Shadows In Motion

a deep thoughts & spiritual musings Blog

It’s probably safe to say that most of us are aware of the NGE that has essentially destroyed Star Wars Galaxies. There has been a lot of talk on gaming sites about how drastically the population on this MMORPG’s servers have dwindled. Many have speculated that server pops were merely in the hundreds.

Now it seems as though that speculation was accurate.

It turns out that the SWG servers sends the population numbers of each server to the game client when a person logs in. This is used by the client to determine if the server has a heavy, medium, or light load, which is the information presented to the player. A curious gamer ran a packet sniffer on his computer and checked the information that it logged to determine the number of players currently logged into Star Wars Galaxies.

This information was taken on a Friday evening:

Read the rest of this entry »

The good news is that this blog has been accepted into the beta of the Yahoo! Publishing Network. The bad news is that I was going to try to use the ads only within the RSS feed and leave them off of the blog for now, but I can’t. It’s (apparently) a requirement to run them on the accepted site itself.

Awhile back I attempted to switch to a donation drive rather than running advertisements. My hope was that people’s general dislike of ads would prompt the dropping of a buck here and there and as a result there would be no need to run any ads. I wasn’t expecting anything big, just a little something now and then. This was not working out at all. The click throughs on the donation link were almost exclusively from web bots.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some scientists in Singapore have created a prototype washing machine that cleans clothes without using any water. Though it may seem too good to be true it does appear to be real. A tool like this would be invaluable in the face of dwindling water supplies and large droughts.

Of course, it would feel very strange to wear clothes that haven’t been ran through a traditional water machine.

I also wonder if clothing that becomes particularly dirty, like something that’s worn on a construction job, would actually get cleaned by a machine like this. Still, even if not, the typical day-to-day wash would certainly be enough for most of us.

Anyway, I very much welcome this development.

Links for this article:

• Read the news article here
• The fark post where I originally learned of this - note: betware the egos and flame wars that are fark.com posts

~Mysk

Just about everyone enjoys getting a little something back for the time that they spend writing. A lot of people like to deny that but you’ll still find ads on their blog. Personally, I’ve always been open about trying to get “pizza money” from the blog; my ambitions may be small, but I think that they’re realistic.

Problem is, no one likes ads all that much. I don’t, and I’ve ran them.

So I’m taking another approach. Ads will be removed from this blog until Feburary 21^st. No ads will be added to posts and none will be ran as banners or the like. Existing advertisements have been turned off where possible. In their place are simple links in the side menu to the Amazon Honor System and PayPal.

Now, you certainly don’t have to toss anything my way. I’m not saying that I produce riveting content. In fact, I feel a bit odd displaying these donation links. However, I would like to see if it’s possible to gain “pizza money” (and, of course, cover the minor hosting costs) through a method other than advertising.

So is it more respectful to use ads, or is this a more respectful approach? You get to be the judge of that. If this works out then I’ll be keeping the donation links and will not be putting the ads back up.

~Mysk

I just noticed an article over on Slashdot about Google’s stock taking a hit because of their resistance to the government’s attempt to pry into their data.

Despite my earlier bash on Google I obviously think that they’re doing the right thing in resisting the government’s demands. This government and their laws are becoming far too over reaching and they have the attitude that they can get away with literally anything. Perhaps they can, and that’s sad in so many different ways.

Google has a point here. They’re not a part of this legal case. This government is wanting information to push their already defeated law and they’re trying to force others to give them information to support their cause. As I understand it, Google is not even named in the original lawsuit, they just have information that may be convenient for the government’s legal arguments. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is ironic on so many levels, and even gets a tiny bit political.

First the snippit:

The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google Inc. to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases.

The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.

If you read the full article then you’ll see that the government is trying to defend the constitutionality of this old law that, mind you, was originally tossed out. How are they trying to do this? By invading privacy! It almost makes me want to laugh.

So here we have an old law that was ruled as being unconstitutional that’s still trying to be pushed and defended by a bunch of people who are willing to disregard everyone’s privacy in order to get their law passed.

Yeah, I think this alone speaks volumes about their case, and the people behind it.

This behavior doesn’t surprise me one bit with this administration, though. The only saving grace that this country (the U.S.) has remaining is that this is the last term for the Bush administration.

Links for this post:

• MercuryNews.com Article About Google
• The Digg.com Thread About This Subject

~Mysk

Technorati Tags: Google, Privacy, Law, Feds, Bush

Shadows In Motion earned its name. I never could remain focused on a single subject, and I’ve reached the point again where I am asking myself what my blog brings to the table.

As I mentioned on my personal blog I firmly believe that a blog needs to produce some sort of unique content. It makes no sense and adds no value, as far as I’m concerned, to simply regurgitate what has already been mentioned on major news web sites. There is the occasional exception for important news, of course, but if you’re not providing a unique service or sharing unique information then why does your blog exist?

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night was an eventful night for torrent sites.  GoDaddy, it appears, decided to pull the plug on websites that assist torrent searches, such as MyBitTorrent.com.  Not only did they change the DNS information and lock the owners out of their accounts, they also demanded a payment of $50 USD before they would be allowed to access their accounts again to transfer their domain to a different registrar.

No warning was given to the owners of the domains prior to changing the DNS and locking them out of their accounts.

This event was covered by Digg.com and M-ook.com and spread to blogs, causing public pressure to quickly build against GoDaddy.  Within about two hours, the public pressure caused GoDaddy to backtrack, reinstate the DNS of the affected sites, and they’re now giving the domain owners the chance to switch registrars without first paying the $50 extortion fee.

Obviously, these events bother me a great deal.  We all know that if it wasn’t for the public pressure put against GoDaddy these sites would still be locked out. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve installed the FeedBurner plugin from OrderedList but I’m having some problems with it.  This post is to serve as a test for the plugin to see if it is working correctly.  If so, then I will post how I fixed its behavior.

Currently it is not redirecting /feed/ to my FeedBurner account.  I have deleted a couple of lines from the .htaccess file and if everything’s now working then this post should appear in FeedBurner.  So, testing 123!

…and good morning / afternoon / evening all.

Links for this post:

• Ordered List’s FeedBurner Plugin
• FeedBurner

~Mysk

As I have mentioned before on Shadows In Motion, another one of my strong interests is the “strange and the weird”.  Unexplained phenomenon has always intrigued me a great deal and it’s safe to say that I have an interest in those subjects that is equal to my interest in computers and technology.  SIM started out as a place for me to share those kind of stories and experiences.

I’m going to break my blog’s current mold to post about this.  All things considered, I don’t see where I can avoid doing so. Read the rest of this entry »