Home For The Holidays

A little late, but oh well…

I took a couple weeks off in December and spent some time in Edmonton visiting family and friends. It was good to see everyone again of course; I have to take an occasional break from going nuts by myself down here in Cowtown. :-) I ate, and read books, and ate, and watched TV specials, and ate, and watched movies, and ate, and chatted, and ate, and visited my grandfather, and ate… Maybe I was premature in buying a smaller belt.

It seems like Edmonton changes more and more drastically every time I visit, too. This time, as I passed by Old Scona, I noticed huge differences. One whole section of buildings had been demolished, new construction was underway in spots, and numerous old shops were gone and replaced by rather low-budget operations. Calgary Trail keeps stretching further and further south. The malls downtown have almost been entirely overhauled. There’s been more activity in the last few years than in most of my youth spent there.

I am also an idiot. After carefully packing up everything I needed for the trip, I rushed out at the last second and forgot a whole pack of items sitting on the kitchen table, including my CDs and Discman, Gameboy, batteries, adapters and chargers, and other miscellaneous accessories.

“Aw, isn’t that sweet,” you might say. “His separation from modern technology taught him the value of basic, plain living and how we shouldn’t rely on blah blah blah…” Screw that. I don’t depend on most of these gadgets; they were bought specifically *for* travelling, and if they get left behind then they were a waste. I did take books with me; if I had left them behind instead would I have been expected to have learned how to get by without books and just enjoy simple electronic pleasures instead? :-P

Anyway, back to the grind…

Biting the Apple

Looking around at a lot of people I know, it seems like I’m the only one *not* using or at least praising the Mac. Why haven’t I taken the plunge yet? Well, it’s not any “OS A sucks, B rulez!!1!” mentality; OSX sounds just great from most reports so far.

I already have two working systems, a full-time Linux server for ‘work’ and a dual boot XP/Linux system for gaming and other CPU-intense tasks, and between them I have pretty much all of my needs covered. Whenever I upgrade it’s almost always to get better gaming performance, not for experimental systems. I don’t really have the room for a new system and I’m not about to *replace* a whole system with a relatively unknown (to me) one. I just don’t have any big incentive to switch or add in a Mac yet.

Except maybe in one spot… The one thing I’m still missing is a laptop. It’s always been a fairly low priority item for me since I don’t travel much, but there’s the odd time it might be useful. Since the tasks it would need to be able to handle would be pretty basic (store files, access USB devices, basic net connectivity), a Mac would cover those basic tasks pretty well while still letting me have one to tinker with.

Will I? Eh, depends on how lazy I’m feeling when/if I ever get around to it. :-P It probably wouldn’t even be a top-end model; something like the 14″ iBook would likely suffice. I’m certainly not about to shell out $4300 for this one…

Neverinstall Nights

For all of the computing progress we’ve made so far, it’s amazing that some things are still so fragile.

All I wanted to do today was install the new NWN expansion, and while it was merrily copying the files to the hard drive it ran into some sort of error and threw up a cryptic dialog box. Normally I’d just restart the install, but oh no, it wasn’t going to be that simple… The expansion pack now no longer recognized that NWN was even installed at all and wouldn’t allow itself to continue.

So, I was going to have to reinstall all of NWN. No problem, I dug out all of the CDs and manuals (damn the bastard who thought printing all the CD keys in the manuals was a good idea) and started a fresh install. After copying all three CDs, it asked for the first disc again, and after putting it in my CD-ROM drive started freaking out. It’s a rather….quirky drive, so I’d gotten used to these little hissy-fits where it would make strange noises, fail to recognize discs, etc., but this time it just sat there continually spinning and making its little choking noises and nothing I could do would stop it; it ignored the eject button, and attempting to bring up the system manager would just hang forever. So, I eventually had to give up and just hit the big ‘ol reset button.

Of course, since the install wasn’t quite finished yet and I’d forcibly aborted it, I had to redo it all over again…

You’d think we’d be able to build tools and programs that are better at monitoring their own state, repairing themselves, and recovering from errors cleanly. We always like to take the easy way out though, and when a simple “eh, just try reinstalling it” works, doing it properly becomes a much lower priority. Especially when it’s just a silly game…

“You Wanna Fuck With Me?”

Does anyone want to buy the full-screen version of the Scarface DVD?

I wanted the widescreen version, of course, but it wasn’t until I’d put it in the player, hit Play Movie, and saw the ‘edited-for-your-screen’ notice that I realized I had the wrong one. I was quite surprised as this is the first time I’d ever picked up the wrong version of a movie. I looked at the case and saw the “Full Screen” lettering right at the bottom of the front, so I accepted that I’d just plain screwed up; I must have been in too much of a hurry, or assumed it would be widescreen since it was an ‘anniversary edition’, or just plain forgotten to check.

So today, when I went to pick up the right version, I checked to make sure it was the widescreen one. I found the rack with them, checked the front of the box, and…it said nothing. It turns out that although it mentions whether it’s full or widescreen on the front of the plastic case, it *doesn’t* say so on the front of the cardboard box wrapped around the case. It does say so on the spine of the box, but in easily-missed tiny print near the edge.

I’m still a dumbass for not checking in the first place, but come on Hollywood, don’t make this even more difficult. If you’ve got a rack full of the same movie in two different versions but the front doesn’t tell you which one it is, that’s just asking for trouble — I’m probably going to glance over them all, not see any difference, and think that there’s only one version there.

Speaking of Spam…

Silly spammers, I crush you like bug!

It did catch me off guard though; I’d never even thought of the possibility spammers would start making comments in blogs, guestbooks, and such automatically. I shouldn’t have been surprised though, as I’ve had to deal with spammers advertising in game forums before.

Fortunately there are already filters and plugins available to help stop them, for MT at least.

The Mob Could Learn A Few Things

You thought the RIAA was bad? It appears that ASCAP is also joining the Evil club.

The whole process of detemining who has the right to collect money for anything music-related is fairly complex, but the way they’re going about it here is outright extortion. “No, we haven’t proven you’ve violated any licenses, but pay us anyway or we’ll sue you into oblivion.” Even if they could win, the legal fees alone would bankrupt most clubs and bars.

It’s reminiscent of how Microsoft would force computer vendors to pay for DOS licenses for every machine sold, even if it didn’t ship with DOS on it…

Now I Just Need A Virus Ninja

The War on Spam is getting to the point where you need better automated tools; having to manually adjust procmail filters for every new trick was quickly becoming annoying.

So, I finally decided to give SpamAssassin a whirl. It’s always been highly recommended but I’d been a bit hesitant to use it since it looked like it might be overkill. It’s the kind of thing you install to handle spam across entire corporate networks (we use it at work here too), so I was expecting something sendmail-like in its difficulty to configure and admin. It turned out to be pretty painless, though — do the ‘make install’, set up the .forward and .procmailrc files (the samples included work just fine), and ta-da, you’re done and your e-mail is now being spam-filtered.

The important question is, of course: does it work? The answer is yes…and no. So far it has caught a good number of spam messages and not accidentally flagged any valid e-mail as false positives. There are however still a few types of messages making it through the filter:

1) Viruses. Unfortunately Swen and its ilk are still circulating around the net far too much, and with little text in the message to parse and none of the spammer’s tricks being used, it’s hard for SpamAssassin to catch these. Technically it’s not really SA’s job to catch viruses; I’ll have to find another package and use it to do additional virus filtering instead.

2) Short, generic spam. These are those messages with vague subjects like “hi”, “lose it”, “can u spend few mins?” etc. and worded like a friendly greeting. Since most of the usual spammer’s tricks are missing, SA can’t judge these very well.

However, there is hope for the latter case: SA uses ‘Bayesian filtering’ to attempt to learn what spam looks like. If I keep feeding messages like those to the database, it should eventually start to be able to tell the difference between them and valid e-mail and start filtering them automatically. In theory, anyway. Only time will tell how well it will work, as it has to build up a history first.

In the meantime I still have to handle those viruses and some spam messages manually. It’s still better than no filtering at all though, and using the SA tools to teach it about the spam it misses isn’t too much of a hassle.

Not For The Shy

An artist has created a usable public toilet in a glass cube to challenge the curiosity – and bravery – of people passing London’s Tate Britain gallery.

Monica Bonvicini said visitors would have to “defy their own embarrassment” to use the minimalist cubicle, made from one-way mirrored glass.

It is impossible to see into the toilet, which will be free to use, but the person inside can see passers-by. — BBC

You Don’t Get What You Don’t Pay For

I finally got around to buying a proper set of headphones for my portable music. Unfortunately, I was focusing primarily on making sure that they were light and unobtrusive — I have a fantastic quality set of headphones at home already, but they’re big and bulky and shut out nearly all other sound, which doesn’t make them very practical for day-to-day casual use. That led me to a set of Sony headphones that only cost around $16, but they seemed to be just what I was looking for.

Of course, they turned out to be utter crap. Too much of the sound leaks away, especially high frequencies, the headband is some cheap plastic that I swear is going to break within a month, and the jack is ultra-quirky. The slightest shift causes crackling, volume fading, and the right channel vanishing entirely.

I’m probably going to have to go down to somewhere like A&B Sound to find a *true* decent set of headphones that won’t break easily, sound good, and work reliably, and it’ll probably cost an arm and a leg. Of course, there are limits…

Overrated

There’s something funny going on at Google…

Looking through the site logs, I see a number of hits from people coming from search engine results. That’s not all that unusual; that’s what they do, after all. The strange thing is, I seem to be abnormally highly ranked for some of those searches.

For example, for a particular pop-culture phrase my site is ranked #5 by Google at the moment. That’s even higher than its original appearances on SA and the Flash animation it inspired! There are also plenty of other sites that have discussed it considerably more in-depth, yet for some reason my one-time throwaway reference to it appears before the vast majority of them when it shouldn’t even be in the top 100.

Likewise I get a lot of hits for Diablo 2-related searches. I have discussed that topic in somewhat more depth, but there’s a different problem here — the searches are usually seeking raw information, whereas the discussion here usually assumes a working knowledge of that information already. I’ve had to go back through those articles and add links back to sites that provide the background and raw info just so those people who were searching for it won’t have completely wasted their time visiting here. You’d think that they’d have found that info first in their search, but no, somehow they wound up here first.

It’s possible that due to the way search engines like Google rank their pages, blogs are becoming overrepresented and overranked relative to their actual value. What would previously have been hidden on some subpage that few people would have linked to before is now present on the front page for some period of time, and the front page is highly linked among all of the blogger’s friends, which drives the ranking of the page up. Even when it moves to the archives, it still inherits some of the rank indirectly from the front page.

Discussions of topics on blogs aren’t necessarily all that useful, either. Like I mentioned before they typically assume a certain degree of knowledge about the topic already and are just relating it to that person’s own life or experiences, which may or, more likely, may not help someone who was just looking for somewhat more generic information. If you’re looking for technical specs on some product, do you really care that I bought the neon green version of it? The traditional blog format of putting multiple entries on the front page and often the archives also tends to group information together inappropriately. You may have hit a blog page from searching for terms ‘foo’ and ‘bar’, but they might have been from completely separate, unrelated entries.

Potentially the more useful information on the net is now being buried in a sea of overranked blogs. I don’t know if this is really a trend overall though; this is just what I’ve noticed for a few topics on my own site. Anyone else noticed the same thing?

Why Windows CE Sucks, Part 137

I was getting a bit tired of the same old playlist on my PocketPC, so I took over 400 of my favourite MP3s, transcoded them to ~96kbps Ogg Vorbis format, and wrote a script to randomly pick out around 256 megs worth of them each time it was run, to build new playlists that would fit in the memory card. The hardest part of all that was not the transcoding, or writing the script; it was just getting the damn files transferred to the PocketPC.

About the only way to transfer files to it is to open it up under Explorer, and drag and drop files into the folder you want, and the ActiveSync program takes care of copying them over. However, attempting to do so would invariably halt and cause the USB connection to break after three or four files were copied. I’d have to resync, delete the partially copied file, and restart the copy where it left off. That would be merely annoying except that after a while it wouldn’t just break the connection, but it would also corrupt the memory card.

Now I had to reformat the memory card, but guess what, Windows CE doesn’t include any way to format cards. I had to go looking for utilities on the net, and most of the ones I ran across were commercial bundles of utilities, and I wasn’t about to shell out money just to format this stupid card. I finally found a free set of tools to do the formatting, and could use the card again.

I also finally found out that other people were having the same problem, and that there was a patch available for ActiveSync that fixes problems with large file transfers, and applied it. Now the files are transferring properly and there haven’t been any breaks or corruption yet, but it’s going very slowly at around 100K/s. Even with an old USB 1.0 connection it should be ten times faster…

Though in the end it’s now working, it’s frustrating that it had to be so much trouble in the first place. Devices like PDAs are supposed to just work right out of the box, but they couldn’t even get something as basic as transferring files working properly…

What The Hell Is J0684IDX.AUT For?

It’s amazing how much crap accumulates on our computers. While working on something, I hit an unexpected ‘out of disk space’ error, so I started poking around trying to find stuff to get rid of so I could free up some space. It didn’t take long, and I figured I may as well spend a bit of time tidying up my whole system.

After I was finished I had deleted over 19 gigs of files. This system only has a 40 gig drive to begin with. Multi-megabyte trace files from bugs long since fixed, database snapshots from customers from years ago, source code from previous versions that’s no longer needed, online manuals I’d saved to disk and only used briefly, ten-line test programs written to quickly check something, software installed and used once and then forgotten, temp files from programs that failed to clean up properly, and all sorts of other junk was hiding about in the nooks and crannies of the filesystem.

It’s especially fun when you find files with no immediately obvious use, in a vaguely-named folder, with no documentation. Anything I couldn’t figure out within 30 seconds got thrown in the recycle bin.

Of course it’ll probably only take me a couple more months to fill the drive back up with junk again…

My Love For You Is Like A Troll

There is, of course, another EQ expansion on the way. I can almost remember back after the first one had been released around three and a half years ago, and Verant’s attitude was “Eh, we *might* make another one…” Of course if I had a cash cow like that I’d milk the hell out of it too.

There hasn’t been an official announcement, so for now there’s just rumour, speculation, and a few tidbits discovered in the test code. There will be new zones and spells, as always, some new alternate advancement skills, and the addition of a new class: the Berserker.

Managing classes is a tricky business. The things players do in these games really boils down to one of three areas: Healing, Hurting, and Helping. Thus all you really need are three classes, one to handle each area. That’s a little boring though, so to add some variety you can subdivide and overlap the areas a bit. Hurting can be done through toe-to-toe melee, spells, or minions, which can be separated out into the Warrior, Wizard, and Mage. Take a Warrior and reduce his ‘hurting’ ability a bit, but add a bit of ‘healing,’ and you’ve got a Paladin. Or mix the melee and spell ‘hurting’ abilities and you’ve got a Shadow Knight. The problems are, you have to make each class sufficiently different that they’re not copying each other too much, each class has to be useful for something so that people want to play them, and they have to be relatively equal in power (‘balanced’) so that people aren’t too jealous of each others’ power. There wouldn’t be much point to playing a Warrior if a Paladin could do everything the warrior could do and more.

It’s not clear yet what kind of class the Berserker will be, but just from the sounds of it it’ll probably be a melee damager primarily, maybe with some special skills of some kind. They have to do something to make it different enough from the other classes to make it interesting, though.