Author Archives: Jon

About Jon

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Attack of the spam-bots

Lately visitors may have noticed a large amount of spam hitting both .net and .com. Today I took a little time out of my studies and did a lot of site maintenance. Fixed some minor security holes that may have attracted the spam-bots. I also updated the XHTML to the main layout of the site due to the release of Internet Explorer 7. Now it views perfectly fine wherever you browse on the site! The updates do not affect Firefox 1.5 – 2.0 or Internet Explorer 6.0 or lower because their parsing of XHTML is different (and possibly more effective than 7.0 in my honest opinion).

As soon as I find the time I will continue to update the forum to the newest version, but with this semester being a lot more difficult than anticipated it’ll take me a while to finalize the design to the forum. I could just install the newest version of the site, and leave it without a custom theme, but I don’t think members would like that much. This is one of the coolest Jurassic Park sites around. The forum must mesh with the site in some way, shape or form. Anyway, if anyone is skilled in modifying Invision Boards drop me an email (don’t forget to change the “[at]” to “@”). I’d like to get it done before the year 2010.

Blast from the past

Here is a late Halloween treat for all of you… A while back I must have found the original Jurassic Park teaser trailer. I’m not sure when I found it or who originally posted it, but I’ve posted it here for now. From what I gather the teaser trailer reveals nothing, but an idea that started in 1990 involving a single mosquito trapped in 65 million-year-old amber. It’s pretty amazing to think that teaser trailers have not changed much over the decades–The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III had similar teaser trailers, which left us to ask “was that a dinosaur?” I’ll see what else I can dig up. Thanks goes out to the original poster of this teaser trailer!

 

Download the Jurassic Park Teaser Trailer Now! (8.5 mb)

Trick or treat

With Halloween right around the corner, tomorrow in fact… Id like to wish everyone a happy and safe Halloween! For those that are interested, well be hosting a Halloween Costume Showoff. For those that wish to participate it will be hosted in the general forum at www.jpdatabase.com. All you need to do is post a picture of yourself (with or without friends, it doesn’t matter, but the more the better!) in your costume(s) with a little description of what you’re supposed to be (even if its obvious). Members who participate might find they are in for a trick or a treat. No one will ever know. Muhaha (that is supposed to be an evil laugh. Corny. I know. I bet I sound like Doctor Evil when I do that). I hope you all join the discussion even if you do not celebrate Halloween.

On the more serious side of things, the host responsible for hosting the Jurassic Park db gave us a treat this past weekend. Since our server is one of the oldest hosted by them we received a brand-new server with various upgrades! Complete with more storage and bandwidth. This means the Jurassic Park db can host more Jurassic-type stuff, all for your internet browsing pleasure. In the end we shall spare no expense.

I’d also like to announce that once all the software for the new server has been loaded we will be upgrading the forum to one of the latest versions of Invision Board.

We’re currently finalizing the new layout. Due to technical reasons the old layout cannot be used without serious rewriting of the source code. There is no set date for the release of the new forum because were all currently preoccupied with our undergraduate and graduate studies in various Universities. That pretty much is the reason for the lack of updates around here. Not to mention Jurassic Park IV news has been really slow over the last few months.

Can Jurassic Park make you dance?

Can you believe that Jurassic Park has actually inspired a musical? Well no, but it is a comedy. What started as a seven-minute comedy sketch at last years Toronto Fringe Festival has extended to over a fifty-minute “crowd pleaser” called The Marking of Jurassic Park: The Musical. Finally joining the ranks of mainstream theatre. Cast of three—Darryl Hinds (playing a megalomaniac director), Scott Andrews (as a sycophantic composer), and Scott Sykes (playing clueless actor as a lead dinosaur) fill the stage with comedy. Read more about this interesting musical at TheStar.com and at Diesel Playhouse. Who knows, we might see it off Broadway sometime soon.

Currently playing at the Diesel Playhouse (directions), 55 Blue Jays Way, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, until August 19.

Dates
August 8 — 19
Tuesday — Friday at 8:00 pm
Saturday at 8:00 pm/10:30 pm
Sunday at 4:00 pm

Ticket prices
$18 — opening/Sunday matinee
$20 — Tuesday to Thursday
$25 — Friday and Saturday

Jurassic Park media is back

Sometime last week I finished making video clips for Jurassic Park. It’s not a hard task given today’s technology. What is problem is my ISP. It’s been a royal pain for me to get online and place them on the site. There are so many people on during the summer the internet slows to a crawl throughout the day. I guess it doesn’t matter if you have dial-up or broadband, the same result occurs. I’m sure you all know someone that it happens to constantly or maybe it happens to you as well.

Anyway, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve released 14 high quality Jurassic Park video clips, 15 to 50 seconds long, at a resolution of 416 x 224. As we were making these clips it was decided upon to use the XviD codec over the normal MPEG Layer-1/2 compression that we’ve used in the past. The end result from using the XviD codec showed excellent compression while maintaining superb quality in an MPEG Layer-4 format. Even more entertaining are the file sizes– they’re extremely small. Of the clips created the largest file size is 4.88 mb! This is a dream for dial-up users, and a 2 second wait for those using broadband.

More is due to follow in the next couple of weeks before we all head off to school again. If there is anything you wish was on the site (but isn’t) or you have something for the site, please contact us! We’re always here working to enhance the Jurassic Park community.

Dinosaurs grow like human teenagers

New research on the Albertosaurus shows dinosaurs actually went through the teenage phase. The teenage phase is classified as sudden growth spurts, not puberty (at the moment). Researcher Philip Currie from University of Alberta believes they are more human (mammal-like) than reptilian. Gregory Erickson from Florida State University confirmed the discovery while putting together the first non-avian (non-bird related) dinosaur growth chart.

The chart compared twenty-two Albertosaurus fossils from a bone bed in southern Alberta, where the ages of the creature ranged from two to twenty-eight years old when they died. They plotted measurements of weight and size of the Albertosaurus. They have concluded that the growth and death patterns did not fit reptiles at all.

The explanation for this is simple—throughout a reptile’s life, say a snake, they continue to grow. Reptiles never cease to stop growing, which is why they can become so big before they die. In the case of dinosaurs they, they reach a certain point and stop growing, just like mammals.

This is an amazing discovery among itself, and will possibly pave the way for us to revamp our outlook on dinosaurs. Possibly prompt Spielberg and his dinosaur expert to take this new discovery into consideration for Jurassic Park IV. It makes me wonder if inGen would have discovered this when they were manipulation the dinosaur DNA in an essence to make them grow faster for a profit. Read more about it at CNEWS – Research confirms dinosaurs had teenage phase, making them more like mammals.

Can the Tyrannosaurus see?

I’m all pretty sure most Jurassic Park fans remember the heart-stopping incident with Alan Grant and Lex. A few days ago, July 1 to be extract, a good friend of mine CyborgCompy pointed me to an article at sciencenews.org. It would seem scientists at University of Oregon in Eugene have discovered that the Tyrannosaurus probably had the best vision in its class. This creature had an ability to see non-moving objects and a focal length of up to 3.7 miles. It would go to show that Alan Grant and Lex would be in for a world of trouble. Here is an excerpt:

 T. rex had a binocular range of 55°, which is wider than that of modern hawks, Stevens reports in the summer Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Moreover, over the millennia, T. rex evolved features that improved its vision: Its snout grew lower and narrower, cheek grooves cleared its sight lines, and its eyeballs enlarged.

“It was a selective advantage for this animal to see three-dimensionally ahead of it,” Stevens says.

Stevens also considered visual acuity and limiting far point—the greatest distance at which objects remain distinct. For these vision tests, he took the known optics of reptiles and birds, ranging from the poor-sighted crocodile to the exceptional eagle, and adjusted them to see how they would perform inside an eye as large as that of T. rex. “With the size of its eyeballs, it couldn’t help but have excellent vision,” Stevens says.

He found that T. rex might have had visual acuity as much as 13 times that of people. By comparison, an eagle’s acuity is 3.6 times that of a person.

T. rex might also have had a limiting far point of 6 kilometers, compared with the human far point of 1.6 km. These are best-case estimates, Stevens says, but even toward the cautious end of the scale, T. rex still displays better vision than what’s needed for scavenging.

This article is definitely worth the read. To read more about our friend, the Tyrannosaurus, click here. It might save your life if you ever end up on Isla Sorna (again).

As far as I know

I woke up this morning and decided I was going to release version 11 of JPdb to the public today, regardless if I have all the content I wanted to publish with or not. As you can see from the links we have, we have a lot of content on the way. Most of which are being written up by myself and co-webmaster Samfan. Sadly, Samfan had to fly home to Hawaii this week and will be back in approximately 3 weeks. I’ll make the best of it now, so if you find any errors on this new design please contact any one of us. Also, free free to join the forum and post about.

Tim Murphy

Tim Murphy played by Joseph Mazzello (Simon Birch, Radio Flyer) Grandson to InGen Founder John Hammond and younger brother to Lex Murphy. Very interested in dinosaurs; he not only studied many species but he also had an idolization for Dr. Alan Grant. Tim survived through the T-Rex attack, which left him stranded within the electric Explorer that was entangled in a huge tree. Most memorable would be the 10,000 volt shock that he endured while climbing over the electric perimeter fence, deeming him “the human piece of toast.”

Lex Murphy

Lex Murphy played by Ariana Richards (Tremors, Prancer) The grand-daughter to InGen Founder John Hammond and sister to Tim Murphy. As a bright-spirited thirteen-year old, she had a love for computers as she once said “I’d rather be called a hacker” when her brother jokingly said she was a nerd. While being hunted down by Velociraptors in the kitchen scene, she eluded one of the Raptors with her reflection which led to both herself and her brother’s safety. Her computer skills later came in effect when she navigated through Jurassic Park’s security system where she managed to restore everything back to working order.