Anyway, my friend and I got to play around with the system earlier today (quite randomly, actually, since we were just strolling downtown getting food and stuff). We got to play Kinect Adventures which included activities such as navigating a raft with our bodies, dodging items on an obstacle track, and plugging up leaks caused by some very vicious fish. I believe the second game we tried was Kinect Joy Ride which was basically a racing game with a variety of game modes. I was actually quite surprised at how well the sensor picked up body movements, though I did have some problems controlling my car in Joy Ride (though that was likely due to my inexperience with the controls). Both games had relatively slick UIs too given the new method of control; I can’t think of many ways to improve upon them off the top of my head.

Perhaps the technology is still too immature or the style of games will only fit in with a niche group of people; nevertheless, it’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft, Sony (with its PlayStation Move), and Nintendo (with its Wii – or presumably, the Wii’s successor) battle it out for a piece of console gaming’s future.

Geez, Apple’s hype machine is ridiculous. Pretty much every other news story and tweet I’ve been reading had some sort of reference to the iPad. Just take a look at TechCrunch and Techmeme over the last day and a bit – I’m hoping no company was stupid enough to release anything that day.

I’ve been using full-sized keyboards for a *very* long time now so that blows everything else out of the water for me. When I’m motivated I can type at speeds exceeding 100 words per minute, although that’s typically not necessary with the stuff I do.

I’d rank pen and paper as second. It’s pretty much a necessity in university when you’re taking down notes and whatnot. Although some people can get away with using laptops in class, I find that it’s extremely hard to copy out diagrams and mathematical equations. Perhaps this is some indication that I should learn LaTeX or something?

Next up would probably be a close race between my Wacom tablet (using Window’s handwriting recognition software) and my iPod Touch. I’m still rather slow at both, although that might just be because of a lack of practice.

In last place is a standard phone with a three-letters-per-number keypad. Yeah. I don’t use my phone very often and I text even less.

From Wikipedia, Google Wave is a communication and collaboration tool designed to merge common networking applications like e-mail, instant messaging and more. It works in real-time, so people can see what others are contributing as they write.

Each “wave” is essentially a thread (analogous to forum topics and chained emails) where people can jump in anywhere to add content. Some examples of use can be found on a page published by Google. I won’t go too much into detail on that, since I haven’t had the chance to use it in such an environment.

What’s interesting about Wave (or at least the Wave protocol) is that most of the code will be released as open source. As such, developers can join in and add their own applications/extensions, making the whole works even more useful. In terms of functionality, it obviously surpasses e-mail (and I believe one of Google’s goals is to supplant it with the Wave protocol).

Will Wave be successful? Sure. I can definitely see people using it in collaborative environments (say, working on a large project at work ). It may even replace certain social networking applications given the right extensions. However, a goal like replacing e-mail and instant messaging… I dunno. What’s great about them is their simplicity; if I want to get a point across, I can quickly shoot off a block of text. In addition, pretty much everyone who uses the internet knows about e-mail; the same can’t be said of new gadgets like social networks and whatnot.

I suppose as the general populace becomes more technically adept, they’ll begin to see the benefits of using stuff like Google Wave. What will really make or break the protocol is how readily people are willing to accept it in lieu of traditional tools. Some sort of backward-compatibility with widely-used applications would surely go a long way in gaining acceptance.

For this to work, you must be running Apache as your web server (I suppose IIS should have a similar method, but eh…) and have mod_rewrite enabled. We’ll be creating (or adding to) a .htaccess file as follows:

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RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?domain.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/subdir/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /subdir/$1

The first line turns the runtime rewriting engine on to allow for modifications. The second line determines whether the request came from “www.domain.com” or “domain.com”; this is to prevent rewriting the URLs of any subdomains you might have. The condition after checks to see whether the request has already been redirected to the subdirectory. If not, then the rewriting rule is executed to make it so.

The above code is sufficient if all you want is to move files from “/www/” to a subdirectory “/www/subdir/”. However, Apache is quirky in that it requires a trailing slash at the end of directory names (to specify that it is indeed a directory). Normally this isn’t a problem since there is a module (mod_dir) that automagically redirects a path without a trailing slash to one that does. However, it conflicts with the above code in this case: first a request is directed to a subdirectory and then mod_dir issues another redirect, exposing the subdirectory name. For example, a request for “http://irythia.com/somefolderhere” will become “http://irythia.com/subdir/somefolderhere/”.

Note: mod_dir only executes if there isn’t a trailing slash on directory names, so if you qualify URLs with one the rules above work as expected. That is, “http://irythia.com/somefolderhere/” won’t change.

To fix this problem, we add another rule to append a trailing slash on all URLs ending in directory names.

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RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?domain.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(/|\.[^/]*)$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1/ [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?domain.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/subdir/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /subdir/$1

Note the additions in lines 2-4. Again, line 2 checks to see whether the request came from “www.domain.com” or “domain.com”. Line 3 checks to see if the URI ends in a directory by filtering out file extensions (i.e. .php, .html, .js, .css, etc.). It also checks to see if there isn’t already a trailing slash. Finally, we rewrite the URL. The [L,R=301] flag tells Apache to not execute any more rules and do a permanent redirect.

And that’s that. Upload the .htaccess file to the root web directory (/www or /public_html) and you’re good to go.

Some final notes: this is essentially a hack to work around limitations imposed by many web hosts; there are probably better methods if you have direct access to the server. Since it is a hack, it might not work on all sites without modification; this post is pretty much a reference for myself. As well, there is likely some performance penalty (as minor as it is) because the .htaccess file rewrites all requests that hit the domain. Of course, if you were that worried about performance, you wouldn’t be running on a shared host anyway.

Twitter

At this point, pretty much everyone who uses the Internet on a frequent basis knows about Twitter. Now that the initial hype has died down, I’ve finally created my own account. The tool itself is relatively simple on a conceptual level, but I think that’s one of its main appeals. A single question (“What are you doing?”) is all that is asked, although it is by no means the only thing that you can tweet about.

Traditional channels have covered Twitter extensively over the last couple years. At one point, even Oprah Winfrey talked about it on her show, thereby putting it into mainstream use. We now see people of all sorts twittering, from celebrities to politicians. Is this bad? Well, it depends on your view I guess.

One issue of contention is that a lot of content on Twitter is just mindless noise (to most people). The classic example is that “people don’t care about what you had for breakfast”. While it is true that a lot of stuff being tweeted is of little value, this can be resolved by following the right people. For example, fans of Digg might follow Kevin Rose to see what he has planned for the future.

As for me, I’m tracking a lot of the leading experts in web development and design along with several game developers. What they have to say is often quite intriguing. Indeed, Twitter is a good source of news as oftentimes people are sending out tweets while events are happening. I can definitely see the value in using tool and if nothing else, it can supplement my microblogging habits (for years, I’ve put random comments next to my MSN nickname ). Actually, one of the reasons why I looked into Twitter was because it could update my Facebook status.

In conclusion, Twitter is – when used correctly – a valuable tool. It definitely synergizes well with a blog.

Stack Overflow / Super User

Both Stack Overflow and Super User are wiki-like tools designed to be Q&A sites. The former was created for programmers while the latter targets computer enthusiasts. The concept is simple: if you have a question on a topic, you can post it on the site and have various experts try to resolve it for you. You can also browse current open questions and help out where you can.

While I haven’t spent a lot of time on these two sites, I did notice that questions are (usually) answered extremely quickly. This could be useful in, say, debugging a project at work when you have to meet a deadline. The community also doesn’t look kindly upon “homework-like” questions, preferring inquirers to put in some effort. This is an attitude that I agree with; we don’t really need another way to destroy academic integrity.

As I mentioned, these are wiki-like tools, meaning you don’t need an account to post/answer questions. However, it’s likely that you’ll want one anyway to keep track of your activities on the site. One of the first things that I noticed when creating an account was that both SO and SU support OpenID. Now, this is actually the first time that I’ve used it so it was kind of interesting. It turns out that I already had an OpenID though, since Google was a provider (man, Google does everything now…). How convenient.

Well, I didn’t actually have any questions to ask so I can’t comment on that aspect. I did provide some answers though. Hopefully I didn’t embarrass myself.

StumbleUpon

I’ve heard about StumbleUpon back in high school, but this was the first time that I’ve taken a serious look at it. In essence, it is a service that builds a directory of content sorted by tags and serves it to users based on their interests. Through a pseudo-randomized algorithm, different content is shown to users when they click the “Stumble!” button on the toolbar provided. I guess the entire purpose of this is to expose people to new content that they might be interested in (and haven’t seen before).

After creating an account, you can post some basic information about yourself for other Stumblers to see. You then make a listing of your current interests for StumbleUpon to use. When this is done, all that’s left is to install the toolbar (or access the web-based one), click “Stumble!” and enjoy the show.

For each page that you stumble upon, you have two available options: thumb up (adds site to favourites) or thumb down (so you aren’t shown similar content in the future). When adding something to your list of favourites, you can choose to write a review of it. This is recommended if you want to be an active participant in the community. As for the list of favourites, there is actually a subset called discoveries. These discoveries are pages where you have been the first to visit (and thumb up); essentially, you are adding new content to the StumbleUpon index when you do so.

Seeing as StumbleUpon is built around its community, there are obviously tools that promote relationship-building. Among theses tools are friend lists and interest groups, on top of the profiles and reviews that I mentioned above. I haven’t actually tried out this aspect of StumbleUpon yet so I can’t really comment, but it shouldn’t be too far removed from other networking tools.

I’ve set my toolbar to look for content in the realm of computer science, nature, art, music, mythology and other similar topics. There are definitely some interesting things to see if you’re open-minded.