The Junkyard

The Blender Institute has just released it's fourth movie: Tears of Steel. The movie is set in a futuristic Amsterdam where robots try to destroy the world, a small team of warriors and scientists found refuge in the Oude Kerk desperately looking for the right way to save the world.

Unlike the previous movies this one is not an animation, yet it's been filmed in the real world and Blender is used to insert the robots, some features and lots of decoration using a newly developed VFX pipeline.

Watch the movie on the website or YouTube. Or download the torrent.

Last month SP2D got released. SP2D is a classic platformer using the unreal 1 engine. You can use the standard UT weapons to kill your enemy In a 2d environment this means the biorifle is much more powerfull and suiciding with the ripper is even easier then in a normal way. A special way of killing monsters is by jumping on their heads.

The initial release contains a mission of 10 maps as well as instructions to build new maps. Despite a few bugs in the maps (a few doors placed suboptimal) and translocator it all seems to work well.

Download is available here

Although it's being worked on for a while now the latest project of the Blender Foundation: Mango kicks off now with a small testing film: Quit Blender. Rather then the previous project which featured completely animated films this project will produce a short science fiction movie set and filmed in Amsterdam with the VFX made by blender.

The kickoff movie can be watched here.

This week Unigine released it's so called Naval Strategy Game Oil Rush. The game is about capturing and defending different types of platforms which produce oil or units and can be used as hubs to launch new attacks. As you need these platforms to build units and defenses the game focuses on quick action and defense.

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Destionation Unreal now hosts a new Coop server besides it's array of MH servers. The server is set up by iDeFiX and currently hosts the Operation NaPali Campaign.

Coop is a gametype derived from the original unreal series. You (and some friends) explore a strange and often hostile world on a story based quest. Compared to other gametypes the speed of these games is much lower, the maps look much better and fights are sparce but well thought of.

If you like the old unreal, coop or just want to check out some new environments you can check out the server on 85.14.203.180:5555

Currently I'm developing my own webspider, the primary use is to index sites I want to follow but that don't offer RSS feeds. It's currently in a simple state where it downloads a page and extract the links. Yet for retrieving the page in a nice way and parsing the contexts I use a few modules I'd like to share.

To retrieve the pages I use LWP::UserAgent and HTTP::Request. I aim the webspider to be nice so I check the robots.txt with WWW::RobotRules and the robot meta tags with HTML::TokeParser.

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I think almost everybody is aware these days that major companies or websites like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are creating profiles of their costumers in order to show targeted adds. I don't know if that's a bad thing, for example if someone sends you a wish list you can just pick up the item from the advertisements next to the list.

Another way of advertisement is sending/posting plain spam, and since I removed the recaptcha and changed to commitcontrol on my weblog I get to see all spam messages that are posted, besides that I also check my filtered emails so I know what I'm spammed about. The email, and now the spam comments made me wonder, is there something like targeted spam?

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As development on my own webspider continues and now reached a stage where the basics seem to be working well and it's ready for a larger implementation it is time to put up some basic information about it. I will write about the technology later, this article is intended for administrators who find the user-agent in their logs and are wondering about it.

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I just released NP_LatestComments v1.85 which is a modification of the mod previously build or modified by anand, moraes, admun, e-Musty, PiyoPiyoNaku. This plugin for Nucleus CMS shows the latest comments for all or just one blog.

I added support for the NP_BBCode plugin, different odd/even comments and fixed a bug in breaking comments by word.

For more information about using the plugin and downloads see the wiki page.

I hope people will find these changes useful, comments can be left below (if I fixed that) or in the forum thread.

In februari's "Best Waves" I shortly wrote about the search engine DuckDuckGo. I've been using it on and off since and the search engine has been developed and improved ever since. Some improvements are really welcome for my normal (programming) searches.

The way it handles searches and prints information is quite different from the way Google (tries) to do it. Not only does it claim not to track your searches, it also tries to answer your question itself rather then linking to a page. There are a couple of really interesting additions that I'd like to write about.

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