Geekspeak

Victory?

2010-01-18T17:34:00.002-06:00

Today is Martin Luther King day, one of those random federal holidays that always seems to leave me wondering just what's open and what's not. It's usually safe to assume that the mail won't be delivered (lazy gits!) and that banks won't be open. There's no holidays at work since we're always supposed to be on site, so that's easy enough to keep track of. We have fewer employees come in, which is nice since that makes things much quieter.

The question I wind up asking all the time is "do the buses run today?" Our city attempts to be modern with a website that has the bus schedules posted among a number of other things, but the days when there's no service is hidden somewhere non-obvious and I always wind up having to hunt for it.

When I found it today, I decided that I was done looking and thought I should just keep the list of days in a convenient place. But, being a dork, I went and wrote a simple CGI script to determine if the buses were running and put it on my webserver. I reasoned that just having a simple link that I could check for this information would be rather handy.

It was maybe 15 minutes to put together. In the process of writing the thing and looking up when various holidays were, I became just familiar enough with the list of days that the buses don't run that the program doesn't seem quite as useful now that it's mostly in my head.

Figures.

2010

2010-01-01T06:26:00.004-06:00

'Cause it's gonna be the future soon
And I won't always be this way
When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away

--Jonathan Coulton, "The Future Soon"

In the scheme of how we actually live our lives, a new year doesn't really mean a whole hell of a lot; it's another trip around the sun for Earth and all the forms of life clinging to its surface. Not that we can really tell, but we mark this as significant anyway. Time to pull down last year's "Hooter's" calender and move on.

But hey, by our calendar it is 2010. And that's just neat.

I guess that the last year has had its ups and downs... For me, the good parts have been overshadowed by the general stress, depression, and so on and I haven't really been able to see them easily. So while I did post that I was glad to be done with 2009, it seems that further contemplation may indicate that this was a hasty conclusion.

However, rather than spend more time considering this, I'll move forward. Forward to THE FUTURE!!!

2009-12-17T13:08:00.001-06:00

Lets see if this works

Python : The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

2009-09-28T06:43:00.000-05:00

Recently, I started to really jump into learning Python. I'd been interested in it before; the live interpreter was awfully handy and it seemed like another good language to pick up. For whatever reason, I wrote a couple trivial programs in it and never really got back into it until a few months ago. Since then, I've wound up rewriting a couple Perl + shell scripts in the language and really liking it a lot. What follows are my impressions after trying the language out for a little while.

The Good

Python is really easy to learn, almost stupidly so. Much like my early days with BASIC on an Apple II, I can jump right in and try new things in the interpreter to see if they work as planned. This interpreter is also a very nice way to play with and test a half-complete script in pieces before letting the whole thing run, which is terribly handy.

Overall, Python seems to go out of its way to be really helpful; even if you don't have documentation handy, it isn't difficult to dissect a module and figure out how you can use it thanks to the dir and help keywords. Most documentation I've run into is surprisingly useful -- informative without being stupidly verbose.

Speaking of being verbose, I can't help but draw some comparisons to Java here. Python is certainly object-oriented, much like Java and C++ but it lacks those languages' distinction of being wordy and obnoxious. Yes, lots of things are objects, but you really don't notice unless you want to. Python doesn't seem to care what paradigm you use when programming.

I've also noticed that the various libraries available in Python are really helpful; tools like Mark Pilgrim's Feedparser make handling RSS and Atom a fucking breeze. You give it either a url or a file name and it figures out what you mean on its own and parses it into a homogeneous data structure. This saves me a lot of time compared to poorly-maintained junk like XML::Simple or some of the other XML parsing tools out there. This seems largely prevalent in the community as a whole; APIs are ridiculously easy to use I've found. pyAudere is another example; in roughly three lines of code, I can have a sound card initialized, an audio file (most formats supported, and it'll figure out what you mean on its own) loaded into RAM, and played back. I don't know that I've replicated such a feat with other tools.

Which brings me to something else I've really liked; the functional programming primitives that are readily available in Python. Tools like map, reduce, and filter and of course lambda are all just sitting there waiting to be utilized. These are awfully useful if you're hacking at Project Euler for fun, but quite handy for more typical usage.

As a new user of the language, I don't think that I can escape commenting on whitespace. For the most part, Python's whitespace rules are exactly what you should already be doing in the first place and as such I don't really see them as an issue. Lately, I wish that Java had a similar mechanism for when I have to read other people's code.

The Bad

Python is constantly evolving. Right now, there are two major branches of the language, the Python 2 version family and Python 3. Within Python 2, there seem to be three significant versions (2.4, 2.5, and 2.6). Here's where the fun begins; I wrote a program on my netbook which had Python 2.6 installed as that version seems to be both current and well-supported by major libraries. Python 3 has some nifty changes, but it seems that a good number of libraries don't support it yet. This will undoubtedly change in time, but right now I only play with Python 3 a little bit and tend not to use it for anything I'm trying to really work on.

Normally when there's multiple versions of a language, it would seem a simple task to just avoid other versions. I did however bump into issues with this, and while it isn't Python's fault, it is annoying. I wrote a script on my netbook, tested it and everything, only to have it crash when I ran it on the Debian box at home. The problem? I was using a string formatting method that wasn't supported in 2.4 (the default version on the system) but was most certainly present on the copy of 2.6 on my portable machine.

I'm also not a fan of how bugs just seem to lie in wait with Python scripts. Because Python scripts don't get compiled at runtime like Perl, I've been bitten by the occasional bug hiding down an obscure branch of a program, such as a syntax error or type mismatch that I never noticed before. Being new to the language, I often make late discoveries about things returned by objects, or member functions that are apparently missing in today's version of the language. This is highly irritating to me.

While I haven't run into this, I have heard tales of poorly-behaved editors in collborative projects utterly wrecking a script because one was using tabs and another turned the tabs into spaces (and so on). It's a little alarming to me that an editor can break a build that badly, but this isn't something I've run into in practice.

The Ugly

That multiple versions problem I mentioned? It can rapidly escalate into its own special world of pain and suffering. Again, this isn't really a problem that I pin on Python's tail, but it has been a bit of a headache. While downloading and building a version of the Python interpreter isn't an arduous project, it seems that the standard library isn't assembled for you in the process. My current installation of 2.6 on Debian 5 is halfway braindead because at no point in the configure script did it bother stopping to say, "hey, you need a current version of simplejson for this to work!" or anything like that. Even better, the instructions supplied when I attempted to make these things were not accurate. I think I know how to fix it, but I'm bothered that this should be an issue. Oh well, it could be worse; evidently there's problems getting it to build at all on OSX 10.6.

Conclusions

I'm really liking Python as a tool, and have barely looked back at Perl for the most part. I like Perl regular expressions better and how they just flow into the code as opposed to Python's re module, but that's mostly an issue of culture shock for me. Otherwise, I'm finding that a lot of my projects just work better, and seem to do so with less work on my part, which is really the important thing.

2009-09-08T20:50:00.001-05:00

Internet down since 0945 today. Mediacom cant send a tech until thursday - when im in michigan. Useless.

Everything is Better With METAL

2009-08-08T17:26:00.001-05:00

I think that they should run this clip by Mastodon before movies.

PSA

2009-08-07T07:48:00.001-05:00

Parents, remember to talk to your kids about black metal before somebody else does.

Or else!

Movies : Primer

2009-08-03T05:14:00.000-05:00

If you don't have time to read my blathering today, take one thing away from this post : See Primer if you haven't already.

I've been watching more movies lately as I finally broke down and got a Netflix account. While I have seen a fair number of pretty good films, I am reminded that Sturgeon's Law is in fact quite true. Not to mention that in an era where "science fiction" seems to mean "tits and explosions, but they're in space" it seems that really good science fiction has been hard to find, at least in the cinema. Still, there are good movies to be found if you look hard enough, and one of the best that I've seen recently is an obscure independent film called Primer.

Primer is about a couple engineers producing computer parts out of their garage and then trying to take things to the next level. They attempt an experiment with superconductive materials and are surprised by anomalies in their test results; further examination of the data reveals that they have created a device that may well allow them to travel through time. Once they've confirmed that this is the case, they ask themselves "what do we do with this?" Instead of bewildered disbelief and grandiose plans, they approach the use and circumstances surrounding their time machine in a fairly convincing manner; they're actually aware of time travel stories in popular culture and approach the situation as carefully as they can.

Also, the fairly natural dialogue of the movie is something I appreciated; people interrupt each other. They speak in jargon without explaining it to the audience. Between this and their fairly believable reactions to the situation as a whole, the character became very human and believable. It's also nice to see that the entire story was moved along by the characters instead of increasingly implausible situations. There's no villain or monster waiting to devour them. There's no plot to assassinate a famous leader or anything like that -- it's all about the people and one great big "what if?"

Anyhow, I really liked this movie and don't want to go into it too much for fear of revealing the plot. Suffice to say, I really liked it and recommend taking the time to watch it twice.

2009-07-30T10:13:00.001-05:00

138/84 we are good to go!

2009-07-29T07:15:00.001-05:00

If I worked in human resources, I would change my name to Giger.

Quickie

2009-07-23T09:11:00.002-05:00

Here is a short but funny clip about pseudoscience in today's culture.

Never heard of this guy before this morning; caught it on Pharyngula this morning.

Podcasts: Metalcast

2009-07-22T03:50:00.003-05:00

It isn't often that I write about this particular form of media; out of everybody I know, only one actually listens to podcasts at all. Anyway, I've recently become hooked on Metalcast, a weekly one-hour music show featuring a mix of songs by various heavy metal bands.

Anyhow, I have rarely listened to music podcasts before and didn't really know that there were good ones out there. The first one I listened to was terrible and another was only "almost good." Metalcast is completely unlike those so far -- I've enjoyed every episode so far and find that it's really top-notch material on the whole. They consistently play a good sampling of tunes, and don't typically waste a lot of time introducing the songs. Audio quality is good on the MP3 version and probably better on the standard M4A feed.

They've been running since 2006 and have 119 episodes in their archive right at this moment. Many of their episodes are basically grab bags of interesting songs and just as many are specials focused on specific bands, sub-genres, and even countries. If you're into metal, there's no way you won't find something worth checking out.

Best of all, I'm hearing new and interesting music that's very well-selected by people actually interested in what they're doing. It's like radio, minus the HORRIBLE SUCKING SOUND. I strongly reccomend this show to anyone who might be remotely interested in it. It's really worth checking out.

Gamestop Sucks

2009-07-21T00:01:00.001-05:00

This is something less than news, but I just thought I'd take a moment to point out that GameStop has managed to sink my opinion of them to "Internet scammer" or at least a bunch of incompetent buffons who have never heard of "customer service" in their lives. To be clear, after hearing stories about the lengths that Nordstrom's would go to to serve customers, I have to conclude that GameStop is the anti-Nordstrom's.

Back in May, I got a copy of Guitar Hero: Metallica from my Dad, and really enjoyed it. However, as this title is based on the GH: World Tour engine, it sometimes uses a feature that my normal guitar doesn't have -- the little slider bar near the base of the guitar. Generally, this isn't a big deal, but I figured it might be nice to pick up a guitar made for the game and it wouldn't hurt to have a second one around anyway.

My options seemed pretty limited; most place I went wanted to sell me the guitar + game for about $90, which struck me as pointless since I didn't want the actual game, just the guitar. At best, one shop told me that if they had the PS2 guitar in, they'd sell it for about $40-$45. Of course, nobody ever had one in stock.

Back in June, GameStop started a sale of copies of various plastic-instrument games to clear out their warehouse. I looked idly and saw that it was an online only deal, and that the PS2 version of the game with the guitar was listed at $34.99. Perfect; It was like getting the guitar for $5 to $10 off and another set of songs for free. I figured "why not?" and placed the order.

In about a week or so, I finally got the package from the UPS guy and discovered that they had sent me the Xbox 360 version of the game. So, I called customer service and explained it to them and they confirmed that there had been a mistake and e-mailed me a return label to send it back.

Awesome; now I have stupidly-large box to send back and no vehicle to get to any UPS store with. I have no printer to speak of, AND the clowns at UPS won't print the label if I bring it in on a flash drive. I wound up hauling it to work on the bus, printing the label there and having the UPS driver there pick it up.

Then, I wait.

The package gets delivered to them quickly enough. Then - nothing. No phone call, no e-mail. I give them a week and then call on a Friday afternoon inquiring about the order. They tell me that they have to find a copy of the game yet. Annoyed, I wait another six days before calling again. They *still* can't find it.

Horseshit; it does not take that long to find something in a modern warehouse unless those in charge are completely incompetent. At this point, I'm not seeing any option other than calling my credit card company and filing a fraud report. Sending me something other than what I ordered is understandable. Leaving me hanging and fucking around instead of sending what I bought and paid for this long is unacceptable.

Fuck Gamestop.

And UPS, while I'm at it :P

One Long Month

2009-07-20T00:01:00.000-05:00

I was going to avoid posting this story until it was all done; however, it seems that these things just don't end. I've had a lot on my mind recently, and this story has been at the center of it.

For the most part, June 12 was like any other Friday; I ran some errands, cleaned up around the house a bit, and fell asleep in the afternoon while a Linux install was running on my test machine. Between an additional computer running and having turned the air conditioner off, I was sluggish when crawling out of bed. I saw that my voicemail had a message waiting for me -- from work. I listened to the message and heard exactly what I've been dreading for months; our company had been outbid for the site I worked at. The good news was that most of us already at the site were to be retained in our current positions.

What bothered me was that I wasn't sure what to do; stay with the client and change companies after three years, or stay with my current company and leave the client high and dry? After all the client was specifically asking for us to stay, and we had considerably closer ties with them.

Also, I was offered another job with the same security company for significantly higher pay; another couple dollars an hour for a position in a nearby town. This weighed into the decision too -- my company was right out the gate with another position for me and recognized that I was doing a good job, something I didn't expect from the giant company coming in. I did the diplomatic thing and told him that I'd have to think about it (as I hadn't heard the offer from their rivals yet.)

There was to be a meeting between myself and a representative from the new company after work one Wednesday morning, so I met with her and was surprised to have a lengthy job application dropped on me. You could fill out less paperwork than what I was handed and get a house loan. I filled out what I could, but had none of my references handy, nor certain details about previous places I'd lived and so forth. I asked if I could take it home to finish it, and was told that it was against company policy and that I'd just have to do it another day. Fine.

At that point, I was becoming convinced that I should stay with my company; they came right out of the gate with the job with better pay. That, and I didn't have to apply for my own job. I know it's something that the new company needed to do, but it bothered me anyway. So, I called my company and said I was interested in the new position.

They never called back that day.

Or the next day (when I called again).

Or Monday.

So, the next time we were scheduled to meet with the new company, I brought all of my references with me and handed them to the representative and filled out the mountain of paperwork in front of me. I can't sit around and hope that they'll get a position for me, and the job I've had for the last few years has been optimal for school. I figured that at this point, the story was over and everything from here on out would be fairly dull.

Wrong.

I had a physical and drug test scheduled for that Thursday, which went badly. My blood pressure was very high -- alarmingly so. The doctor said that he wouldn't sign the paper for me to work and that I should go see my doctor, get on some blood pressure medication and come back in a week. Problem was, I didn't have a week.

I told the company contact and my immediate manager about this and there was some alarm; at the site, we really can't afford to be down another officer. We're down one and another is about to go on maternity leave. If I were out, not only would I be out a steady paycheck, my co-workers would be reduced to three people covering a six-man post.

Well, I went to see a doctor at the free clinic on the following Monday and when she saw my numbers and family history, she sent me to get my blood drawn and put me on some medication. I've got to say, the meds work pretty well; I haven't had a headache since I started them and a test on the following Thursday showed that I was getting a bit better -- not enough for the one doctor to sign my paperwork, though. Panic ensues :P

I had my blood drawn on Thursday morning (ugh!) and got a call about it while in CPR training that day. High cholesterol, high glucose. Worrisome; high blood pressure/heart problems and diabetes run in my family. I was asked to come back in on the following Monday.

As for work, my boss, the company contact, and the representative of our client leaned on the new company's HR person until I was given two more weeks to bring my blood pressure down enough for the doctor.

I went to see the free clinic doctor again on Monday and she didn't like where my blood pressure was, so she put me on another pill and recommended a few things to look for in terms of changing my diet. In a slightly ironic twist, I was also told to walk two miles a day. Anyhow, I've been doing everything she said and even keeping up with the walking. I figure that by the time the 24th rolls around, everything should be done. As it is, the transition to the new company was Monday, and I was even the first officer on the site.

Wednesday, though, saw a twist that rather freaked me out; I got a phone call saying that they never got my references. Frantically, I called the company contact and asked what the hell was going on. I had thought that all of this was resolved quite some time ago, but having it coming up again was just absurd. Hopefully, that's been resolved.

So, officially, it's still not over. I could be utterly screwed in the near future, or everything could be fine. I'm really sick of all this waiting and just want it to be done.

Coming Soon...

2009-07-17T07:51:00.000-05:00

I should be back to updating regularly on Monday. Posts are already in the queue.

Strange Journey?

2009-07-17T07:35:00.002-05:00

I don't know, but the photo looks like the Second Impact.

Anyway, what came up in my feed just this morning was an announcement that Atlus has a preview site for their next game up, and somebody with more skills/patience than myself has pulled the relevant bits out.

Shin Megami Tensei : Strange Journey

Neat?

I'm far behind on this series; There's at least five titles that I can think of that have had U.S. releases on current hardware that I haven't touched.

The Stars Are Right!

2009-06-28T22:41:00.001-05:00

This is least as plausible as any of those Chick tracts. Well, Dark Dungeons was totally real, anyhow.

I should print this up and keep them with me for the next time someone implies that I wasn't born okay the first time.

2009-06-05T07:17:00.001-05:00

In detroit, return trip also going smoothly. Should be home soon.

2009-05-27T14:13:00.001-05:00

Everything good so far; in minneapolis now, connecting flight leaves in just over an hour - on time, amazing.

Words fail me.

2009-05-25T01:12:00.003-05:00

One of the more amusing movies to get lambasted on MST3K was the infamous Hobgoblins. Fairly amusing on its own, this movie was outright absurd and seemed to be a cheap imitation of the more popular Gremlins franchise. Over the top acting, poor sets, weak plot and an unpleasant 80s stink make this an instant classic in the world of bad movies.

Jokes about a sequel have been around for a while, and much to my surprise, one came out last year in June. I think I'll have to rent this and become dangerously intoxicated in the process.

Hobgoblins 2 trailer

Wolfram Alpha

2009-05-20T23:37:00.003-05:00

After months of hearing about Wolfram|Alpha from the usual sources, I thought it might be interesting; instead of a normal search engine, it's supposed to assemble data and put it together for you in a cohesive manner. For example, if you enter "Long Island, NY" you get a map of the United States, a little red dot indicating where Long Island is, the population, and the area.

That's all well and good, I guess. But this isn't anything more than Wikipedia already does (with varying degrees of accuracy.) It does a few other neat things involving mathematical formulas and such, but I can't seem to convince the damn thing to do much that's actually useful. Even as a web site, it's damaged to begin with; you can't run a query without javascript turned on. It's one thing to enhance your page with the language, it's another to require it to function. As it stands, this is pretty brain-damaged web design.

But, when it comes to actually doing anything, Wolfram|Alpha is fairly useless. I've found that all queries fall into four categories:

Trivial: Something you could have just as easily gotten from another source or that you just threw in there to see what would happen.
Bad Input: Queries that aren't trivial are often too complicated for the site to parse, leading to the site asking you for something simpler.
Too hard: When you actually make a request that's simple enough to be understood, but detailed enough to be useful, the site complains that it can't handle the request because of limitations of the server. Awesome.
Jokes: A subset of "trivial" queries. You'll be pleased to know that asking it for the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. You may also note that I was able to tell you this on a static page with no amazing software behind it.

If their ability to parse requests improves and the server capacity issues die down after people find it useless, it might become a useful tool. Right now though, it seems like a bad punchline to a poor joke.

Koyaanisqatsi on YouTube

2009-05-09T18:47:00.004-05:00

Just like the title says.

This is a film I really enjoyed, and even have the soundtrack on my Mp3 player. The audio and video quality on YouTube is fairly good for the format, but I still strongly recommend finding a copy of the DVD and befriending someone with a projector.

Anyhow, my hat is off to MGM for posting the movie.

2009-05-06T07:32:00.001-05:00

I need to find a better way to bounce SMS messages than is offered by the fail whale.

Some Topical Fun

2009-05-02T09:49:00.002-05:00

Time for some fun with Google and current events:

Type "do I have swine flu?" into Google.
Press "I'm Feeling Lucky"
PANIC!

2009-04-23T06:30:00.001-05:00

Fedora 10 wont even boot from a live CD. Color me unimpressed. :(

Lizard Luncheon

2009-04-18T06:42:00.000-05:00

I've finally had some opportunities to test a deck that I've been working on and the initial results are quite promising. Right now, it has won eleven of twelve games I've played with it, which is certainly a good sign. Consequently, I'm more seriously considering going to the local Friday Night Magic tournaments to see if it really holds up against actual players. Here's the deck list:

Creatures (32):
4x Birds of Paradise
4x Tukatongue Thallid
4x Elvish Visionary
4x Sprouting Thrinax
4x Nantuko Husk
4x Scarland Thrinax
4x Hissing Igunar
4x Algae Gharial

Spells (4):
4x Grave Pact

Land (24):
4x Llanowar Wastes
4x Karplusan Forest
2x Savage Lands
5x Forest
3x Mountain
6x Swamp

This deck was inspired by a post on mtg.com by an author who was quite excited about the Scarland Thrinax acting as a second Nantuko Husk in a Grave Pact deck he had been playing. Without looking closely at the deck list, I wound up with an early version of this deck and quickly brought it to the revision above. Even a couple control decks had problems keeping up -- not to mention the prevalence of cards which read "counter target non creature spell" wind up leaving their owner up the proverbial river.

The addition of the Hissing Igunar was because of how much it reminded me of the Disciple of the Vault that caused so much trouble several years ago. When it hits the table, I get another way to deal damage to an opponent that they can only do so much about. When combined with Grave Pact, each creature that dies on your own side is worth a point of damage to your opponent. Even worse, it makes dropping a board-clearing Wrath of God a painful proposition. Frequently, two of them on the table would be enough to make my opponent scoop right on the spot. Other creatures in the deck prove to be formidable as well; between the Gharial's shroud and the actual threats in the deck having a tendency to get very large, it's often difficult to get rid of any valuable material.

I've considered a few changes; one that was pointed out to me was the addition of some Sulfurous Springs to the deck to make it easier to hit the important three black mana mark for casting the Grave Pact. While the Elvish Visionary doesn't directly fit the theme, it does make the deck a touch smaller and does serve as food for the other critters. The birds are starting to seem superfluous at this point as the mana acceleration has been less important than mana fixing. Manamorphose is looking like a good option; it's a quick mana fix and it replaces itself in your hand. Another thought is the seemingly omnipresent Kitchen Finks. A little life gain plus a two for one deal when feeding my critters certainly isn't bad.

One other addition that sounds promising is Cauldron Haze. Handing out persist to my creatures just before a Wrath wound certainly be nice, not to mention it would serve the purpose of making some creatures edible a second time around -- notably the Sprouting Thrinax. It would even help get another use out of the lowly Tukatongue Thallid as it would come to play just long enough to die and sprout another saproling.

Anyway, I'm glad that I've managed to make something in standard and have it fare pretty well at the college. We'll see where it goes from here.

Spellchecking blog posts about Linux and about Magic is always a fun activity; there's so many nonsense words involved!

2009-04-16T08:50:00.001-05:00

It seems that this site is now imitating twitter. The horror, the horror.

New and "Improved"

2009-04-16T08:33:00.003-05:00

It seems that Debian Lenny is a great success in making Linux more "windows-like." That is to say, it has become finicky and obnoxious with a tendency to irritate the user.

I've been using Debian since September of last year and liked it for the most part. I managed to get a minimal system installed with fluxbox running on top of it for a pretty responsive system. My main gripe with it was that it was a bit antiquated and newer programs that I might want to try simply wouldn't work because glibc was a bit too old.

Recently, I've had the opportunity to try the latest iteration of Debian, 5.0 a.k.a. "Lenny" and I'm a bit irritated by how it has behaved. At least, I'm bothered by the xserver it comes with which is apparently "new and improved!"

I installed Lenny on Proteus (my test machine) and found that it didn't ask me any questions about screen resolution when I installed xserver-xorg-core, which was a little puzzling. I had to add some other package to even get the startx script, which presented me with an ugly and misshapen desktop. Normally, I run in 1280x1024 @ 60hz because that's what my monitor supports. For some reason, this wasn't clear to the system.

I brought up a terminal and tried xrandr to find that it didn't know about the resolution I needed either. I tried a few reccomended tweaks to xorg.conf but nothing seemed to help. Out of curiosity, I installed Debian 4.0 on the test machine to see if maybe there was some specific issue with the card. When I did that, it worked perfectly on the first try.

Here, I attempted to be clever; I took my xorg.conf from the test machine with everything working as expected and stashed it on my main box, reinstalled 5.0 and copied xorg.conf back over to the test machine. No dice; it's behavior was exactly as muddled as before.

Very, very, sad. I'm out of ideas.

Twitter

2009-04-13T00:01:00.001-05:00

When I heard about Twitter in later 2006 / early 2007 or so, my reaction was along the lines of "Why?" I suppose "What hath god wrought" would also be an appropriate sentiment. The entire idea struck me as utterly pointless; I'm reasonably sure that nobody cares what I had for lunch today or if I'm taking a dump. So, consequently, I don't use it. At least, I don't use it like most people use it. Sure, I have this blog where I ramble like an idiot about whatever I happen to find interesting on a particular day, but that's because it's a medium that lets me express a more complete idea and go into details about it. While brevity may be the soul of wit, most people (myself included!) aren't going to say anything that interesting in 140 bytes.

That isn't to say that the site is completely useless; during the 2008 Democratic and Republican national conventions, it was used as cooridinating tool among the various protesters. More recently, it was used in Moldova as students protested a communist victory in a recent election. Twitter has its uses, at least when it's used with cell phones and such.

The core reason for the 140 byte limit on Twitter messages is because you can also send messages via SMS -- a message sent to "40404" from a phone associated with a particular account is posted on that account. Using this in conjunction with the really simple API that Twitter provides can allow you to pull off any number of silly tricks with SMS and your home computer. Right now, I have it bouncing alert messages from my security camera to my cell phone.

So, it's not useless; I just don't feel the need to tell everybody where I am and what I'm doing right away. I just can't pretend to be that important.

Hmm.

2009-04-11T20:26:00.001-05:00

The next Doctor Who special is called The Waters of Mars.

It might be an anagram for "War of the Masters."

Maybe?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

2009-04-02T14:26:00.003-05:00

You know, some things just amaze and annoy me.
Bomb Threat on Campus This is one of them.

Cripes. I saw this today while I was on my way to take a lunch before class. On top of everything else, this just made me shake my head; some stupid jackass made a bomb threat targeting the school. There wasn't one found, but based on the vending machine that was detonated mere blocks from the school, I don't blame them for being JUST a bit concerned.

Right after I bought my lunch today, it happened AGAIN. I just left; this shit is crazy.

I seriously hope they catch this assclown soon; this is a waste of time and money. Also, I'm not a fan of sitting around outside in the cold while the classroom buildings are searched AGAIN.

This on top of certain other issues, and it's been a long day. I'm just going to omit my commentary for now.

Found him!

2009-04-01T09:33:00.000-05:00

Aha! I found you!

One Crumb at a Time

2009-04-01T04:11:00.004-05:00

As of late, I've been a bit busy; every time I sit down, it seems that there's one more thing I need to do. Consequently, I haven't written much here or hacked a single line of code recently.

Well, I have written a little bit for class. I'm currently taking an class on assembly language programming that has proven to be rather interesting in some regards. While I've programmed in some capacity for a long time, dealing with assembly is an interesting twist for me. It's really amazing how easy it is to screw things up when you leap from the comfortable world of code structured by indentation, regular expressions, and even the capacity to define functions in a sane manner to dealing with things as the machine does. Spaghetti code seems like the law, and it is very easy to forget that there's some things you have to at that level.

Take something as simple as a loop in C :


for( x = 99; x > 0; x-- )
    printf("%d bottles of beer on the wall...\n", x);

I'm not going to claim that this is simple, it is fairly readable and based on the context of the printf statement, you could easily guess what the different parts of the for statement do. What this translates to in assembly¹ is a bit more intimidating at first glance :


         BR main        ; jump to the main program
count:  .WORD 99        ; symbol table / variable declaration
string: .ASCII " bottles of beer on the wall...\n\x00"
main:   DECO count, d   ; print the value of "count"
        STRO string, d  ; print the string from above
        LDA count, d    ; load "count" to register A
        SUBA 1, i       ; subtract 1 from "count"
        STA count, d    ; store the contents of register A to "count"
        CPA 0, i        ; compare A to 0
        BRGT main       ; if A is greater than 0, jump to main
        STOP            ; duh?
.END                    ; assembler directive

Some notes : I only think this is correct; I haven't got the VM in front of me to double-check. Also, I'm pretty sure that the LDA and STA statements can be dropped in this example since SUB and CPA both work on the A register and never need to go to memory. Also, I'm more than a little miffed that blogger.com's stylesheet ignores code and drops tabs from my text.

This is pretty opaque to most people, at least without the comments. Anyway, what I wanted to illustrate is that when you do things on this level, you really have to spell things out to the computer. In one instance, I managed to screw up a nested loop by not remembering to store the count value in memory after I was done with it on the register. In the C example, all this stuff is handled for you.

The course has taken a weird path; we started with a description of computers from the logic gate to the software level (which arguably has several of its own strata). Several people observed that the author of our textbook seemed to be making a desperate attempt to copy the OSI network model to explain things, and I tend to agree. From there, we looked at a few specific computers and even translated code between a made-up language and Java as an exercise. We even looked at a few other high-level languages as an assignment. From there, we looked at hex opcodes for Pep/8 and a few other systems (Motorola 68000, x86, and MIPS, I think.) From there, we actually moved back up from opcodes to assembly mnemoics and have just now started with formal grammars.

It's a pretty neat course, and the challenge of writing code not just in another language but at a lower level of abstraction. In addition, I've long wanted to know just how things happen at that level and what higher level code really means when it gets down to the processor. I don't that I'll get a chance to use much of this practically, but it seems worth knowing anyhow.

Anyway, this is pretty much what I've been doing when not at work, sleeping, or otherwise busy. Exciting, isn't it?

¹The assembly language in question is for a virtual computer called Pep/8, specifically made for class work.

Cosmos

2009-03-21T17:59:00.001-05:00

One of my all-time favorite documentaries is online for free right now.

Cosmos is presently available on Hulu.

It's just 13 hours long. Just.

Coming soon

2009-03-16T00:01:00.002-05:00

Over the course of the next week, I'm going to try out git as a revision control system. I've been hearing quite a bit about it that makes me really want to try it out. I've been using Subversion for a while with school papers and small programming tasks, though I'm certainly still a newbie with it. So, until next week, here's a nice tall glass of Kool-aid :

Why Git is Better Than X -- Reasons to use Git instead of basically anything else. Short, concise read and probably does a better job of summing up why it's so nifty than I might.
Git Ready -- Git tutorials for all levels. Very nice, strongly recommended.
Interview with Junio Hamano -- Interview with the maintainer of Git. This is the first place I really heard about the system back in 2007.[audio, 45m]
Linus Torvalds talks at Google -- Linus Torvalds talks about Git. [video, one hour]
Randal Schwartz talks at Google -- Speaks for itself, I'd say. More technical than Linus' talk. [video, one hour]

Happy Pi Day!

2009-03-14T16:26:00.001-05:00

Yes, that's right, it's March 14th, a.k.a. Pi Day!

And there's even a bill in congress to make it official. Whee!

It's also Einstein's birthday today too. Don't send flowers, he won't get 'em.

He's right, you know.

2009-02-25T09:50:00.002-06:00

Dear Randall Munroe,

Damn you for pointing this out.

Because I kinda want one now.

Anyway, I've been kinda busy with things lately and just haven't been in the mood to write. Today, I'll be hauling stuff upstairs in another really poorly-engineered move and Internet access won't be quite this good again. My only option up there at this time is wireless, ie: "no carrier" pigeons. I might be able to spring for my own personal cable modem, but that seems sketchy at best right now.

So... we'll see what the future holds.

One thing occupying my time is preparation for a D&D campaign. I've started up a blog to track relevant information. It all starts tomorrow. Whee!

Stress? Oh, a bit.

2009-02-18T09:48:00.003-06:00

The last few weeks have been particularly stressful for me, and a couple of events this morning have really pushed me right to the edge. It's been one thing after another, and it is taking its toll on me.

For a few weeks, my job has been hanging in the balance; it's bidding season again, so everything becomes highly uncertain once again. I could lose my position and be stuck "floating" from site to site -- not really a good deal for someone without a reasonable means of nighttime transport. So this has been gnawing at the back of my mind for rather a while now.

A week and a day ago, one of my housemates broke into my bedroom. Nothing was stolen, nor was there any vandalism or anything like that, but the fact of the matter has left me quite uncomfortable when it comes to staying here or leaving the apartment for any length of time. I happened to get photos and videos of this because during the break-ins this summer, I decided that spending a little money to keep myself from being a sucker was probably a good idea.

For better or for worse, my investment in paranoia paid off. Sort of. I use a motion-detecting camera that keeps images on itself as well as uploading them to a FTP server. The server, when it detects that new photos have been dumped to its incoming directory bounces a message to my cell phone (in a roundabout way; you'd laugh if I told you.)

At 1:40 a.m. on Tuesday morning, the 10th of February, I got one of these messages. As I hadn't correctly set the firewall, I couldn't log in to see what had happened. It wasn't until I got home that I could check the images to see what was wrong -- this made for a very long night. Anyway, I've since taken the photos, posted one online and squashed the lot of them into a video which is now on YouTube. At this point, there are many copies of the evidence, including a couple 8.5"x11"s that will be given to the other roommates stuck living here. I've already spoken to the property manager about moving, and ought to be in another unit in just a week or two.

In light of that, I've taken to leaving my lamp on and music playing at night when I'm gone, in the hopes that it will deceive potential thieves into thinking that I'm home. I've also made it easier to check the camera from work.

This morning at work, someone slipped and fell on a patch of ice near the back of the building. I had noticed these slick spots and applied salt as needed. Checking the weather for the day, it seemed likely that this wouldn't be a problem again, and when I walked around that part of the building again, it seemed fine. Sigh. Nothing sucks like directing an ambulence around the building over a mistake you might have made.

After how quickly someone was removed for a single mistake, I was more than a little concerned that I'd be blamed for the incident and lose my job. Yes, a recurring theme, but that's my life lately. With the shitty job market and my lack of employable skills, this thought terrifies me.

By the time I left the building, it seemed that the slip and fall had blown over. Anyone in a position to make a decision thought that I had done my best and let it go. Relieved, I slept on the bus down to the station.

I get home, glad to be done with work for the week to find a scrawled note on a lime post-it attached to my bedroom door.

Turn the fucken NET on and turn your T.V off when you leave

Interesting, as I never turned the "fucken NET" off in the first place. Also interesting was that there was no music coming from my speakers and that my monitor wasn't springing to life when I hit a key. I looked at the KVM switch and found it in the default position of "1" and discovered that my bedroom had lost power between 0517 and 0521. I can only assume that some wanker thought they should kill the power to my bedroom over this.

This is just insane. I can't possibly move out quick enough; hell, I've got to work overtime this weekend.

I'll be bald by the end of the week if I keep having to pull my hair out like this.

Head in the Clouds

2009-02-10T12:01:00.002-06:00

The buzzword of the day seems to be "cloud computing." As usual, people are quick to point at "the cloud" as the Next Big Thing and are assuming that it'll be the next step to a technological utopia. Or something along those lines. The idea is getting a lot of ink, despite that it really isn't anything new when you step back and look at it.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty that benefits from non-local storage. I've sworn by web-based e-mail since I was in high school; even Hotmail was clearly a better choice than the mom and pop ISP we had at the time. After all, changing to another provider meant that we'd lose our e-mail address. It's been over ten years, and I haven't needed to inform everybody about a new e-mail. Of course, I got on the GMail bandwagon early and did exactly that, but it's been my static e-mail address since 2004. The essentially unlimited storage combined with the ability to connect over IMAP (or POP3) and keep your mail locally is an excellent balance between "the cloud" and "keeping your data when the cloud vanishes."

For many things, the cloud is avoidable by doing as little as keeping a flash drive with you. For the vast majority of documents, even a 1GB drive is plenty of storage, and a 4GB drive is plenty for my home directory. There are some problems that aren't easily solved with such a device and are better served by web applications. A prime example is the time sheet I keep; at work, I would have to hammer it out in Excel (an example of the "fucking train wreck" design pattern) and then pray that it would open correctly in OpenOffice. By instead using Google's spreadsheet application, I don't need to have OO installed (it serves no practical purpose anyway) and I neatly sidestep issues about file compatibility. For larger projects, it would certainly be impractical, but for little things like this, it does quite well.

But, we can't have technology without misapplying it can we? I keep hearing talk about using cloud computing and wireless technology to replace personal media players. And, I keep laughing. Because it is an idea that goes beyond mere stupidity to outright insanity.

We reached a point a couple years ago when "DRM Free!" became a selling point to the general public (as opposed to geeks like myself), and electronic music retailers are finally giving up on the idiotic policy of treating customers like criminals. There's still some holdouts, but I expect that they'll choke on their own irrelvance soon enough. A portable device to which you could wirelessly stream music to would pretty much require an authorization scheme and likely would only allow for a limited degree of local storage. After all, why would you need to store the song when you can stream it, right? You can pretty much expect that anyone offering such a service won't allow you to download your purchases or stream them to an unathorized software or hardware implementation. If customers are finally realizing that DRM is evil and stupid, will they stand for this?

But that's just cynical speculation; let's look at the other problems.

To get wireless Internet, you've got two options that I'm aware of; WiFi and various cellular services.

First, WiFi. It's already not so hot around the home, and you don't get a whole lot of range from consumer-level access points. Now, even if the device were clever enough to jump onto any open access point it could find and suck down streaming packets from anywhere it could get a connection, it might be able to finish a song. Of course you'd be breaking the law, but don't worry, it isn't enforced too often. Even if you had enough coverage to sustain a connection through multiple WiFi access points, what happens when you're on the road? Or somewhere other than right inside a city?

Of course, you could get on one of the various 3G cellular networks which already have damn good coverage and rarely lose signal. Hell, it's even unlikely that you'll get a hiccup when you move from one tower's coverage to another. Of course, these are still run by the phone companies who are quite happy to charge out the nose for their services -- services run on public property, no less. As it is, plenty of iPhone users are probably happy with their service for web browsing and other similar applications. But, can you stream music over such a connection? (Seriously, I haven't tried.) And how well will it work if such a device seriously saturates the market? Telecom companies are notorious about dragging their feet when it comes to building out their network in any capacity. Hell, we still call 7MbPS "high speed" in this country!

But the real issue isn't any of these. People may well be willing to accept idiotic DRM -- they have in the past, right? Such a service may well work over WiFi and my own experiences with the technology are unique to me. Cellular service might be adequate for lots of people to stream music over. I'm quite willing to accept that I am wrong, wrong, WRONG about the technological aspects. And hell, wireless would be nice for copying songs from my computer to the device while at home.

The question that nobody seems to answer when they gush about this potential technology is what advantage does it give me over my existing music player? Storage? I just bought a MicroSD card for $20 -- that's 4 GB of storage that fits on my thumbnail. My current media player is 16 gigs and is nearly full now that I've shoved seven audiobooks, around two thousand songs, and tonight's podcasts on it. Many people opt for hard drive players that hold up to 160GB and never manage to fill them. Being able to stream your music might be advantagous if we lacked the means to store hundreds of albums in our pocket. So far as I can see, such technology is about as useful as bulletproof socks -- they sound neat, but what's the point?.

Break in

2009-02-10T08:51:00.001-06:00

Yeah, I'm rather pissed.

Friends, family, the photo is up on Facebook. Nothing was stolen that I can see, but I'm still pretty angry.

Casually Competitive

2009-02-09T05:09:00.000-06:00

When it comes to competition in Magic, I'm in a weird kind of middle ground between casual player and tournament player. I ran tournaments for a few years, which meant I wasn't able to compete for a while, though I did manage to play side games a fair bit and since I was at a hub for trading, I was able to build a few decent decks. These days, I haven't been able to get in rated games because of time constraints -- my weird schedule doesn't go well with Friday Night Magic events, and Sunday drafts are even worse.

Now, I have been fortunate enough to get a few casual games in every week; I've been attending the campus group twice a week and playing two to five games a session. Of the three people I've played, two are pretty casual and I'm able to consistently beat them with any almost well-constructed deck. The other regular player keeps up better than I do and seems to play fairly often; I've gone 2-2 against him.

At least in theory, I could start coming out ahead in sanctioned events. Were I to keep at it, update my collection and so forth, it's possible that I could at least manage a top 8 at FNM sometimes. As it is, my skills are rusty and I've caught myself making some fairly bad play mistakes. My collection is a bit behind the times, and that doesn't help if I plan on playing Standard for any length of time.

Extended might be workable, though; enough of what I currently own is still in format right now that I could make a showing with some practice. In fact, there's an extended PTQ on the other side of the state in about a week or two. Of course, my schedule and lack of a car is still a problem.

Given present circumstances, it seems that I've hit a plateau when it comes to Magic, and a pretty low one at that. Unless there's some drastic alteration to my current situation, it seems that I'll stay there.

Meh.

Dungeons and Discourse

2009-02-04T00:56:00.002-06:00

I know that I posted the original long ago, but a sequel has come out and is really funny, at least if you get the jokes.

Dungeons and Discourse (The original)

Advanced Dungeons and Discourse (New!)

Edge Cases

2009-02-02T05:36:00.001-06:00

I've played Magic off and on (more off, really) since about October of 1994, and I have been a computer geek for even longer. While these two things are only indirectly related, I have found them to be complementary hobbies; being able to hack together software helps in deck creation and analysis. The act of writing software improves your ability to write better code, and Magic is an interesting special instance of this.

In the decade and a half since its creation, Wizards of the Coast has printed an estimated ten thousand unique cards -- I don't have precise numbers handy. If you've been playing for any length of time, keeping track of the masses of cardboard in your collection can be daunting; searing for cards you don't have that might improve a deck can be nearly insurmountable if you don't have the resources.

Until recently, Wizards of the Coast kept a flat text file called the Oracle text that served as the one true wording of every card ever printed. Sadly, Oracle texts are now kept in the crawling chaos of the Gatherer database and there is no reasonable way to pull down the text. The closest I've managed is a horrible mess that takes a week and a day to dredge out of the database backend and it stupidly prints multiple versions of single cards because they appeared in multiple editions.

As an aside, the name "Oracle" is really frustrating as it's also the name of some high-end database software. Searching Google for anything related to Oracle is usually a fruitless effort.

Anyway, back on topic; I had gotten back into the game after a hiatus of about eight years. In that time, three core sets had been released as well as about two dozen expansions. Consequently, I had no idea what was in those sets, what was good, and what I should track down to improve on various decks. While there were a few ways to search online, I wanted to be able to look these things up without an Internet connection and I wanted better control of the parameters of my search. Gatherer wasn't around then, and most means to search Magic's cardboard ocean were fairly crude.

Having recently learned a little bit about perl and even less about MySQL, I looked at the big fat text file that comprised the Oracle, and reasoned that I could probably make a pretty nice system for myself. Managing large amounts of data is what computers are allegedly good at, so I figured that this would be perfect.

Looking back, what I did was fairly silly; I didn't know about perl DBI, so I wound up writing a perl script that converted the Oracle into a MySQL script that I would run after connecting to a local database. This worked, and I was pretty happy to see that I could quickly get results for specific queries; nothing took more than a second or two, even on my old Pentium 3.

Of course, that conversion script was hack after hack... and it was fragile.

First, the fields in the Oracle text weren't named; I had to make the script make educated guesses as to what was where. If it came across a line of text after a blank line, it was probably the card name. A line starting with "Summon", "Artifact", "Enchantment", or other common things was clearly the type. Most cards had mana costs that were easy enough to spot, though there had to be a special case for lands (which don't have a mana cost.) Creatures were the only cards with power and toughness, and sometimes those weren't numbers.

Even after jumping through those initial flaming hoops to get the thing working correctly, there were still other problems lurking. While subtypes weren't an issue, I didn't immediately notice the "split" cards from the Invasion block weren't going into the database correctly. Artifact lands also required a special case, as did the "flipping" legends from Kamigawa block. Were I still maintaining this program, the new mana symbols from Coldsnap and Ravnica would also require special tweaks... and on it goes.

The one constant of Magic is chaos; new rules, new cards, new card types, etc. Many sets have made subtle or blatant alterations to the game; new editions rewrite the rules. What used to be a "mana source" or an "interrupt" is now an instant. You no longer "summon bears" so much as play a "Creature -- Bears." Once upon a time, multicolored creatures were an entirely new thing, and there weren't colored spells that cost zero colored mana to play. But, that's just how it is. The rules now are significantly more sane than they ever were in the old days. Anyone who wants to argue this is invited to go read the rules for the stack and then compare them to the rat maze of timing.

I have nothing against the numerous alterations, mind you. What I really wanted to focus on was how programming for Magic will always keep you busy because it seems that every three months will prompt another evaluation of your program. In the end, dealing with the inevitable edge cases has proven to be quite educational.

Anyway... I've got another project to fiddle with. Until next time...

Parody

2009-01-31T09:26:00.002-06:00

MPAA warning parody from the IT Crowd. This has probably been around a few times, but it still makes me laugh.

Anyway, I'm off to get some sleep. Can't make the pre-release today :(

Guitar Hero: Metallica setlist

2009-01-30T00:01:00.000-06:00

Somehow I managed to miss this when it was posted on the 23rd, but it seems that Metallica has posted the setlist for their Guitar Hero title. My thoughts, after sorting the list into albums :

Kill 'Em All
- Hit The Lights - A fitting start if the game is to follow Metallica's career.
- Whiplash - Not bad.
- Seek And Destroy - I was disappointed to see some other song with this title in a GH game. This version, however, is still a favorite.
Ride The Lightning
- Fight Fire With Fire - For my least favorite song on this album... that's still pretty damn good.
- For Whom The Bell Tolls - YES
- Fade to Black - Sold! Always a good song.
- Creeping Death - FUCK YEAH
Master of Puppets
- Battery - Badass. My fingers hurt already.
- Master of Puppets - Awesome.
- The Thing That Should Not Be - Good pick.
- Welcome Home (Sanitarium) - Sweet.
- Disposable Heroes - Love it.
- Orion - A surprise, and not an unpleasant one.
...And Justice for All
- One - No surprise here, classic tune.
- The Shortest Straw - Sweet.
- Dyers Eve - This will kill my wrists dead.
Metallica
- Enter Sandman - Of course. I'll still beat this one quicker than Dad did ;)
- Sad But True - Meh.
- The Unforgiven - Ehhh. I think the sequels ruined this song for me.
- Wherever I May Roam - Well, alright. It's not "Through the Never" at least.
- Nothing Else Matters - This will be the one track on the "easy" tier. Actually, it might be easier then Smoke on the Water.
Load - King Nothing - Eh. One of the better recent songs, but that's not saying a lot.
Re-Load
- Fuel - I will point and laugh at anyone doing vocals for this one.
- The Memory Remains - Whatever.
Garage, Inc. - Mercyful Fate (Medley) - It seems odd to have a medley of cover songs in this release, though I do happen to like this track.
St. Anger - Frantic - Good news; it is possible to play Guitar Hero with the sound off.
Death Magnetic - All Nightmare Long - This one's okay, anyway. It's one song from the new album that has grown on me.

Overall, this is a pretty solid list, with a clear preference to Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets with a few obligatory tracks from the rest of their catalog. There is no track list that will satisfy all fans; there will always be at least one song that someone feels that was too important to have omitted. I'm sure that a lot of the songs will still be available as downloadable content on the platforms that support it, too. Anyhow, I'm pretty excited to get my copy in June.

Open Question

2009-01-29T00:01:00.000-06:00

Now that I'm back playing Magic again, I was wondering what sites people follow for news and information. I've got the three that I used to read on my feed reader, and am looking for more.

MTG.com of course. Their site remains awful and is getting worse, but the content remains good.
StarCity Games Paysites and RSS feeds don't mix very well. The free articles are sometimes worth a look.
MTG Salvation I'm glad to see these guys still around several years after the drama that created them. Nobody else manages to get spoilers quite like these guys.

What MTG sites do you read regularly?

Pulled Back In

2009-01-28T00:01:00.000-06:00

Last semester, a group of tabletop gamers was advertising a new group on campus. For the most part, they seemed interested in Magic, which is still a favorite way to kill time for me, despite rarely ever getting the chance to play. I talked to them when they had a table set up in one of the halls and gave them my e-mail adress, hoping to hear that they had a room set up for weekly meetings. They sounded optimistic about getting a room every Thursday afternoon, a time when I had absolutely no obligations.

Sadly, becuase they're a group without "Christ" in their name, they weren't given a room last semester. They wound up meeting on Mondays, at 6pm, about 10 miles from campus. So, I chalked it up as another failed chance to game at all and forgot about it.

Well, good news! This semester, they managed to get a room for two hours a week (one hour on Monday, one on Friday.) I met with them on Friday and they seem like an alright gang. I optimistically brought a couple old MTG decks with me and played two matches with one of them and found out how much I had forgotten. Ah well, I still went 1-1. (UG Madness 2-0, Monoblack control 0-2) I'm not able to really play standard right now, but if we can get drafts going when there's more time, I'll be all over it. Otherwise, I'm eyeballing my card boxes and considering some casual but effective decks that I wanted to try.

I'm hoping that this becomes a fixture on campus and that more opportunities for nerdy cardflopping arise. We shall see...

Molehills, Mountains, Robots.

2009-01-26T00:01:00.000-06:00

While I do happen to think that Obama was a good choice for President, I am constantly irritated by the irrational love-fest and media obsession with trivial nonsense. I don't care if they attended church on Sunday, I don't care about the breed of their dog, and I seriously don't care about the kids starting out at a new school in D.C. Given the historical significance of this election on top of the replacement of a disastrous administration, I can see why there's such media furor. But -- when policy decisions are made, we cannot allow a double standard to exist for this administration.

And, we geeks need to not make painfully ignorant posts about the White House's "robots.txt" file. Two examples follow :

The country's new robots.txt file :

Here's a small and nerdy measure of the huge change in the executive branch of the US government today. Here's the robots.txt file from whitehouse.gov yesterday:

Obama's New Robots.txt

Change is afoot…

Within a few moments of President Obama being sworn in, a new whitehouse.gov was revealed. The new site looks great, and promises greater transparency about the actions of our President and government.

Both are followed by a comparison of the old White House's 2400+ line robots.txt file and the new two-line one.

Let me explain this file before explaining why it doesn't matter.

Search engines do their magic by "crawling" the web with programs often called "spiders." These simply pull down web pages and then whatever those pages link to and so on. After that, the pages are indexed in various fashions for use by the search engine itself. In informal standard exists to prevent spiders from downloading information from certain parts of a website; some site admins may not want certain directories indexed, and some will prevent a spider from pulling down certain kinds of dynamic content. These rules are kept at the root of a website; if you'd like to see it yourself, simply visit a favorite site and manually add "robots.txt" to the URL of the base site.

It's an informal standard, but a pretty helpful one at times. For more information, see wikipedia's article on the subject.

So, yes, Bush's whitehouse.gov had a massive robots.txt file, preventing indexing of a lot of parts of the website. And yes, Obama's whitehouse.gov has just two lines, preventing the indexing of a directory called "includes".

This is not a surprise or a big deal; for all intents and purposes, the January 20th whitehouse.gov is an entirely new website with new administrators. Also; there's very little there as of yet beyond the basic policy things that you would expect from a new president. You cannot reasonably compare these two files at all; one represents eight years of work and the other was just put in place recently. It is also entirely possible that there's a massive difference in terms of technical competence between the two administrations which could lead to a needlessly bulky exclusion file.

Compare these after eight years, then we'll talk. Until then, stop turning molehills into mountains, people.

Change!

2009-01-22T03:44:00.001-06:00

Yep, that's right. Things have changed.

That is, I got a new phone.

For $20 out of pocket, it's pretty nifty.

That is all.

Crime

2009-01-19T10:29:00.001-06:00

Being in a city that is 6 times larger than my hometown (12 times if you count the surrounding suburban sprawl) it is clear that crime will be a bigger problem, not just in terms of raw numbers but also in terms of percentages and scale of the crimes. We have drug busts, murders, robberies, all that fun stuff. In spite of this, the numbers themselves are still pretty low when you take things into perspective. Which I do. And consequently, I don't tend to worry about these things much if at all. Even when I was living near what I'm told was a rough neighborhood, I wasn't terribly concerned about getting mugged (I don't look like someone with money) or anything.

For the last couple years, I've lived in an apartment in spitting distance of the highway that runs through the city. As you might guess, this means I hear a lot of sirens at any hour. I'm just about desensitized to this now.

The thing that still doesn't register with me is that some pretty bad shit happens really close to me. At one point, I walked into work and the guy I was reliving asked if I had heard about the shooting. At the fast food joint. The one across the fucking street from me. I had slept through the whole thing, and the party had already ended. More recently, when my sister was visiting, there was a large commotion involving police and ambulances just down the street. I don't know what actually happened, but it stands to reason that it was pretty bad with that kind of disco-light action coming from the arrangement of cars out there.

Last night? I was outside, strolling around the work site when I saw a few police cars speeding by with their sirens blaring. I thought it was a little odd to see them dash down the road like that, but not totally unheard of. Without further notice, I finished my rounds and got ready to leave about six hours later.

The lead story on a local news website was pretty impressive: there was a car chase and a mobile meth lab. Neat! The arrests were just down the road, and they were busted at 2:30am... roughly ten minutes after I saw the cars speeding down the road. Wow.

Maybe I should take this "crime rate" stuff a little more seriously?

Salvation?

2009-01-13T16:23:00.003-06:00

An amusing parody of the infamous religious tracts of Jack Chick. If you don't know what I'm talking about, take a moment to read Dark Dungeons first. Granted, Chick's work is insane enough to be parody on its own...

Software : mp3splt and mp3wrap

2009-01-13T11:13:00.000-06:00

I hadn't planned on turning this into the "neat program of the day" blog, but I just happened to find another couple tools that solve minor annoyances.

For the last year plus, I've been consuming audiobooks from emusic.com. So far as I can tell, they're the only legit company offering audiobook downloads right now, and their selection is only okay at present. However, since my subscription allows for two downloads a month (at $20/month) it's been quite sufficient. My one significant gripe is that a number of their older selections are rips from books-on-CD and thus have two odd artifacts.

First, they will remind you every hour and ten minutes that you're listening to (for example) "Very Bad Deaths, by Spider Robinson. Continued; disc six." I don't know why the original source material had the disc numbers as part of the audio; I presume that they're written on the physical media itself. It makes even less sense to keep this when you convert to mp3s. However, fixing this would take a bit of extra work and would probably be a legal problem for them (blah, blah, derivative work.)

Second, the original discs are cut into many smaller tracks, roughly two minutes each. This makes some sense in the original format; there isn't a way to place a bookmark in a CD very easily, making it convenient to pick out tracks for later. This isn't quite as useful on an mp3 player in my experience (though, if you lack a bookmark feature on your mp3 player, that's a different matter.) With most books, this is a non issue - you're running through in a linear fashion anyhow, so it doesn't matter. But, when the book is a collection of short stories, it's sometimes nice to be able to switch to the story you're looking for instead of guessing and poking about the place.

With a pair of simple(...ish) tools, both of these problems are solvable without any mucking about in audio editors or losing quality by converting to WAV and back again.

First up, Mp3splt. Fairly easy to use; you specify where your cut starts and ends and it pulls the relevant data out of the file you tell it to. For example, if you've found a lone song in a music podcast that you'd like, you can use his to cut it out for later. Or, as mentioned before, trim the "Disc n" announcements from an audiobook. Also, you can have it attempt to split tracks based on silence detection or even through use of a cue sheet. This is an excellent tool to have around. It is available for any operating system that you might reasonably have installed.

On the other side of the coin is Mp3wrap which takes a bundle of mp3s and turns them into one. Like I mentioned, this is useful for short stories and such, but it could also be useful as a way to transfer a bunch of songs as a single file without fiddling with tarballs, rar files, and so forth. If one were so motivated, wrapped up mp3s could be treated kind of like a mix tape from the days of old; you could send someone a pile of related music that you liked and maybe they'd find something of interest. Interestingly enough, mp3splt can recognize mp3wrapped files and cut them as appropriate. It is available for Linux and Windows, though it probably builds on BSD and related systems without too many issues.

Anyway, enough of that for now. I've got to get to class fairly soon.

Open Question

2009-01-08T09:08:00.003-06:00

I don't have a post in my head right now. I might later on, but until then, I ask a question of anybody stopping by. Please answer in the comments (with a link if you can!)

What sites/blogs do you read on a daily basis, and why?

Here's three of my own answers :

John Scalzi's "Whatever" -- An award-winning science fiction author and compulsive blogger for the last decade or so. Frequently quite funny or at least interesting. Look for any of the "Big Idea" posts, where other authors talk about what inspired them to write their book.

The Daily WTF -- Often disturbing stories of horrible code, insane management, and other "curious perversions in information technology." It's often worth reading the comments here just to watch a bunch of insecure gits try to one-up each other with their MAD SKILLS.

Respectful Insolence -- The pseudo-anonymous "Orac" is a doctor who always seems armed and ready to tear apart the latest stupid pseudoscience to rear its ugly head. The anti-vaccine movement and AIDS denialists are probably the most common targets here. He makes a lot of long and highly readable posts when he's on a tear -- always worth a read.

Software : Didiwiki

2009-01-07T06:04:00.001-06:00

I'm always pleasantly surprised to find that in the world of free/open source software that somebody has already managed to create something that I happen to be looking for. Discovering a package that I hadn't been previously aware of that just happens to suit my needs always makes a day better.

Recently, I was scrawling notes about various things in Persona 4 in a notebook, stopping when I realized that doing so was fairly stupid. It's a waste of ink and paper, plus there's better ways to organize information. Text files on a computer are certainly one way to keep a reference for game information in some kind of order, but even this seemed clumsy, especially after searching a lengthy FAQ for another game that was stored in an 80-column flat file. Something HTML-like would be preferable, and if I could get it online and maybe have the other two people I know playing the same game in on it, we could build up something a bit more useful than the existing guides to the game -- without spoiling it too much, either, since we wouldn't have the pre-existing knowledge on hand.

I reasoned that the best solution to have multiple people editing and organizing things would be along the lines of a wiki. If you're not familiar with the idea, go poke around Wikipedia for a bit. In short, though, it's a collection of web pages that link to each other that anybody can edit with a very simple markup language. Anyhow, I thought this might be an improvement over simple notebooks and thought that there was probably a way to set up my own wiki for this project.

There were two broad options that I saw; get a hosted site somewhere and use that, or set up my own. I didn't think that my efforts really warranted setting up a site on Wikia or other sites, so I scratched that and considered hosting my own site. However, the only software I saw to do this was fairly bulky and often offered (or required) more than I wanted or needed. Many naturally require a full-featured database, and some appeared to depend on Apache -- both were things that I really didn't want on my desktop and certainly not my laptop.

Through an apt-cache search of the Debian repositories, I found a package that described itself as follows :

simple wiki implementation with built-in web server

DidiWiki is aimed at those who need a quick and lightweight wiki for personal use, such as notes, "to do" lists, etc. It is written in C, and has very low system requirements (binary size of ~25k stripped). This makes it particularly useful for handhelds. DidiWiki does not require installation of a separate webserver, scripting language, or database.

No external web server or database needed? Jackpot!

I had aptitude install it for me and the server was up and running less than a minute later. I pointed my browser at http://localhost:8000/ to see what was there and found very little -- exactly what I wanted! There's little more already installed than a concise "help" and "welcome" page, and from there it's pretty easy to make your own pages to add to the collection.

Overall, it's pretty quick, it's ready to run on the web, and requires little to no effort to install. For small projects, this is probably all the power you'd need to keep track of everything. I've already started to fiddle with it a bit, and perhaps if I'd had the foresight, I would have opened up a port on my firewall to play with it a bit more from work. It passed some of my simple attempts to hack my own system using it as a vector, so I'm fairly happy about that... for now.

There are some potential downsides of course; the entire wiki is kept in a series of flat text files with no mechanism for tracking the history of file changes. There is no method for limiting use; if it's online, anyone can edit anything at all. I have managed to make it slow down pretty badly while trying to serve one badly-formatted and large file, so that's a possible issue. Also, it hasn't been updated since 2004.

Thankfully, it can be built from source easily enough, and this isn't the kind of thing you'd expose to the entire Internet. Further, the issue of file modification history is mostly minor and it is something you can work with. If so motivated, I could keep the directories under version control -- which adds some odd possibilities for collaboration.

But in the end, this is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for; a simple to install and operate wiki that has just enough features to make it useful. It would be a particularly bad choice for anything of much importance or where it would see very heavy use; I'm not sure what it does if two people attempt to edit a given file at the same time, for example. But for small projects, this is awesome.

Freshmeat page for Didiwiki

Random Things

2009-01-06T05:27:00.002-06:00

There's a few random things that have crossed my mind lately that strike me as really odd or just an example of insanity. I admit that some of this insanity is my own, but a portion of it belongs to the rest of the world.

I don't remember the last time that someone asked me for I.D. for purchasing any alcoholic beverage. While I did for a while work at a grocery store (where a number of clerks knew how old I was) this hasn't been the case for nearly three years now. Even when I bought booze at other places, I was rarely if ever carded. I have however been checked nearly every time I've purchased a video game, and sometimes when purchasing movies. The weird thing about someone asking for I.D. when it comes to movies, this seems to be utterly at random; The Omen did not trigger the system to request age verification, yet Office Space did.
In many states, it is illegal to purchase/possess/own/use fireworks. Even the humble firecracker or bottle rocket is grounds for a fine, and sale of such things is heavily restricted. Generally, to get anything other than a sparkler or ash worm, you have to go to an indian reservation or another state entirely. Why? Well, there's some chance that someone might get hurt. Conversely, it is very easy to get a rifle. This makes absolutely no sense to me.
I have caught myself -- many times -- reaching for a calculator while sitting at a computer.
Text messages on phones are more expensive to send than Internet service was in the early 1990s. Yes, the technology is a bit more advanced, but $0.20 for 140 bytes is utterly mad.
Banks continue to try to sell "fraud/identity protection services" to keep your money safe. Of course, this is why you keep your money in a bank in the first place and the notion of charging extra for them doing their job is absurd. Even more obnoxious, I don't doubt that if you were to carefully track junk mail, you would find that your bank has no problem selling your name to advertisers -- which is exactly what they're not supposed to do.

Okay, those last couple are more rants than anything. I'll just stop before I turn into Andy Rooney or something.

I feel old

2009-01-03T18:09:00.002-06:00

So, you've probably heard that after this year, David Tennant will be stepping down from his role as the Doctor. His replacement was announced earlier, a guy by the name of Matt Smith, who has only been acting for a couple years so far.

Announcement here

I'm older than the new doctor :(

Why didn't I think of this?

2008-12-31T14:43:00.001-06:00

Far Side Reenactments

Some of these are pretty neat. Enjoy.

Also, happy new year!

Fighting Back

2008-12-30T04:43:00.004-06:00

Well, I hope that anybody who wanted to see that video I posted yesterday already caught it; Tim Minchin, the guy who performed the poem/monologue asked the guy who posted it to take it down. No hostility, threats, or DMCA nonsense, he just asked. Amazing how this works, no?

Anyway, this reminded me of something I wanted to touch on a bit over a week ago and completly forgot about until now. I was going to comment on the anniversery of the death of Carl Sagan and how badly someone like him is needed in these times. He was an excellent communicator and was passionate about science and the fight against ignorance. When pseudoscience and applied ignorance become policy, all of us are threatened. Seeing the nonsense that keeps surfacing as legitamate these days is enough to terrify me. Seeing people turn off their brains and parrot nonsense from the likes of quacks and crooks is a worrying trend. Does anyone answer these people?

Yes. Yes they do.

Today, I'm going to focus on YouTube and the voices for science that are leaping out of the woodwork there. Primarily, these three people are fighting back against the dangerous nonsense of creationism, though they do touch on other topics and I happen to find them entertaining in some respects.

First up is the infamous Thunderf00t. He's probably best known for his video series titled "Why Do People Laugh at Creationists?" where he examines claims by these cretins and tears them apart. At present, the series is 26 parts and each video is about five to ten minutes long. While he's been slowing down a bit lately, creationists never seem to stop saying profoundly ignorant things, so I doubt he'll ever run out of targets.

Next is CDK007. It seems that his style of video has become well-known on YouTube, enough so that fans have imitated him on several occasions. He often uses a fairly direct explanation and very simple graphics/captions to describe the science he's discussing. While he does go off into more politics and religion, it seems that such things are inevitable these days. My favorite of his videos is where he attacks the "blind watchmaker" strawman. In fact, it's the first one I saw (and probably even linked to at the time).

I recently learned about Potholer54 from a recent interview on The Skeptic Tank; he's taken a lot of time to generate his From The Big Bang To Us (made easy) series. Originally, these were made because in endless debates with creationists, he found himself explaining the same things over and over again, so instead he just made these easy to understand explanations for how we got here. ALso of note is his side channel Potholer54debunks which is a bit more of a direct attack on commonly-drooled nonsense. A favorite is his counter-punch to the claim that carbon dating doesn't work. I admit, I got the giggles when a certain recurring theme came up in it.

Anyway, it's good to see that there's some people out there trying to shine the lights and drive away ignorance. I'll probably post some favorite blogs and podcasts next time I do this.

This Made My Day

2008-12-28T21:24:00.003-06:00

Seriously, watch this.

I know all too well the conversation this fellow is talking about. I've never heard of this performer before, but I'll have to dig out more of his work now.

Roughly a 10 minute bit, the audio is shit but all the text is on screen.

Offtopic : I've been having trouble making comments on any blogger.com sites when logging in with my usual ID/password -- even on my own blog. So, no, I'm not ignoring comments, I just can't respond to them. Additionally, the main blogger.com page is still a pain in the ass to use; there's some stupid javascript text scroller that bogs my machine down.

Natrually, the help files are worthless and just tell me to go post on a pseudo-newsgroup that's populated with others having the same problem and no solutions. Is it time to give up on this site and start again elsewhere?

Holiday

2008-12-24T04:35:00.001-06:00

It's a little after four thirty in the morning, and I'm at work. Sure, it's Christmas eve, but it's also very early in the morning and I have the next couple nights off. If I had anything to do over the holiday, I'd be quite free to do so. Still, there's something to be said for a bit of peace and quiet.

I had dinner and played Dominion with my good friends last night, then came in to work. A light snow is falling, which tells me that it's at least warm enough that being outside won't be too bad. I'm sitting at my desk, watching the snow fall and listening to the Callhan's Place trilogy of audio books.

The buses run tomorrow much to my surprise, so I can pick up a bottle of brandy and eggnog at the store on my way home. I'm already starting to unwind as it is.

Life is good, in this moment if nowhere else. I plan on savoring it.

You ought to do the same, if you can. Life's too short to be bitter.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Hindsight

2008-12-20T03:40:00.000-06:00

Back when I ran Magic tournaments, I quickly became dissatisfied with the software provided by the DCI to assist in running events. Granted, it was several orders of magnitude better than shuffling everything up by hand, doing all of the tiebreaker calculations on the back of an envelope, and writing up the tournament report with (gasp!) pen and paper. Work like this is stupid and repetitive and we shouldn't do it; that's what computers are for. Regardless, a number of quirks that I have long since forgotten bothered me and consequently I started to work on my own.

The only language I was marginally proficient at was C; I had dabbled in perl, but didn't feel confident enough to work with it. I also reasoned that if I kept my code fairly clean and efficient, it would be pretty portable and other people could extend it with bells and whistles like a GUI (I was working on a console application) or even ways to make it work over a network.

I did learn a fair bit from working on this; I beat on the keyboard in a number of ways to see how well it handled bad input. I found out just how badly a naive function can bog down a program and got some notion of Big-O notation. I even managed a crude fixed-point math system because I was fairly paranoid about floating point numbers. Even to this day, I suspect them of being unclean and impure. This was the first thing I worked on that really needed a makefile and probably the first program I wrote that I built and tested on multiple operating systems.

The well-known properties of hindsight came to mind recently when I did a little reading about a nifty piece of software called SQLite. SQLite is a small library that lets you implement a tiny database for your program. Instead of the relatively large and complicated software that is commonly used for databases, SQLite is fairly easy to add in to a program.

The program I wrote used the standard fopen() with a special file format that I had scrawled in some notebook. I also wrote a bucket sort for pairing players by score, as well as my first crude attempt at a binary search tree. About the only thing I didn't write for managing tournament information was quicksort(). With a database on the back end, I wouldn't have had to write any of the code for this; it'll store everything in it's own format and return it when you ask for it. You can even ask it to give only certain information and even have it sorted in pretty much any order you like. Not that writing these things out the long way wasn't informative of course; I'm glad I did it. But if I were trying to write such a program again, I wouldn't hesitate to use this library.

According to an interview with D. Richard Hipp the creator of SQLite, you could even use it in place of MySQL on most websites; his rule of thumb boiled down to "if you only use one server for your site, you're probably fine with SQLite." While I don't think I would use it on a website, it certainly is great for single user applications.

In fact, you probably are using something with SQLite in it right now; the list of famous users of SQLite is pretty impressive by any standards. Based on how widespread this library is, I wouldn't be surprised if it were one of the most successful bits of software ever produced. And why shouldn't it be? Apart from having bindings for nearly any programming language you might realistically use, the entire library is in the public domain.

Anyway... This is a neat bit of code, and fairly easy to use, too. While it isn't right for every job, it is pretty damn flexible, and is a good way to save yourself some work.

HATE CRIME

2008-12-16T09:03:00.000-06:00

Protest turns violent.

Games - Dominion

2008-12-13T03:57:00.001-06:00

Despite being aware of of the world of "designer" board games, I've had little chance to play many of them. Work, school, and distances between friends and family are pretty limiting factors, which is what drives me into video games instead of the more social tabletop setting. However, through a friend of mine and an online board game engine, I was introduced to one such game called Dominion.

If you don't like long posts, I'll summarize : you should play this game.

If you do like long posts, here goes!

Dominion is a hybrid of board and card game in that the gameplay centers around cards, but since everybody starts with the same deck and same general chance to alter that deck, it plays more like a board game. Of course, my own definition of card game also has included overpriced pieces of card stock for the last fifteen years or so.

There are three basic types of cards in the game: treasure (used to purchase other cards), actions (the bulk of the game, these do many things), and victory points (you need these to win.) Each player starts with the same basic deck, which changes over the course of the game based on what cards you purchase. Use of actions will aid you in various ways or hinder your opponent in others, hopefully leading you to have more victory points in your deck when the game ends.

Each turn is broken into three phases, easily remembered as "ABC" : Action, Buy, and Cleanup. During your action phase, you may play a single action card from your hand and the effects listed on it happen immediately. Most action cards have fairly simple rules, such as the Woodcutter which gives you an extra two coins to spend during the turn as well as the opportunity to make a second purchase if you have the coins to do so. There are of course actions that give you additional actions, or let you draw extra cards, or even force your opponent to discard cards from their hand.

During the buy phase, you may spend (discard) treasure from your hand to purchase cards from the table and add them to your deck, specifically the discard pile. What you'll buy depends on a lot on personal taste, what else is on the board, and what other players have been purchasing or using during the course of the game. You'll probably want to purchase better treasure cards to accelerate your ability to purchase victory points, though the various action cards help with this as well.

Then, you wrap up with the cleanup phase, where you discard your hand and put the played action cards for your turn into the discard pile, then draw five more cards. If any three piles of cards are empty, or if all the Province cards have been purchased, the game ends.

When the game ends, each player tallies up the number of victory points in their deck and whoever has the highest total is the winner.

At its heart, this is a fairly simple game to learn and play. However, it manages to keep itself fresh by changing the game nearly every time you start. The game contains a set of 25 different action cards; only ten of these are used in a game, and are usually selected at random. Depending on what's on the board, the flow of the game may change dramatically; the presence of Gardens on the board (+1 victory point for every 10 cards in your deck) often influence players to bulk up their decks with cheap cards just to boost their final score. Thieves steal money from another player's deck if they can, but if everybody is buying Moats, you might not want to bother. And so on.

Over the course of probably fifty to one hundred games, we've collectively found little synergies and responses to strategies that have kept the game pretty fresh. For me, it has been a lot like playing Magic when a new set comes out; there's always some little trick waiting to be discovered.

One cool thing about the game is that because victory points aren't tracked during the game, you don't often have a sense of hopelessness when you're losing. Granted, this may well cause you to misjudge your opponent's position during a game, but that's a fair trade off. In addition, you don't have the slow, crushing deaths that are common in other games. Like in Magic when your opponent is choking you to death with a slow control deck. Or in Battletech when you've taken engine and gyro hits, leaving you limping across the field with your weapons half-useless. Instead, you keep jockeying for a better position and hoping for the best when the game ends.

Another aspect that I like is that there isn't much room for cutthroat gaming in Dominion. The various attacks each affect every opponent, so you can't single somebody out or gang up on them so easily.

I thought I'd finish this up by talking about a couple of my favorite cards from the main set :

Witch -- +2 Cards, each opponent gains a curse. Curses are pretty nasty; they're similar to victory cards in that there really isn't much use for them mid-game, but they also knock a point off your final score. Plus, the guy who played the witch gets two extra cards in their hand; what's not to love?

Chapel -- You may trash up to four cards in your hand. While your discarded cards come back next time you would draw from an otherwise empty deck, trashed cards leave the game for the duration. This is very handy for thinning out your deck at any stage of the game, as well as getting rid of curses. I have actually abused this card so bad that I've had basically no money in my deck -- and still managed to win.

Moneylender -- You may trash a copper piece; if you do, +3 coins for the turn. These guys are a good way to make a quick buck. When used right, you can win a game in record time with these bastards and very little else.

Throne Room -- Play an action card from your hand twice. There's certainly a few cards where this isn't so hot, but certain attacks sent from a throne room are quite fun. Not to mention anything that lets you pick up more cards or actions. Sadly, I have bad luck with the throne room and seem to draw it alone an awful lot of the time.

But yeah, that's Dominion, and I'm utterly hooked on it. If anybody here happens to use BSW (or wants to know what the hell it is) and wants to try it out, let me know. After I get through this week of Crazy Eddie Overtime, I'm unlikely to turn down a chance to lose a few matches.

Countdown to Exorcism

2008-12-09T16:12:00.006-06:00

Persona 4 comes out today, but I'm basically waiting for the postal fairy to drop my copy in my mailbox. Finally, something will displace the Guitar Hero games in my PS2 for titles that I play to death. Of course, I still need to finish Persona 3: FES. This seems to be a common pattern for me with RPGs in the last couple years; I'll get really far in one and wind up not finishing it. Baten Kaitos for example; I'm at a save point in the last section of the game and still haven't run in to finish it off.

Other news, I'm taking my calc exam early. Whee.

Interesting news : Mark Jason Dominus' Higher Order Perl has been put online for free. (For those who are really retentive about these things, this is "small-f" free. I don't care about the politics; it's a damn fine book and a friendly gesture on the author's part) I read this book back in early 2006, and it made me realize that I wasn't really harnessing the power of perl as much as I could have. A statement in the book that I thought was important was that many of us still write C programs in perl, despite the LISP-like facilities it has.

Granted, LISP is pretty scary, and The Wizard Book is not exactly a bathroom reader, but there's still some handy techniques to learn and understand. If you're a programmer, you should check it out.

Random : Something about the automaker bailout. Remember kids, free market capitalism only applies when you don't want to be regulated; socialism is only bad when you're not getting shit-tons of money.

Happy December 8th!

2008-12-08T12:59:00.002-06:00

As I stated once upon a time, December 8th is the day that logic died: George Boole died in 1864 and Ann Coulter was born in 1961.

Also of note, Bob Bell (The original Bozo the Clown) died on this day in 1997.

December 8th seems to be a bad day for musicians; John Lennon was gunned down in 1980, and "Dimebag" Darrell Lance Abbott of Pantera was murdered in 2004.

I'm not revisiting this topic because there's any real significance to the date; there's a lot of famous people in the world and only 365 days in the calender, so they're going to have to share dates of birth and death. Rather, there has been recent news concerning two people connected to this day.

First, Ann Coulter got her jaw wired shut recently. This probably won't be a permanent condition, so her love affair with the sound of her own voice will continue in time.

Second, John Lennon was recently pardoned by the Vatican for his comment about being "bigger than Jesus." I don't see why he would need to be pardoned for what was probably a factual statement, but there you go. I'm sure his remains are greatly moved by this.

Yeah, but...

2008-12-05T12:35:00.002-06:00

I'd be writing more often, but if I write here then I'm not working on my paper or feverishly studying calculus.

Also, I'd be replying to comments if Blogger hadn't recently become ~~retarded~~ special.

More to come, when there's time.

Ohhh, wait, my soul has been sold, so that I'll be glued to the TV starting on December 9th. Hey, Persona 4 comes out, I cannot resist.

Lights In The Sky

2008-11-23T03:50:00.002-06:00

Fifteen or so years after I got a mix tape full of music that was entirely new to me, including a remixed version of Nine Inch Nails' Wish. It wasn't long before I was entirely hooked on them and a few other bands that I had never really listened to before. Now, a decade and a half later, I've finally seen Nine Inch Nails live.

And it was a hell of a show.

Before

Back in March, I learned that Reznor had published his first label-free album, a collection of experimental tracks called Ghosts I-IV (a.k.a. Halo 26) and was making the first volume available for free (as in speech and as in beer.) I signed up to download it and grumbled a bit that they wanted my e-mail address, fearing that I'd get tons of Useless E-Mail from the organization despite their claims otherwise. Much to my surprise, this wasn't the case; I only got a couple more from them. One was to announce an actual album ready for download (The Slip / Halo 27) and the other was to let me know that the Lights in the Sky tour was coming to my city -- a couple months in advance no less. In fact, I was even offered the chance to get pre-order tickets once they were available. Even better, the concert was happening on a night that I was free from work.

Since I managed to forget the preorder (sigh) I wound up ordering the tickets through the infamous Ticketmaster which was an ordeal in and of itself; they have the usual Shitty Website, scalping fees, and usual nonsense. Also, I'd like to point out that they are continuing to spam me with information about concerts that are nowhere near me; they have this strange idea that if something is in the same state, it is automatically close to me. Not to mention that at some point, the envelope with the tickets bounced back to their offices, prompting a phone call to a very confused and angry me. I told them to resend the tickets, watched the mail like a hawk and considered screaming at people at the post office until things were sorted out.

Also of note, a promotional EP was put out online featuring one track from The Slip and four tracks from some of the supporting acts on the tour. In addition, the download included about a half-dozen desktop wallpapers, one of which was on my computer screen for a couple weeks. It was a cool thing to hand out, though it didn't include the opening act from the leg of the tour that I was on.

Amazingly, everything worked out; I got my tickets and my sister made it to town on time a couple days before the show with only minor complications. We even managed to catch a late bus downtown and stopped to pick up earplugs at the grocery store before the concert.

The venue is apparently immune to the "public" smoking ban in our state, so the air was fairly thick and gross. I took a walk around the site and saw an unusual number of people wearing NIN shirts; at nearly every concert I've been to, it was more common that you'd see people wearing shirts for other bands. Anyway, there were already a fair number of people sitting as close to the stage as they could get, some with their backs up against the security fence in front of the stage.

The stage was set up in a slightly unusual manner; there were no speaker stacks on it. Instead, they were hanging from the ceiling in two stacks of about twenty or so. Undoubtedly, this was to accommodate the four large light rigs on stage; one was a grid of very mobile mini spotlights that could change colors very quickly -- it also looked like the lights were comprised of a bunch of smaller lights. I don't know jack about stage lights, so I'm not at all sure what these were. The three other rigs were large and rigid walls of smaller lights that effectively acted like a bunch of pixels on a computer monitor. Two were curved, and one was flat. I couldn't get in very close, but I suspect that the setup was modular enough to quickly replace damaged panels. In addition, there was a bank of probably a dozen strobes on each side of the stage.

I also had a short glance at the sound board and other controls, but couldn't get any real useful information other than "that's a big mixing console" and "oh, neat, an iMac."

Opening Act

The opening band was a Japanese experimental rock group called Boris that I had heard one or two tracks by, but was otherwise not familiar with. They really didn't catch my interest much in the 45 minutes or so that they were on stage. Most of their music was rather slow and indistinct and didn't seem to get much of a reaction from the crowd either.

The Main Event

After a surprisingly short intermission, the venue was plunged into darkness and the noises of 999,999 started playing, eliciting much cheering from the masses as they packed in close. When 1,000,000 started, the crowd started moving like mad; mosh pits started, people were shoved about, things were thrown into the air. Everybody, myself included, was really getting into the show right off the bat... only to have the intensity further turned up by the classic March of the Pigs. When this song started, it became quite clear as to why there were police on site and an ambulance outside. It was not at all unlike being uncomfortably close to a riot.

Not that I minded of course, I was jumping around and yelling like an idiot myself, as well as gleefully shoving people from the mosh pit the hell away from me. Fortunately, the only injuries I sustained were a couple small bruises and a small bump on the head thanks to some drooling fucktard throwing a studded leather belt into the air. I should have kept the stupid thing.

The elaborate lighting was put to good use; when a change in instruments was needed, the front curtain of lights would come down and a couple members of the band would play in front of it and the ninja roadies would swap equipment while obscured by the video and other effects shown on the front curtain. Interludes between songs were often filled with random ambient tracks from Ghosts. There were a number of small cameras on stage as well, usually looped back into the back screen and used to create a fairly intimidating closeup of Trent's face during a few songs.

Some of the Year Zero material used cameras pretty well, putting up displays of the crowd on screen as well as a few (possibly pre-recorded) feeds from other places in the venue. To fit in with that album, one of the displays for that song was covered with a "CENSORED BY THE BEURAU OF PUBLIC MORALITY" logo.

Overall, the light screens were used in pretty nifty ways, including a few multi-layer visuals used for the ambient pieces and a few apparently interactive bits. At one point, a solid screen of blue was "sprayed away" by Reznor holding a light of some kind. If this was choreographed, it was well done. If it was actually interactive in some way, I'm downright impressed with that as well as the Echoplex drum machine display. While the stage effects were impressive, they didn't overwhelm the music at all.

The setlist covered every album, pulling tracks from Pretty Hate Machine right up to The Slip. The vast majority of staple songs that I really wanted to hear that night were covered, from the classics to the newer songs that I happened to hear beforehand. Among them were Head Like A Hole, Terrible Lie, Wish, and Gave Up. Even the newer songs were pretty good and have prompted me to listen to the new albums again. It was during the older songs that the crowd reacted strongest though, singing along and everything.

A gigantic and red NIN logo covered the front of the stage while a loud sound like a sustained and distorted guitar echoed through the speakers. Soon (after another stage alteration, of course!) the encore began. Six songs were played in the encore, notably Hurt which is a song that I'm amazed anyone at all can sing live.

I was surprised with how minimal interaction with the crowd was; there was one short speech at the end and a random couple of comments said to someone with a "SEX ME UP, TRENT" sign near the front row, but other than that they just did their thing up on stage and that was that. I also noticed that the elements from Year Zero were toned down from other reports I've heard about this tour -- I assume that it's because the recent election has made the album a bit less culturally relevant. Regardless, it was nice to see the political side of things quietly pushed aside.

It seems that the general ban on recording devices has been given up on; the sheer number of cell phones and small video cameras in the crowd was mind boggling. Once upon a time, that was the kind of thing that could get you thrown out of a place. Now, there's tons of photos on Flickr and all kinds of grainy videos on YouTube. Go, Internet.

After

We caught a cab quickly after overpaying for some shirts and exiting the venue. The cab driver had never heard of the band, and talked about drugs that were apparently popular in our city. Our reaction was mostly along the lines of "smile and nod" and I think that he had been trying to sell us something. Either way, he was at least honest enough to take the freeway instead of ripping us off by taking the long way through town.

At the end of the night, we had a distinct case of "concert stink"; the smell of cigarette (and apparently other) smoke is still in my sweatshirt in addition to the smell of cheap beer thrown through the crowd. Yuck. At least my ears weren't ringing thanks to the earplugs.

Anyhow, it was an awesome show. I hope I get the chance to see them again, and I'm reminded that I really ought to see more live bands.

He Should Have Stapled It.

2008-11-18T01:29:00.002-06:00

Why, yes, this is exactly the kind of thing I would do.

Here's a "picture".

Not that I've ever walked around with a red marker in my back pocket. Certainly never at grocery stores selling "Nacho's" and "pizza's."

Damn Dexter's Dark Demons

2008-11-15T09:38:00.002-06:00

Seriously?

Demons?

No, really?

REALLY?

I hope that Dexter in the Dark will be to Lindsay's books like Snake's Revenge is to the Metal Gear series.

RIP,Michael Crichton

2008-11-05T12:55:00.000-06:00

Author Michael Crichton Has 'Died Unexpectedly'

Geez. I really liked his earlier stuff. That just came out of nowhere.

Election Day

2008-11-04T05:05:00.002-06:00

Well, today's the day. I'm all set to vote after class today.

There's nothing more to be said at this point that someone else hasn't already said. I'll save my comments for another day, maybe. At this point, I'm just glad that the end is in sight and we can, as a nation, move on and up out of the darkness of the last eight years.

To repeat what someone else said before me,

"America, don't fuck this up."

Subhuman Trash

2008-11-03T12:34:00.002-06:00

Twice now, I've written about Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptists and their campaign of hatred against everything that isn't strictly in line with their warped and narrow interpretation of an ancient book of fairy tales. Before, I had simply thought that he was a hateful and bigoted old man and very likely a closet case as so many right-wingers seem to be lately. I was wrong; he's worse.

I just read a post about Phelps' son on the RDF : Running From Hell (original on a Canadian site called Ubyssey. After reading this, I am convinced that Fred Phelps is subhuman trash. I hate to even waste the time to write about this violent, hateful, and outright stupid junkie, but this is a story that must be told.

“The Bible says ‘spare the rod, spoil the child,’” explained Nate, “and he would be screaming that out as he was beating us.” One Christmas night, Pastor Phelps hit Nate over 200 times with a mattock’s handle, swinging it like a baseball player.

What the fuck. Phelps is a coward and a bully, even to his own family. Seriously, a fucking mattock? This guy is lucky to be alive. And Phelps? He belongs in the bowels of the worst prison on this planet.

More recently, WBC planned to protest the funeral of Tim McLean, the young man who was beheaded on a Greyhound bus. However, they were barred from crossing the Canadian border.

At least Canada gets it right. This alone is enough to make me want to move north. This guy is an embarassment to every living thing on the fucking planet.

“I know that very early on [my father] was under the influence of those drugs,” Nate said. Pastor Phelps was attending law school and would take amphetamines to stay awake and barbiturates to come down. “It spiralled out of control [and he] was prone toward violence….He just wasn’t tolerant toward the presence of all of us kids running around—and the accompanying noise….He would beat the kids with his fists and kick them and knee them in the stomach.”

There is no fucking excuse for this. None. Drug abuse combined with assaulting children like that? This thing has no morals. No spine. No humanity. Were he to drown in a bucket of pig vomit, he would actually manage to devalue it.

He remembers when his father would force him and his siblings to run five to ten miles around the high school track every night. One evening another boy was riding his bicycle along the outer lanes of the track, and Fred began yelling at him to leave. The boy’s response was to keep riding on the track, and Fred’s was to push him off the bike. The boy left, screaming, and 20 minutes later a truck came screeching into the parking lot. The boy had brought his father, who approached Fred and knocked him to the ground.

“The man was threatening to sue him,” said Nate. “Then my old man yelled at us all to get in the car and we went home, and [my father] ended up beating my mom that night.”

This thing called Phelps is foul enough that I would be relieved to find out there was a Hell, only because I'd know that he would be rotting away there. How can any living being have so much hate? How can anybody be as irredeemably evil as this disgusting bucket of cow shit?

Anyway, I'm unable to go on about this. Too much anger isn't good for anybody. Take the time to read the story.

Words Fail Me

2008-11-02T02:11:00.003-06:00

From Reuters :

AOS detectives assumed a "noble cause" doctrine where the ends justified the means and bashing a criminal was a "community service," said the integrity report.

"Squad members became renowned for wearing black suits, white shirts, dark sunglasses and a team-issue black tie," said the report. "The outfits imitate the costumes worn by a network of violent criminals in the film Reservoir Dogs."

I'm actually torn as to whether or not this is badass or just fucking creepy. I also seem to be incapable of making any kind of amusing quip about this.

Australia's "Reservoir Dogs" police squad revealed

Subversion and Office

2008-11-01T05:46:00.001-05:00

Recently, I was describing to somebody the advantages of a piece of software called Subversion and why I use it for college papers. Let's be clear; this isn't the best application of the suite, but it does a decent job anyway. He said, "ah, but Word does that and you won't touch it." I thought I would address this misconception here as well as in real life. The most basic application of Subversion is to easily store previous revisions of a file and restore them if needed. On the surface, that sounds an awful lot like what Office does for you, but the similarities end much quicker than expected. Here's why it's different and even (in most cases) better to use software like Subversion.

Previous versions are stored elsewhere
When you make edits to an Office document and allow previous versions to be stored, your file will retain the changes made allowing someone else to view previous alterations. While this may or may not be desirable, it seems that it is more often the case that you don't want to show every little edit to somebody else. The result of clumsily using this feature can be pretty embarrassing.
Saving versus committing
Saving is simply when you write to the disk temporarily. However, the idea of committing a change lets you store only revisions that you deem important; when working on software things like bug fixes and new features would justify a commit to the repository. When something is still in progress, committing is bad form -- instead, the commit trail will show the significant changes made. In the case of using Subversion for school papers, things like adding paragraphs or moving text around are worth a commit. Word is considerably more adamant about storing every little edit and doesn't seem to put any significance on the edits.
Networking
It seems that Word does have an online collaboration feature, unlike my previous assumptions. However, I am presently under the impression that Word needs to be running while edits are made. Since I don't have the means to further test any of this, I'm just going to say what Subversion is good at rather than make a comparison. A textbook example of how Subversion is used is to allow multiple people to make edits to the same project. In short, Alice and Bob pull copies of file F from a central repository and work on them. Alice works on one part, Bob works on another, and when they're done, they commit their changes to the Subversion repository. If there's a problem (such as both of them making changes to the same part of the file), they're told where it lies and can usually fix it. This seems basic enough, but I would like to point out that each person can be using whatever software they like to edit the file in question and don't have to be working at the same time. Also, neither of them needs to have the original copy -- it's already backed up for them. In addition, the repository itself can be easily backed up off-site if need be.
Branching and Merging
Closely related to the previous point, you can use Subversion to create "branches" of your project. In a software example, I might be trying out a replacement GUI library to see if it works better with the project. Anyone working on that branch will be able to do so without interfering with the "mainline" development of the program. Better still, if it turns out that the changes in that branch are desirable for the main project, they could be merged back in by the software for you. Or, in the case of school papers, you might have to make changes to your style sheet1 and continue working from these alterations instead of from the original copy.

Outside of the collaboration features (which I can't comment on), these are things that (like so many others) Word just gets wrong. But then, that's another topic, and a particularly long one at that. Until next time, MS Smart Quotes are the work of the Robot Devil.

Who is next?

2008-10-31T00:11:00.000-05:00

David Tennant quits Doctor Who.

Well there it is; there's a new Doctor coming after the season of special episodes. Tennant has been one of the most popular leads for this show since the Tom Baker years and it's disappointing to see that he won't be on the show once Davies is gone in favor of Moffat. Ah well. I guess the 2010 season will be a completely new direction for the show.

My question: Who will replace him?

About those attack ads...

2008-10-12T07:09:00.003-05:00

"I just have to rely on the good judgment of the voters not to buy into these negative attack ads. Sooner or later, people are going to figure out if all you run is negative attack ads you don't have much of a vision for the future or you're not ready to articulate it."

-- John McCain, 2000

For once, I agree with him. Of course, this is "eight years ago" McCain. Bizarro-McCain of the current "Presidential Idol" race needs to be sent back to Htrae. Actually, I'm not sure which is which; neither has a goatee. Either way, the previous version wasn't quite the sad sack who is running right now.

Can we have the old McCain back? Surely there's an old revision of McCain somewhere in the repository that we can restore. Of course, he might in a collection of source tarballs on. Obama, being fairly new, probably has previous versions stored in Git.

In other news, coming off of a caffine high makes you say things that are sillier than normal. I mean, I just went on a tangent about previous versions of senators being stored in revision management systems. What the hell is wrong with me?

Idiocracy

2008-10-02T02:31:00.003-05:00

If you haven't seen Mike Judge's Idiocracy, I strongly recommend that you do so. It was marketed as a comedy, but it is one of the most frightening films I've ever seen. The theme that really struck me was actually the effect of advertising and unchecked corporatism, but the one that's relevant right now is how painfully stupid people are becoming.

Tonight, I was struck about the head and neck with yet more evidence of this steady decline in our culture and the way we idolize ignorance and value credulity. CSPAN-2 was running vice-presidential debates from the past, and I happened to come across the Bentsen-Quayle debate of October 5, 1988. I wasn't old enough to remember it happening when it actually occurred, and hadn't even heard the context of the "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy" quote before, so it was neat to see. Of course, seeing history presented in present tense is usually more intriguing to me than reading a summary later on.

It was interesting to see that we've been recycling slogans for a while now... I can't help but wonder how far back politicians have been saying that we need a "fundamental change in Washington." Seeing Lloyd Bentsen talking about energy concerns, climate change, and finance concerns twenty fucking years ago made me wonder if perhaps he had slipped through a time warp.

Anyway, Dan Quayle has a reputation of saying some profoundly dumb things in his time. Some of this is well-earned; flubbing something in a speech is one thing, but he made gaffes that are confusing to even read. That being said, he did get a number of quotes mis-attributed to him by word of mouth and a Mad Magazine article called (I think) "Things We Can Expect To Hear From Dan Quayle."

I did see something Quayle did in that debate twenty years ago; he managed to form complete sentences and occasionally expressed a cogent thought. Regardless of your opinion of Dan "insurance policy" Quayle, one thing is clear; he looks like a rocket scientist next to Sarah Palin.

I don't think I have the words to express my disgust with this candidate. She cannot name a single news source that she reads. She doesn't know a single Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade that she disagrees with. She is corrupt, duplicitous, and flagrantly dishonest. She can barely complete a goddamn sentance. What's worse is that people look up to her insanity and willful ignorance as a virtue, while muttering nonsense about "small-town values" or some other such hollow rhetoric.

She scares the hell out of me... And she would be the second-in-command after the oldest person to be elected to office comes to power.

I realize that I'm not saying anything new here. The fact is, I don't even think I've said all that can be said, but seeing that debate earlier really brought it all into razor-sharp contrast for me. Given Quayle's reputation, I had thought it would be an utter train wreck -- like the one I'm expecting tonight.

Let me emphasize my concern over this one last time before I sign off; the situation is so fucking disturbing that I've actually got a voter registration card in my wallet for the first time. Of course, my take on our idea of an election is an entirely different can of bees...

Hit the road, Jack

2008-09-26T15:42:00.002-05:00

I'm a little late to the pile-on, but I can't let this pass by without commenting...

Jack Thompson disbarred

Good riddance. I'm not an attorney, but I can only imagine what an embarrassment this guy was to the profession. His endless, obnoxious harassment of game developers was bad enough, but he goes way back when it comes to assaulting free speech. I doubt he'll simply fade away, though; Minitrue will probably have his ill-informed rantings on whenever they need to pin blame for another tragedy on video games. He might still be able to engage in egregious abuses of the legal system as he can still file suits, but hopefully the lawyers he'll have to rely on will laugh him out of their offices.

We haven't seen the last of this clown, but he has been nicely hobbled for now. More to come when I'm not eyeballing my bed so closely.

Bah.

2008-09-23T18:12:00.002-05:00

The people I meet are often enough to disturb me. Just a couple weeks ago, I met a "9/11 truther" in real life. If you haven't heard of this sort of thing, it's the people who come up with increasingly implausible explanations for the attack on the World Trade center. It ranges from "The Bush administration planned the whole thing" (yet they can't get anything else right...) to "The Jews running the Federal Reserve used missiles and holographic cloaking devices to make the missiles look like planes and set off explosives in the towers!" (You're an Art Bell fan, aren't you?)

I'm not even going to go into the arguments here; it's been done to death. The problem with these guys is that any refutation of their crackpot babbling is clearly just part of the cover up and will be quickly countered with "nineelevenwasaninsidejobwakeupsheeple!!!" When I mentioned that NIST had published a pretty comprehensive report on building 7 for example, it was quickly dismissed because, after all, NIST is part of the government. So instead of evaluating the evidence, they resort to ad hominem. Don't get me wrong, it is clear that we have one of the most corrupt administrations in our country's history, but that doesn't mean that you can discard evidence on such grounds.

So, that's one kook that leaves me shaking my head. What's really sad is that the WTC conspiracy theory crap is only the tip of the iceberg.

I also get really tired of the assumption that any book I'm reading is automatically for school and the subsequent surprise when I say that this isn't the case. Seriously, this "oh, I don't read" thing frightens and disturbs me. No matter how many times I run into this, I'm always dumbstruck by it.

Of course, it's no better when I actually am doing homework. I'll try to explain the subject when they ask and I'm often met with "Why would anyone need to know that?" There's two responses that come to mind; I could waste my breath explaining it to them or just say that "I want to do more than scrub floors for the rest of my life like you."

People. Bah. I could go on, but it's not worth it.

Yarr, Bitches!

2008-09-22T13:28:00.000-05:00

I've written about the abominable Fred Phelps and his merry band of inbred hatemongers, but today I've got something special. Normally, I don't have much good to say about "counter protesting"; it's silly and doesn't seem to achieve anything. In this one case, I'm glad to be wrong.

Pirates Protest Phelps

Yep, the cuckoo Phelps hate group walked the plank this morning after a happy bunch dressed like pirates and holding signs saying "God hates shrimp -- Leviticus" and "God hates cotton-polyester blends" stood opposite them at the corner of Markham and Scott streets. The group, made up of Central Arkansas Pastafarians, waved swords and growled "Arrghh!" in a manner that would have made Abbie Hoffman proud.

Awesome. I happen to like the Pastafarians far more than most other religious groups as it is -- but dressing as pirates and using other nonsense from Leviticus on these clowns? I could get behind that any day.

With cars honking and waving at the pirates and a TV crew giving them all the attention, the Phelps group -- with a child in tow, sadly -- picked up their "fag" epithets and went away. Pitiful.

Arr, keep up the good work mateys! Show them landlubbers a thing or two!

Damnit

2008-09-01T22:45:00.001-05:00

Are my e-mails from GMail getting through?

I'm used to not getting responses, but I've also found that a lot of e-mail servers are dropping GMail adresses on principle.

Anyone? Bueler?

Ah, fresh air...

2008-08-30T09:15:00.003-05:00

What do people learn by watching the news?

Ignorance is a virtue.
Credulity is a good thing.
Asking questions is a really bad idea.
Knowing things is dangerous shit!
Brainless fucking pageantry is more newsworthy than any war.
You can slander anybody so long as you prefix the statement with "some people say..." and get away with it.

Sometimes, you just need a breath of fresh air to get away from the idiocy. Here's a couple :

You Are Dumb Post-Millennial Judgment and Retribution for the Information Age. Updated five times a week with comments on the painfully stupid people that have managed to make asses of themselves publicly.

Pat Condell's Godless Comedy Sincere, direct, ruthless, and far saner than a lot of people. Don't bother watching if you're religious. I'm serious, and I warned you.

Begin Semester 5

2008-08-26T04:21:00.000-05:00

Classes began a week ago and I think that things are off to a good start. I figured that instead of writing about my impressions on day 1 (where I had one class), I'd wait a week so that I would have a better impression to go by.

Before even getting into that, I did want to mention that my schedule is considerably less insane than it has been in basically every previous semester. Not only is my day done at noon, I don't have a single class on Thursdays -- meaning I have one day every week without any obligations. Last Thursday, I managed to get a lot done (cleaned my bedroom, pay bills, and do homework) and even had time to just sit the hell down and relax.

Four days a week, I've got my calculus class. We're still at the point where we're reviewing stuff that I feel like I've done a thousand times, but I'm still keeping up on the suggested problems because I'm seriously out of practice. I'm actually glad that I kept my old precalculus book handy since there's a few things I had to look up that aren't mentioned in this semester's textbook.

About the textbooks... I suppose the college isn't terribly different from any other, but a recent change in the precalc books has just been shown to be more idiotic than previously thought.

For a while, the math department used "Precalculus with Limits" by Larson, Hostetler, and Edwards, which was actually fairly decent so far as my limited experience with these things goes. We used the fourth edition (if memory serves, anyhow) so by that time one would hope that the nonsense was beaten out of it. It also lacked the absurd amounts of superfluous photography and other extra drivel that's common in many textbooks.

When the upgrade treadmill started up, this book was replaced with a horrible lump of garbage that was mercilessly thrust upon the students. I might devote an entire post to just how bad this book is one day, but here's the broad strokes :

First edition. I trust this about as much as a 1.0 release from Microsoft.
Garish random coloring, sidebars, and other drivel. Appears to have been written for middle-schoolers.
Poorly-written problems.

This is largely off the top of my head. Anyway, as I found out the book for calculus is also by the authors of the old precalc book. In fact, it's a new edition of the book that the school had been using before. Clearly, by someone in the department's evaluation, this group of authors produced a good enough book for another couple years on the treadmill. Why not for the precalc book?

Meh.

Anyway, the other class is Composition II, which seems like it should go well enough. After last semester, it appears that I don't have a lot to worry about with regard to writing, so it should be easy enough. It looks like we'll be focusing more on making arguments and analyzing how other people construct their own arguments, so I'm already somewhat familiar with the subject matter.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

2008-08-25T22:01:00.002-05:00

Two decades ago, Metallica released ...And Justice For All, their last really credible album. While Justice wasn't quite up to par with their two previous albums, it was still a very solid effort by any standard. In all fairness they had just lost their bass player (and arguably the band's entire writing talent) a couple years beforehand, so it's not a surprise that the album isn't nearly as cohesive as previous works.

Seriously, though, twenty years is long damn time. Also, it makes me feel really old.

It's no surprise that their albums for a long time after have been mediocre at best; And Justice For All was also the last time that they worked with Flemming Rasmussen as their producer. For roughly fifteen years, they worked with the astoundingly awful Bob Rock and left us with the black album and Load.

Anyway, I don't have time to get into the details today, so I'm just going to post this and get ready for work. Whee.

Public Service Announcement

2008-08-04T21:57:00.004-05:00

I think it's been said many times over, by people considerably more eloquant than myself : don't get tattoos in languages that you don't understand. A lot of people here in the U.S. get tattoos of random Chinese characters on them and have no clue what they say. I had guessed that it was likely that a lot of them were wrong, but I had no idea how frequently this was the case.

Observe!

Hanzi Smatter

You have been warned.

Ban this, you nitwit.

2008-08-03T22:05:00.001-05:00

Do you ever feel like there's people who just don't get it? Today, three minutes of video from a Texas news station has left me with bruises on my forehead. Seriously, the sheer amount of unprocessed idiocy caused me to ram my head into my desk repeatedly in a feeble attempt to make the burning stop. Seriously, I can't even imagine being as ROCK STUPID as the drooling asshats in this video.

Ban Fahrenheit 451

That's right; a book that decries rampant censorship is being challenged. Why? Because it depicts all kinds of things that offend some ignorant jackass' personal morality. The thing is -- these wouldn't be bothersome if this twit had the capacity to actually read the damn book. Yeah, the burn his collection of ancient folklore, but it's depicted as a bad thing. The whole thing is against censorship!

Cripes. Talk about missing the point. I wonder if that constant wooshing noise causes deafness.

It looks like the father in this video at least scanned the book, looking for things offensive to his tiny mind and without a doubt, there's a long list. Were we to ban school reading based on this imbecile's standards, anything beyong "Dick and Jane" would be prohibited. Even by his own standards, his bible would be unacceptable; has this clown put any thought into that? Of course not; goose-stepping morons like him would rather burn books than read them ¹.

Thankfully, there's still a group of students standing up against this blithering dolt. They've gathered signatures on a petition and are speaking out; good for them! It's good to see a few people out there who will stand up and resist the creeping willful ignorance that is strangling our country.

EDIT : It seems that this is an old video, from about two years ago. Perhaps if I weren't a dumbass, I would have noticed this.

¹ Totally stolen from Sean Connery in Last Crusade. Thankfully, I don't have to make an ass of myself trying to imitate his voice when I write.

Seven Years Later...

2008-07-14T10:19:00.003-05:00

After seven or so years in development hell, I'm happy to say that a trailer for Chuck Palahniuk's Choke seems to have appeared on the 'net. Actually, it looks like it's been around for over a month, so I guess my head has been firmly wedged up my ass.

Behold!

I really liked the book, though I took it to be a bit more grim than the trailer suggests. We'll see though. Almost certainly going to see it when it comes out in September.

Details

2008-07-11T09:02:00.001-05:00

This makes me want to get Quake 3 running.

Back

2008-07-10T08:31:00.002-05:00

Well, it's been a couple weeks. I guess I should pick up the proverbial pen again.

See, what happened was I had a couple posts in my head and got distracted by the death of the great George Carlin and got into this mental race condition where I didn't feel right without writing something about him first. I hit a block though, the thing is -- what the hell could I say that hadn't already been said? Or that would really do justice? I came up blank. I'm just going to say, he should have been elected president. He was honest, direct, and had some pretty good (if controversial) ideas and wasn't afraid to come out and speak his mind. He would have also been uniquely qualified for the job since I'm pretty sure we'd have to drag him into office kicking and screaming the whole way. Nobody who actually wants the job should be allowed into office; even running should disqualify you.

Anyway... more to come. Perhaps even something interesting.

If you don't already listen to Spider on the Web there's something terribly wrong with you. That, and the most recent episode had a pretty surprising bit of news (or non-news, depending on how you look at it) before his reading of "The Guy With The Eyes."

I'll be surprised if the optioned property actually gets filmed -- moreso if it does justice to the original. T.V. and movie adaptations of things are difficult at best.

Bigger than the real thing

2008-06-22T09:43:00.000-05:00

As I rambled about before I have a bit of a fondness for cover songs - at least good ones. Today, I'm going to go in a different direction than before and talk about cover songs that I didn't actually know weren't original in the first place. In many cases it is largely a matter of the newer version being more memorable or more current to the time. Below is a list of ten songs that I didn't know were covers right away, as well as extensive YouTube links to each song. I aimed for live versions or old videos when possible, but a lot simply don't have easily acquired performances and are just photo montages.

Onward!

There's a little-known law on the books that mandates that any period piece about the late 1960s or early 1970s must include a few bars of Jimi Hendrix performing "All Along the Watchtower." This may actually be more common in Vietnam films, but either way - you hear this song a lot, even if you're not watching Battlestar Galactica after it jumped the shark in season 2. Anyhow, I only recently found out that the song was written by some guy named Bob Dylan. I wonder if he ever made it big.

I don't know much by Carlos Santana outside of She's Not There and Black Magic Woman. Until I went digging around, I didn't know that She's Not There was originally performed by The Zombies who were eventually killed and eaten by their namesake during the filming of George Romero's documentary Night of the Living Dead.

So long as the walking dead are on topic, the only good thing to come out of the awful sequel to The Crow was White Zombie's "Boogieman" which seemed slightly out of character for the group, but not entirely. This version and a later remix were popular amongst my friends, though I preferred the album - or "original" in my mind - version. It wasn't until I saw the lyrics quoted in a Stephen King book and attributed to K.C. and the Sunshine Band that I learned it was a cover song.

When you want to get down (after a heroin addiction), you should write a song about Cocaine. At least, that's what I thought Eric Clapton did; It turns out that the one strictly anti-drug song that isn't obnoxiously preachy was actually written by J.J. Cale. Either way, Cale's version didn't nearly destroy a tape deck. *whistles innocently*

Rammstien has been a longtime favorite band for me. The first I heard of them was random one-off tracks from movie soundtracks before Du Hast and Engel really took off over here. Here you have a band of wacky Germans growling things at you and treating everything like a percussion instrument -- what's not to love? Anyhow, they did a really sweet B-Side called Das Model. Having never heard Kraftwerk, I had no clue that they had performed this song some twenty years prior. Although I couldn't find a good clip of Rammstien performing the song, I don't doubt that their efforts were a touch livelier than the weird robots on stage in the Kraftwerk clip.

Type O Negative is a band that I've appreciated for having long songs with often savage and crude lyrics. Because of this, I found Summer Breeze a touch out of character for them. I guess I was right, it turns out that this is an older song by Seals and Crofts. Hearing this right after "Kill all the White People" is ... strange.

When Marilyn Manson did his version of "Tainted Love" I thought it was a decent update to the original version by Soft Cell. Of course, their version is actually a cover in and of itself - of the more upbeat Gloria Jones version. I never would have guessed that this song went back that far.

Stretching back even further is one of the songs that They Might Be Giants is famous for : their version of Istanbul (Not Constantinople). A lively tune and from what I've heard it's a staple of their live shows. What I only recently learned is that it was first performed by The Four Lads in 1953 -- and may have been based on Irving Berlin's 1929 classic "Puttin' on the Ritz."

"Suicide is Painless" sounds like the kind of thing that Marilyn Manson would write. In fact, he said it was more gloomy and depressing than anything he himself had ever written; the original by Johnny Mandel and Mike Altman is almost unrecognizable at first. Of course, anybody who has found themselves awake at three in the morning with the T.V. on to a broadcast station knows this as the theme to M.A.S.H. While the videos I found for this song are pretty lame, take some consolation in knowing that they don't have a laugh track.

I found this final song purely by accident. I had heard that My Dying Bride was an alright band, and thought I would check them out. While I had "Meisterwork" on shuffle, I kept wondering what the one quiet song with clean vocals was. Eventually, I got up and found that the song was called Roads and it quickly became a favorite of mine -- and a of a friend of mine too. Later, he found that Portishead did the original - which is also really good. Unlike the last song, both of these videos are worth checking out.

What cover songs do you know of that became better-known than the original?

Quickie

2008-06-20T18:20:00.001-05:00

I've got to run into work for an extra half-shift because someone called in sick, so today's post will be a simple link to a video that explains why I'm voting republican this year.

I hope this clears things up.

Splash Damage

2008-06-19T05:54:00.002-05:00

In general, the flood has affected me indirectly; water conservation, buses not running, and a film not being delivered to the movie theatre on time. Really, I'm not bothered by this -- shit happens, and based on the state of things here, it could have been a lot worse. I consider myself fairly lucky, or at least on the favorable end of a statistical anomaly.

That being said, a side effect of the flood has me mildly annoyed right now. My company has certain obligations in such events that presently require many hundred extra hours on the weekly schedule, so things are fairly tight at the moment. Because of this, requests for vacation time are bound to be met with mocking laughter at best. Unless things turn around really quickly, I won't be going anywhere this summer.

Oh, and get this - we already have people who are quite possibly still going to be off for a few days at my site. I volunteered to pick up a few extra half shifts only to learn that they won't fill a schedule if it will require overtime to do so. Right, good luck with that one!

Ah well. These conditions won't persist for too long. We're back down to merely a major flood now. No longer could the conditions be called "biblical" or "second coming" or "Cedar Rapids is the new Atlantis."

I did happen to see some of the affected area yesterday morning, and it's pretty amazing. Broken out windows all over the place, piles of debris everywhere, and the occasional bored-looking member of the national guard sitting down on a street corner. It looks exactly like a disaster went through here. Funny, that.

Stan Winston

2008-06-17T09:20:00.002-05:00

Damn. The legendary Stan Winston passed away just about two days ago. If this name isn't ringing a bell right away, he's the legendary effects guru involved in films such as Aliens, Terminator 2, Predator, Jurassic Park, and he even did the costumes for the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special.

I've gotta stop reading the news. Sheesh.

Psychics

2008-06-16T22:47:00.002-05:00

I have no real respect for supernatural claims until they can be demonstrated under laboratory conditions. The results must be statistically significant, reproducible, and properly controlled before I give a damn. Otherwise, such claims are flat out meaningless. Don't give me anecdotes or appeals to ignorance or authority, give me hard evidence.

Many of these claims are ultimately silly and mostly harmless; many more are a way to fleece people who don't know any better. Others still are downright harmful and destructive. However, I don't want to harp on this aspect of things today.

There is an interesting failure of basically all of these people who claim to predict the future; their amazing failures to actually do so. You never read about a fortune-teller winning the lottery, nor can you seem to get a tarot reader to give you anything more than the vaguest advice and in the broadest terms.

Just a few minutes ago, as I was looking over photos of the destruction downtown and thinking about the damage done to places I frequently visit; the bus station, the pawn shop, the magazine store, the bank, and sadly, the library was submerged as well. I had almost forgotten what had moved in to the magazine shop merely a few weeks ago...

A fortune teller.

Oops.

Of course, I haven't been downtown yet and she may well have moved her shop out of the area before the flood came. So, results are still pending, but I won't be too terribly surprised to find some crystal balls and tarot cards in the debris.

Like that song from the 80's...

2008-06-14T17:17:00.003-05:00

Here comes the *$&! rain again.

Anyway, I feel like crap today, so I'm just going to post some links.

Girl struck by lightning AND she wins the lottery. Okay, it was just $20, but that's not so bad.
Video arcades' last gasp. sigh Depressing.
Red Beats Blue Apparently, a study shows that the team playing red in team-based first person shooters is more likely to win. Better red than dead, I guess. Anyway, this is something I'll have to take a closer look at.

LIghtening the Mood

2008-06-13T19:20:00.003-05:00

After a few too many posts on the absurd amount of water covering the area, I thought I'd post a few links that were slightly more entertaining.

First off is a short tribute to The Naked Gun performed using Grand Theft Auto IV. I felt it was a good fit.

Apparently, these Gummi Phalli look like lighthouses. Perhaps it's just paridolea.

Universal Music Group v. Augusto dismissed. In short, U.M.G. was claiming that the materials they gave away could not be resold, even though there was no actual contract stating as such. From the E.F.F. :

In dismissing UMG's lawsuit late Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge S. James Otero ruled that the promo CDs are gifts distributed by UMG, as they are mailed free and unsolicited to thousands of people without any expectation or intention of their return. The first sale doctrine says that once the copyright owner sells or gives away a copy of a CD, DVD, or book, the recipient is entitled to resell that copy without further permission.

(Emphasis mine)

Good news for a change!

Variations on a Theme

2008-06-13T10:53:00.005-05:00

Back to things that are a little more on-topic for this blog. I think that we've all heard quite enough about the floods for now.

For a few years, I was pretty much the epitome of non-gamer; not only did I play next to nothing, I found that there was little original or even interesting on the market. Much as I liked Doom I thought that the excessive abundance of first-person shooters was annoying and unoriginal. For a while, I was even calling them "Doom clones." While I wasn't alone it was a silly stance to take. As has been demonstrated to me lately, it takes only subtle variations on a theme to completely change the way a game is played.

Take scrolling shooters as an example. In some senses, we're still playing an advanced version of Galaga in that swarms of monsters are rushing on screen for us to shoot. However, were we to add the ability to move around the entire screen to Galaga, it would no longer be quite the same - being able to move up to where the monsters are would make it considerably easier to hit them accurately. Changing the number of bullets you can have on screen would probably reduce the game's overall challenge as it would be easier to take out more monsters quicker.

Many of the individual elements of such games change the field considerably; do you get one basic type of weapon, or can it be powered up or changed mid-game? Are there bombs? Do the bombs destroy incoming bullets? Are there power ups? What do they do? How do the monsters come on screen? These do a lot to change the game, though the most drastic gameplay changes can be observed to have a large effect on your overall style of gameplay.

Ikaruga is a favorite example of mine, mostly because I really appreciate its minimalism and how it exchanges the "everything plus the kitchen sink" style of its predecessor for it. The rules that make Ikaruga stand out are fairly direct; your ship has a "polarity" -- dark or light -- that you can switch at will. Opposite colored bullets kill you, where similar colored ones can be used to charge your special weapon. On the opposite side of the fence, shooting monsters with the beam that is opposite their own color does extra damage. In addition, scoring is maximized by killing groups of same-colored monsters at a time, forming "chains." Each cluster of three monsters killed is worth a point bonus that increases every time you repeat this task without interruption.

The light/dark mechanic influences both the design and general flow of the game; there's a long section in level 2 that is basically blossoms of bullets filling the air, forcing you to not only switch polarity for the waves of shots, but also shoot enemies with shots that will take them out quicker. Furthermore, if you're trying to make a top score, you're going to be "chaining" monsters as much as you can. If you're a rank novice like myself, this will often lead to a lot of dodging and weaving to try and bag the correct enemy ship to keep from breaking the chain.

So, Ikaruga has you dodging some bullets and making it a point to be hit by others. A different angle on this is taken in Castle Shikigami 2 which encourages you to get closer to the swarms of ammunition hurled into the air by making your weapon more powerful while you're within a certain proximity of a shot. This changes the way you observe and interact with bullets drastically; it becomes important to know the paths of shots so that you can maximize your potential to deal damage. In boss fights, finding the right location on the screen to fire a charged-up shot in the correct position to hit the bad guy makes the battles like some sort of twisted dance.

DoDonPachi does little concerning the behavior of bullets; smaller ones are nullified if you're using a continuous shot. However, what makes this game stand out is the way it dispenses bonus points -- you get bonus points for destroying enemies in rapid succession as determined by a timer in the top left portion of the screen. Apparently some players have managed several hundred kills in a row due to simply knowing when and where each critter will appear. It takes just a bit of planning to effectively keep your kill count up and the timer pegged at the top of the bar, but it's possible to do quite well once you get the hang of it.

Each of these games plays differently enough that it would be incorrect to simply disregard them as merely members of a genre. Even if you're good at Ikaruga, Castle Shikigami will present new challenges. Surviving Batsugun doesn't mean that you'll take the top score in DoDonPachi.

A truly good game can establish an identity not only by being different from everything else, but by standing out amongst its peers in a given genre. The variations in scrolling shooters paint a very vivid picture of this -- keep in mind, that I've barely scratched the surface of this sort of thing by only looking at three games in a very tight group within their field.

What changes in games (not just video games, either) altered the entire style of play for you?

Downtown is a long way from here.

2008-06-12T23:25:00.002-05:00

Here's some links to photo galleries of the effects of the flood.

Alliant energy has several galleries (about halfway down). Downtown is a mess.

Flood pics as a video from youtube. A lot of the shots of the river really don't have the same context if you don't normally see it about twenty feet below where it normally is.

A ton of Flickr photos Lots to see here, I'm still flipping through it myself.

What a mess.

Water, water everywhere.

2008-06-12T03:49:00.002-05:00

As you may have heard in the news by now, the midwest of the country has been hit with a lot of rain and consequently a fair bit of flooding. As I write this, there's another great big red smear on the weather map headed this way.

It isn't nearly as bad here as it is in a lot of places, but that isn't to say that things aren't getting ugly. The current projections show that we're going to see flooding that beats our current record by about four feet. The neighborhoods around the Cedar River are all under an evacuation order and curfew, enforced by the police and national guard. Iowa City is looking like a mess as well, and there's really no signs of relief right now. The month of May was unusually wet and June is normally our rainy month. The current forecast gives an 80% chance of more rain today, as well as 20% and 50% Saturday and Sunday respectively.

Now to the question that I'm sure any friends and family would like to know about : I am miles away from where the worst flooding in 100 or so years has ever reached. Nowhere that I have to go on a regular basis includes the downtown area. The worst I've run against has been really wet ground on my walk to work and the buses getting rerouted.

But yeah, it is pretty ugly. I'll see if I can get some photos.

Links for today

2008-06-11T21:39:00.003-05:00

Here's a few stories I found interesting today...

Cell phones pop popcorn? Nope.

You may have seen a few videos of a few people apparently popping popcorn by using their cell phones. It looks convincing - almost. Gawker.com shoots this nonsense down, so you can relax and go back to navigating busy traffic with a phone stuck to the side of your head.

Unicorn born in Italy

It isn't invisible or pink, but that's still pretty wild.

Historical contingency in the evolution of E. coli

Okay, that probably doesn't sound like the most interesting thing in the world on the surface and I assure you that you won't be the life of the party bringing it up but it's worth a read. Myers has a very readable explanation of this paper which describes a pretty darn amazing experiment testing the evolution of E. Coli. Seriously, this is worth the five or ten mintues it'll take you to read it.