It’s official. Starcraft II is coming! Truth be told, I’ve not exactly played Starcraft before owing to its age. As a fan of Warcraft III who has played Blizzard’s games growing up, I’m really excited to see a new game being released in the future! World of Warcraft was something I wanted to play as well but seeing that it required a monthly subscription, I guess it was not the type for me. Perhaps I’ll get to it when I have some sort of stable income.

The graphics look pretty sleek. Definitely an improvement since Warcraft III. Since I haven’t played World of Warcraft before, I’ve got nothing to compare. I wonder if it will run well on a Pentium 4 machine. I’m getting pretty high CPU usage on my Pentium 4 computer just by visiting their Starcraft II and World of Warcraft site alone.

Anyway, here comes my developer rants. Skip these if you are not interested.

I’ve observed that Blizzard have pretty “high-tech” and good looking sites compared to many other corporate sites. Of course, you can say that they are a gaming company and thus the higher graphic density of their sites but hell, their designs do appeal. And if you happen to view the source code of their sites (WoW or Starcraft II), LO! and behold, their sites are written in XML and transformed to XHTML by XSLT. Wow. I swear I’ve never seen any other sites do that.

After pondering through this, I think this is a pretty clever way to setup a website. My hunch is that they store at least some of their content not in the form of databases but in these XML files that we are served. Their scripts can simply edit the XML files and then when a client requests for a page, they can simply serve the XML file to the clients without the need to regenerate the whole page using server side scripting like most sites do now. Rather, the “display” generation is done by the clients themselves via XSLT!

This is pretty analogous to what many Web 2.0 sites and AJAX have been doing: moving processing to the client and relieving load off the servers. I’ve written something about this in one of the articles of my Thinkquest entry. In the JavaScript case, data is served to the client and through JavaScript, the page displays and or allows manipulations to the data through AJAX etc. In this case, the server serves content to the client via XML and the client formats it accordingly using XSLT. I’ve got a feeling we might be seeing more of this in the future.

Time to brush up on XML and learn XSLT!

Tags: Web

I haven’t blogged for a while. If you’ve noticed, I’ve just changed the site design. It’s called Redoable and is kinda cool. And since there was a new version of Wordpress being released (2.2), I thought it might be a good chance to do a mini-revamp now. Some minor problems with the theme though they should be solved soon.

It was kind of sad that VJ soccer boys lost to RJC yesterday. I’m sure they’ve tried their best and let’s hope they can at least win the third title.

There were some people from Millenia Institute yesterday at the above mentioned match who sat at our side and decided to jeer and create trouble during the match. At the end, some of the male teachers who were there and some ex-victorians went ahead and gave them a piece of their minds. I’ve been reading this person’s blog recently regarding the students from the school he teachers. Coupled with the recent posts about the “parents’ letter” issue, I wonder what the hell our education system is moulding us into.

This morning at Jalan Besar stadium, our soccer girls managed to win TJ 1-0 to get into the finals. Good job girls! The goal was pretty cool. A long range shot. I’ve just realized that even though the stadium is relatively nearer form my house than any other places, it still would have taken me 15 minutes to walk there. Add the blazing sun into the formula and… you get the picture.

I’m sure that for most of us who went down to CCAB yesterday and for those that went to the stadium to support today were not thinking about half-days or full-days when we were cheering for them to win. Those who are seriously do not get the point. It was more of school spirit that drove me to support them in addition to reasons like our class were supposed to go and because Jalan Besar stadium is so near my house.

There was this lack of spirit for Dunman High and I could feel more of it here. Time passes really fast and it is six more months before we are out of the school and into world of National Service. I hope I can still remember my time here vividly when the time comes.

Now, time to start work on the stacks of things I plan to do. Any one has extra time to sell? I’ll buy them!