Month: April 2004

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:)
Continue reading “The Miniature Gigantic Space Hamster Retires”

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.)

Yes, More InstallShield

Tip for the day:

Trying to enable detailed logging to track down problems manually either through extra script commands or trying to pass through command-line parameters through all the layers was annoying, but there’s apparently a way to enable the logging permanently:

Go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer registry key, and add a string value named “Logging” with the value “voicewarmup”. Log files will then always be generated, in the %TEMP% directory.

Possession

Well, it’s that time of the month again. Yup, that’s right, it’s time to pay the rent on my cottage in the countryside.

They’ve got quite the scam going here. I haven’t actually played Asheron’s Call in about half a year now, but every month I still fork over my $10 USD to keep the subscription alive, and log in at least once in order to refresh the cottage’s lease.

Why? Well, in one word: Stuff.
Continue reading “Possession”

old_dog->learn((ptr = new Trick));

Too many are the days where I head to the office, grind away, wander home, collapse in bed, and wake up the next morning feeling no better off than the previous day. Sure, some work got done, the bank balance is a bit bigger, but did I reallly improve any? Did I learn anything at all? Maybe I did, but it didn’t ‘stick,’ or was too trivial, and got lost along the way.

So, as a test, the new plan is to post here each day at least one new thing that I learned that day. Anything, work or personal, theory or practical, technique or tip, as long as it’s something I didn’t know before. It may be too technical, personal, or irrelevant to hold your interest, but who cares — this is for my benefit, not yours. :-P

Today’s (very boring) lesson is:
Continue reading “old_dog->learn((ptr = new Trick));”

Music, Eh?

The arguments over digital music rights and file sharing still rage on, and everyone seems to be talking past each other due to different assumptions about just what rights we actually *do* have when it comes to music copying, rather than what they should be. That of course raises the question, just what *are* those current rights?

Well, in Canada anyway, the relevant legislation is part of the Copyright Act:

Copying for Private Use

80. (1) Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of

        (a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,

        (b) a performer’s performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or

        (c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer’s performance of a musical work, is embodied onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer’s performance or the sound recording.

(2) Subsection (1) does not apply if the act described in that subsection is done for the purpose of doing any of the following in relation to any of the things referred to in paragraphs (1)(a) to (c):

        (a) selling or renting out, or by way of trade exposing or offering for sale or rental;

        (b) distributing, whether or not for the purpose of trade;

        (c) communicating to the public by telecommunication; or

        (d) performing, or causing to be performed, in public.

(found via Slashdot)

So what does this mean? Basically, if you can listen to a piece of music, you also have the right to make a copy for your own private use. For example, if you’re listening to it off the radio, recording your own copy of it is perfectly fine, as long as you keep it private. It’s this portion of it that has suddenly become relevant and caused people to start proclaiming “File sharing is legal in Canada!!!” Well, they’re *half*-right…

The downloading portion is apparently perfectly legal, as it is covered by the above legislation. What’s not so clear is whether it’s legal to have shared it in the first place. The case cited in the story above found that placing files in a shared folder did not constitute ‘distribution,’ but that sounds like a loophole and a particularly weak point of the case. This, if anything, is what will likely be challenged and potentially revised.

Assuming it does get changed, this creates the rather odd situation where downloading shared music will be perfectly legal, it’ll just be a violation to share it, versus the situation in the States where both ends of the transaction are considered a violation. Odd solutions are, however, in keeping with Canadian tradition… :-)

The other effect the above legislation has is that it clarifies just what you can do with songs that you own. Some people would argue that no, you don’t have the right to even make MP3s or to copy songs to iPods or other computers and such; copyright’s ‘fair use’ only allows single backup copies and in the States the DMCA prevents even that if it would mean circumventing copyright protection. Fortunately, since if we own the music we can always ‘broadcast’ it to ourselves, and the law lets us make additional copies with no specific restrictions on purpose or format or copy protection, again as long as it’s for our own personal use.

Sounds fair to me. Certainly better than what they’re having to put up with in the U.S. right now…

Google Ogles E-Mail

It turned out to be a pleasant surprise that Google’s e-mail service wasn’t an April Fool’s Day joke after all, but it’s already raising its share of controversy.

The main controversy seems to be over the plan to show ads based on the content of the e-mail you’re currently reading. The normal gut reaction to this is that it’s an intrusion into our privacy, since after all the e-mails are meant to be read only by the recipient, not Google.

Really though, this is a red herring. As long as the e-mail is being stored by Google, there’s no guarantee of any kind of privacy to begin with. Google claims that the scan results are kept private and people are saying that that’s not enough and they don’t trust Google to stick to that, but by the same argument there’s no reason to trust them even if they weren’t scanning them for ad targetting. For all we know, the Google admins could print out randomly picked e-mails and laugh at them over coffee.

It also depends on how well it works in practice. It would be kind of tacky if an e-mail about Uncle Bob dying of cancer gets accompanied by ads for funeral services…

The other major issue is that any old e-mail will be retained by Google indefinitely. This is more a matter of control than privacy, and it’s much more debatable. If I want to delete an e-mail, does Google have the right to retain it in its archives, even though it may not show up in my inbox anymore? The e-mail is arguably my intellectual property, but it’s also Google’s equipment. Presumably the agreement we’ll have to accept to use Gmail will give them this right, but is it a right they can even legitimately demand?

I dunno, I’m not an IP lawyer… :-P

In any event, it’s good that all of this is getting aired out now, so that people are aware of what they’re getting into. Lawsuits to block it and/or force it to change seem a little extreme, though. There’s always the simple answer, too: if you don’t like it, don’t use it…

To Register Or Not To Register

Spam is no longer constrained to e-mail; it’s now an ongoing problem within the blog communities, through anonymously posted comments that direct you to the usual array of porn, penis pills, and Prozac. MovableType in particular has been a favourite target due to the simple comment system and it is now essential to run the MT-Blacklist plugin to automatically catch most of it. It’s not a perfect solution though as some spam still leaks through, and you have to be vigilant and keep the blacklist up-to-date.

The MT authors have a new authentication system planned for the next major release though, called TypeKey, which is supposed to solve the spam problem completely. That introduces a few new wrinkles, though…

– It introduces a dependency between my site and another site that didn’t exist before. If their site is down, then you won’t be able to fully use my site. Six Apart seem to know what they’re doing (they already run the fairly large TypePad) and it’ll *probably* be fairly reliable, but it’s still another point of failure.
– Movable Type may be relatively popular, but there will still be a large number of people who won’t already have a TypeKey registration, so having to go and obtain one will be extra work to them.
– And the usual array of privacy concerns, information tracking, etc. for the ultra-paranoid out there. :-)

The net result of all of these is to reduce the odds that someone will comment due to the ‘annoyance’ factor. A first-time visitor that might have left a quick greeting might not bother if it looks like it’s going to be a hassle.

Fortunately, it looks like there will be a middle ground: the comment policy can also be set as ‘moderated,’ where they have to be approved before they will appear, and this can be combined with the TypeKey service so that fully authenticated comments will appear right away and people who don’t want to use it can still leave comments that just won’t show up immediately. What remains to be seen is just what the annoyance factor on having to actually use and choose between these modes will be… And spam will still be able to be submitted in moderated comments, but at least it won’t actually reach the front page.

One wonders why I would even care for a site this small, but hey, I’m a control freak with nothing better to write about at the moment… :-)

Arcades (Not The Roman Column Kind)

One of the duties delegated to my iBook is to be my main emulation machine. Console systems, the Atari 8-bit, the C64, and others were all part of my early computing and gaming days, and when nostalgia kicks in I like to revisit them once in a while.

Looking through the recent changes to MAME though, I suddenly realized something: I didn’t know these games. Of course you don’t fondly remember everything and at some point it’s no longer nostalgia but merely recent history, but I’d never even heard of most of these games let alone played them.

At some point I fell behind somehow. As a younger kid I was your typical vidiot that you’d find in the arcade in the spare moments of the evenings and weekends, but right now if you stuck me in an arcade I’d stick out like a sore thumb. Somewhere along the way I went from one state to the other, but I couldn’t really tell you exactly when.

So what happened?

1) Time. One of the things you lose as you grow up is all that copious free time that enables you to stand around the arcade for hours at a time in the first place. Maybe just chores at first, but eventually you pile on studies, a girlfriend, a job, other friends, and before long you’re a salaryman fighting to squeeze in any relaxation time.

2) Money. Games started getting expensive near the end of the ’80s and start of the ’90s. Sure, most classic games were still a quarter, but any new games were usually 50 cents, or even a buck for the really snazzy ones. You didn’t really get much value for that money either; whereas a classic game you were semi-decent at could last a while, the new games were over far too quickly if you sucked, and the cost didn’t allow you many attempts to hone your skills.

3) Access. Arcades seem to have peaked in the late ’80s sometime and only shrunk ever since. At the Kingsway mall in Edmonton there were two arcades that I regularly went to back in the ’80s, roughly divided into newer and older games, but it’s been diminished greatly since then. The last time I was there I can’t even remember seeing *any* games (though I wasn’t really looking, either). It’s the same in other malls too — if there are any games at all, it’s limited to a tiny little section with only a handful of the most recent titles.

4) Skill. I have to admit that I’m really not as good at the action-oriented arcade-type games as I used to be. There’s not much point to playing them then if you can’t devote the time to improving yourself, and there’s no fun if the games are ruthlessly harsh on newbies.

5) Age. Well, I’m not getting any younger. The arcade environment just makes it even more painfully obvious how much of a kid’s business it is and makes me feel like even more of a fossil. :-)

6) Home. And finally, what’s the point in going to the arcade when you can enjoy all your old favourites and embarass yourself privately on new titles in the privacy of your own home! Home video game consoles may be what finally killed the arcade for good, and looking back I can’t say I really miss it.

Burn Baby Burn II

It’s probably about time I actually got around to getting a DVD burner. I’ve been avoiding them for a while due to compatibility concerns and new developments and such, but it seems to have finally gotten to a point I’m comfortable with now that current burners support both + and -, R and RW. Sure, there’s talk of the dual-layer burners soon and blu-ray down the road, but there’ll probably be an initial ‘glitchy’ period while kinks are worked out that would delay things further yet. I don’t really *need* dual layer anyway; this is mostly for data backup and archival and recorded video, not copying, so I don’t care about fitting whole movies and special features and such on them. I’m glad I waited until the +/- problems were (mostly) sorted out, but I can’t wait forever…

Now I just have to decide on which burner. Sony’s are highly recommended, but expensive, and I’d also prefer one in an external enclosure with both FireWire and USB interfaces, so I can swap it around among all the systems. LaCie makes a whole bunch that fit that bill, but I haven’t heard any reviews yet. And I can always take an internal one from, say, HP and stick it in a separate enclosure.

Time for more research…