regarding pc hardware, I feel old

So my desktop's busted. Random restarts, if I leave it powered down all day it'll run for a couple of minutes first, before it starts spam restarting.

Usually when something like this happens it's the power supply, I tend to run those into the ground pretty regularly. That did not seem to be the case this time, unfortunately. Didn't seem to be a cooling issue either. Next on the list is motherboard and cpu....

It turns out that while I wasn't looking a lot of things have changed in PC hardware. Intel has a terrible, confusing brand tangle* of processors to choose from. I bought a Core i7 920 processor and a motherboard that supports Core i7 chips. But the chip didn't fit. Core i7 is split into two socket types, LGA1156 and LGA1366. WHO KNEW. (I didn't. These concerns are completely absent from the "[how to select your awesome new intel processor]" marketing posters.) Anyway I went back and got the right motherboard.

Oh the motherboard doesn't fit into the case. I'm not sure if this is because my old Dell is just Dell, or if the case standard actually changed (AGP to ATX?) and frankly I don't really care. I bought a new case.

So I was finally all set to put it all together. Oh the ram doesn't fit either. DDR3 is not DDR2.

On we go. I mean it's not a disaster, the good thing about being an old man is that I have lots of money to throw at these things. Still, burnsauce.

...

I actually still kindof like working with PC hardware... the form factors, the interface design decisions, it all speaks to a very specific design aesthetic, a funny split between engineering and show business, between high-tech and consumer concerns.

I love that you can build a PC mostly by trying to plug things into eachother until everything is plugged in, and then turning it on. That's pretty much what I do. It's sortof similar to the old PC Adventure game ethos of "[pull every lever and pick up everything that isn't nailed down,]" and I find it amusing that those problem solving skills actually turn out to be useful in some situations. Which is to say, in environments where every possible/sensible physical interaction has been planned out ahead of time, and made to work or not work as appropriate. So that if you can plug it in, it probably works. There's a certain nostalgic beauty to the process.

*brandble?

augmented reality game ideas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality

So the overwhelming problem for an augmented reality game is content creation, amirite? I mean, the real world is big. Way, way bigger than any virtual world I'm aware of. To reach a national or international audience, an augmented reality game can't rely on traditional video-game content creation pipelines. You need to either crowdsource content creation, restrict yourself to a small locality, or auto-generate content somehow. Or some combination.

So here's how I think you solve it, I'll put it in the familiar frame of an MMO, because I don't have a strong theme idea yet...

Your baseline game takes some huge local dataset like Yelp or whatevs, crunches it, and turns each node into a spawn point for critters based on the node. So a Chinese restaurant creates Chinese Food creeps that wander around the vicinity. You may or may not want to make a sophisticated thematic mapping algorithm so that all your creeps aren't ethnic food? I guess it depends on the game...

So anyway one dataset/layer gives you mobs for any populated area. Make your second layer something more explicit like the geocaching dataset. May as well include all this free content in your game, right? Caches become boss monsters or quests.

Next, give your players input into the game. As they do stuff they go up levels. The average level of players in the vicinity affects the average difficulty of the area. So if a bunch of high level bozos live in a town, then the newbs need to be careful when visiting, for example. Which means that your dedicated players will create your high level content. And the developer's office naturally becomes the highest level content in the game.

From there you might as well keep layering in every dataset you can think of, crime statistics, UPA pickup games, movie times, house prices, really anything.

What's the central activity of this game? Killing creeps? Collecting shiny stuff? Damned if I know. What kinds of things do people even do outside? What kind of augmented reality game would you like to play?

tacos

Tacos Mexico, on Van Nuys south of Sherman Way. It's no Salsa and Beer, so I wouldn't really take anyone else there, but they have great truck-style tacos for 1.05 each. Three or four makes a meal.

Also I tried putting butterscotch in my coffee, but it didn't work out as well as the chocolate syrup did. Lesson learned I guess.

missing music

I caved in and bought The Beatles Rock Band on Saturday. We visited my parents and set it up and had a great time with all my siblings, singing and playing through the songs. There are 2 key features to the game. One is singing harmony, which was pretty fun. The other is that everyone already knows all the songs, which is fantastic.

Between that and the jam session with Mick at PAX, I've been really wanting to get back into making music. The problem is, somewhere along the way I seem to have convinced myself that I'm not dedicated enough to learn an instrument. So I'm not sure what to do about that. Maybe get myself hypnotized into thinking that I love to practice the guitar. I'm not sure if I'm susceptible to hypnosis or not. I've always suspected that I'm not, but that might just be hubris.

The solution that my imagination keeps drifting towards is for me to invent my own musical instrument/interface, that takes the drudgery and dexterity out of the equation. But that almost sounds harder (and definitely a lot more pompous) than just learning an existing instrument...

Humph.

So in conclusion, any way I slice it, my big ego seems to be getting in the way of my making music. Probably time to knock it down a few pegs, I guess. Sometimes I wish I had a work ethic instead of a dream ethic. What can you do eh? :-)

I was kinda looking forward to it

My Driver's License finally came in the mail, so unfortunately I won't need witnesses to swear that I am me. Thanks everyone who offered. :-)

bonus drama - notaries and identification

So, I lost my Driver's License some time ago. I went to the DMV to get a replacement. They took my picture and all that. I waited 60 days, but it never came. I called, they said the picture didn't make it into the database. I went back to the DMV. They took my picture again. Now I'm on the waiting phase again. Hopefully it arrives soon, but in the meantime, I get to learn about Notaries Public.

There's a couple of documents we need to get notarized in order to buy this house. There's a disclosure for the Loan, and then, most crucially, there's the purchase contract itself. The thing is, a notary's main job is to confirm that you are who you say you are. I currently do not possess sufficient documentation to satisfy the requirements. We were able to get away with just Anne signing this loan disclosure, but for the purchase that's definitely not gonna fly.

So I looked up the California Notary Public guidelines, to see what my options are. On page 8 it talks about identification, and the long and short of it is that I need to have 2 credible witnesses present, with their identification, who will swear that I am really me.

We're gonna do it old-school.

I actually found it really interesting reading about notaries, because they are literally responsible for the fabric of trust that our common/civil law relies on... And it's all based on the idea that either the notary knows you personally, or can establish trust through other community members. Having ID cards is basically a shortcut for that mechanism, and frankly ID cards work way better in large cities where nobody knows eachother. But I do like that we have this old trust mechanism to fall back on.

house negotitations

So, let me tell you about this house. When we first saw it, it was listed at 550. We loved it-- it was two separate houses one a lot, with 2 garages. The lot is huge, 8,700 square feet, the second unit has 2 bedrooms, a great kitchen and its own yard. Both houses are in great shape. Great, this is exactly what we want, and it's out of our range.

We talked to the agent, the agent said, "she'll let it go for 460." We said, ok wow we can actually do that. We put in an offer at 460, our offer had an appraisal contingency, so that if the property appraises for less they have to drop the price to the appraisal.

Endless paperwork later, we're finally approved for the loan, and the appraisal comes back at 405. We're very excited, she has to drop the price, right? We offer 405. Well actually she has a backup offer at 435, so she counters at 435.

Now here's the thing, the bank is only going to lend us money against the appraised value of 405k, so if we want to buy the house for more than that we need to make up the difference up-front with cash. We were a bit lean in the down-payment department to begin with*, so this represents significant pain for us. We review our finances and counter 420, and it's as high as we're willing to go. We think we've lost the house to the other buyers at this point.

Radio silence for a few days, then we get a call saying she'll take it for 425, she just wants 5k more and we can seal the deal. Now, it's not the 5k in purchase price that's a problem, it's the fact that it's up-front that makes it a deal breaker. We can't give her more than 422 and feel like we're not being totally reckless. We already feel pretty reckless frankly.

More radio silence, then we get a call saying that our agent and the seller's agent have both agreed to take a 1.5k pay cut in order to make up the difference between us and the seller. The deal is on. So that's where we are right now. The seller has the football, we expect them to sign and pass it back to us any minute now.

I'm not totally sure how I feel about all this yet. I think it's gonna be good, but I don't want to hear your second-guessing until after we've finished the whole thing and moved in and made our first mortgage payment. Then we can talk about how irresponsible we are. ;-)

*For all you's out there wagging your finger right now, please remember that we will be renting out the front unit to cover more than half of our mortgage payment; some things are not as irresponsible as they look.

updated!

foodonshirt.com is back up, my shirts are on sale for 16$ a piece, 3$ flat shipping. I let this go for way, way too long.

Ultimately I decided it was not worth it to rescue the old ruby on rails site, and I decided to use an off-the-shelf store (Magento). There are pros and cons to it... inventory management is really smooth, and I had to do relatively little work to get it working, but it means tweaking everything, a lot, and I still don't get quite exactly what I want. My biggest gripe is with the checkout process; it has like 3 too many steps, and some bad defaults. I'd like to try to streamline it if I get the chance, but who am I kidding? The only way this store is ever gonna see more work is if I actually sell all the shirts I already have in stock and decide to do another run.

But anyway now you can vote for which food-on-shirt related flash game I should make! You''ll see the poll if you go to one of the shirt pages, e.g. here and scroll down and check out the sidebar.

friday night at the office

I probably won't be here too much longer but,

1. Nobody in my rss list makes posts on friday evenings.

2. Actually I'd like to make a graph of when news (or at least posts) are produced throughout the week.

3. Weekend! Yay!

dwarf fortress update

I haven't been playing but I have been following the development blog:

I'm back to combat text, which still involves some retooling of things as the text illuminates further problems, but I'm closer to being done with the combat revision, anyway. I found a lot of things wrong with the groundhog bite today. First, a groundhog ripped a lion in half and bit off a dwarf's arms... and it was using every part of its head (eyes, nose, etc.), not just its teeth, for the biting. After I fixed that up, it was still using its teeth like little needles and piercing brains and so on. I eventually got that sorted out.

I had a dragon fight some lions, and after a little bit of dragonfire and close combat, I ended up with a dragon covered with the gramatically-in-progress "lion melted fat spatter".

I love you Tarn Adams......you go there so no-one else has to. You take it to the limit and beyond, so that no-one else is burdened by the burning lack of a fully detailed, fully simulated fantasy-mashup pocket universe. Thank you for all you do.

more signs of stress - avoidance and creativity

Today I read the google wave draft protocol spec. It was amazingly concise.

2.4. Operations

Operations are mutations on wavelets. The state of a wavelet is entirely defined by a sequence of operations on that wavelet.

Clients and servers exchange operations in order to communicate modifications to a wavelet. Operations propagate through the system to all clients and servers interested in that wavelet. They each apply the operation to their own copy of the wavelet. The use of operational transformation (OT) guarantees all copies of the wavelet will eventually converge to the same state. In order for the guarantees made by OT to hold, all communication participants must use the same operational transformation and composition algorithms (i.e. all OT implementations must be functionally equivalent).

Reading specs has become a weird kind of guilty pleasure for me... or at least, I never thought I'd enjoy it, but I find that I kinda do. Maybe because it lets me be smug, if only in my own head: "oh yeah if you just read the spec you'd see how they handle that..." And since like nobody reads specs, (because theyr'e written in math,) reading and understanding a spec is a recipe for instant self-esteem!

<_<

I also applied for access to the google wave developer sandbox. Because I don't have enough to do with my spare time?

I can't resist

the atheist apocalypse

http://www.viruscomix.com/page433.html

interface writer's manifesto

I like what this guy has to say about interfaces... Programmers need to work harder so that users don't have to. User requests are what computers are for!

http://wilshipley.com/blog/2009/08/pimp-my-code-part-16-heuristics-and.html

There is so much work to be done, all around us.

my daily nih - virtual rpg systems

nih - not invented here - a bad habit many engineers (certainly this one!) will cop to; if it was designed by someone else, it's crap and we should build our own.

I've recently been preoccupied with the idea of running a traditional rpg online. I was in one game a few months ago that was a lot of fun before it ran out of steam. We used a traditional forum setup and that worked alright, but there are some things about the way a forum is set up that make it less than optimal. Forums are good about maintaining a timeline, but bad at conveying game information efficiently. Things like maps, side conversations, character attributes, and ancillary characters are at best awkward hacks. That won't stop you from having a good time. Here is a site with a large community of play by forum games.

But to me an online rpg session is more similar to a game than a forum; I'd build it from the ground up around maps, characters, statuses, events, and attributes. Other people have approached this problem before. Here is a chart of some existing virtual battle mats that take a virtual map plus chatroom approach to online RPGs.

The thing is, most of these applications seem to have been designed for the world of 15 years ago. Most of them are downloadable clients, where the GM sets up a server on his local machine and gives his IP to his friends, who run their own native clients and connect to it. This is how online games worked in the 1990s. Nobody does this anymore in real life - games in this decade are centrally hosted. In fact I'd get rid of the native client entirely and use a web client instead. There are so many advantages to the web client! Compatibility, ease of use, accessibility from anywhere (including at work), centralization, and serialization. If your game is hosted on a web server with a database back end, you can have some confidence that you won't lose your campaign history if your GM has a power outage. Most of all, this model forces players to be online concurrently, which is often a deal breaker. There's a reason we're playing online in the firstplace, instead of meeting up at someone's house.

I also don't love the chat paradigm; it's good for letting people talk quickly, but I think there's something to be said for the more considered pace of a forum; players are encouraged to edit and embellish their posts, and the result is a higher quality, more readable and re-readable game.

I want to take the best of both approaches.

Forums are

-centrally hosted - GM needs no special software

-persistent - game data is never lost

-availabie- game can be accessed at any time from anywhere

-higher post quality - rich editors and the ability to edit posts after posting means better prose.

-multi-channel communication - secret threads for certain GM/player purposes.

The multiplayer computer game approach gives us

-maps

-built in character concepts

-object status and attributes

-fog of war

-dice rolling and other rpg tropes (initiative, turn order) built into the interface

-rich game appropriate GM controls

The system I would build would focus on creating the timeline of a story. The GM would have full access to edit anything anywhere in the timeline, and can assign out permissions to the other players to edit their own actions in the present and some subset of the past, or larger subsets as appropriate. The maps, the objects with their statuses and attributes, are all a part of the timeline. As you browse through the game log, you see how the map evolved with the actions, and you can see how the characters' attributes change over the course of the session/chapter/game.

The whole thing is stored forever in a database, and accessible from (almost) any browser. Like wikipedia, every edit is stored and is reversible. The default view of the game shows the final state of the timeline (or you can view the edits in strictly linear fashion if you want to see how it looked before someone retconned it.)

Also, sounds similar to google wave.

thanks shai

filed under: Nate hates Eclipse:

So I have had many problems with eclipse breaking and not loading after a lot of use.

I know this problem happens to other people as well.

If you delete

...\ workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.resources

And then force sync it (just that folder!)

You should get your eclipse working again, with all your settings in place.

Shai

godwin's law meets health care debate

Representative Barney Frank FTW - also, note the crowd's reaction - these are not the angry mobs we have/had heard so much about, though certainly the crazy is in attendance.

winscp - better than putty

If you're frustrated by ssh/putty, use WinSCP instead. I don't think I'll ever go back.

game idea: wind

You are the daughter of the bird god. (For whom I'm going to temporarily borrow your flavor, thanks Tim.) This is a Wii game, mostly a flight simulator. You fly by tilting the controller, you flap your wings by tipping the controller up quickly. Blah blah something's wrong you have to go on a quest, probably involving stolen eggs or something. At the start of the game you don't really know any of this though. You start out in crow(?) form, and as the game progresses you earn more and more bird forms. Also you can see the wind.

Each form has some unique properties, hummingbirds slow down time, sparrows fly through trees, eagles dive and snatch prey, and have enhanced sight, Geese speed up time to travel long distances, penguins swim, ostriches, parrots can talk to people, etc.. All the birds you meet along the way will bow to you.

Flight details are massaged to make sure that your character seems competent: obstacle avoidance is built in to some extent, hawks won't smash into the ground, etc.. Of course if you "die" you just disappear in a puff of magical feathers and reappear as a seagull soaring out of the clouds above where you died. As you progress you gain spiritual strength, which you spend to transform and use other divine tricks, but your physical body must also be maintained by eating and drinking periodically. If you're a good girl we'll eventually let you turn into a terror bird or a velociraptor or a phoenix or roc.

There's a loose story but the game is mostly a sandbox, where you can fly around and find things to do in most directions. We'll use some American Gods tricks and some others to make sure that wherever you go, that's where you need to be. As you progress and solve more problems and earn more forms you learn what your real goal is, but throughout we want to keep the focus on the joy of flight.

game idea: jaguar ninja

You're a ninja in feudal Japan, in say the early 1500s. You're on a boat on a secret mission. You end up (intentionally or not) swept across the Pacific to the Aztec empire. You are captured by a bunch of Aztec cultists and thrown in a pit with a bunch of Jaguars, without your weapons. As the beasts circle you, you go into the stance that is the start of the flowing water unarmed kata. The noonday sun shines directly down onto you. There's a total solar eclipse.

You wake up. You are a jaguar with all the memories and skills of a ninja. Your old clothes are shredded and scattered around the den. There's a little bit of blood. Using a combination of your ninja tricks and jaguar advantages, you scale the pit in the dead of night. Time to complete your mission.

From here the plot might tak you anywhere, probably do some jungle training, some aztec temple cultist hunting, and ultimately sneaking back on the boat to Japan for the second half (?) of the game.

Gameplay: stealth action, ala Assasin's creed, with less stand-up fighting, but more intimidation. A lot of stalking prey, frightening gardeners, revealing yourself at just the right moment, and biting people in the neck. Probably ideal for Xbox 360, you have a growl button, a pounce trigger, a swat/bite trigger, and a climb/freerun button, and a stealth button. Or stealth is your default mode, more likely.

The final missions involve assassinating Japanese nobles inside their home, sneaking along rafters, killing rival ninjas. Important components include managing your prey's fear level, tracking via scent (colored trails ala Twilight Princess), and following your master's teachings in your new form. You never revert to your human form, but you do see your daughter off to a safe and happy life.

What is up

I've been pretty stressed out the past few weeks. We've been trying to buy a duplex in Hawthorne, my car broke down, we've had a rough milestone at work, my driver's license has not arrived, and I had to see a doctor. I've retreated somewhat into some bad habits of eating, thinking, and acting. But overall things are great, and they'll be even better in a few months when it calms down a bit. It's nice to step back, internally, and put your worries in perspective.

Cheers! :-)