Malcolm Micallef's Blog » Awesome

Half life Fans read this…

Malcolm Micallef — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 05:47:38 +0000

My super secret sources have handed me so exciting news. At first they told me that Half life 2 Episode 3 was going to be announced next week. Unfortunately that fell through.

The rumors are now saying that Valve are going to be announcing a new source engine and so Half Life 3 is coming out. Half life 3 will be episode 3. These rumors coincide with the rumors that episode 3 was going to be too large to release as just an episode.

Watch the inter web guys for the announcement of HL3 next week.

Amazing video showing Google’s Chrome Speed

Malcolm Micallef — Wed, 05 May 2010 17:52:48 +0000

Google Chrome has many features which makes it my favourite browser to use. This video, which was created today, shows how fast the new Chrome browser really is.

Goodies for my latest project started arriving

Malcolm Micallef — Wed, 05 May 2010 17:10:52 +0000

Here are images of some presents I bought myself for my latest project. This time what I am creating is not just software but uses hardware. You can see a photo of the components which arrived so far.

5 points for anyone who can guess what these specific parts will accomplish. These points are not redeemable for anything useful. These points are used to gauge how intelligent I think you are

This is also my first official unboxing. Exciting stuff.

P.S. Ignore my foot in one of the photos.

June. The World Cup and now the return of …

Malcolm Micallef — Sat, 01 May 2010 09:48:23 +0000

The world cup happens once every 4 years. It’s a great event where friends meet up and support their favourite countries. At least until Malta reaches the world cup. It’s a time where you meet up in a converted car park to drink obscene amount of beers or go to the beach for a swim and find the closest restaurant with the greasiest food you can eat while watching the best players the world has ever seen.

This June is the return of another important TV event. The I.T. crowd season 4. This is the original UK episodes not the US or German versions. For those who don’t know what the I.T. crowd check out the youtube videos below.

For some strange reason YouTube seems to have disabled embedding the videos into the site. So I will just have to send you to YouTube. The links below will take you a few clips of the I.T. crowd. You don’t have to be a geek to understand the humour.

The I.T. Crowd – This is the Internet

The I.T. Crowd – Customer Support

The I.T. Crowd – Piracy

Top Tip: Freeze your hard drive to recover your data

Malcolm Micallef — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:15:32 +0000

Everyone should back up their data often but barely anyone does. So when your hard drive fails (and I guarantee you it will fail in the worse time possible) here is a top tip which seems to be true.

It seems that placing your hard drive in the freezer and then taking it out and plugging it into your PC. Will give you a window where the drive will function correctly and you can take advantage of this and recover the data you require.

I ended up reading a few stories about people who were putting their HD in the freezer to help fix it long enough to be able to recover their data. I guess that by doing this, some metal parts in the HD could contract, putting back in place defective parts, and making everything work again for a few minutes.

Now most of you are saying poppy cock (not sure if that’s how you spell it but I will try not to swear on the site) but it seems to be true. Remove your hard drive and place it in a zip lock bag to prevent condensation getting into the drive. I would place it in two zip lock bags to protect it further. After an hour or two remove the drive from its cold cold grave and plug it into your computer. If you can access the drive, hurry up and recover the data. This is only a temporary solution.

I think the longer you leave it the freezer the better because the drive would get cold. It seems that leaving it in overnight might you a working drive for a whole 20 minutes. So next time your drive fails and you need the data think of using this idea. Either way the drive is dead and there is nothing left to lose.

My Morning Session with a Shot Gun

Malcolm Micallef — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 16:10:42 +0000

This morning some friends and I went for a friendly round of clay pigeon shooting. We were all having fun competing against each other. Everything was going well, no one had shot himself in the foot and we all managed to hit quite a few clay pigeons.

Suddenly out of nowhere we saw planes coming over the horizon. After a while we heard very bad German accents coming from all around us. It was dead undead Nazi German Zombies !?!?!?!

The fight went well. We did take a few casualties but we managed to push the zombies back where we then got the QUAD DAMAGE power up with a rocket launcher and finished them off.

The battle was going so well there was time to take photos as we pushed back the beach head of the zombies.

What a day…

Everyone should try this sport at least once in their life. Next chance I have I will go again

Everyone should watch this video at the start of their day

Malcolm Micallef — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:36:13 +0000

The video above is a real eye opener. If everyone in the world had to wake up listening to this video I really believe the planet would be a better place to live in.

The speech is an excerpt from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. It talks about the photo of the same name “Pale Blue Dot” taken by Voyager I on February 14, 1990 just before it passed Saturn.

For those who can’t watch or listen to the video here is the speech going on during the video:

The spacecraft was a long way from home.

I thought it would be a good idea, just after Saturn, to have them take one last glance homeward. From Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would be just a point of light, a lonely pixel hardly distinguishable from the other points of light Voyager would see: nearby planets, far off suns. But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having.

It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos—but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance, and perhaps also our last for decades to come.

So, here they are: a mosaic of squares laid down on top of the planets in a background smattering of more distant stars. Because of the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world; but it’s just an accident of geometry and optics. There is no sign of humans in this picture: not our reworking of the Earth’s surface; not our machines; not ourselves. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalisms is nowhere in evidence. We are too small. On the scale of worlds, humans are inconsequential: a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.

Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings; thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines; every hunter and forager; every hero and coward; every creator and destroyer of civilizations; every king and peasant, every young couple in love; every mother and father; hopeful child; inventor and explorer; every teacher of morals; every corrupt politician; every supreme leader; every superstar; every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings; how eager they are to kill one another; how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity—in all this vastness—there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we’ve ever known.

The Pale Blue Dot.

YouTube Music Pirate 0.2.1

Malcolm Micallef — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:11:28 +0000

YouTube recently updated their site which caused some open source code to fail. I decided to quickly rewrite this code to make it more robust and hopefully work for a very long time.

For all the people who were using it before please delete that version and replace it with this version. The download link is below. Happy pirating and pillaging.

YouTubeMusicPirate

The Web’s latest Incarnation

Malcolm Micallef — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:30:31 +0000

Chat roulette is a new website started in November 2009 and since its launch has gained a lot of popularity. The website allows two random strangers to have webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website randomly begin an online chat (video and text) with another visitor. At any point, either user may leave the current chat by initiating another random connection.

This website is the brain child of a 17 year old high school Moscow student. The site receives about 500,000 visitors per day and there are about 35,000 people on Chat roulette at any given time. There has to be some normal people in that 35,000.

Celebrities claiming to have used Chat roulette include Kelly Osbourne, Joel Madden, Nicole Richie, and Perez Hilton. Unverified sightings of celebrities have been reported. These include Paris Hilton, Ashton Kutcher, Jonas Brothers, Jessica Alba and BJ Penn. So if you ever wanted to talk to a celebrity from the comforts of your own home you have a chance. I am still hoping on talking to Jessica Alba and Megan Fox.

There are people who use the service as intended and there have been some weird moments (some pictures below) but then there are the creative ones which used the website to bring joy and laugher to the masses. I am yet to meet the Piano Man or Kermit the Frog

If you are stuck inside on a weekend or just need someone to talk to for a bit try this service. You never know your new best friend or the love of your life might be one spin away.

Check out the videos and pictures below showcasing some of the memorable chat roulette moments.

Was that the last Computer/Console you will ever purchase?

Malcolm Micallef — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:50:35 +0000

Recently I have ran into a new technology being developed by Unlimited Detail which is such a great leap in technology it is hard to imagine. If this company has their way not only do they stand to make an unimaginable amount of money but they would have changed the game graphics forever.

Below are two videos which show case and explain the situation with computer graphics. In my opinion it’s a great demo and explanation of the pitfalls of polygons. If you have no understanding of how computer graphics work and you care how your games will look in the future you will still understand the video and get a good vision to the future.

I don’t think this technology can be over looked for long. Could you imagine a Nintendo Wii playing games which have better quality graphics than a PS3 or XBOX360. They solved the problem using search engine techniques. Humans have developed very powerful search techniques. The best example of these techniques would be Google. They are capable of going through a ridiculous amount of data in a very short time.

Only problem there is with this solution would be that if it had to be implemented on current technology it would mean that the console or gaming rig you just bought will be your last one. This obviously is not bad for us but bad for the hardware manufacturers who depend on the sales of these products.

The only thing that would improve the graphics of this system would be buying a monitor which can support a higher resolution (higher than FULL HD). Currently I believe that some hardware giant (might be Panasonic) released a television which supports 4000×2000 resolution. They developed techniques which receive full HD feeds and up scales them to the required size.