Release Date for Assassin's Creed 2

Finally a release date for Assassin's Creed 2. Here's another game I can't wait to get my hands on. The long awaited sequel will have you sneaking and killing in fancy and very cool ways across the city of Venice during what looks like the Renaissance era.

You still play as an assassin living a past life in memory retrieval machine from the first game. The full story hasn't been divulged yet, but I'm really looking forward to it.
See the Assassin's Creed Official E3 Trailer on youtube here!

Release Date for Bioshock 2

Finally a release date for the long awaited sequel of the game that brought us thousand's of leagues under the sea to the awesome city of Rapture. Bioshock is expected stateside on November 3rd and for those of us this side of the atlantic, we get it a few days earlier on 30th October. The game is looking to be a roaring success as you play as one of the original Big Daddy's trying to escape the clutches of a grown up little sister, known as the Big Sister. She's looking recruit more little sisters to build an army.

Playing as one of the Big Daddy's, you'll be able to use the drill from the original game and numerous other weapons. You'll be able to use plasmid's as well, this time you're able to mix plasmid's to send things like flaming bees at your enemies.

If you liked the first game, you'll love this one even more. I'm dying for it's release, alas I must wait and enjoy Fallout 3 for the moment.

Check out an awesome Big Sister trailer here!

-Mike

Fallout 3

I'm slowly getting back into gaming again and what better way than playing Fallout 3. What an awesome game. You play as an escapee of Vault 101, one of the many vaults which helped to protect many humans from the nuclear wars that spread outside. In search of your father, you traverse the wasteland to find him and try and understand what happened to this world which had been hidden away from you for so long. Interesting gameplay and things to do like making your own weapons, specialising as a ladykiller and getting bio enhancements are just some of the beauts of this game. The whole terrain is completely open for exploration and it is recommended to do as many as the side objectives in the game as possible as finding your father, means you finish the game quicker and miss most of the beauty of the game.

There's a moral meter int he game as well, for when you do good and when you do wrong. It's measured in Karma and this affects how you play the game and what kind of person you become. Certain Karma types allow for different gameplay and access to different weapons and missions. So as soon as I finish playing the good guy I'm going to come back and play the game again as one mean son of a b*tch.

I'd recommend this game to anyone who's played Half Life, Bioshock or any RPG's out there. For anyone who enjoys a good story line or for those of you who like to ponder moral dilemnas, then this is the game for you.

-Mike

People Per Hour

I think I've mentioned this in my twitter before, but here's an interesting site called People Per Hour.

The basic idea behind it is, people ask a question or request a job to be done (mostly computer related) and others place bids on answering or doing the requested job. Once the bid is accepted, money is then transferred. Great idea. I think I'll keep watch and see if I'm able to do anything with it.

Peopleperhour.com

Ideas Ideas Ideas...

A while ago I was looking at TCP offload engines (TOE) and I thought it was a very interesting idea.

TCP Offload engines have been around for a while. Basically what they do is take processing load off of the CPU by taking the entire TCP/IP stack and processing it within the network controller. Why would you want this?

The rule for any telecomms system at the moment is that to transmit one bit of information to another system takes 1 hertz. When you're transmitting 1000bits (125bytes), this is only 1000hertz, which ain't so bad. However when you scale this up, it gets very large indeed and you'd barely believe how much processing power it takes away from you when you're trying to do other work at the same time and it will inevitably bring the system to a stand still until the transmission is complete. When you think of the likes Gigabit ethernet (1000,000,000 bits per second), this will take 1GHz of processing power from your PC which could be used for gaming or other processing intense programs. This is only in half duplex (single direction). Full Duplex would be twice this which is up to 80% of your systems current capabilities.

The problem with the TCP offload engines is that they are difficult to use and hard to customise to each system. If the telecomms system changes, it will need to be re-programmed to the specific system. This is awkward unless you're using the same system the whole time.

Dell have actually brought systems out in their ninth generation PowerEdge servers.
For more information on TCP OE, check out wikipedias site here.

Ideas Ideas Ideas...

Here's another idea that I've been trying to play with lately.

I've been looking into noise cancelling technology. However they only seem to work on headphones for the moment. I'd like to be able to attach these to the likes of fans where there's a low frequency hum. Noise cancelling only really works for low frequency waves as it is able to reproduce the opposing wave to cancel it.

Just as a quick physics mention here. Waves work in peaks and troughs (they go up and down). To cancel a wave, you must recreate each peak's or trough's exact opposite. This opposing wave must match the original's wave amplitude and wavelength. That's the basics, don't want to go into too much detail here.

Anyway, my idea is based upon PC cooling fans and trying to eliminate the noise of them completely. To build it, I would get one small microphone pointing away from the fan. I may need to add multiple microphones around the fan for this to work completely. Then using a speaker alongside the fan and connecting circuitry between the microphones and speaker we can then produce it's inverted wave.

Unfortunately this is a slightly difficult task. Waves do not just travel in the one direction, they radiate in every direction and this is where the problem lies.
Hopefully, because I just want to cut out the noise of fans specifically, I can achieve this goal without having to do too much work on it.

Ideas Ideas Ideas...

Here's an idea.

How about an in car text messaging system. You know when you're out on the road and you want to contact someone but you don't want to necessarily call them. However texting while driving is difficult, dangerous and illegal. Well how about a system built into your wireless/handsfree kit which uses speech recognition and converts it straight to text. Can't imagine this being a huge problem.

I notice in Toytota's Prius, there's a little screen in the dash to show the cars systems. The text message could be displayed here temporarily before being sent.

I can't imagine this to be a huge problem to achieve.

Bodies exhibition

Bodies Exhibition

I surprised my girlfriend with tickets to go see the Bodies exhibition in the Ambassador on O'Connell street. She'd been dying to go for ages. It's not something I would normally go to see on my own.

We were quite hungover after a night out in the Sublounge. The dark lighting was a little easier on our aching heads. The exhibit was amazing. Everything is taken from real human bodies. Apparently the bodies were all chinese people. The work involved in preserving the bodies and presenting them in the stalls to show off the incredible masterpiece which is the human body. From being able to see the bones of the ear, every muscle in the body, the nervous system and dissections of the body in incredible detail, it really was a treat to be able to see so much.

A few exhibits outlined the damage to internal organs and was enough to put any smoker off their disgusting cancer sticks.

The most shocking display was the fetus section where you could see fetuses at different stages in the pregnancy. From four weeks old to 3 months, it really was amazing, yet very disturbing. I thought it would be an apt display for any anti-abortion campaign.

I'd recommend this Bodies exhibit to anyone. It closes 26th July, so get there quick.

Super Splits

Just found the most awesome drink ever last night. Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum and Club Orange, it tastes exactly like a Super Split ice cream! Best drink ever!