Word­Press 3.0 – code­name Thelo­nious – is now avail­able for down­load or auto­matic upgrade respec­tively. The 13th major release includes a new default theme called Twenty Ten, intro­duces new APIs, and merges MU and Word­Press. Even bet­ter, the devel­op­ers man­aged to cre­ate a lighter inter­face and stuff in 1,217 bug fixes and fea­ture enhance­ments. What I like most so far is the new bulk update for plu­g­ins. A com­pre­hen­sive list of the improve­ments is avail­able on 3.0′s Codex page. Go get it from the offi­cial site.

Well, well, well. First they fuck up the orig­i­nal movie so that you can’t pos­si­bly watch it in the cin­ema and now they’re rush­ing pro­duc­tion for the sequel. Of course, Clash of the Titans earned nearly $490 mil­lion world-​​wide thus mak­ing a sequel eco­nom­i­cally sen­si­ble, irre­sistible even. If you haven’t seen Clash of the Titans already wait for a bet­ter cut on Blu-​​ray or DVD. Want to know why the movie sucks? Head over to chud.com and be enlightened!

As far as the sequel is con­cerned, it looks like the pow­ers that be are focused on get­ting the script ready for film­ing in early 2011. At least they want to shoot the film in 3D instead of try­ing a post con­ver­sion again. Blu-​​ray + DVD + dig­i­tal Copy combo of Clash of the Titans will be out on July 27th. Accord­ing to ComingSoon.net a sneak pre­view of The Green Lantern will be included. As if that would help the movie …

A few days ago, the E3 trailer for Deus Ex: Human Rev­o­lu­tion made it into the web. The third install­ment actu­ally is a pre­quel to the orig­i­nal Deus Ex pub­lished in the year 2000. In March the first trailer was shown to the pub­lic. The E3 trailer expands on the for­mer and drops a few hints of the pos­si­ble plot. Before I start ram­bling, do your­self a favor and enjoy the trailer:

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With the debut of a short Mor­tal Kom­bat film titled Rebirth spec­u­la­tion has run ram­pant on the inter­net yes­ter­day. The nearly eight-​​minute clip fea­tured a very inter­est­ing and dark and gritty take on the fight­ing fran­chise. The short is directed by Kevin Tan­charoen and fea­tures a cast that includes Ian Anthony Dale (Scor­pion), Lateef Crow­der (Baraka), Mat Mullins (Johnny Cage), Jeri Ryan (Sonya Blade) and Michael jai White (Jax). Accord­ing to Jeri Ryan’s twit­ter­ing Rebirth isn’t a live-​​action trailer for the next Mor­tal Kom­bat game and it’s not a trailer for a new MK movie. Looks like an inde­pen­dent pro­duc­tion to sell Warner Broth­ers Tancharoen’s reimag­in­ing of the franchise.

So, there’s no guar­an­tee that there will be a reimag­in­ing or if there is that the same actors will play the char­ac­ters in a fea­ture film ver­sion. Despite all that, the ‘teaser’ looks like a huge suc­cess online. Lots of talk here and there and I have to admit, I like Tancharoen’s vision more than the first two films and I def­i­nitely like it more than that sorry excuse for a series titled Mor­tal Kom­bat: Con­quest. Any­way, enjoy the trailer:

I bought Prince of Per­sia: The For­got­ten Sands dur­ing my stay in Lon­don over the extended week­end. Today, I had noth­ing to do so I put it in the PS3 and had a go at it. After roughly seven hours I was done. The real play­time is about one hour less and six hours of game­play aren’t all that good for a game like this. The pre­de­ces­sors took me longer. Any­way, let’s see if I can sum­ma­rize my expe­ri­ence a lit­tle better.

I won’t tell you any­thing about the plot. Let’s just say that the sto­ry­line is weak and you surely won’t be absorbed by the nar­ra­tive. The acro­bat­ics and plat­form­ing is up to the Prince of Per­sia stan­dard set by The Sands of Time. The first two hours are pretty easy going but it get’s more chal­leng­ing later on. The prince unlocks new pow­ers like freez­ing water or mak­ing por­tions of ruins seem like they did before they were destroyed. You have to com­bine these pow­ers to get through the later lev­els and this is def­i­nitely more chal­leng­ing than the begin­ning areas. Thanks to the abil­ity to rewind time you improve the odds to beat tricky plat­form­ing areas.

Com­bat is more bor­ing because it mostly con­sists of but­ton smash­ing. The first ene­mies are easy, the later ones are a bit tougher and some­times quite big. With the pow­ers the prince unlocks with his expe­ri­ence points everything’s easy, though. Using these pow­ers requires the same resources as does rewind­ing time so you may  have to be care­ful, depend­ing on your play­ing style. Dur­ing nor­mal game­play you can’t max­i­mize your pow­ers so you should play the game’s chal­lenge modes.

The visu­als of the game aren’t impres­sive at all. The game had poten­tial, though. Some­times, TFS looks really fan­tas­tic which is unfor­tu­nately negated when you arrive at dull look­ing areas. Some areas even look a bit unfin­ished. Seems like the devel­op­ers had a lot of pres­sure fin­ish­ing the game in time which results in this unre­fined game.

Funny side­note: You can unlock addi­tional stuff via Uplay and the devel­op­ers added an Ezio cos­tume (Ezio is the lead char­ac­ter in Assassin’s Creed II).

So, what’s my con­clu­sion? The game is nei­ther bad nor awe­some, but good. It has a solid base but there’s quite a bit of untapped poten­tial hid­den deep within. That makes it bet­ter than the 2008 Prince of Per­sia but that’s it. It’s got good voice act­ing and some inter­est­ing plat­form­ing but com­bat is a dull affair. If I had to rate the game, I’d give it 6 out of 10 points.

An Israeli research team has devel­oped a machine algo­rithm that can rec­og­nize sar­casm. Tested on Ama­zon, SASI (Semi-​​supervised Algo­rithm for Sar­casm Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion) can detect sar­cas­tic sen­tences in prod­uct reviews with 77 per­cent pre­ci­sion. The results are even bet­ter on Twit­ter where SASI iden­ti­fied sar­casm with 94 per­cent pre­ci­sion. Basi­cally, the researchers had human anno­ta­tors tag­ging sen­tences for sar­casm. The team then iden­ti­fied cer­tain sar­cas­tic pat­terns and cre­ated a clas­si­fi­ca­tion algo­rithm that puts each state­ment into a sar­cas­tic class.

The algo­rithm were then trained and turned loose on an eval­u­a­tion seet. Con­sid­er­ing the over­all pre­ci­sion SASI scored, that’s not a bad shot at inter­pret­ing the human sense of humor. It almost imme­di­ately reminded me of a project called Stu­pid­Fil­ter. If they could incor­po­rate this algo­rithm … but then, they haven’t updated their web­site for nearly two years. Too bad. Any­way, if you really want to know more about how the algo­rithm works, you should check out this PDF (~93 kB).

So what’s the use of rec­og­niz­ing sar­cas­tic state­ments? The researchers believe that SASI could be instru­men­tal in gen­er­at­ing bet­ter per­son­al­ized con­tent and make bet­ter rec­om­men­da­tions to human users. They also think that the algo­rithm could ben­e­fit opinion-​​mining systems.