Spell Checking Arrrgg

June 26th, 2005

Spell Checker
The past couple of days I’ve been looking for a decent spell checker for WordPress. Every spell checker I find uses the PHP Pspell() function which requires the Aspell librarys installed on your server… Well, since my hosting provider doesn’t allow compiling I’m unable to install the libs required for this very useful feature.

Does anyone know of a decent spell checker that doesn’t make use of PSpell() ?

Microsoft On L33tSpeak

June 24th, 2005

l33tSpeakThis is just hillarious. Microsoft has crafted a website for parents to address child safety: “Understand how your kids communicate online to help protect them”. I can just see lil johnny coming home from school and telling mom that he pwns her and she has no ski11Z haha. I’ve included some of the more funny bits below:

Key points for interpreting leetspeek

Numbers are often used as letters.
The term “leet” could be written as “1337,” with “1″ replacing the
letter L, “3″ posing as a backwards letter E, and “7″ resembling the
letter T. Others include “8″ replacing the letter B, “9″ used as a G,
“0″ (zero) in lieu of O, and so on.

Non-alphabet characters can be used to replace the letters they resemble.
For example, “5″ or even “$” can replace the letter S. Applying this
style, the word “leetspeek” can be written as “133t5p33k” or even
“!337$p34k,” with “4″ replacing the letter A.

Letters can be substituted for other letters that may sound alike.
Using “Z” for a final letter S, and “X” for words ending in the letters
C or K is common. For example, leetspeekers might refer to their
computer “5×1llz” (skills).

Rules of grammar are rarely obeyed.

Some leetspeekers will capitalize every letter except for vowels (LiKe
THiS) and otherwise reject conventional English style and grammar, or
drop vowels from words (such as converting very to “vry”).

Mistakes are often left uncorrected. Common typing misspellings (typos) such as “teh” instead of the are left uncorrected or sometimes adopted to replace the correct spelling.

Non-alphanumeric characters may be combined to form letters.
For example, using slashes to create “/\/\” can substitute for the
letter M, and two pipes combined with a hyphen to form “|-|” is often
used in place of the letter H. Thus, the word ham could be written as “|-|4/\/\.”

The suffix “0rz” is often appended to words for emphasis or to make them plural. For example, “h4xx0rz,” “sk1llz0rz,” and “pwnz0rz,” are plural or emphasized versions (or both) of hacks, skills, and owns.

Beyond Unreal..

June 23rd, 2005

Unreal Engine 3

David Breyer was asking me the other day about the new Unreal Engine 3. For those who don’t know, Epic Games, developers of the Unreal series, gave a demonstration of their Unreal 3 game engine at the past E3 convention in LA earlier this year. The new updated engine will be used in their new game Unreal 2007 due out probably late 2009….

A guy on IRC had posted some amazing looking screenshots that looked, well.. Unreal! Searching through my history, I managed to find them:

Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
Screenshot 4
Screenshot 5
E3 trailer

Oh, and if you have the skillz, Epic is now hiring.

USB Swiss Army Knife

June 23rd, 2005

USB Swiss Army KnifeThis makes complete sense. Since the form-factor of a USB drive is about the same size as a pocket knife and you’re going to be carrying around the USB drive in your pocket anyways, may as well combine the two.

Buy it here

SWISSMEMORY TM USB Victorinox
NEW: available with capacities up to 1GB!

It is the first time that an original Swiss Army Knife has been equipped with a USB Memory. It comes new also in a retroALOX style. The SWISSMEMORY TM USB Victorinox is a trendy accessory, a perfect gift and business tool. The small all-rounder integrates numerous useful tools and is available in two versions: one with a stainless steel knife, scissors, a file and a screw driver and the other without these tools, to carry when travelling on planes. Both versions include a pressurized pen and a red LED. The new 1GB Version includes a white LED.
The SWISSMEMORY TM USB Victorinox is available with a memory capacity of 64, 128, 256, 512MB or 1GB.
It is also possible to detach the USB part, a patented technology.

Some nVIDIA 7800 Specs

June 23rd, 2005
GeForce 7800 GTX Technical Specs
8 vertex shading units
24 pixel pipelines
Core clock/ memory clock: 430 MHz/600 MHz with support for overclocking
128 bit floating point through the entire pipeline
302 million transistors
256-bit GDDR3 memory architecture
PCI Express x16 support
Windows XP, 2000, ME, 9x, Mac OS X, Linux support
Technologies In Use
SLI multiple card support
Direct X 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 support
OpenGL 2.0 support
High dynamic range (HDR) rendering
CineFX 4.0 engine
Intellisample 4.0 support for anti-aliasing and no jagged edges
PureVideo improved HDTV support
Unified driver and compiler architecture across Nvidia product lines

Not Your Average Robot

June 22nd, 2005

Gun Toting Bots

I was telling Steve Doss about how cool Battlefield 2 is and how he should run out today and get it. His response was a link to this “gun toting bot” and a question “is THIS in your game????”

Read all about it here

Sell That nVIDIA 6800!

June 22nd, 2005

Nvidia Last night, nVIDIA held its launch event for the new GeForce 7xxx series graphics chips. Tim Sweeney (Founder of Epic games) was on hand to show a demo of the Unreal engine running on the new nVIDIA GPU chipset. Previous demos were run at 640×480, while the demo shown last night was running at 1280×1024 quite smoothly!!!! NUTS. On a side note, Sweeney perdicts that the G70 Nvidia Geforce 7800 GTX is actually going to end up better than ATI’s upcoming R520….

Google Maps Tricks

June 21st, 2005

Google Maps

I was over gandering over at Philippe Niquilles’ website reading over some of his great Google Maps discoveries:

It’s amazing what people do (or google itself :) ) with google maps. For example add google maps to your website with this workaround (or this) or view Yahoo Traffic data on google maps.
I’m really looking forwad to 3d google maps. That seems to cool!

And last but not least yet another google maps “cool scenes” site

Microsoft AntiVirus/SpyWare

June 21st, 2005

OneCare So I guess the rumors were true. Microsoft is suiting up to begin testing of their new antivirus offering they are now calling “One Care Live“.

OneCare is set to combine the anti-spyware software that Microsoft has already been publicly beta testing along with antivirus and firewall software. Microsoft has not announced pricing for OneCare yet but one can guess it will be subscription based like their competitors and will no doubt come bundled in Longhorn.

News Of The Wierd

June 21st, 2005

Okay, so I am on IRC last night and a couple of dimwits in #xbox post a couple of URLs which at first glance appearto be fake.. The scary thing is, they’re not.

What’s this world coming to…

Man eats dead wife, dies choking
Newcastle - Two KwaZulu-Natal girls have been left traumatised after seeing their father eat the flesh off their dead mother’s face on Friday morning, said police.
More..


Charges Against Teen Upgraded After Dog He Allegedly Raped Dies
SPARTANBURG, SOUTH CAROLINA (FOX Carolina News) - A Campobello teen is accused of raping one neighbor’s dog and another neighbor’s two little girls. Now the dog has died and charges against the teen have been upgraded.

Raped Dog

More..