemed a bit more relaxed than in Sweden, with smoke shops selling “Smoke blends” and bongs in all colors, but it’s actually pretty much as restricted as in Sweden – and so the tolerability amongst the population must be higher. Onto something a bit different, the Brits really love their CCTV – it felt like you couldn’t walk much more than a a few dozen feets between the signs warning you that you are constantly being monitored. A quick look at Wikipedia shows that there is an estimated 4,200.000 cameras in use throughout the kingdom. Cameras were everywhere – I wouldn’t be surprised if I was registered on several hundred of them throughout my four-day visit.

Oh yes, and here’s a British Big Mac.

Verdict: Nice, reminds me of the Swedish version.

In pictures
Go ahead and look through the gallery below!

In other news…

His awesomeness is so thick, you can almost
cut through it with a butter knife.

These past few weeks I’ve been indulging myself in the post-apocalyptic 2003 CBS show Jericho. Portraying a small town at the heart of the United States in the aftermath of a series of nuclear explosions. The show was initially cancelled after its first season but resurrected after a petition for a seven-episode second minis-season, after which it was… yeah, you guessed it – cancelled again. A real shame according to me. To be completely fair, the show is very corny – sometimes it feels like you could guess large parts of the dialogue, but despite its flaws, it somehow managed to go beyond them and the show really works. In fact, it works really well, although it might just be my love for dystopian futures at play. Definitely a recommended watch!

When I grow up, I want to be a search engine!

To the outside world, the Majestic12 website doesn’t look like much – it hardly even resembles a search engine.  But behind that plain-looking facade, Majestic12 is a living, breathing organism with thousands of participating computers who crawl the web for content and links . Majestic12 users donate their bandwidth to the project, and I’m trying to do my part. The actual search engine of the project is still after almost four years of crawling pretty much useless, and any of the larger search engines do a far better job, but the concept is intriguing and the thought is good. Another interesting idea is that you can create your own search algorithm, providing you are handy enough! All that is needed is to register on the search engine subsite and start tinkering with the priorities that you feel are important in search results.

I’ve got the power! Now if I just edit a random memory location anndd…

Of course, with putting the trust in the end users comes great responsibility – a user might have had his DNS records hijacked, rerouting sites incorrectly and possibly lowering the ranking of benevolent sites while improving that of malicious ones – or he might be a ill-natured hacker himself, possibly trying to employ SEO for his own or a contractors site,  requiring double- and triple-checking by independent other users of the project, as suggested in this forum post, which increases the load on web servers as each page has to be checked multiple times to ensure correctness. This hasn’t seemed to be a problem thus far, but as the search engine grows I hope that the programmers behind this extremely ambitious project are prepared for counter-measures. All I can do for now is to urge you to start your own node and help with this project. The crawling software runs under Windows, OSX and Linux.

Majestic12 is a great alternative to other causes like SETI@Home and it might very well be the future of search engines.

Majestic 12? That sounds familiar!
You weren’t the only one to think that! Majestic 12 is one of the most popular conspiracy theories of all times and is thought to be a secret committee consisting of scientists and government officials gathered by president Truman after the supposed UFO Crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. There is a huge amount of information on the topic, and I haven’t even had time to skim the surface, but it seems like a fascinating read.

In other news…

The b(a/ea)stard in action

Ever since Mattias showed me Bastard Tetris, he has (possibly) inadvertently killed a small part of my soul. This seemingly innocent Tetris clone uses a custom-built algorithm that instead of randomizing the tetrominos you get, tries to give you the worst piece computationally possible. It even mocks you by showing which piece it will absolutely not give you under any circumstance. Oh the pain. My current record after a few infuriating games is 250 points, which translates to a measly five cleared lines. This game should be available to all *NIX and Linux distributions, and is called bastet in packet managers around the planet. For anyone else who wishes to play this I found a clone made in flash, although the algorithm seemed nicer as I managed to clear six lines on my first attempt.

High on validation

The thin… black line?

I think I’ve found my drug of choice. It’s neither alcohol nor tobacco, and probably not whatelse you can guess – it’s W3’s (X)HTML validation engine. Pressing that big button nervously, awaiting the  validation server to fetch ones page, perform its ruthless tests and spit out either that satisfying green glow, releasing endorfins at light-speed into your system, or being faced with that that ominous red banner that makes your skin creep like a bad trip (I would assume.)

Ah, to be alive!

PS. I think the cwalken twitter might be influencing me a bit too much for my own good. DS.

In other news…

Covers for Junior and The Understanding, respectively

The new Röyksopp album, Junior –  is good. Actually, it’s very good. Not really “The Understanding”-good and far more poppy, but I think that might be because “The Understanding” will always hold a special meaning in my life. Somehow Junior reminds me of Pocket Symphony, which is something very positive – even with all the hype I thought Pocket Symphony was very solid. I hope Röyksopps pays their neighboring country a visit on their upcoming tour.

Christopher Walkens twitter feed

The man, the myth, the legend.

A few days ago I stumbled upon Christopher Walkens twitter feed on Digg, and now I truly feel ashamed to say that I have never seen a movie starring him. This guy is simply amazing – his feed always cheers me up. A few genius excerpts are wonderful tweets such as:

“An escalator in Grand Central Station is out-of-service. I stood on it for a minute or two in the name of subtle irony. No-one else did.”

…and my definitive favourite so far…

“There are many people here now. More than before. It seems undignified to talk about that though so I won’t. Welcome, I think.”

Combine those quotes with fun trivia such as the fact that he was a lion tamer at the age of fifteen and the following video…

…and you’ve pretty much created the most awesome man alive.
(Music video for Fatboy Slim – Weapon of Choice)

But wait, I’m not done yet.

There.
Done.

Now I’m just going to go work on some plan (scheme?) to somehow become this awesome in the future.