Da Room » All

The Supergirls: The History of Comic Book Heroines

northernavenger — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 12:23:14 +0000

Awesome presentation about the history of female super heros. Starting in the early 1930s and ending up in modern times. Including Wonder Woman’s change in personality over the years.

The Strangest Secret

northernavenger — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:45:31 +0000

WireTap: Funny radio show about impersonators on Twitter

northernavenger — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 02:42:46 +0000

SEO and Traffic from Social Media? (Flickr, Facebook, Stumble, YouTube, ect.)

northernavenger — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 02:21:34 +0000

A Short History of Design Policy, Multimedia

northernavenger — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:30:12 +0000

A multimedia video about the history of design policy.

Mega64 GDC 2020 Commercial

northernavenger — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 23:51:53 +0000

BE AT THE HOTTEST VIDEO GAME EVENT ON THE WEST COAST -B@YB33- GAME DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE WHERE THE G-D-C STANDS FOR GAWD D*** CEXXY

Website & Domain Sale

northernavenger — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 06:47:52 +0000

Website & Domain Sale

to purchase or make an offer on a domain email Kirkins@gmail.com

Synthetic Worlds Real Economies

northernavenger — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:51:10 +0000

Since the eighties people have been playing MMORPGs at an increasing rate. Though they are fantasy games played for entertainment, many of them have developed rather complex economies, with everything from stock exchanges to black markets. The real start of virtual economies is simply the desire by players to posses scarce virtual possessions. However they really start to show their nature when players start to attach real world currency value to in game currency, items, and properties.

Some games like Second Life encourage users to put real currency value on Lindon Dollars, the currency used in the game, where as many other games, RuneScape, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Warhammer Online and Final Fantasy XI, strictly forbid converting real world currencies for in game currency. In games where converting currencies is not aloud elaborate black markets spring up, where in game currency can be purchased. Some people living in areas with low living costs manage to make a living “farming” in game currency to sell on these markets.

Like real economies, virtual economies can experience inflation. For example between August/September 2004 and 18 months the currency of Second Life decreased by 40%, likely due to a drop in popularity.

Inflation occurs naturally in most fantasy and fighting based MMORPGs. This type of inflation has been coined “Mudflation”. The term mudflation dates back to a forum post in 1993 refering to the game EverQuest, as the game became more popular so did the term. The reason for this type of inflation is that players are able to fight spawning(regenerating) NPC(Non-Player Characters) which when defeated reward the player with currency or valuable items. Since these items are created out of nothing they take away value from the rest of the currency in the game by increasing the supply of the item or currency.

Game designers try to fight inflation with money/gold sinks. A money sink is a way in which the game destroys in game currency. For example when buying an upgrade or item from a NPC, because the currency was not given to another player it is removed from the game. It is ideal for game designers to create money sinks which are equal, or close to equal, to mudflation. If this is done correctly effects mudflation can neutralized.

The Virtual Economy entry on wikipedia lists 5 common factors of virtual economics.

1. Rivalry: Possession of property is limited to one person or a small number of persons.
2. Persistence: Possession is maintained even when the property is not in use. Users expect property to remain in their possession between sessions.
3. Interconnectivity: Property may affect or be affected by other people and other property. The value of property varies according to a person’s ability to use it for creating or experiencing some effect.
4. Secondary markets: Virtual property may be created, traded, bought, and sold. Real assets (typically money) may be at stake.
5. Value added by users: Users may enhance the value of virtual property by customizing and improving upon the property.

Website Accessibility #2

northernavenger — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:23:18 +0000

W3C standards are CSS and HTML standards agreed on by the World Wide Web Consortium, the group responsible for defining major standards used in web design.
Following W3C standards ensure Consistent display of content across browsers and devices, better rankings in search engines, and better accessibility.
The first thing that should be done to follow web standards is to define the DOCTYPE within or before the html tag.

All tags within the html document should be closed. Leaving tags unclosed can cause errors in some situations such as screen readers.

Doctypes Available in the W3C Recommendations via w3c school

"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

This declares the document to be HTML 4.01 Strict. HTML 4.01 Strict is a trimmed down version of HTML 4.01 that emphasizes structure over presentation. Deprecated elements and attributes (including most presentational attributes), frames, and link targets are not allowed in HTML 4 Strict. By writing to HTML 4 Strict, authors can achieve accessible, structurally rich documents that easily adapt to style sheets and different browsing situations. However, HTML 4 Strict documents may look bland on very old browsers that lack support for style sheets.

Newer browsers such as Internet Explorer 5 for Mac, Netscape 6, and Mozilla use a standards-compliant rendering for HTML 4 Strict documents. These browsers use a “quirks” mode for most other document types to emulate rendering bugs in older browsers.

"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

This declares the document to be HTML 4.01 Transitional. HTML 4 Transitional includes all elements and attributes of HTML 4 Strict but adds presentational attributes, deprecated elements, and link targets.

Newer browsers such as Internet Explorer 5 for Mac, Netscape 6, and Mozilla use a standards-compliant rendering for HTML 4.01 Transitional documents that include the URI of the DTD in the DOCTYPE. These browsers use a “quirks” mode to emulate rendering bugs in older browsers if the URI is omitted:

"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">

This declares the document to be HTML 4.01 Frameset. HTML 4 Frameset is a variant of HTML 4 Transitional for documents that use frames.

"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

This declares the document to be XHTML 1.0 Strict. XHTML 1.0 Strict is an XML version of HTML 4 Strict.

"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

This declares the document to be XHTML 1.0 Transitional. XHTML 1.0 Transitional is an XML version of HTML 4 Transitional.

"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">

This declares the document to be XHTML 1.0 Frameset. XHTML 1.0 Frameset is an XML version of HTML 4 Frameset.

This declares the document to be HTML 3.2. HTML 3.2 is well supported by most browsers in use. However, HTML 3.2 has limited support for style sheets and no support for HTML 4 features such as frames and internationalization.

This declares the document to be HTML 2.0. HTML 2.0 is widely supported by browsers but lacks support for tables, frames, and internationalization, as well as many commonly used presentational elements and attributes.

Website Accessibility #1

northernavenger — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:35:19 +0000

A 2004 survey found that 81% of websites failed to meet the minimum accessibility standards.
It also found that the 19% of websites which did meet standards run on average 34% quicker then those sites which didn’t meet accessibility standards.

Language indicators indicate the language in which text is written. This is useful for screen readers used by those with impaired.

Normally language attributes are placed in the Body tag.

Example

lang=”en”

You can also use code to specify a language for specific text by using a Q tag.

Example

Her super-powers were the result of γ-radiation, he explained.

Name of Language	ISO 639-1 Code
Afar	aa
Abkhazian	ab
Afrikaans	af
Akan	ak
Albanian	sq
Amharic	am
Arabic	ar
Aragonese	an
Armenian	hy
Assamese	as
Avaric	av
Avestan	ae
Aymara	ay
Azerbaijani	az
Bashkir	ba
Bambara	bm
Basque	eu
Belarusian	be
Bengali	bn
Bihari	bh
Bislama	bi
Tibetan	bo
Bosnian	bs
Breton	br
Bulgarian	bg
Burmese	my
Catalan; Valencian	ca
Czech	cs
Chamorro	ch
Chechen	ce
Chinese	zh
Church Slavic; Old Slavonic; Church Slavonic; Old Bulgarian; Old Church Slavonic	cu
Chuvash	cv
Cornish	kw
Corsican	co
Cree	cr
Welsh	cy
Czech	cs
Danish	da
German	de
Divehi; Dhivehi; Maldivian	dv
Dutch; Flemish	nl
Dzongkha	dz
Greek, Modern (1453-)	el
English	en
Esperanto	eo
Estonian	et
Basque	eu
Ewe	ee
Faroese	fo
Persian	fa
Fijian	fj
Finnish	fi
French	fr
Western Frisian	fy
Fulah	ff
Georgian	ka
German	de
Gaelic; Scottish Gaelic	gd
Irish	ga
Galician	gl
Manx	gv
Greek, Modern (1453-)	el
Guarani	gn
Gujarati	gu
Haitian; Haitian Creole	ht
Hausa	ha
Hebrew	he
Herero	hz
Hindi	hi
Hiri Motu	ho
Croatian	hr
Hungarian	hu
Armenian	hy
Igbo	ig
Icelandic	is
Ido	io
Sichuan Yi	ii
Inuktitut	iu
Interlingue	ie
Interlingua (International Auxiliary Language Association)	ia
Indonesian	id
Inupiaq	ik
Icelandic	is
Italian	it
Javanese	jv
Japanese	ja
Kalaallisut; Greenlandic	kl
Kannada	kn
Kashmiri	ks
Georgian	ka
Kanuri	kr
Kazakh	kk
Central Khmer	km
Kikuyu; Gikuyu	ki
Kinyarwanda	rw
Kirghiz; Kyrgyz	ky
Komi	kv
Kongo	kg
Korean	ko
Kuanyama; Kwanyama	kj
Kurdish	ku
Lao	lo
Latin	la
Latvian	lv
Limburgan; Limburger; Limburgish	li
Lingala	ln
Lithuanian	lt
Luxembourgish; Letzeburgesch	lb
Luba-Katanga	lu
Ganda	lg
Macedonian	mk
Marshallese	mh
Malayalam	ml
Maori	mi
Marathi	mr
Malay	ms
Macedonian	mk
Malagasy	mg
Maltese	mt
Moldavian	mo
Mongolian	mn
Maori	mi
Malay	ms
Burmese	my
Nauru	na
Navajo; Navaho	nv
Ndebele, South; South Ndebele	nr
Ndebele, North; North Ndebele	nd
Ndonga	ng
Nepali	ne
Dutch; Flemish	nl
Norwegian Nynorsk; Nynorsk, Norwegian	nn
Bokmål, Norwegian; Norwegian Bokmål	nb
Norwegian	no
Chichewa; Chewa; Nyanja	ny
Occitan (post 1500); Provençal	oc
Ojibwa	oj
Oriya	or
Oromo	om
Ossetian; Ossetic	os
Panjabi; Punjabi	pa
Persian	fa
Pali	pi
Polish	pl
Portuguese	pt
Pushto	ps
Quechua	qu
Romansh	rm
Romanian	ro
Romanian	ro
Rundi	rn
Russian	ru
Sango	sg
Sanskrit	sa
Serbian	sr
Croatian	hr
Sinhala; Sinhalese	si
Slovak	sk
Slovak	sk
Slovenian	sl
Northern Sami	se
Samoan	sm
Shona	sn
Sindhi	sd
Somali	so
Sotho, Southern	st
Spanish; Castilian	es
Albanian	sq
Sardinian	sc
Serbian	sr
Swati	ss
Sundanese	su
Swahili	sw
Swedish	sv
Tahitian	ty
Tamil	ta
Tatar	tt
Telugu	te
Tajik	tg
Tagalog	tl
Thai	th
Tibetan	bo
Tigrinya	ti
Tonga (Tonga Islands)	to
Tswana	tn
Tsonga	ts
Turkmen	tk
Turkish	tr
Twi	tw
Uighur; Uyghur	ug
Ukrainian	uk
Urdu	ur
Uzbek	uz
Venda	ve
Vietnamese	vi
Volapük	vo
Welsh	cy
Walloon	wa
Wolof	wo
Xhosa	xh
Yiddish	yi
Yoruba	yo
Zhuang; Chuang	za
Chinese	zh
Zulu	zu