Live from Austin!

I must start by saying that nothing I’m about to write should be construed as any kind of comment regarding IBM’s possible plans for Linux on the desktop.

Having said that, I’m happy to say that I’m now finally running Linux on my ThinkPad, complete with Notes 6.5.1 under WINE. So far it’s looking good, it’s looking like I’ll be able to go 100% Windows Free™ in the next month or so.

Contrary to rumors on some web sites, it’s not some super-secret “Blue Linux”. It’s just a regular Linux distribution from a well-known vendor, with a bunch of IBM stuff pre-installed and pre-configured. The key point is that on IBM hardware like this ThinkPad, everything just works—X works, sound works, external USB hard drives work, USB mice work including the scroll wheel, there are icons preconfigured for all the applications an IBM person typically needs, and some sensible choices have been made so that there aren’t ten different text editors and ten different GIF viewers. I still managed to find over a gigabyte of stuff to remove, but then again I’m a Gentoo zealot.

It took a couple of evenings of my own time, but I think it’s worth it. And just in case things go horribly wrong, I have a spare hard drive with a Windows 2000 install I can swap in…

I had this dream that Microsoft bought the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum, and re-launched them as The Encarta Museum. We went, to see how bad it would be, and laughed at the mis-spellings and other errors until we were identified as enemies of Microsoft and the museum security squads were sent to terminate us.

That wasn’t the interesting bit. No, the interesting part was that the dream wasn’t finished, so parts of the escape sequence were still just pencil-test animations. I think this is my subconscious making fun of the software development process.

After some controversy over just how bad the weather gets in Austin, I decided to go pick up some actual historical data from the NOAA web site.

First, the monthly averages, in turn averaged for 1931-2000:

Of course, averages don’t tell the whole story—so I took the last ten years of monthly maximum temperatures, and found the maximum of the maxima for each of three locations…

Now we’re watching “Insomniac” with Dave Atell. By some strange quirk of fate Dave’s in Austin in this episode. I must say, sara seems to approve of the all-female roller derby…

With the advent of radar-absorbent materials, dazzle paint is making a comeback in the form of dazzle-painted stealth boats.

The US Department of Education has changed its policy regarding which TV shows should be provided with closed captions for the deaf. The new criteria are secret, and were decided by a five-member panel of people whose names are also secret. All that we know is that the rules set down by Congress require that captioned material be “educational and informational”.

So, to help illustrate the difference between factual educational programs and non-educational entertainment, here are some examples from the official list of updates produced by the panel.

Officially NOT EDUCATIONAL:

AMC Documentaries
VH1 Behind The Music
CNN en Espanol Deportes (Sports)
Daytime Court trials
Documentary: Gay Hollywood
Documentary: Hell Up in Hollywood: Soul Cinema & the 1970’s
Documentary: Hollywood & the Holocaust
Documentary: Hollywood & the Muslim World
Hollywood Lives and Legends
AE Investigative Reports
Lifetime Intimate Biographies of Women
Reel Radicals: The 60’s Revolution in Film
Time Squad

Officially EDUCATIONAL for deaf people:

21st Century Astrology
ABC Good Morning America
Amazing Animal Videos
Atlantis: In Search of a Lost Continent
Bob the Builder
Cory the Clown Show
Degrassi: The Next Generation
ESPN2 Sports Figure
FOX News
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Pinocchio
Play Piano In A Flash
Robinson Crusoe
The Fountainhead
The Time Machine
Vanity Fair

I have broadband. I have a PlayStation 2 next to the router and cable modem. I have disposable income. I play video games. Yet, I do not have a PS2 network adaptor, and I haven’t played any online games.

I’ve been thinking about why not. I decided to put together some suggestions for Raph Koster, who’s the big cheese at Sony in charge of online PS2 gaming.

1. Either charge a subscription, or charge for the game, but don’t ask me to pay twice.

   If I need a subscription to play, I’m very unlikely to pay $50 for the game, because if I decide I don’t like it I’m left with a $50 coaster. Games which are offline or online can get away with charging for the game itself, but it’s still a bad idea if the main point is the multiplayer: A high up-front cost to join a subscription game screams “We don’t think you’ll stay a member for long so we’d better get some cash up front”.

2. Monthly subscriptions don’t work for me, unless they’re really cheap.

   Your market is people with broadband and significant disposable income. To me, that says adults with jobs. Like many adults with jobs, there are months when I don’t really get any time to play video games at all.

   It seems to me that it’s not technically hard at all to have a “per hour” fee, capped at the cost of a monthly subscription. That would encourage casual gamers and people who aren’t sure they will like the game enough to get really into it and spend hours on it every month.

3. It has to be co-operative.

   I have zero interest in player-versus-player. If I want a competitive challenge, a computer opponent is better for several reasons:

   • You know they won’t cheat.
   • You know it won’t be a hopeless mismatch of abilities.
   • You don’t have to deal with network lag.
   • The computer won’t camp, sulk, or otherwise behave in a deliberately game-ruining way.

   My motivations for gaming are primarily exploration, puzzle solving, and new experiences. Looking at the top selling games of all time suggests to me that the majority of gamers are the same way: “The Sims”, the “Myst” adventures, “Tetris”, the “Super Mario” games—none of them are about combat. There are a few combat games in the list, but they’re the ones that have lots of exploration and a strong plot—“GTA Vice City” and “Half-Life”.

   Furthermore, the multi-player combat game market is glutted already. People who want that already have lots of options.

4. It has to be social.

   This is where it gets hard. There’s no point in having other humans involved in the game unless you can talk with them, but on the other hand there has to be a way to get matched up with players who have similar gaming interests, and to keep out the assholes.

   This suggests to me that an essential part of any multiplayer online game is persistence in user IDs, and some kind of feedback or rating system at least as good as eBay’s.

   That doesn’t mean massive censorship. If people want to talk trash all day, just let ‘em go do it with other people who want to talk trash all day.

That’s all I have so far, but I live in hope that someone will take notice and come up with some multiplayer games that appeal to me.

So as I walked through Davis Square today, I looked down and noticed a small ziplock bag filled with powder. On closer look, the crystals appeared to be slightly larger than regular sugar, perhaps similar in size to Demerara brown sugar. The color was off-white, with a touch of yellow, maybe the merest hint of brown. The bag was about 6cm by 4cm and packed fairly full.

I considered what it might be. None of the innocent possibilities seemed likely. It was too light in color to be brown sugar, and too yellow to be regular bleached sugar. Silica gel? Maybe, but who keeps silica gel in a transparent plastic ziplock bag?

OK, I thought, so suppose it’s not something innocent. Cocaine is fine white powder, so that’s not it. Crack comes in rocks, so probably not that either. Overall, and speaking strictly as a non-expert, I guessed the most likely possibilities were heroin or crystal meth. It seemed like rather a lot of powder to be heroin, but since my entire knowledge of typical dosages of heroin is taken from having watched Trainspotting once, I could be hopelessly wrong. I learned quite a lot about the chemistry of illegal drugs at school, but they didn’t really go into much detail about how to recognize and evaluate the quality of a sample.

I considered what, if anything, I should do. Obviously the law abiding thing to do would be to pick it up and hand it in at the local police station. Wait, did I say “law abiding”? I meant fucking stupid. Yeah, I’m going to walk into Somerville PD with a plastic bag full of something I think might be crystal meth.

In other words, thanks to the War on Drugs, I did nothing. I quietly went on my merry way. And then I thought about a recent cartoon by Ted Rall, about a similar situation and the War on Terrorism.

So anyhow… if you dropped your baggie of crystal meth in Davis Square, it might still be outside the Somerville Theater.

I just received an invoice for a Christmas gift. I ordered something for my family from a UK web site, and had it delivered to them, gift wrapped. The company apparently assumed I was in the UK too, because they sent the invoice to the card holder address but forgot to put enough postage on it, so it ended up being sent surface mail.

So if you’ve ever wondered how long it can take a letter to get from the UK to the US by surface mail: about three months.

Then this evening, I got a phone call from some kind of collection agency, saying they wanted to talk to me about an accident I witnessed… in 1998.

the fucking alpha cpp compiler seems to fuck up the goddam type “LPITEMIDLIST”, so to work around the fucking peice of shit compiler we pass the last param as an void *instead of a LPITEMIDLIST

—Comments from the leaked Microsoft Windows 2000 source code, as reported by kuro5hin

Incidentally, the first exploit based on the leaked source code has gone wild—there’s a bug in IE 5 which allows people to take over your machine remotely if you download an image file from their web site. No fixes yet; download Mozilla or Firefox if you want a fast, free Windows web browser that isn’t a security disaster.

Our landlord had someone visit today to value the house.

I’m not ready to move. I wanted to wait until the election before having to make a decision.

My new boss is in Austin, TX; and they’re closing the office I work at in just over a year, so I’ll be telecommuting anyway… so maybe it’s time to start investigating what it would actually take to move to Vancouver, BC.