Oh Yay, Another Expansion

Sony has taken a bit of a different direction with its most recent expansions, and Omens of War, the next one, looks to continue the trend. Specifically, instead of releasing big expansions with a ton of new content for everyone, they are now focusing on smaller expansions focused on specific types of players, released more often. It makes sense from certain points of view (sustains interest, adapts to player demands more quickly), but it’s hard to shake the feeling that they’re just trying to milk as much money as they can out of the players…

So what does this one offer and do I even care? Well..
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But Watch Out For Light Breezes

Now this would definitely turn some heads:
Commuter Cars

It’s an interesting enough idea and design, but not really a full replacement yet. It suffers from the same thing as the rest of the pure electric cars: a lack of range, and that’s especially a killer up here in Canada, where the major population centers are farther apart. It wouldn’t be good enough for city-to-city travel, and really who wants to buy two separate cars or always have to rely on buses, trains, or planes?

It’s pretty much the exact opposite of what I need, but I’m sure there are some markets it could do well in. I certainly hear enough complaints about commuting from people I know in places like California…

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

Screw this, I’m sticking with the PocketPC for my music needs for now. As much trouble as it is, it’s just too much of a hassle to switch at the moment.

The iHP-120 looks really nice, but is expensive and even bulkier than the PocketPC. The iPod has the capacity, but not much else. The other iRiver players are nice and small, but damn hard to get hold of and also rather pricey for the larger-memory models. And miscellaneous other faults in the other products.

Of course every product has its downsides, but considering that I already have a more-or-less working solution at the moment, whatever replaces it had better be damn-near perfect if I’m going to be shelling out hundreds of dollars…

My Own Library

The spring cleaning frenzy continues. I think my bedroom is now the least cluttered it’s been in at least five or six years. No more boxes on the floor, clothes on the boxes, piles of papers and junk on the desk, etc.

An essential part of this process has been throwing stuff out. A large part of the reason it gets so cluttered in the first place is that I run out of room to put things, so they get dumped on the floor or desk ‘temporarily’, to be sorted later on. And things get dumped on top of them. And then they get hidden by a blanket tossed off to the side. And so on… After throwing a lot of old junk out, I finally have some more room in which to put everything.

There’s one thing that I’ve been reluctant to throw out so far though, and that’s the books. My collection might not be that large compared to some people’s, but it’s still a fair amount of space. There’s a fairly wide variety, too: textbooks, technical manuals, paperbacks, comics, game manuals, reference guides, tutorials… I don’t really want to let *any* of them go. Throwing out a book almost seems sacrilegious somehow, as though I’m devaluing the very information contained therein.

Do I really need all of those books? Well, maybe… The textbooks for courses long since passed? I’ve already thrown out my own notes for those classes, but the books are somehow different. On occasion I actually have gone running back to them to check on some bit of information I vaguely remembered, so they are still occasionally useful. How about the paperbacks and comics? I do sometimes like to reread my favourites. Game manuals? Not really, but they take up the least space. Some of the computer books are fairly recent and still relevant, and I refer to them often. Others though, aren’t quite so up-to-date. Do I really need “The MC68000 Reference Guide” anymore? Almost certainly not.

In the end though, I’m really just too lazy to sort through them for the few I might actually get rid of and dispose of them properly, so for now I’ll just keep building my own little library here. I just need to get more bookshelves so I’m not forced to keep stuffing them in closets, in drawers, on top of desks, etc…

iTunes and ID3

Today’s lesson:

ID3 tags are annoying. All the different versions of them, that is.

I’ve been using my own script for ripping CD tracks and converting them to MP3, with all of the appropriate ID3 tags and such. That required manually entering all the album and track data though, which was a pain. I considered extending the script to get the appropriate information from the CDDB databases automatically, but that’s a lot of work and I never got around to it.

Now that I have the iBook though, it turns out that iTunes is a pretty good CD ripper. I can slap a CD in, select all the tracks, wander away and come back ten minutes later to a complete set of properly-sorted 192kbps MP3s. However, not all was well. If I took the tracks and then tried to play them in xmms or on the PocketPC, the ID3 information would not show up. It looks like Apple is using their own extended version of the ID3 tags to embed extra information like the album jacket cover pictures, and other programs haven’t caught up yet.

Fortunately, the fix is simple. If I use the “Convert ID3 tags” option and set it back to version 1.1, the tags are now properly recognized by everything else. I don’t think I’m using any of the extended tags that would get lost in the conversion anyway.

Okay, Maybe I Don’t Want It All

It feels weird not wearing a ring after so long. I never realized how often I’d subconsciously fiddle with it with my thumb, and I catch myself doing it and finding nothing there. After sticking my hand in a garbage bag, there’s often a slight panic as I sense the ring missing after pulling the hand out, before I remind myself that I didn’t put it on in the first place. Ah, the forces of habit…

Yesterday’s lesson:

Don’t select whole categories of packages in Debian. It’s just a Really Bad Idea.

I wiped Slackware off of my Athlon system so that I could free up some disk space for XP. I rarey ever use Linux on it anymore now that I have two other systems running it, so there’s no sense in letting it hog 100 of the 140 gigs, especially when I have to frequently clean up files to keep from running out of space in the XP partition.

I do still occasionally use Linux on it though, so I left a 40 gig partition and put Debian on it. Slackware’s great on the server, but I wanted to experiment more with other distros with better desktop support. The basic install went smoothly enough, and it was up and running in no time.

Of course, I can’t leave things well enough alone… I pulled up ‘aptitude’ and started browsing the package listings, seeing if there was anything interesting. Since it was getting late and I was impatient and wanted to let the installs run overnight, I decided I’d just select the whole ‘admin’ and ‘base’ categories and sort out the useful bits in the morning.

Oh, that was a mistake… In the morning I discovered that the downloads and installs had aborted partway through due to errors. And that there were now some 50+ package conflicts. And that there were six gazillion settings irrelevant to me that wanted to be configured. And that even after working out the conflicts, there were still installation errors. And after working out those errors, the system plodded along slowly under the weight of some 400-odd processes, when idle. And programs were still generating numerous error reports and mailing them to me. Oops.

So, rather than try to trim things back to what I actually needed, I just reinstalled from scratch again. Now I’ll be a bit more careful about what packages I select…

Most Alumni Have The Opposite Problem…

I don’t think I’m going to be able to wear my iron ring much longer. Three or four times now in the last week it’s just slid right off while I was in the middle of doing something, and it’s only a matter of time before it falls into the garbage/toilet/drain/etc.

It’s questionable whether I even really have the right to continue wearing it, as I haven’t gone for the proper P.Eng. title yet. Software work doesn’t require it, and I’d be hard-pressed to justify my recent work as ‘engineering’ anyway. Still, I did take the Oath, and it still serves as a reminder of that regardless of what little pieces of paper I have…

Yesterday’s (belated) lesson:
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Today’s Challenge

I have a slight problem. Whenever I get mail, or flyers, or magazines, or most anything else on paper, it tends to get tossed off onto the kitchen table, or top of the fridge, or some other out-of-the-way place.

So, after eight years of accumulating stuff this way, I finally went around and collected all of the bits and pieces lying around the apartment and I’m left with:

Now I have to sort them into three piles: stuff I can throw away, stuff I have to shred first and can then throw away (old bank statements, credit card bills, etc.), and then the stuff I really want to keep (tax records).

Sigh, sometimes I feel like I skipped the qualification exam for being an adult…

The Taxman Cometh

It never fails. Every year I swear I’m going to do my taxes early, to get it out of the way, and every year I’m sitting at my desk a day or two before the deadline, frantically calculating away…

At least I’m getting a fairly big chunk back this year. Of course that’s only because they freaked out and charged me huge instalment payments due to ‘other income’ whose tax had not been withheld in the first place… Fortunately that was the last year I’ll have to declare that ‘other income’ (yearly instalments of a payout from the sale of our company), so next year’s taxes should be simpler again.

Now I just have to remember to get my RRSP payments in on time…

The Miniature Gigantic Space Hamster Retires

Whew. Yesterday I finally finished Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, and it only took, um, a little over two years. Not playing continuously, of course. A little thing called EQ kept butting in and shoving BG2 onto the back burner…

It’s definitely a *long* game, though. Even with a walkthrough, to accelerate it and get it over and done with, it still took a few weeks.

Overall I liked it a fair bit. Although the main plot was linear, there were tons of little side quests to pursue at your own pace. The kits and new class types added a lot of flexibility in character generation and new tactics — I played a sorceror, and having to carefully choose which spells you want requires some serious thought about how you want to play, for example. There were a lot of nice little subtleties too, like intra-party chatter, some NPCs responding differently based on obscure little conditions, strongholds, both good and evil paths in a lot of places, multiple solutions to quests dependent on things like your wisdom or charisma, etc.

It definitely wasn’t as open-ended as something like Daggerfall, but it’s probably about as close as you can get and still keep a strong plot line and keep the quests from being too generic.

There was one thing that bugged me, though… (Spoilers:)
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Taking Exception

Today’s lesson:

Exceptions are hard.

OOP-style exceptions in languages like C++, that is. I’ve been thinking of ways I could better use them in my own code, and it’s more complex than it first appears. Raymond Chen, a fairly well-respected programmer (even if he does work at Microsoft), discussed this recently and posed a bit of a puzzle, and if even he and other highly-experienced people can’t agree on proper solutions, what hope is there for a poor slob like me? :-P

The Honeymoon Is Over

Okay, I’ve had it. I’ve been able to tolerate the little flaws, the imperfections that you learn to work around or live with, but this is the straw that broke the camel’s back. Once you’ve reached a certain point of frustration, there’s just no hope of salvaging what you had.

This PocketPC sucks as an MP3 player.

Oh it worked ‘reasonably’ well for a while. It did its job, playing songs in random order, so what could there possibly be to complain about? Aside from the low capacity, that is. And that trying to add whole directories to the playlist would often crash the player, requiring that the files be added one-by-one instead. And the stutter at the start of many songs if I dared try the power-saving mode in order to get a decent lifetime. And that in order to protect the screen I have to keep it in its case, making using the controls difficult. And a half-dozen other little quirks that pop up from time to time.

And then today, after docking it at the office like I’ve done a hundred times before, *something* got corrupted. Now it’ll only play one song and stop. Re-examining the playlist puts garbage in it. Launching it through an association in the File Explorer causes a memory fault. And I just don’t care anymore.

Today’s lesson:

Nailing your head to the coffee table is more fun than fiddling with glitchy PocketPC software.

Logs (Big and Heavy, But Not Wood)

Today’s Tip:

One of the Windows worms currently running amok is annoying in that it uses a buffer overrun exploit via a very long URL. Not a problem for a Linux system, but this makes the web server logs balloon in size and makes them a pain to browse manually.

Fortunately, it can be mitigated a bit. Changing the “%r” in any LogFormat lines in Apache’s httpd.conf to “%!414r” completely trims out any URLs which are considered too long.

But What About Platinum?

News of the day:

A recent discussion on Slashdot has revealed some information that I’d been meaning to research for a while now: CD-R/RW media reliability. It’s apparently mostly dependent on three factors: dye lifetime, the reflective metal, and proper adhesion.

The best dye is phthalocyanine, with cyanine in second place and metal azo as the worst. For the metal layer, gold is best due to a higher reflectivity (closer to pressed CDs, for better compatibility in players) and resistance to corrosion, with silver in second place. And adhesion is simply how well it’s glued together, with no leaks or weak spots, and just varies from brand to brand.

So, for the absolute best reliability, you want phthalocyanine/gold discs. They can be a bit more expensive though ($1 USD per disc is what I’ve seen quoted). What I might wind up doing is dividing my files into three categories: essential, important files, which will be archived on the phthalocyanine/gold discs; the common, non-essential files, for which phthalocyanine/silver or cyanine/silver are good enough; and the ‘whatever’ files, things like videos and music burned merely for convenience, where any el-cheapo brand will do.

(Though I do still plan to move to DVDs, I’ll probably still archive some stuff on CDs just for extra reliability and redundancy.)