Following up Guy Kawasaki‘s advice in Reality Check (great book, but ‘The Art of the Start‘ is still his masterpiece) I am claiming this blog on Technorati (claim code: i7zdtsfc9j). If you are down to your last $ 20.02, spend it on his fantastic book called ‘The Art of the Start’. If you are down to your last $ 39.99, spend it on ‘Four steps to the Epiphany‘, or so I’m told as my copy is still on back-order…

In my last post I reminisced about ‘The Secret of Monkey Island‘, a game from the early nineties. Since then I lot has changed. Indeed. the graphics got a lot better, but a lot of people are saying that mainly because of the incredible focus shift to graphics the fun and gameplay qualities of recent games have been lacking behind. Well, I would like to share two great game-related videos with you that show off just how ingenious and big games have become.

The Beatles: Rock Band

What’s so impressive about this game? First of all: the licensing. It’s not often that you see a game based (or rather dedicated) to such a huge popular influence as The Beatles. Even after all those years, The Beatles are still at it in this shiny new form. Secondly, this is probably the best game intro movie I have ever seen.

Milo Project

What’s so impressive about this game? You really should see for yourself If this is the future, I rejoice it in all glory because this truly removes the limits between the virtual and the real world. I also fear it. If people can get addicted to fantasy games like World of Warcraft and totally immerse in its world, what about games like these? I am sure lots of lonely teenagers will lose track of the first and the second world. But hey, it sure looks incredibly cool!

Way back in 1990 Lucasfilm Games released an incredible game called ‘The Secret of Monkey Island‘. This very video game is often hailed as the first family-accessible adventure game. I remember being frustrated by being unable to understand this game when I was about 8 years old, as my English reading skills were very limited.

Although the game sprung many a sequel, it was never as great as the original first episode. So of course I had to install ScummVM and run the original (DOS) game when I bought my first Linux PDA (Sharp Zaurus Z-5500, extremely buggy but oh so cool) way back in 2002. And I did the same last year when I acquired my Nokia E-71 smartphone. Somehow, this game keeps it fun-factor, even after finishing it ten times (in 15 years).

The saga continues!

Most of the fans of the series thought the franchise had died after ‘Escape from Monkey Island’, the fourth installment of the series. However, this year the surprising news was released that Telltale Games had acquired the Monkey Island license from Lucasfilm Games and announced a new Monkey Island game called ‘Tales of Monkey Island‘, a whole new sequel to be released in 5 episodes. On top of that great news LucasArts  announced a remake of the original game, ‘The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition‘!

I bought episode 1 of ‘Tales of Monkey Island’ as WiiWare and played it a bit. Apart from the bad graphics, Telltale Games actually did a good job capturing the whole Monkey Island feeling. It’s not bad, but couldn’t catch my attention as the first game in the series did (which had rather great graphics for the time actually). Much rather I would had played the remake of ‘The Secret of Monkey Island’ but that game was only released for Windows, XBOX and iPhone (none of these platforms I own myself).

Guybrush Threepwood’s Crysis

Okay, that’s quite a lame pun. But yesterday (through Spectives.com!), I found another great Monkey Island initiative: a demo of LeChuck’s Revenge’s Tri-Island Area in Crysis’s Cryengine! Check out this impressive video and the project page with before and after screenshots of the environment of the game. I don’t know what I like more, this demo or this Monkey Island comic

This week ilse media launched its latest start-up concept: Spectives.com. Spectives.com was founded by Rutger van Waveren and soon thereafter bought by my alma mater in the internet world (I worked at ilse media back in 2003). ilse media, once famous as the company behind the first Dutch search engine ilse.nl, is one of the biggest internet companies in The Netherlands. Of course Google won the search engine wars, but ilse media is still a big player in the market with websites like nu.nl and startpagina.nl. Since then ilse media has launched a lot of different concepts but none of them have grown to be as successful as the fore-mentioned sites. Let’s hope that Spectives.com can change this.

Tweeps could get access to the beta preview by sending a DM to @spectives. After I got the general login credentials I was able to peak around in this new concept. Oh wait, let me first explain the concept! It’s rather simple (as most successful concepts, so they are on the right track): Spectives.com is a visual feed reader. Whereas other (RSS-) feed readers focus on the headlines, Spectives.com focuses on the visuals in the feed. A picture says more than a thousand words, so their aim is right.

Well, time for a wrap-up of my first beta preview. On the high note: the people behind Spectives.com managed to create a website which combines visuals from all different sources, yet deliver it in a non-overwhelming way. The problem with most visual-rich websites is the enormous clutter and user-unfriendliness that comes with it. This problem is addressed well by the easy-for-the-eye design they opted for. Another plus: being one of the first people to access the new concept, I was able to register an account and collection with only my first name

The site is extremely simple and within 30 seconds you understand the concept and are happily adding collections to your follow stream. The next step: adding your own feeds. This is where it gets messy. I started the webcomics collection, but had a hard time to find webcomic feeds that actually shared their comics in a feed. Of course, XKCD.com happily shared the comic in its atom feed, but I wasn’t successful in finding other well-known webcomic feeds. That’s the problem with launching an innovative idea like this one: if all feed readers are visually impaired, why serve visuals in your feed? Hopefully this will change as Spectives.com gets more populair.

If you would like to participate in the beta test as well, try DM’ing @spectives and beg for an invite. And share your feedback with the team. It’s a beta after all.

Yesterday I wrote about the avatar finder I was building. I posted a comment to the blog of the Email Standards Project asking for avatars. digirati replied and send me their avatar, but unfortunately they weren’t able to locate themselves in the mosaic. So now I had the source image of an avatar which was quite likely to be included (as digirati was one of the first 1,000 people to tweet their support) but still no (edited?) tile. Luckily, digirati’s avatar had quite a lot of pixels of the same color (R = 34, G = 34, B = 34), so I decided to pixel scan all tiles I had separated from the mosaic earlier and save them to a database.

Here’s digirati’s avatar:

And here’s the code:

$start = $argv[1];
$loop = 15;
for ($i = $start; $i < ($start+$loop); $i++) {
    // Create resource from image
    $image = @imagecreatefrompng('tiles/tile_' . $i . '.png');

    $width = imagesx($image);
    $height = imagesy($image);

    // Loop through all pixels
    for ($y = 0; $y < $height; $y++) {
        for ($x = 0; $x < $width; $x++) {             // Extract RGBA values from pixel             $rgba = imagecolorat($image, $x, $y);             $r = ($rgba >> 16) & 0xFF;
            $g = ($rgba >>  & 0xFF;
            $b = $rgba & 0xFF;
            $alpha = ($rgba & 0x7F000000) >> 24;

            // Save pixel RGBA values to database
            $query = sprintf("INSERT INTO gd_pixels (tile, x, y, r, g, b, alpha) VALUES (%d, %d, %d, %d, %d, %d, %d)", mysql_real_escape_string($i), mysql_real_escape_string($x), mysql_real_escape_string($y), mysql_real_escape_string($r), mysql_real_escape_string($g), mysql_real_escape_string($b), mysql_real_escape_string($alpha));
            $db-> query($query);
        }
    }
}

Because I already had separate tiles I didn’t have to scan the whole image at once but could just scan tile for tile. I created a little bash script which called the PHP script with a $start argument. This argument contained the first tile to process, after which the PHP script processed 15 tiles before finishing execution after which the next 15 tiles would be processed. My MacBook pixel scanned about 4 tiles per second, so after about 75 minutes all tiles were scanned. Now that I have a gd_pixel table weighing just over 30 million rows it’s time to search for digirati’s avatar.

The following query yielded quite some results:

SELECT tile,COUNT(*) AS pixel_count FROM gd_pixels WHERE (r = 34 AND g = 34 AND b = 34) GROUP BY tile ORDER BY pixel_count DESC;

But unfortunately, not the right one. So I tried to broaden the search area by looking for RGB values between 30 and 38. The pixel colors could have changed due to JPG compression or editing by the mosaic creators of course.

SELECT tile,COUNT(*) AS pixel_count FROM gd_pixels WHERE ((r > 30 AND r < 38) AND (g > 30 AND g < 38) AND (b > 30 AND b < 38)) GROUP BY tile ORDER BY pixel_count DESC;

Still no dice Broadening the search even more than this would yield to much irrelevant results. So now there are three options:

1. I’m doing something wrong;
2. through editing the pixel colors changed so much that it would be very hard to look up any specific avatar at all;
3. or digirati is not in the mosaic at all.

Unfortunately, now I’m back at square 1. So if you happen to found yourself in the mosaic, please let me know

As I wrote earlier, the fantastic FixOutlook.org initiative created an enormous mosaic of all supporter’s avatars. Because it’s quite a lot of work to find your own avatar between 18,040 avatars I decided to give it a try using PHP and GD.

First I tried to do it by pixel scanning, using GD’s imagecolorat() function. By looping over every pixel (there are 30,992,064 in the image) and saving its RGB values to a MySQL database we create a table describing every pixel. By feeding a tile to the same pixel scanning functions we can look the pixels of that tile up in the table and have the coordinates of the tile returned. Nice solutions, but an enormous resource hog.

My colleague Andries suggested a different method: clipping the image in separate tiles and then calculating the MD5 hash of the image. We then do the same for the needle tile and look for a collision. This should be much faster but only works when the original tiles are not edited when put in the mosaic. I know that the avatars are resized from the original 73×73 pixels to 48×36 pixels, but I don’t know whether any other filters are applied. My own avatar is actually not in the mosaic (I can tell that with certainty because the mosaic was already high and dry upon the Redmond wall when I tweeted my support) and I don’t know anyone who is included. So if you happen to be in the picture and still have the original Twitter avatar, please leave a comment. I fired off an e-mail to The E-mail Standards Project asking them whether any filters were applied during the creation of the mosaic.

Another idea (by my colleague Nils) would be to use ImageMagick’s compare function which shows the differences between two images. Using this method has the advantage that the original avatar may be edited, since it can return the actual difference between the needle and the haystack. But first I need a source avatar… I’ll keep you updated!

For those who are interested in the code which did the clipping, here it is. It only took 16.2656 seconds to complete the tiling of the full mosaic on my Macbook Pro. Quite impressive! I had to increase the memory limit in my php.ini file though. After clipping is completed you’ll have 18,040 avatars sitting in the tiles/ directory which can be read by PHP’s md5_file() function.

// Create image resource (from mosaic file)
$image = imagecreatefrompng('fixoutlook-mosaic.png');

$i = 0;
for ($x = 0; $x < $width; $x = $x + 48) {

    for ($y = 0; $y < $height; $y = $y + 36) {

        // Create resource for new tile
        $dest = imagecreatetruecolor(48, 36);

        // Copy tile from mosaic
        imagecopy($dest, $image, 0, 0, $x, $y, 48, 36);

        // Save tile
        imagepng($dest, 'tiles/tile_' . $i . '.png', 0);

        // Remove tile from memory
        imagedestroy($dest);

        $i++;
    }
}

PS: This great syntax highlighting is done using the Syntax Highlighter WordPress plugin.

The last few months The E-mail Standards Projects has been actively campaigning against Microsoft’s decision to use the Word render engine in its new Outlook version. This impacts E-mark and other companies involved in e-mail marketing due to the fact that this disables the ability to send rich designed mailings because of very limited HTML support. To make a fist against MS Office The E-mail Standards Projects launched the FixOutlook.org initiative. By tweeting your support your Twitter avatar is added to the Wall of Fame at FixOutlook. After gathering the support of 25.000 fellow protesters The E-mail Standards Projects created a enormous mosaic of all the supporter’s avatars and send it off to Microsoft HQ.

FixOutlook.org mosaic on the wall at Microsoft HQ.

Want to see if you are included? The 20 mb weighing original mosaic image can be found online.

To see if Google had already indexed my new blog I googled (lower-case ‘g’, right?) my own name. Good news: Google has indeed indexed my new blog already (that’s quite fast!). What I also found out was that my name shows up in Google Query Suggestion when searching on the Dutch Google version (google.nl). Here’s a screenshot:

I wonder what led to the inclusion of my name in Google Query Suggestions, whether it’s a certain amount of hits or a certain amount of queries for that name (no, I’m not really that narcissistic). Two other interesting things:

• The Google Query Suggestions tool shows way less results than the actual amount of results (8.590 versus 21.200 total hits).
  I don’t know the reason for this. It could be that it uses only a subset of all available data to improve performance (which is really important with live query suggestions). Or perhaps it only contains domains with a certain pagerank?
• When clicking on the suggestion, the original query (what you typed so far, before clicking on the suggestion) is included in the URI (‘oq=vincent+van+sch’). I think Google uses this to learn from its users to measure how good their suggestions are.

The next step is Wolfram Alpha’s index Which -incorrectly, I might add- interprets ‘scherpenseel’ as ‘scherpenzeel’. A very common (and annoying!) mistake that people make with my last name all the time due to the fact that there is actually a town called Scherpenzeel in Holland.

09/09/09 does not only mark the 3-year anniversary of me and my girlfriend but also the 10-year anniversary of the Sega Dreamcast. The Dreamcast was Sega’s last console which was way ahead of its time (it even had a 56K modem!). Unfortunately it was a major failure due to piracy, heavy competition from Sony’s PS2 and lack of support from developers (due to both the piracy issue and the fact that Sega couldn’t really scale to the demand for the console). Also the fact that Sega suddenly rushed to have the Dreamcast released (which caused very few games available on launch day) upset quite a lot developers. In 2001 Sega ceased all activities in the console market and decided to focus on arcade gaming and console gaming for other platforms.

But now, 10 years later, a company called redspotgames is taking pre-orders for a new Dreamcast game called ‘Rush Rush Rally Racing’. At first I thought this would be a rather clever PR stunt to get the spotlights on redspotgames, but they seem to focus exclusively on developing games for the Sega Dreamcast. I guess they are rooting for the nostalgic Dreamcast-players out there. View the trailer to get that retro-feeling

It’s here! I’m currently writing this from my brand-new MacBook Pro! And guess what, it actually has that new-car smell going on. Of course, as a new follower of Steve-Jobsism I just had to make pictures of the un-boxing party. Enjoy!

What? Did you really think I was going to upload a video to Youtube? Nah, I’m not that big a fanboi yet. But I didn’t want to keep the pictures to myself. Can you see the halo in the last picture? It’s not edited, I promise.

Update: After one day of use I absolutely fell in love with this machine. The MacBook Pro is such a solid yet esthetically-beautiful machine, both from a hardware as a software perspective. Truly amazing. One thing that surprised me though: the system already had Snow Leopard installed, even though it was assembled before Mac OS X 10.6 went on sale. Unfortunately I had just ordered Snow Leopard this weekend — O well, it’s still by far the best laptop I have ever owned.