St. Louis Likes Watching Baseball a Bit

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the TV ratings for the MLB All-Star Game:

The Nielsen Co. says that Fox’s telecast of Tuesday night’s contest from Kansas City was seen in 20.5 percent of homes with a TV in the St. Louis market. That’s up from the 17.8 rating last year and tied with the figure from 2010. The local All-Star rating soared in 2009, when the game was played at Busch Stadium and drew a 37 figure.

All those games were on KTVI (Channel 2). Coming in second this year was KC (18.7), followed by Detroit (16.1).

Best baseball fans in the country. It’s one of the main reasons I like living here. People “get it” when it comes to the game itself.

Indie Game: The Movie is 50% Off and You Should Buy It

The reaction to the film has been well-beyond anything we thought possible when we started the project two years ago.  The film is currently experiencing really great word of mouth (some higher profile examples: here, here & here).  One of the things we hearing is how the film is great way to show & explain to non-gamers or non-devs what goes into making a game and/or why they love games the way they do.

People seem to like discovering and sharing the film.  And today, we plan to make that discovering & sharing a l’il bit easier.

Go get it.

$5 gets you access to the film in both on online stream and as an up-to-1080p DRM-free download. I haven’t watched it yet but have heard it’s amazing and am looking forward to it. 96% “fresh” rating on RottenTomatoes.

Return to Red Dead?

From a Q&A on the Rockstar Blog:

Awesome, we love Red Dead too – and are thrilled that so many of you loved John Marston’s tale and are excited for more epic Western action. As we mentioned in our last set of Asked & Answereds to similar questions about the future of other game franchises like Bully and L.A. Noire, we don’t always rush to make sequels but that does not mean that we won’t get to them eventually. Stay tuned for further announcements about the future of the Red Dead series.

Yes, please.

Red Dead Redemption is one of the bast games I’ve played in the last 5 years. Way better than GTAIV.

Bully and L.A. Noire can stay done though.

Infinite Complexity in 4096 Bytes

Creative Applications Network:

Worthy winner of the PC 4kB intro competition at Revision 2012 and latest example of the compact-coding tradition exercised within the demoscene, Hartverdrahtet by Akronyme Analogiker is a three minute long audio-visual trip into a procedural fractalverse, compressed into a minuscule piece of software. No bigger than 4096 bytes – less than an empty Word document, as demoscene activists like to point out – the executable file contains all the mathematics needed to generate the unfolding visual complexity and audible ambience upon a double-click. A solo effort by a talented coder who calls himself Demoscene Passivist, Hartverdrahtet reveals a mesmerizing cosmos observed through what could be an electron microscope – ethereal, greenish and a little eerie.

Truly astounding. 4096 bytes.

Sign Your Apps

Jeff Keacher:

Then two days ago, I was testing some changes to the web site in Internet Explorer and decided to try downloading the installer.  A big, scary, red warning box popped up […]

I think this blog post is titled incorrectly. Internet Explorer isn’t really the problem here.

So how do you fix that problem? One way is to wait for the installer to “age” a sufficient length of time, but the specifics are murky, and the problem comes back when a new installer is released.

The better solution is to get a code-signing certificate and sign the installer. StartSSL had what appeared to be the best prices, so I parted with some money and got a certificate.

The real moral of the story is that your code and/or installer needs to be signed. The last time I worked on an installable software product was pre-Windows 7 and we never would have thought about releasing an installer without signing the installer—especially after testing.

This is only going to be more prevalent with Gatekeeper coming to Mac OS and the increased security I am sure has found its way into Windows since Vista.

Back to IE: I think you should test in it—and I think the best thing Microsoft could do for IE and making sure things work with it would be to release it for Mac.