Welcome to the first Casual Asynchronous MMO on the iPhone for only $9.99. On sale now through Christmas for $7.99. Players of Aurora Feint: The Beginning: Your accounts and characters can automatically transfer over! Play 68 levels!! Enjoy!!!


"With its Lord of the Rings aesthetic and tilt functionality, Aurora Feint: The Arena stands apart from other match three puzzlers.... And in a first for iPhone games, Aurora Feint: The Arena will take its RPG-like elements online." --- 1up.com

Features:
- Real-time asynchronous player vs. player dueling
- Continuous personal news feed
- A thriving multi-player community
- Powerful new character classes
- Player profiles with walls
- Friend and global leaderboards
- Amazingly beautiful artwork and particle effects

Compete head to head against other players in the world even when they are not online. Their Ghosts will take you on in real time duels and try to mess up your game play, as if they were really there. Keep an eye on the Tavern News Feed to get continuous updates on your friends and enemies in the world. Join the Tavern at any time to meet and chat with new players or write on their walls. Create a male or female character to guide through 68 levels of puzzle-based game play. Aurora Feint 2: The Arena comes loaded with even more powerful character classes, an updated sound track, intense visual effects, and new locations to explore.

Rated #1 iPhone game by Game Informer Magazine

Visit www.aurorafeint.com for hints, tips and tricks.


LINK:http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/M...297399058&mt=8

The Patapon are at war again and need God’s drum beats to march to victory. After Haripon’s ship crashes he awakens to your rhythm after and sets out to find survivors. If this sounds a lot like Patapon you’re right. Sony didn’t deviate much from the formula of the first game. Instead they expanded upon it by adding new elements like hero Patapons. You meet your first hero trapped underneath a rock separating your small army of spear throwing Patapon from a fire breathing Dondonga.

Save him and you get to name him. Yes, this Patapon is that special. I stuck with the default name ”hero” and brought him on a mission to crush an enemy base. The hero Patapon did more damage than a regular spear throwing Yaripon and has a special attack. If you’re in fever mode and hit the drums perfectly on beat the hero Patapon tosses a spear with a green aura. This spear does about 2x - 3x his regular attack which is already around 2x a regular Yaripon. The glowing spear also releases a wide green cloud that damages a group of enemies. Since the Zigoton, the rival tribe of the Patapon, tend to cluster together the toxic green cloud is debilitating. To balance out the game Patapon 2 piles more Zigoton on the screen which makes for some chaotic fights. The other ability my hero Patapon had in the demo is he can respawn on the battlefield. If your hero dies a ten second counter appears above his picture. When the countdown ends he magically appears on the battlefield with full HP.

The basic Patapon can upgrade to becomr more effective too by utilizing the evolution system. By gathering items you can change a normal Yaripon to a PyoPyo, a walking eyeball with rabbit ears. If you include the normal form there are eighteen possible evolutions for the Patapon shown on the evolution tree. Since evolving Patapon requires items you’re showered with items during the missions.

I turned one of my Yaripon into a PyoPyo and switched an axe wielding Tatepon into a purple eye with cat ears before setting off for the final mission in the demo. In this stage I fought the Bocchichi, a giant bird. I struck first with a wave of arrows and spears. The bird retaliated by pecking the ground which directly hit my spear line. Then the flightless bird jumped in the air and hit the Tatepon group with a ground pound. The bird’s most deadly attack is a blast of yellow gas from its behind that puts any Patapon it touches to sleep. While sleeping the Patapon are vulnerable and more importantly for the bird they can’t attack. I should have made more arrow shooting Yumipon. That would have made the fight a breeze, but thanks to the powerful hero Patapon and his glowing green spears I took the bird down. I also lost most of my army so the fight was really my hero Patapon and few survivors versus the bird boss. Stick tightly to the beat to activate the hero Patapon’s special attack was the key to victory.

http://www.siliconera.com/2008/11/21...the-bird-boss/

img class=face src=http://planet.ubuntu.com/heads/keescook.png alt= pThere#8217;s this great CPU feature called #8220;a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_bitnx/a#8221; #8212; it protects your computer from intrusion by blocking execution of memory regions that weren#8217;t expected to be executable (i.e. stack/heap data). You really want this enabled. Unfortunately for you, it seems some BIOSes default to disabling it. On Dell laptops, look under #8220;Security#8221; / #8220;CPU XD Support#8221;: you want it enabled. In an American Megatrends BIOS, I found it under #8220;CPU Features#8221; / #8220;Execute Disable Bit#8221;: you want it enabled./p pAs far as making use of the CPU feature once it#8217;s not disabled in the BIOS, you#8217;re already using it if you#8217;re running a 64bit kernel. And if you#8217;re using 32bit, you can start using it if you install the code-server/code flavor of the 32bit kernel. As a bonus, you get to a href=http://www.outflux.net/blog/archives/2007/09/27/stupid-bios-tricks-to-find-your-4g-of-ram/address all your physical RAM/a if you do this too (since -server#8217;s #8220;a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_ExtensionPAE/a#8221; mode is the kernel mode that allows #8220;nx#8221; to work). For Ubuntu Jaunty, I#8217;m hoping to get some element of the system (installer? jockey?) to a href=https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/use-pae-when-possiblemake the right kernel selection/a for a given system./p pIf #8220;pae#8221; is in your /proc/cpuinfo flags:br / code pre $ grep --color pae /proc/cpuinfo flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr strongpae/strong mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall emnx/em lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm /pre p/p/code(note the #8220;nx#8221; in there too, since my BIOS isn#8217;t set to disable it)/p pThen you almost certainly want to use code-server/code kernel flavor:br / code pre sudo apt-get install linux-server linux-restricted-modules-server /pre p/p/code/p

pI've been waiting for a new jack swing revival ever since I learned that the Boyz II Men and Hi-Five tapes I loved were part of something called "new jack swing," but as great as this year's emGold: New Jack Swing/em compilation is, any such revival would probably be ill-advised. The title of Brooklyn "thug-house" DJ/producer a href="http://www.myspace.com/danceswithwhitegirls"strongDances With White Girls/strong/a' just-released debut EP for the Rapture's a href="http://www.myspace.com/throneofbloodrecords"strongThrone of Blood/strong/a label is emNew Crack Swing/em-- a much better fit for this epoch of political hope and financial despair, at least based on this wildly diverse party banger, "Everyone's Got to Make a Living"./p pIf new jack swing was a "a href="http://www.citypaper.com/music/story.asp?id=15896"stronghip-hop/ramp;b hybrid/strong/a", then this emNew Crack Swing/em track-- like the a href="/article/download/144643-new-music-curtis-vodka-krudmart-mixtape-august-08-curtis-vodkas-get-down-tonight-mix"strongKrudmart Mixtape/strong/a or a href="/article/download/41801-curtis-vodka-hey-girl-mp3"strongChris Brown remix/strong/a by Alaska's a href="http://www.myspace.com/curtisvodka"strongCurtis Vodka/strong/a-- throws in elements of house, too. Sorry, a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9c5otT-RUA"strongSnap!/strong/a fans: We're not quite talking hip-house, but at the outset we're not that far off. Built around a line from "a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8YWxzPKBSc"strongJenny From the Block/strong/a", "Everyone's Got to Make a Living" starts with bare beats and a soulful falsetto vocal, then picks up block-rockin' buzz, piano house keys, synth arpeggios fit for Giorgio Moroder, and finally some African-style group vocals, as if anticipating its own Panda Bear remix. Dances With White Girls may still be DJ Frog from Philly, but based on this song from the emNew Crack Swing/em EP, you'll be happy to be fooled by the rocks that he got./p pstrongMP3:gt;/strong span style="text-decoration: underline;"a href="http://downloads.pitchforkmedia.com/Dances%20With%20White%20Girls%20-%20Everyones%20Got%20To%20Make%20A%20Living.mp3" target="_blank"Dances With White Girls: "Everyone's Got to Make a Living"/a/spanbr /[from the emNew Crack Swing/em EP; out now on a href="http://www.myspace.com/throneofbloodrecords"strongThrone of Blood/strong/a]/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/k3sNYCddoH8t5Pc2a-W9Oh18yw0/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/k3sNYCddoH8t5Pc2a-W9Oh18yw0/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/pitchfork/today/~4/pdwKoiS5KYQ" height="1" width="1"/

Remember when Kanye West threatened to make an album where he would bear his heartbroken soul, align with T-Pain, sing on every song with the then inescapable Auto-Tune effect and, less problematically, lean on the common element — the Roland TR-808 drum machine — of classics like “Make It Last Forever,” “Posse on Broadway,” “808,” and “Bossy”? It would have been a wreck, a case of an artist working through paralyzing heartache while loose in a toy store. Except West wasn’t joking. Not only did he go through with it, but Roc-A-Fella released the result in time for the 2008 Christmas shopping season. It was indeed a wreck, if a kind of fascinating one, which helped make the material — voiced by someone who could not really sing, whose substantial shortcomings were not made less obvious by a polarizing studio device — seem a little less difficult on the ears.

In various spots across 808s & Heartbreak, the constant flutter of West’s processed voice, along with a seldom interrupted sluggish march of aching sounds, is enlivened by the disarming manner in which despair and dejection are conveyed. When, in “Welcome to Heartbreak,” he dispassionately recounts sitting alone on a flight, ahead of a laughing family, he makes first class sound like Siberia; he’d swap lives with the father in an instant. The majority of the lyrics, however, are directed at an ex who evidently did some damage; in “RoboCop” alone, she gets compared to the antagonist in Misery and is called a “spoiled little L.A. girl.” Earlier in the album, the number she did on him is called “the coldest story ever told,” yet he admits he still fantasizes about her. All the blocky drums, dragging strings, droning synths, and joyless pianos lead to a bleak set of productions — even the synthetic calliope in “Heartless” is unnerved, and the relative pep of “Paranoid” provides no respite, its bitter lyrics subverting a boisterous beat. Several tracks have almost as much in common with irrefutably bleak post-punk albums, such as New Order’s Movement and the Cure’s Pornography, as contemporary rap and R&B. (”Coldest Winter,” where West longs for his departed mother, samples the most desolate song from the first Tears for Fears album.) For anyone sifting through a broken relationship and self-letdown, this could all be therapeutic. Otherwise, no matter its commendable fearlessness, the album is a listless, bleary trudge along West’s permafrost.

pFiled under: a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/spyphotos/" rel="tag"Spy Photos/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/economy/" rel="tag"Economy/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/hatchbacks/" rel="tag"Hatchbacks/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/mazda/" rel="tag"Mazda/a/pa href="http://www.autoblog.com/photos/spy-shots-2010-mazda3-5-door/1178000/"img vspace="4" hspace="4" border="0" alt="" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/11/mazda3_spy_hatch.jpg" //abr / div align="center"emstrongsmallClick above for more "official spy shots" of the 2010 Mazda3 5-door/small/strong/embr //div br /The styling of the new a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/11/19/la-2008-2010-mazda3-shows-its-smiling-face/"Mazda3/a is generally pretty good, with one notable and extremely controversial element: that happy-go-lucky smiling face. Still, we've yet to get an official uncovered glimpse of the upcoming 5-door hatch, so there may still be some surprises up Mazda's sleeve. Today we discovered the odd batch of "official spy shots" straight from a href="http://www.autoblog.com/photos/spy-shots-2010-mazda3-5-door/1178016/"the horse's mouth/a, Mazda that is. They show the upcoming hatchback as it a href="http://www.autoblog.com/photos/spy-shots-2010-mazda3-5-door/1177992/"sheepishly/a plays a href="http://www.autoblog.com/photos/spy-shots-2010-mazda3-5-door/1177994/"peek-a-boo/a with its sedan sibling through some beautiful European scenery. From what we can tell, that blissfully chipper visage is alive and well on the 5-door. The rest of the details, unfortunately, are still pretty obscured by all that effective black vinyl clothing. br /br /When it finally is a href="http://www.motivemag.com/pub/news/2010_Mazda3_Hatchback_Coming_to_Bologna_Motor_Show_in_a_Few_Weeks.shtml"debuted at the 2008 Bologna Motorshow/a in Italy next month, the hatch's engine options should basically mirror those of the sedan's, which means the U.S. will initially get both a 148-horsepower 2.0L and a larger 167-horse 2.5L version of the MZR four cylinder engine. Could a Mazdaspeed3 be far behind? br /br /div class="postgallery"pstrongGallery: a href="http://www.autoblog.com/photos/spy-shots-2010-mazda3-5-door/"Spy Shots: 2010 Mazda3 5-door/a/strong/pa href="http://www.autoblog.com/photos/spy-shots-2010-mazda3-5-door/1177981/"img src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/11/mazda3-prototype-drive_1_thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" //aa href="http://www.autoblog.com/photos/spy-shots-2010-mazda3-5-door/1177999/"img src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/11/mazda3-prototype-drive_11_thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" //aa href="http://www.autoblog.com/photos/spy-shots-2010-mazda3-5-door/1178000/"img src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/11/mazda3-prototype-drive_29_thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" //aa href="http://www.autoblog.com/photos/spy-shots-2010-mazda3-5-door/1178006/"img src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/11/mazda3-prototype-drive_3_thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" //aa href="http://www.autoblog.com/photos/spy-shots-2010-mazda3-5-door/1177989/"img src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/11/mazda3-prototype-drive_4_thumbnail.jpg" alt="" title="" //a/divbr /[Source: Mazda Via a href="http://carscoop.blogspot.com/2008/11/2010-mazda3-hatchback-spy-photos.html"Carscoop/a]p style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/11/21/spy-shots-sort-of-mazda3-five-door-hatchback/"Spy Shots (Sort of): Mazda3 five-door hatchback/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.autoblog.com"Autoblog/a on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:57:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/11/21/spy-shots-sort-of-mazda3-five-door-hatchback/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/forward/1379438/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/11/21/spy-shots-sort-of-mazda3-five-door-hatchback/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/gJOVvtmBsv00ehhlT4hf8GrI5XI/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/gJOVvtmBsv00ehhlT4hf8GrI5XI/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=lBuU35Ez"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=lBuU35Ez" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=FNYqBQqc"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=FNYqBQqc" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/autoblog/~4/ZR6-d843Roc" height="1" width="1"/

In celebration of its semisesquicentennial1, Esquire magazine shares the seven greatest stories ever told in the pages of their magazine and has published them online in their entirety. (See also Esquire's 70 greatest sentences.) Get a load of these initial paragraphs.

The School by C.J. Chivers:

Kazbek Misikov stared at the bomb hanging above his family. It was a simple device, a plastic bucket packed with explosive paste, nails, and small metal balls. It weighed perhaps eight pounds. The existence of this bomb had become a central focus of his life. If it exploded, Kazbek knew, it would blast shrapnel into the heads of his wife and two sons, and into him as well, killing them all.

The Falling Man by Tom Junod:

In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did -- who jumped -- appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else -- something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man's posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end. He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.

What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now? by Richard Ben Cramer:

Few men try for best ever, and Ted Williams is one of those. There's a story about him I think of now. This is not about baseball but fishing. He meant to be the best there, too. One day he says to a Boston writer: "Ain't no one in heaven or earth ever knew more about fishing."

"Sure there is," says the scribe.

"Oh, yeah? Who?"

"Well, God made the fish."

"Yeah, awright," Ted says. "But you have to go pretty far back."

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold by Gay Talese:

Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra's four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday.

M by John Sack:

One, two, three at the most weeks and they would give M company its orders -- they being those dim Olympian entities who reputedly threw cards into an IBM machine or into a hat to determine where each soldier in M would go next, which ones to stay there in the United States, which to live softly in Europe, and which to fight and to die in Vietnam.

The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes! by Tom Wolfe:

Ten o'clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua aqua, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry. Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock-car races, and that old mothering north Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields. Mother dog!

Superman Comes to the Supermarket by Norman Mailer:

For once let us try to think about a political convention without losing ourselves in housing projects of fact and issue. Politics has its virtues, all too many of them -- it would not rank with baseball as a topic of conversation if it did not satisfy a great many things -- but one can suspect that its secret appeal is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one's life, one does not feel as much, often happily so, and politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.

[1] That's seventy five years, yo. Quattuordecennial is the anniversarial name for fourteen years. Others. ↩

xhtml2pdf converts HTML/XHTML/XHML to PDF using the ReportLab Toolkit, the HTML5lib, and pyPdf. It supports HTML 5 and CSS 2.1 (and some of CSS 3). The main benefit of this tool that a user with Web skills like HTML and CSS is able to generate PDF templates very quickly without learning new technologies. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU General Public License v2 hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / Background colors for inline elements like SPAN. Inline images and left and right aligned images. The option "--system" for a command line tool to dump system version info. The CSS attribute -pdf-line-spacing for fix space between lines. Creation and handling of data URIs with base64 encoding (others to come). A new general file loader that is also able to load remote data and data URIs. PDF Joiner to concatenate many PDF and pisa documents. Page backgrounds can now be images or PDF files. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/9N1EfLrXT0UdzVmZjqQ3FbaFKX0/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/9N1EfLrXT0UdzVmZjqQ3FbaFKX0/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-unix/~4/HSYSwHgWrhw" height="1" width="1"/

xhtml2pdf converts HTML/XHTML/XHML to PDF using the ReportLab Toolkit, the HTML5lib, and pyPdf. It supports HTML 5 and CSS 2.1 (and some of CSS 3). The main benefit of this tool that a user with Web skills like HTML and CSS is able to generate PDF templates very quickly without learning new technologies. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU General Public License v2 hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / Background colors for inline elements like SPAN. Inline images and left and right aligned images. The option "--system" for a command line tool to dump system version info. The CSS attribute -pdf-line-spacing for fix space between lines. Creation and handling of data URIs with base64 encoding (others to come). A new general file loader that is also able to load remote data and data URIs. PDF Joiner to concatenate many PDF and pisa documents. Page backgrounds can now be images or PDF files. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/A7AGNfJynsEKM-ufv9jP5b9meCY/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/A7AGNfJynsEKM-ufv9jP5b9meCY/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-global/~4/HSYSwHgWrhw" height="1" width="1"/

img src="http://c.fsdn.com/fm/screenshots/48220_thumb.png" align="right" alt="Screenshot" hspace="10" vspace="10" Gmsh is an automatic 3D finite element grid generator with built-in CAD and post-processing facilities. Its design goal is to provide a simple meshing tool for academic problems with parametric input and advanced visualization capabilities. It is built around four modules: geometry, mesh, solver, and post-processing. The specification of any input to these modules is done either interactively using the graphical user interface (based on FLTK and OpenGL) or in ASCII text files using Gmsh's own scripting language. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU General Public License (GPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / This release improves the transfinite algorithm, introduces a new uniform mesh refinement scheme, and fixes the high order meshing crashes observed on Windows and Linux. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/H5-3zfEddstcYkWS0ZKHEaU65DQ/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/H5-3zfEddstcYkWS0ZKHEaU65DQ/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-unix/~4/VxVmK7dUwcY" height="1" width="1"/

img src="http://c.fsdn.com/fm/screenshots/48220_thumb.png" align="right" alt="Screenshot" hspace="10" vspace="10" Gmsh is an automatic 3D finite element grid generator with built-in CAD and post-processing facilities. Its design goal is to provide a simple meshing tool for academic problems with parametric input and advanced visualization capabilities. It is built around four modules: geometry, mesh, solver, and post-processing. The specification of any input to these modules is done either interactively using the graphical user interface (based on FLTK and OpenGL) or in ASCII text files using Gmsh's own scripting language. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU General Public License (GPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / This release improves the transfinite algorithm, introduces a new uniform mesh refinement scheme, and fixes the high order meshing crashes observed on Windows and Linux. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/2Vm5zZ894X5SCs1L-12uhTT5UOc/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/2Vm5zZ894X5SCs1L-12uhTT5UOc/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-global/~4/VxVmK7dUwcY" height="1" width="1"/

In a November 21 Washington Times article about President-elect Barack Obama's plan to lift the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the military, Robert Knight, director of the Media Research Center's Culture and Media Institute, was quoted as saying that the efforts of activists to lift the ban will lead to "a Pearl Harbor moment." Knight is also a columnist for Townhall.com and Human Events.

According to the Times, Knight said: "Homosexual activists are overconfident because they have not yet seen a counterforce emerge as occurred in 1993. ... But as the threat grows stronger, we will see groups forming and the resistance building." Knight was then quoted as saying: "Americans go about their business and are not activists until they have a Pearl Harbor moment. That has yet to happen, but it will." The Times also reported that Knight said most Americans "are unaware that gay activists have the military in their gun sights."

Knight previously compared the legalization of same-sex marriage to the attack on Pearl Harbor. In his June 17 Townhall.com column, Knight wrote that former Human Rights Campaign executive director Elizabeth Birch "not[ed] that the natural elements had remained intact in the Bay State [Massachusetts] following the beginning of 'gay marriage.' She assured the young audience, which soaked up her utterly illogical argument, that the 'sun still came out, the birds still chirped and the flowers still bloomed,' or something to that effect." Knight continued: "Well, the birds chirped and the flowers bloomed in Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941, as the American fleet lay smoldering."

Knight has also previously stated that "the endgame of the gay rights activists, and I've said this before, is the criminalization of Christianity," and claimed that "gay rights advocates are laying the foundation for the criminalization of Christianity, Judaism and every other religion that preaches God's view of sexual morality."

From The Washington Times November 21 article:

"Homosexual activists are overconfident because they have not yet seen a counterforce emerge as occurred in 1993," said Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Media Institute at the Media Research Center, an organization that seeks to balance perceived liberal bias in mainstream news coverage.

"But as the threat grows stronger, we will see groups forming and the resistance building," he said. "Americans go about their business and are not activists until they have a Pearl Harbor moment. That has yet to happen, but it will."

He added that most Americans "are unaware that gay activists have the military in their gun sights."

Online gaming competition site, BringIt, has launched in open beta, but its gambling element may cause some issues.

Online gaming competition site, BringIt, has launched in open beta, but its gambling element may cause some issues.

[a href=http://www.ecommr.com/ title=linklink/a] [a href=http://del.icio.us/url?url=http://www.ecommr.com/ title=moremore/a]

Look, I know the drill. If any element of the Twilight movie varies even slightly from the way you pictured it in your head, then it is the worst film ever made and you hate it and Catherine Hardwicke has ruined your childhood. Or, alternatively, you've built up so much anticipation for the movie that you're going to love love LOVE it no matter what, even if it's bad, you don't care, you refuse to listen to any criticisms LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU. I know how it goes.

The book's most devoted fans are seeing the film anyway, so I guess I'm talking to everyone else -- those who haven't read the book, or who (like me) read it, mostly enjoyed it, then didn't give it another thought. Is the Twilight movie of any use to those people? Or, as a friend asked me, does it work purely as a vampire movie?

Oh, heavens, no. Noooooo. This is not a vampire movie. This is a somber teen romance that happens to have some vampires in it. Little attempt is made to establish the mythology of the bloodsuckers, and the supernatural elements are downplayed -- a wise move, since the special effects, when they are necessary, are at about the level you'd expect from a movie that is more focused on romance than sci-fi action.

All of which is in keeping with the tone of Stephenie Meyer's book, which is eight parts romance and two parts action/fantasy. That's why it's been such a phenomenal success with women, and why the male-dominated geek industry -- the Nerderati, if you will -- has been so skeptical of that success. "What?" they scoff. "A super-popular vampire book that we, as men, AREN'T interested in? Inconceivable! It must be terrible, and its popularity is probably being over-reported!"

Filed under: Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, Fandom

Continue reading Review: Twilight -- Eric's Take

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The next installment in The Met: Live in HD series will be a new production of Berlioz’s rarely staged opera-oratorio, La Damnation de Faust. The composer’s unconventional take on Goethe’s version of the Faust legend has never had a secure place in the operatic repertoire, in part because it’s not quite an opera and not quite an oratorio. It contains some of Berlioz’s most extravagantly expressive music, though, and is most often presented in concert form, as it was at its Met premiere in 1896. The work is becoming more dramatically viable as new developments in stagecraft make it possible for companies to create scenic effects that were unimaginable during the composer’s lifetime, and the work is finally beginning to gain a foothold in the repertoire. The innovative Canadian director Robert Lepage introduced an earlier version of this production in 1999 in Matsumoto, Japan, but he has extensively expanded the scenic elements for the Met’s production, which promises to be visually stunning. James Levine will conduct, and the production will feature Susan Graham as Marguerite, Marcello Giordani as Faust, and John Relyea as Méphistopheles.

The live transmission of La Damnation de Faust will be on Saturday, November 22 at 1:00 (ET), with an encore broadcast on Wednesday, December 3 at 7:00 pm (local time). Check your local theater listings for details or check out the Met’s website.

Ecommr is a collection of interface and design elements from ecommerce sites. I wish there were a bit more context around each screenshot (e.g. which interface element is the focus and what's novel about it) but it's a good start.

(link)

ObjectTools 2.5b3

ObjectTools is an all-purpose tool which solves or simplifies many common problems faced by 4D developers. ObjectTools eliminates the limitations of 4D BLOBs and adds many new features not available with BLOBs. Using ObjectTools, 4D developers can:

• Store and retrieve any 4D data type (except for 2D arrays) by name in any order, eliminating the need to remember and use numeric offsets
• Access elements of arrays in an object without retrieving the array from the object
• Store and retrieve an entire record from any table with a single command
• Embed objects within objects to create hierarchically structured data storage
• Save and restore objects to and from BLOBs
• Dramatically reduce process and interprocess variable usage
• Easily package data for interprocess messaging
• Develop in an object-oriented style

WHAT'S NEWVersion 2.5b3:

• When using OT BLOBToObject, pointers to variables within an array are now converted to nil pointers when running in a compiled database.

REQUIREMENTSMac OS X 10.4 or later, 4th Dimension 2004.1/ v11 or later.
DEVELOPERAparajita Fishman
DOWNLOADS2638
DOWNLOAD NOW (890 K)
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pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/color_blocks.jpg"Does Adobe think they can out-Google Google? Perhaps. The company is involved with Zoetrope, a joint project with a href="http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=45255"researchers at the University of Washington/a. What they're building is a tool that allows for manipulating the web over time. Instead of the snapshot of the web you see today when googling, Zoetrope will let anyone use keyword searches to discover archived web information and look for patterns in the data found. /p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.openx.org/ck.php?n=12673amp;cb=12673' target='_blank'img src='http://d.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=861amp;cb=12673amp;n=12673' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p h2About Zoetrope/h2 pAs with a href="http://www.archive.org"the Internet Archive/a, the data in Zoetrope's database is a backup of the entire web, including those pages which have c