Ken Newquist I’ve recently been considering the question of how best to display random information from a database. Specificially, I’ve been working on a randomizer for Nuketown that would display a random banner ad every time one of the PHP driven pages was loaded. This blog entry details my attempts to create a random generator via MySQL … and how I ditched that solution in favor of PHP.
The government (or those who want to run it) has been doing so many stupid things lately it’s hard to focus on just one thing. On the one hand, we’ve got Bush’s idiotic marriage amendment proposal, while on the other we’ve got Democrats failing over themselves to proudly proclaim they intend to do nothing to prevent Social Security entitlements from crippling the economy. Oh, and then we’ve got the whole Howard Stern suspension thing, which while not directly related to the government, was undoubtedly prompted by the FCC’s recent heavy breathing over Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple.
It truly staggers the mind. But since my normally apolitical wife Sue mentioned the marriage thing the other night, I’ll go with that.
I was driving home on Friday when I dug my Palm Tungsten C handheld out of my jacket pocket and nearly dropped the thing in surprise. It was hot — excruciatingly hot. It was so hot that that I literally couldn’t hold it in my hand, at least not the portion where the computer’s battery was. I half expected it to start uttering a self-destruct message. Visions of the Enterprise exploding above the Genesis planet flashed before my eyes.
Vanished Planet is a cooperative board game in which players struggle to prevent an ever-growing, inky-black entity from enveloping the galaxy. At the start of the game the Earth has been consumed by the entity, and has apparently been transferred to another dimension. The creature has already begun expanding beyond the Sol system, and it … Read more
An old e-mail hoax featuring the Budweiser Frogs has recently re-surfaced with a slightly re-tooled message of digital destruction. The original version of the e-mail, which I last remember seeing when the Budweiser Frogs were still popular (about 1999) just promised to destroy your hard drive. But in keeping with the times, the new version … Read more
An RSS Feed has been added to Nuketown, allowing readers to download headlines from their site into offline readers such as NetNewsWire. The Nuketown RSS Feed contains the headlines and summaries of the webzine’s latest blog entries, articles, reviews, hoaxes, Web links and netheads. Also embedded in the feeds are hyperlinks, so you can read … Read more
For decades, Dungeons & Dragons players have cobbled together custom soundtracks for their games from diverse sources, including various movie soundtracks (Conan the Barbarian, Lord of the Rings), game music tracks (Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights) and even specialized albums (Midnight Syndicate, Toxic Bag Productions). But now they have an official soundtrack, one sanctioned by the … Read more
This post was supposed to be about geek radio shows I’ve been listening to on my iPod during my commutes. And then one of the shows went off the air. The name of the show is “The SixSiders” and it aired on KION 1460 AM in California. It was also broadcast over the Web via … Read more
After the apocalyptic wars that ended our bright and glorious age, hereto unknown species of creatures — both organic and inorganic — rose from the ruins and populated a landscape that came to be known as “Gamma World”. The d20 sourcebook Machines and Mutants chronicles these monstrosities, offering game masters 130+ new critters with which … Read more
Mongoose Publishing is releasing a miniatures game and RPG based on Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and I have some issues with out they describe the book’s government.