In a follow-up to the article I wrote on the Wikipedia Microsoft Points article, here’s the chart that originally got deleted. Hopefully if everything else all fails, the chart will still be accessible, at least through here. 🙂

I had a rather enlightening experience involving editing a page on Wikipedia last month. When an edit conflict arises, it’s a pretty interesting situation. Wikipedia is set-up not as a voted democracy, but such a way everyone reach a consensus on the changes, else you incur the wrath of the admins. Here’s my story on my first ever foray into it.

When I was building my MicroPoints iPhone app, the primary source of information on the Microsoft Points conversion rate came from the Microsoft Points Wikipedia page. At the time, the article had displayed a chart on the MSPoints conversion rates.
Of all the research I had done online, this was one of the most comprehensive places on the internet that dealt with the conversion rates. As such, I based most of my conversion metrics on this chart. 🙂

Shortly after I released MicroPoints, I went back to the page to find this chart missing. 🙁
Checking the editing history, I found that another Wiki user had deemed the chart as a potential advertising and deleted it. I thought this was in error, and undeleted it stating it was a demonstration of currency conversion, as per any other currency page on Wikipedia. The other user said that this didn’t justify its presence on the page, and proceeded to remove it. In what I could probably call a rather n00bish move on my behalf, I nearly sparked an edit war by continuously restoring it,  with the other user removing it.

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I think it goes without saying that I really love Steam. I wrote a little piece a while back on the pros and cons of digital distribution in regards to Steam, and I’m still finding it cheaper, faster and easier than anything else. On that note, Valve blessed us with another couple of huge additions to Steam this week…

Steam now has a Mac client, all Source engine games (and some third party ones) are being ported to it, and it’s free for PC users who already own the games. 😀 (And just to be super-awesome, they made Portal free for a limited time to celebrate. XD)

Just to put it out there, I don’t think mere words can cover how truly epic this is. This is a pretty epic thing. XD

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A little while ago, I wrote a rather scathing (also slightly incorrect) article on the iPad just after it had been announced. A few months later (and still no sign of it coming to Australia as of yet), I’ve had a bit of time to think about it.

And I’m thinking… I definitely want to buy one.

When the iPad was announced, there were two things I was upset about. The first was its silly name. Tampon cracks aside, it’s still too close to iPod. And the second was the fact that instead of us getting a minified MacBook, we’re instead getting a magnified iPhone (Well… iPod Touch). This stang the most since when I originally envisioned a tablet by Apple, I was expecting something I could easily whip out anywhere, and do complex things like web development or programming easily (Although, that may not be impossible 😉 ). One last thing was the lack of USB ports… making any kind of peripheral integration (excluding Bluetooth) totally impossible.

Either way, the more I think about it, an expanded iPhone seems to make sense. At a current technology level, I don’t think it’s actually possible for Apple to make a tablet PC of these dimensions, that can successfully run Mac OSX (Or at least, not without being extremely pricey), as well as integrate touch technology at the same time. For a device like this, the multi-touch features of iPhone OS just make total sense. It also makes sense in the fact that for a mobile device of this kind, a full OS like MacOS would take way too long to load, ultimately degrading the experience. So on reflection, hoping for MacOS on a tablet like this is a bit far-fetched to say the least. XD

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A pretty interesting thing has been happening in the geeks’ gadget world this week. Since I have a blog, I thought I’d offer my $0.02. 🙂

For those of you not in the know, here’s a quick re-hash. An Apple employee named Gray Powell took a prototype model of an as-of-yet unannounced iPhone to a bar, unto which he lost it. It was later found by another patron of the bar, from where it made its way into the hands of Gizmodo, who promptly ran a story on it. In what pretty much solidified the device’s authenticity, Apple sent a formal request to Gizmodo, asking for their ‘device’ to be returned.

Now, first and foremost…. this phone looks friggin’ awesome. Just on Gizmodo’s testimony alone, I really really want one now; way moreso than I ever wanted an iPad. XD Pretty much all of the issues I have with my 3G (Uh, which I guess is really just the camera lol) have been fixed with this model. In addition, you can never go wrong with a higher resolution screen. XD

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A few blog posts ago, when I wrote about the online version of my regex tester, I mentioned that I was experiencing a few technical troubles on my blog. The reason for this was that the regex tester is kept in the same web space as my blog, and the way I had set it up was causing erroneous functions in WordPress.

After a bit of googling and some .htaccess hackery, I got it all working again. Since it was a bit of an interesting concept and solution, I thought I’d write it up here. 😀

So, I have one main block of web space that I use for all of my websites, which is hosted by the fine people at Ennoverse.com (*plug plug* XD). The primary domain for the space is Tim-Oliver.com which directs to the root directory of the space and originally, the directory contained all of my blog WordPress files.

When I went to set up Regex-Tester.com, I decided I didn’t want the files and directories from my blog to mix with those of the regex site. To do this, I placed all of the blog files into a directory called ‘/blog’ and all of the regex files in a directory called ‘/regex’. I then simply set the Regex-Tester.com domain as a subdomain which directed straight to the ‘/regex’ directory after that.

Now, herein lay the dilemma:

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