Fat Fingers And Laptops

I like my iBook well enough, but dammit, whenever I’m typing I often accidentally hit the up arrow whenever I go to press the Shift key. If done in the wrong order, this causes the whole previous line I just typed to be highlighted and then overwritten by the next character I type before I notice what’s happening. Grrr…

Maybe I need to take proper touch-typing lessons. You’d think after all this time I’d be good at it, but my fingers are still mostly all over the place…

My PC Has Turned To The Dark Side

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is a great game, but it’s still pissing me off mightily. Why? Simple, it seems like I can’t go five minutes without the stupid thing crashing on me… It crashes when it loads new areas. It crashes at the start of cutscenes. It crashes if I look at it funny.

It’s somehow related to the video drivers, since the debug dump is almost always in ‘atiogl.dll’ or something like that, the ATI OpenGL subsystem. Reverting to the previous version of the ATI Catalyst drivers helps; it now only crashes every dozen or so area changes instead of every other one. Except that there’s a bug in that version of the drivers that makes the frame rate choppy…

Ugh, this is part of what’s driving people to develop and play games on consoles like the X-box instead. Its version of KoToR certainly doesn’t have these problems…

Update: Although the latest ATI Catalyst drivers are version 4.6, I apparently have to go back *four* whole releases to 4.2 if I want KOTOR to be stable and run smoothly. Wheee…

Sony Finally Wakes Up

I’ve written before about how disheartening EverQuest has become lately, and it looks like there’s finally some acknowledgement from Sony themselves that there’s something fundamentally wrong going on. They recently invited a bunch of high-profile players from the community (high-end guild leaders, experts in particular classes, etc.) to visit them at a summit to try and work out just what’s wrong with EQ nowadays and what can be done to try and fix it.

Here’s one report of the summit from the perspective a community leader of enchanters, the class I play. Some smaller improvements are coming soon, though nothing really substantial yet about the ‘big picture’, but at least they’re listening and acknowledging that things could be improved…

The New Old Version

Firefox 0.9 is out now, for better or for worse (good: bugs fixed, bad: hideous new default theme).

On the Windows version, they made a slight goof though. It looks like it imports all of the previous configuration settings, but the version of the browser reported in the user agent string is one of those settings, so it continues to identify itself as Firefox/0.8 if you do an upgrade from 0.8. OOPS.

The OS X version seems to report the correct version after an upgrade, though.

If someone really needs to tell the ‘fake’ 0.8s apart from the real 0.8s, the ‘fake’ 0.8s also have ‘Gecko/20040614’ as part of the user agent string.

A Mystery

Hmmm, I seem to have a stowaway on my Windows partition. A drive was making odd sounds so I went to check the Event Viewer for any warnings (it turned out just to be the image preview application doing very inefficient I/O) and I noticed a start message for a device driver named ‘nenum13E’. Odd. It doesn’t have a meaningful service description associated with it, either. Strange. Google turns up nothing, so it’s not a well-known program, and could be a randomly-generated name. Suspicious. And it runs out of a temporary directory. *Very* suspicious.

A virus scan doesn’t note anything unusual, though. The other major possibility is spyware, but neither Ad-Aware nor Spybot pick anything up either. That’s unlikely anyway since I’ve always been up-to-date on security patches and don’t use that system very much for browsing.

It should be safe enough to delete it, since nothing system-critical should be running out of a temporary directory. :-P I’m still curious as to what it actually is, though…

The Quest For Quiet

It’s upgrade time again. This time around though, it’s not really about performance; although it’s over two years old, my Athlon system is still pretty much fast enough for the games I want to play. No, this time around the upgrades are focusing on getting some FRIGGING PEACE AND QUIETstability and noise abatement.

Upgrade #1: Power Supply

I’ve been experiencing a number of weird crashes and spontaneous reboots recently, and I think a large part of the problem was that the power supply simply wasn’t keeping up. 300W might have been good enough when I originally put the case together, but a lot has been added to it since then. Thus, the first step was to replace it with an Antec TruePower 480 unit.

It’s hard to tell whether it’s helped with the stability or not yet since the crashes were rather sporadic, but it certainly couldn’t hurt. It’s also has low-noise fans, which help a bit, but not entirely (see below).

Upgrade #2: Memory

Bumping the memory from 512M to 1G has vastly improved playability in a few cases, and EverQuest in particular. No more choppy framerates or disk thrashing leading to facing the wrong direction, casting too late, timing out while zoning, etc.

Upgrade #3: CPU

Okay, this round *is* partly about performance… Since it wasn’t really a priority I didn’t want to have to go all the way and do complete memory and motherboard replacements as well at a much higher cost, so instead I just went from an Athlon 1700+ to an Athlon 2400+, the highest Socket A CPU this same motherboard supports. Not really necessary, but it was cheap. According to the sensors it runs cooler than the old one too, so maybe that’ll also help with stability.

Unfortunately, my noise problems still aren’t fully resolved. It turns out that the vast majority of the noise is from the hard drives, and replacing them is a bit iffier. Partly because a) I don’t really need more space right now, b) there’s nothing else really wrong with the drives and if I want to reduce noise then I can’t even reuse them in another system, so they’re wasted if I replace them, and c) I hate reinstalling stuff. One of the drives is only 12G, so I could probably take it out without much hassle, but it’s also the primary boot drive…

Ugh, it just had to be the hard drives that were the major noisemakers.

Asteroids In Your Pocket

While wandering about looking for information, I discovered that there’s a PocketPC port of MAME, the arcade game emulator. Woohoo! It’s a little on the old side, not having been updated in over a year now, but that’s okay; being the old fogey that I am, I’m mainly interested in the older games that are already included in that version anyway.

The PocketPC seems almost ideal for MAME — it’s portable, so that gives me a lot of games in a fairly small package for travelling. The PocketPC screen is taller than it is wide, just like most arcade screens, for efficient space usage. It already has a directional pad and buttons built-in, so you don’t need a joystick (can’t attach one anyway) or clumsy on-screen emulation. And it should be powerful enough to run all those older games that I want.

Of course, nothing is ever perfect…

Problem #1: Space. The emulator itself takes up about 7 megs, plus the roms (another 11 megs for the ones I want). That’s a lot when you only have 36 megs of memory to begin with, which then has to be split into ‘storage’ and ‘program’ memory and is already filled with various bits of junk. It should run from a flash card, but then a bit of juggling is necessary.

Problem #2: The controls. Although most games only need the joystick and one or two buttons, other features want to be assigned keys too. Coin insert, Player 1 start, Player 2 start, Quit, 3rd fire button, config screen toggle, etc., and there just aren’t enough buttons to define them all. You can at least get something workable if you dump all the ones you don’t really need on a single button though.

Problem #3: The controls, again. Although this PocketPC has the directional pad and buttons, they’re not all that well suited to gaming. There isn’t much feedback to the pad and it’s not well-aligned with each direction, so you can push downwards but it’ll register as left instead, or nothing at all. The pad is fine for normal usage where you can be more precise in how you push it, but it’s not so good in the heat of gaming. The buttons on the other hand have an acceptable feel to them, but they’re placed too close together and to the pad. With one thumb on the pad and one on the buttons, they’re often bumping each other.

Also, pushing on the pad and the buttons tends to make the whole PocketPC ‘wiggle’ a bit, since you’re only pushing on one end of it and there’s nothing bracing the other end. Annoying.

Problem #4: Sound. Although you can enable sound in a lot of the games, doing so slows it down considerably, and then it starts to sound awful and choppy anyway. You may as well just keep the sound off.

Problem #5: Speed. Even with the sound off, a lot of the games don’t seem to run at full speed. Even some fairly simple games like Elevator Action and Arkanoid, which were fine on my old 200MHz Pentium, are a bit slow on this 400MHz PocketPC. This isn’t exactly a high-end model though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s something like slow memory at fault here.

Problem #6: Stability. After a few minutes of play it often freezes up or crashes, requiring a hard reset. I’m not sure if it’s MAME itself or the PocketPC to blame here, but regardless it’s rather pointless if I can’t play for more than that at a time.

Problem #7: Battery life. Although this device claims a battery life of eight hours, I can barely get three hours out of it while playing music on it, and that’s with the backlight turned off. It’ll be even worse when playing games full-tilt.

So close and yet so far. It’s one of those things that *seems* like it should work beautifully, but gets ruined in the details…

Expresso

Although I’m not using anything wireless right now, Apple’s recently-announced Airport Express device looks pretty nifty. Not for the AirTunes feature though; I don’t even have a stereo system (my computers *are* my home audio system) so that’s just marketing fluff to me.

No, what really interests me is being able to have a wireless USB printer server. I’ve often considered getting a printer, but I’m running out of USB ports, a hub would make the wiring mess even worse, and I don’t really have anywhere to put it that’s convenient and near the rest of the computers. With just this device though, I could stick the printer anywhere.

It also acts as a WiFi-to-Ethernet bridge, which has two added bonuses. I could set up a whole second network around the printer and the Airport Express would take care of integrating it into the existing one. Plus, I could also take it on the road and use it as a mobile access point so that I can always roam with the laptop regardless of whether or not the person or place I’m visiting even has WiFi (as long as they’ve at least got an Ethernet port free, of course).

I suppose it would help if I actually get a wireless card first though…

Oh Sure, Now You Tell Me

When I bought my iBook, I didn’t get many of the options or accessories with it. In particular, I didn’t get the Bluetooth module since I don’t have any other Bluetooth devices anyway.

I was recently investigating upgrade options though (I’ve got some new parts for ‘ekosiak’ on the way now), and I was curious just how much the Bluetooth module would cost, since one way of getting Net connectivity on the road would be to use a cell phone with Bluetooth capabilities as the connection. I was unable to determine how much it would cost though, because much to my surprise, it *can’t* be purchased separately at all.

It looks like the Bluetooth module is something that can only be ordered at the same time as the system itself, and the dealer has to install it. What really annoys me though is that there was no indication at the time I bought the iBook that this was the case. It was labelled ‘Bluetooth-ready’ in that you could add in the Bluetooth module, which to me implied that it was an upgrade that could be done at any time.

It’s not a fatal problem as there are third-party modules available (though then they take up a USB slot), and maybe I can convince a local dealer to order and install it separately anyway, but it’s still frustrating to discover this kind of information after-the-fact…

Conspicuous

While I was out for the evening walk tonight, I ran across something unexpected. At the top of the hill by the Jubilee Auditorium, there were a dozen or so people just sitting around on the grass and benches, all facing the same direction. As I passed by, the reason became obvious; they were art students doing drawings of that area (the Alberta College of Art and Design is also nearby).

Of course, they were all facing the sidewalk I had to walk down. It feels strange walking away knowing that there are a dozen or so young people, mostly women, watching your buttback as you fade into the distance…

Progress

My scanner is attached to the dual-boot XP/Debian box, and up till now I’ve done all of my scanning under Windows. I was curious if I could get it to work under Linux too though, to avoid having to reboot just to scan something.

I had no idea what was necessary to get it working in Linux though. I vaguely remember there being a device driver for this model mentioned on some USB compatibility list, and I remembered something called SANE that had to do with scanning, though I couldn’t remember if it was a program or library or what, and I hadn’t the foggiest idea if there were any kind of GUI frontends that would make using it easier or what they’d be called. Normally you have to get a half-dozen prerequisites installed and configured correctly before something new like this will work.

So, I figured I’d work backwards, find the program I’d mainly use, figure out its prerequisites, get them, find and fulfill their prerequisites, and so on. Since I was already in a KDE session, I browsed through the menus looking for something useful, and quickly found the ‘Kooka’ Scan/OCR program under the graphics menu. I launched it to see what it would complain about, and it presented me with a prompt to select which device to scan with, with the Epson model I have already pre-selected. After confirming that, I got a window similar to the Windows scanner software, with a number of option and buttons. I hit the Preview Scan button, and lo and behold, a scanned image of the reference card I had on the scanner showed up.

Well, that was a bit easier than expected. It’s a pleasant surprise when something Just Works when you’re normally used to having to install and tweak complex configurations manually. If the usability of Linux distros keeps improving like this, that desktop market might not be so far out of reach after all…

Trikery

Trikery!
This was part of a graffiti-style mural on the side of this building. It wasn’t your usual random ‘tagger’ stuff; apparently the owner of the building actually commissions them from artists every few years or so.

I’d been meaning to photograph the whole thing for a while now, but then he started painting over it one day recently and this was all I could grab. It’s now a Calgary Flames logo there.

Napster Still Bad, But WordPress Good

After using it a bit further, it looks like WordPress will work out well. In particular I like:

1) Changes are reflected immediately. With MT I had to load the admin URL, select the template section, select the Main Index template, edit in the change, save it, hit the Rebuild button, and wait a while, just to update the numbers on the front page. With WordPress I can just edit the main index file in a plain old text editor.

2) Experimental changes are easier to do. Modifying the style sheet or templates in MT often caused temporary disruptions while I worked out problems, and required a lot of rebuilding. Now I just make a copy of the main index page or style sheet, (e.g., ‘index-test.php’), experiment with changes on it, and then copy it over the regular page when it’s complete, with no disruptions.

3) Posts can be given times and dates in the future, and will remain hidden until that time arrives and then automatically become visible. Writing posts a couple days in advance like this lets me sit on them a while and think of better ways to word things, more points to add, etc., without having to remember to go back and ‘activate’ them later on like a regular draft post.

It also lets posts be released on a more regular schedule, without me having to write them on that same schedule. If I’m feeling productive some night I could write out a half-dozen posts, and then automatically release one per day over the next week instead of overwhelming the site all at once, or trying to remember day-by-day what I was going to write about.

4) The handling of multiple and subdivided categories in WordPress is much better. Subcategories appear as expected in the category lists, and when multiple categories are specified they’re treated equally instead of being separated into ‘primary’ and tacked-on ‘secondary’ categories. (Though for some reason selecting a subcategory does not automatically select its parent category.)

5) Being PHP-based should allow for more flexibility. MT limited you to what you could do through their specific substitution tags, but if I wanted to I could use PHP and MySQL functions to extract whatever raw data I want from the WordPress database.

6) Posts can be split into multiple pages if they’re *really* long.

7) There’s a link management system built-in (i.e., the links in the upper-right corner). It’s not really necessary since you can always add links to the template yourself, but it works reasonably well enough.

There are a few downsides too though:

1) Since everything is dynamically generated, it doesn’t get cached. Just browsing around the site generates a lot more page hits than you’d normally expect, and frequent hits from spiders and aggregators keep getting full sets of new data instead of the ‘304 you’ve-already-got-that’ response. At least it’s all text.

2) The post preview is on the same page as the edit boxes for the post itself. This is kind of a mixed blessing as it doesn’t require you to go to a separate page just to preview, but it can also have unexpected side effects. I have one draft post that I can’t edit anymore because I accidentally put an HTML refresh directive in it and as soon as I go to edit the post it redirects to the new page.

3) The user registration system isn’t quite as complete as I’d have liked. Ideally registered users should be able to be marked for automatic access to protected posts, automatic clearance on comments while holding unregistered ones for approval, and such, but right now it doesn’t seem to do much besides let those users write their own posts. The groundwork is there though, so maybe in a future version…

4) Comments and trackbacks are mixed together, though they serve different purposes. There is a hack out there to fix that and put them in their own separate sections on the page though, and it’s not like I get a lot of trackbacks. :-)