Yaar
February 18th, 2009
Yo ho ho and a bottle of Mountain Dew!
Wow, according to The Escapist, after only a day and a half into the trial, half of the prosecution's case is dead -- and it's the worst of the charges, at that. Of course the other side doesn't see it that way, but the anti-piracy people always love putting out press-releases worthy of Iraq's former Information Minister, insane beret guy (er, Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf)
I don't condone or condemn or condiment what the pirate bay does, but I always felt that the anti-piracy industry hasn't exactly gone out of their way to clean up their image from the stereotypical heartless corporate bastards who sue small children and people's grandmothers, both living and dead. To further complicate the issue, the movie industry teaches us time and time again to root for the underdog. I'm so confused!
It's worth noting that because of the trial, the Escapist has been having lots of articles regarding all sides of the piracy issue, listed on their main page, so check those out too.
ps - Since when are screen-shots of alleged file-sharing good evidence? They should be trusted as much as hearsay. Actual connection logs should be required, legally and directly obtained from the relevant ISP.
pps - For the record, I have never pirated anything. Honest. Yep. Really! Really. In the interest of my journalistic integrity and full disclosure, however, I must admit that I was once pulled over for speeding. After a rent-a-lawyer dance and show, it turned out that I just had an "improper muffler". One that must have been making my car go too fast, of course.
jim - 2:56 PM
Order Confirmed
October 18th, 2008
gimme gimme gimme
Just put down $500 for a Dell mini that won't ship until November 17 :( Also spent another hundred on a bluetooth mouse, an external optical drive, and a tiny GPS receiver that I can integrate into the mini. These should arrive much sooner, only to taunt me with my lack of awesomely moddable mini-computer. What fun is buying reasonably priced but still expensive toys if it takes a month to get them? Seeing one's credit card statement before the shiny new electronics is kinda a downer.
jim - 6:09 PM
On McCain and Marie
October 16th, 2008
I can be a pundit?
One of McCain's strange debate habits seems to be starting off by mentioning some old, well-known political figure who is in the hospital or has recently passed away. This morbid form of name-dropping reminds me of one of the few people I know who is older than him - my Great Aunt Marie. She is a wonderful old-lady who enjoys my John-McCain-is-so-old jokes despite her seniority, and I should write about her more often.
She has but one flaw, if you overlook her latent racism (lol old people, m i rite?). Every time I see her, I get an update on The List. The List is her running mental tally on all her friends who have died or are almost dead. I suppose that when you get to be that age, keeping track of those whom you've out-lived becomes a common hobby. Like McCain, my Great Aunt enjoys greeting you with pleasantries along the lines of "Did I tell you about who cracked their skull open in the shower the other day?" Unlike McCain, however, my Great Aunt will be voting for Barack Obama. Even though, as she says, he's "one of those coloured folks."
jim - 1:22 AM
This Space Has Been Left Blank On Purpose
October 16th, 2008
Because I'm Lazy
jim - 12:57 AM
Super Router
January 24th, 2008
a post two years in the making
Back in the summer of '05, I had a problem with a router that was constantly overheating and puking its guts out. Instead of getting a new router (like a sane person), I decided to hack together a fix, and make it better (like an engineer). I just rediscovered the photos I took during the process, and thus I give you Super Router:
A Temporary Solution (Note: The small aluminum heat sink was the router's first modification)
Just Five Volts: Soldering some wires directly to your router probably voids the warranty. Warranties are for suckers, and those without soldering irons!
Under the Lid: In a pinch, scotch tape is almost as good as electrical tape, and random bits of copper wire are almost as good as an even bigger heatsink.
Bigger,
Overkill? Perhaps. But it worked, and didn't immediately catch on fire. And if it ever does catch fire, we'll just switch to water cooling.
jim - 3:24 PM
I Like Orange Things, You Should Too
October 19th, 2007
like boxes, sodas, and hard hats
Since I purchased the Orange Box last week, I've come to value said box more and more. At first, my only interest in the collection was Portal, which goes for $20 by itself. It's one of the few games that I've ever "eagerly anticipated." I saw the the trailer on YouTube a year ago, and knew it was going to be good. You should watch if you haven't -- it explains the game concept much better than words could. The trailer also gives you a taste of the odd humor found in the game, which includes cute robotic turrets that apologetically try to kill you, and deadpan quotes from the robot voice in the sky such as "If you fall into the water, you will receive an unsatisfactory mark on your report. Also, you will die." For a 4-6 hour game, Portal has a very impressive range of puzzles and more plot than your average FPS. Portal also has unlockable achievements, which add a lot more game play for those of us who are slightly obsessive compulsive.
The Orange Box is also packaged with HL2 Episodes 1 & 2, the latter being a new release. I had neither, so playing both episodes was like playing two thirds of a full Half-Life 2 sequel. Episode 2 also came with achievements, my favorite of which is "Hot-Potat0wned," which requires that you kill an enemy soldier with their own grenade. Simple, but very fun.
Finally, the package comes with Team Fortress 2, a game sequel that has been in the works almost as long as Duke Nukem Forever. I enjoyed Team Fortress 1 for Half Life 1 back in the day, and Valve has made Team Fortress 2 as good as Team Fortress gets. The 9 possible player classes are all very well balanced, and while there are only 6 maps, playing each map as a different class creates a very different experience. Each class is suited towards a different game play style, so I've run across all sorts of different gamers over the past week. Best of all, while TF1 went for the now clichéd as-realistic-as-possible image style (but limited to the graphics technology of 1998), TF2 looks and feels as if Pixar got together with Valve to make a "The Incredibles" style capture the flag game. You should watch the introduction videos for the engineer, demo-man, soldier, and heavy weapons classes.
Finally, like Portal and Episode 2, TF2 comes with achievements, statistic tracking, and a great sense of humor. When you die in TF2, the computer always takes a moment to point out the bright side of what achievement or record you broke or came close to breaking that round. Or, if you failed miserably and got blasted to pieces, it will helpfully point out with bloody bit is your spleen or kidney. The voice acting in the game is another pleasant surprise, with each character having his own encyclopedia of phrases for different situations. These can be triggered manually via the three traditional voice menus, but are sometimes automatically triggered in particularly appropriate situations, which actually makes the game more immersive. All in all, the Orange Box more than earned its $50 price tag.
jim - 2:44 PM
Everything is Fixed
October 4th, 2007
and will stay that way or be smashed to pieces
In my last post, I mentioned a buggy scanner. After re-installing Windows on my Mom's laptop, her scanner started acting weird. At first, I blamed her, because it's always the user's fault. But after looking into it, Microsoft was to blame. Like I said, it's always Microsoft's fault.
The problem was that when trying to scan an image or document through the HP Director software, Internet Explorer would suddenly throw up a bunch of script errors. Turns out that HP was lazy, and made a large part of their scanner GUI out of a hodge-podge of HTML, Javascript, and Visual Basic Dll calls. If they had just used compiled binaries, I wouldn't have been able to fix their code. Then again, there wouldn't have been any bug for me to fix.
According to the error messages, Windows' built in version of Explorer kept freaking out over script errors in some scan.htm file on lines 292, 375, and 1120. And by scan.htm, it really meant scan.js, but Internet Explorer is stupid like that.
HP knows of the problem, but their solution is to turn off image preview because they don't know wtf is going on. Scanning without any sort of preview is really a pain, so I looked into their scan.js file to see what all the fuss was. Turns out that those three lines have some sort of problem calling some Visual Basic functions that work just fine everywhere else in the file.
These complex and mystical Visual Basic functions took me all of three lines of Javascript to re-implement. Not only that, but the functions were just for bells and whistles, not anything related to the actually scanning. They went and reinvented the wheel in Visual Basic, and did it wrong. I never like VB anyway.
So, if by some chance you got here through google and are having the same problem with your HP Scanjet, right-click and save-as here and copy that file to "C:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\Digital Imaging\bbfe\scan.js" to overwrite the broken version. I'll be shooting HP an email soon about my fix to their problem, but in the meantime, it's game night.
jim - 4:54 PM
Everything is Broken
October 4th, 2007
and not because I'm smashing it to pieces
In the past month, three wireless networks, two laptops, a scanner, and an optical drive have all decided to break on me. Well, break on someone who knows me well enough to sweet talk me into fixing it for them. Damn my superior intellect! The wireless networks were especially frustrating, because one of them went through three different routers before staying up (knock on wood). Thank heaven the Best Buy at Hanley and 170 has a very friendly and forgiving customer service desk.
One of the laptops needed its wireless card replaced, while the other (my Mom's) got a nasty virus thanks to an Adobe PDF reader exploit. This is why people should use Foxit instead of Adobe. Plus, Foxit is only 3 meg, whereas Adobe is 70+ megs, and always insisting you install their photo album crap and their background services that slow down windows' boot. Anyway, it took about two hours to clean up the virus's mess. Five minutes later, the laptop's hard drive decided to die. Of course it was also one month after its warranty expired. (I later determined that the virus and the hard drive's death were not related, just horrible luck) My DVD burner also gave up the ghost, after a few weeks of lagging my computer's boot sequence. It too had just passed the warranty period, which was just great.
It's been rather frustrating with the sheer amount of computer problems all happening at once. The only happy ending here is that I fixed the scanner's buggy software myself, and that so much hardware has died recently that there can't be anything left to break (I hope). Now that everything is fixed, life is good again.
jim - 4:23 PM
PHP Versions Make A Difference
June 14th, 2007
of about 38 years
Well, fixed the timestamp bug. To my credit, the code worked just fine on my desktop, which uses a newer version of PHP than this web server. Could be a config file difference, but either way I won't be posting from before I was born anymore. I'm keeping the broken timestamp on the last post, though - it'll make the archives page a bit more interesting.
Another bug taught me that forgetting to close one form leads to some weird side effects when you try to submit data from the following form. Silly HTML. Also of note is that this second post has made the page tall enough to require the scroll bar. Hopefully my CSS stands up to it on other people's browsers. Although you really should be using Firefox. All the cool nerds do.
Speaking of nerds, I guess I should email michael about n&v. Everyone else: don't feel bad that I didn't personally tell you about my glorious return to the world of blogging. You obviously found out about it, with minimum work on my part. I am a marketing genius.
And happy flag day too. Fact: Before Betsy Ross invented the flag in '77, there were no read-only files, only please-don't-erase files.
jim - 4:23 PM
First Post, Version 2.0
December 31st, 1969
The weblog formerly known as Rubidium...
Well, I'm back into blogging thanks to the pressure of several people who will remain unnamed, because naming them and hyper linking to their blogs would be too much work. They've convinced me that it's cool to blog again, or at least past the annoying zomg-it's-so-cool-everyone's-doing-it stage. Which is why I stopped in the first place. No, not because I'm a anti-social poser, but because of all the damn comment spam.
I'm beyond that now all, though (the comment spam, not being anti-social). It only took a fortnight to hack together my own blogging software, create a CSS based layout, and twiddle my thumbs for two days so I could use the word fortnight. Of course, the majority of the work was the last 10%, which would be the little key icon in the upper-right corner. It's a pure CSS login shortcut that only works in Firefox, but that's ok because it only benefits me. It only took three hours to get just right, but after seeing it on N's blog, I knew I had to steal the idea and make it better.
Anyway, now that I have my old soapbox back, I find I have nothing more to say, other than I'm back. Probably more related to the late hour, however. I was going to finish up the comment code, but I'll leave that for later. After all, I wouldn't want to bring this website out of the Beta stage. Also, it seems that being in beta means that all my posts are dated six o'clock on December 31st, 1969. Because I'm an old school blogger.