Foiled Again

14 November 2008 : whining

I’ve had my Windows PC (before which I haven’t had one for half a decade) for three days now. I was actually starting to think “you know, Vista isn’t that bad.” Sure, it’s irritating, and it gets in the way, but with modern hardware, it was pretty fast. It seems a bit better at insulating applications from one another, and the window manager compositing and IO prioritization actually seems to work.

Then I got a blue screen, and I was reminded that running Windows is pants.

Also, apparently I can’t run a minidump file in Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition. As much as I’d love to dive into this with WinDbg right now, it’s time to go to work, so I’ll have to put that off.

Update

Curiosity got the better of me. It’s the Saitek driver that caused the blue screen, dereferencing pointers somewhere off in never never land, from the looks of things. This confirms my suspicions: The Saitek joystick is a good piece of hardware with some really bad software.

Dear Industry, USB Is Shitty, Stop It

14 November 2008 : rambling

So there’s all this excitement about the epic speed of USB 3. Stop getting excited.

USB 2 has a decent amount of bandwidth, but I don’t even care. It’s a dog. It breaks constantly. It doesn’t scale. Try running an external disk, an external sound card, and a mouse all at the same time on a laptop while doing anything compute and/or IO-intensive on your machine. It doesn’t work. It’s not a matter that the drivers are bad (but, dear reader, they are). It’s just that the architecture doesn’t scale for all of the things it has been made to satisfy — USB must now be our mouse, keyboard, external storage, printer, mobile music player, phone, and god knows what else cable.

USB was meant to be a replacement for the serial port. It should be for communication peripherals, and not for data pipes. I’ve long since given up the “firewire was meant for what most people use USB for” argument, as firewire is dead. This is a bummer, but you can get better throughput from a NAS on a gigabit ethernet line than you can from FW800, and even now most machines only come with FW400 if at all.

I don’t get why we’re not seeing more eSATA. Let’s put our heavy IO stuff on a suitable peripheral connection.

There is one upside to this, though. With everybody talking about the bandwidth potential of USB3, nobody is going nuts about wireless USB, which as far as I can tell is still a bad replacement for bluetooth. Count your blessings.

Agricola

14 November 2008 : rambling

Only played one game so far, but my thoughts thus far are that Agricola is awesome. Terribly complicated, despite relatively simple rules. I have no idea how to play it. The strategy, as far as I can tell, makes Puerto Rico look like child’s play.

Twilight Imperium

10 November 2008 : gaming

So, we played our first game of Twilight Imperium. It was, as promised by the manufacturer, epic. We started getting set up around 14:00, and finished the game around 21:45, with another 15 minutes to clean up.

It was only our first game, but one player accumulated a massive VP lead via using diplomacy four times; the rest of the game ended up being mostly meaningless as a result. This was probably due to the rest of us not playing correctly around this mechanic, but my completely inexperienced opinion is that this should only reward a single VP instead of two. Considering public objectives were worth a VP and secret objectives 2 (and all of those required far more effort than picking a strategy)…

Anyway, the game is … epic. It borrows mechanics from a dozen games, and after one playthrough, I have no idea how to play a campaign. I don’t think it’s a game I could play well until I’ve played through dozens of games, and even with experienced players I doubt that could be done in less than 50-60 minutes per player. Unless it was the only thing I played for the next few years, I don’t think I’ll get good at it, and I like too many other games to be exclusive with this one.

After the TI3 game, we played Power Grid to do something a bit mindless and easy; this ended up being a very close 5-player game, a bit over an hour and a half, and nobody was more than a point or two off victory.

Review: The Lives of Others

8 November 2008 : reviews

The Lives of Others was a well done, if predictable, film. Ulrich Mühe delivered an outstanding performance, reminiscent of Ben Kingsley’s finest work. I enjoyed the film, and the Blu-Ray transfer was well done. 7/10.

Race for the Galaxy

7 November 2008 : rambling

As a fan of Puerto Rico, I liked the premise of Race for the Galaxy — it’s like Puerto Rico, but with cards and no chits beyond the VP markers. Neat. Maybe it’s my childhood income and time spent on Magic: The Gathering, but there’s something appealing about a game whose mechanics revolves entirely around decks of cards. In any event, this guy expresses his feelings about the game better than I can:

There is absolutely no interaction between players.

This isn’t strictly true; the phases one picks are a tool to try to control the progress of the game, maximize personal gains, and minimize gains for the other combatants, but there are virtually no direct interactions between players, at all.

Puerto Rico, on which the game was based, at least has some amount of player interaction: The ships, the trading mechanic, and the limited plantations, workers, and buildings available.

So, I think the game sort of fails in that department, but still remains fast and fun, once one understands it.

Also played the first full game of Caylus with the favor board included. It’s a surprisingly simple game when one is used to it, but the mechanics keep it challenging and dynamic. I don’t think it does quite as well at re-balancing the playing field as, say, Power Grid. I think it and Power Grid remain my favorite eurogames at the moment.

This weekend, rumor is we’re going to be playing Twilight Imperium. Am I a massive dork for thinking that some sort of mash-up of Risk, Axis & Allies, Trade Wars, and Die Macher sounds fun? Not a casual game, to be sure, but I think it could be entertaining 5 or 6 games in when I actually get it.

It's Nice When Technology Just Works

4 November 2008 : rambling

After putting a new video board in my G5, it works fine again, without smelling like burning plastic death. Realizing no new macs are coming this year, I decided to solve my short-term issues by swapping the two 160GB drives for 500GB drives. To do this, I made a time machine backup, powered down, yanked the drives, plugged in one 500, restored the boot drive to it, booted, restored the second drive to it, rebooted, installed the second drive, and everything just worked.

The process and result is so uninteresting, but that’s the point: It just worked, with no hassle.

Next I swapped my secondary 500GB backup (archives from the RAID array, which is primary backup for everything else) with a 1TB USB disk, which proved to take only the following:

umount /mnt/mybook
mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 /dev/sdb1
mount /mnt/mybook
touch /mnt/mybook/TOKEN # lazy way of not writing backup to a mountpoint
/etc/cron.daily/backup.mybook

Different sort of thing, but was pleased at how simple that was as well.

The only problem is that I now have a couple of terrabytes of small mybooks that I don’t need anymore. I tossed a few around to back up trivial stuff that doesn’t need to be backed up, but I’ve still got a TB spare. On the upside, I’ve been losing about 500GB/month to WD drive failures, so I’ll probably need the spares soon.

And then there’s the problem of two 160GB drives that aren’t worth the power to spin them. That’s sort of weird to comprehend.

Storm King Photos

4 November 2008 : photo

I need to process some more of them and get them up on flickr, but here are some excerpts from my Storm King photos.

Wishlist. Random bitching. I'm buying a PC.

2 November 2008 : rambling

In an effort to not buy myself these things, I’ve put up a wishlist for my birthday and Christmas; it’ll be linked on the left of my website from this point forward, till I grow bored of it. I’ll keep it up to date and so forth; now that Amazon does the universal wishlist thing, it works pretty well, since I can do things like add board games from Lotech Games (I was very happy with their service and selection). Now you know. I wish the wishlists had a “randomly shuffle the items in this list” functionality, but whatever, it serves the purpose.

Went to Storm King today; pretty sure all of the photos I took were crap, but I’ll post some later if any turn out not to be. At the moment, my iPhoto computer is offline. I removed the video board yesterday, and confirmed there was a large area of burning near one of the transistors under the GPU. There’s a brand new GeForce 5200 on the way to try to get that limping along. My plan is to put bigger disks in it and hopefully keep it running for another few months, anyway. When I reach that terminal date, the idea will be to go to the current iMac, with the biggest disk it can hold, I think. To solve my “I want to play games on Windows by rebooting” problem, I decided instead to just, you know, buy a PC. When I next run out of storage on my file server, I’ll buy a 3TB WD NAS and use that as the new backup box.

This means I will own a Windows PC again. It makes me sort of sad, but it’ll actually play C&C and Supreme Commander and so forth. And Crysis, I guess. I don’t really have any interest in Crysis, but it’s such a running gag, I feel like I have to get it. It just makes more sense than buying a mac pro just because it might play windows games okay too. None of the software I use uses more than two cores effectively, at this point in time, so an iMac will be sufficient once I can’t repair the dual G5 anymore; I’ll just suffer with low-speed photo processing in the meantime. I don’t really understand the current PC hardware landscape, but it will have a core 2 extreme something and a 9800GT, and it sounds like that’s good enough.

Other than that stuff, not too much going on. I may start jury duty Wednesday, or any time during the next two months; this is really bad timing, work-wise. This also makes it very hard to book holiday travel. Or work travel. Or plan anything, really. Work is busy. I’m burnt out. I still like my iPhone. There are rumors some other folks are actually interested in learning how to play Twilight Imperium. Ended up playing Caylus; it’s quite good, and simple, once you get going.

LittleBigPlanet is a pretty awesome video game. Best platformer ever. Or at least since Mario 3. The songs are fucking catchy. I think they were picked entirely based on how likely they were to get stuck in your head.

That’s all for now.

Oh, my epitaph, should I die suddenly: “I’ve been meaning to read that.”

Review: Anathem

31 October 2008 : reviews

Anathem is an ambitious novel by Neal Stephenson. It reads like some sort of weird combination of The Glass Bead Game and Goedel, Escher, Bach.

Let’s talk about the language shift.

There’s a long tradition of inventing words that mean other things (Burgess, say), but why use it to represent identical concepts as in our language? The author introduces the text by saying that he’s replaced most things with a familiar word for us where it makes sense to, but this is a bit false, since most of the “new” words are just 1:1 substitutions for words in our language; only a few represent unique concepts. I understand the idea that it’s a microcosmic illustration of the parallel worldtrack phenomena, but I think it’s stupid and unnecessary. There, I said it. Call Occam’s razor and the Pythagorean theorem what they are; we’ll take for granted that the other narratives will have different names, but they’ll also have completely different languages, so it won’t even be relevant. Duh.

The plot is somewhat linear, with the end state pretty typical for Stephenson’s work; he does like the protagonist as a pawn that saves the day sketch for a story. It looks in that regard like a structure similar to his earlier works, but with a maturity in writing that those lack.

In the end I’m somewhat torn by the story. I’m irritated by the toying with words, the platonic theme was a bit heavy-handed, but the story was readable, had a few nice twists along the way, and kept my interest. 7/10.

Technology, Failing To Fulfill My Dreams

30 October 2008 : whining

I’ll preface this by saying that I’ve been, all things considered, quite happy with the Power Mac G5 I inherited from Sarah. It has been virtually hassle-free over the years, has performed well, and has needed little surgery, beyond tearing out its DVD drive at one point and replacing it with the guts from an external LaCie burner. The case design is exceptional, the fan system quiet, and it looks nice.

That said, as best as I can tell, the video board is melting whenever I leave the machine on, so for now it stays off. I’m ready to pull the trigger on a replacement, except:

• The Mac mini hasn’t been updated in forever, and has insufficient disk space for me to move to it. Also, it doesn’t have FW800, which is a bitch when I’ve got 3TB of FW800 on my desk.
• The iMac may be updated soon, but the real problem I have with it is that it’s got the right mix of components for my needs, except that it comes with a screen welded to it. I don’t want to keep paying that tax.
• The Mac Pro more than satisfies my needs, but is in desperate need of an update, and I really can’t fathom paying top dollar for it when Core i7 gets released to the market in 2-3 weeks.

The alternative is making the jump back to a laptop, but I don’t really need a laptop (a net book would cover my mobile needs, and a laptop as a desktop replacement charges too high a tax for not enough performance, and disk limitations).

So, rather than invest in a Mac desktop in the twilight of its product cycle (as I’ll contend all of them are now), I am spending $80 to pick up a new (something feels dirty about saying that) GeForce 5200 FX AGP Mac edition in hopes that it will stop the burning inside my case. If it doesn’t, I’m SOL, as I’m not going to invest in a new logic board, and I’ll have wasted the money. If it works, I’ll hopefully limp along until the new Mac Pro comes out, and pull the trigger at the right time.

And no, if you’re thinking “switch to a PC,” that’s not an option. Have you used Vista? Really?

My needs are basically this, in a desktop:

1. Lots of space: While I back up to another machine, I like to keep all of my photos on my workstation. This means a data budget of a few gigabytes per week, on average. As I’m planning on making the jump to a 21mp body, this is going to get a lot worse in the near future.
2. Speed: Working with huge RAW photos, and especially working with sequences of huge RAW photos, is really painful on my current hardware. I want it to not be so. This means, in reality, I need both decent CPU power, and decent I/O performance.
3. Gaming: I’d like to be able to play Supreme Commander, and eventually any other half-decent RTS game. At the moment I have no means of doing this. The Mac Pro provide a slight chance of this (by booting to Windows), but the video hardware is always going to be a few generations off peak.

Issue #1 seems to be solvable by external storage, except external storage is typically slower than internal, and for whatever reason, I’ve had a much higher failure rate for external drives (three in three months, this year alone) than internal drives (two in two years, and I have twice as many of these).

To solve issue #3, I’m still thinking about just purchasing a dedicated windows box, leaving it in my DMZ, and not worrying about sullying my mac with the whole boot camp experience. Then, there’s also no incentive to overspend on video hardware for the eventual mac. Downside is now we’re talking $4-5k for the two systems combined. Ouch.

In other news, the main gasket for my brew group also is leaking now. Brew temperature water getting sprayed on your hands? Not fun.

LittleBigPlanet

28 October 2008 : rambling

Huge shocker, Sony still sucks at game launches and LBP can’t connect to the server.

Review: Strada 18

28 October 2008 : reviews

Ate dinner at Strada 18 tonight. Starters were the calamari and the house-made mozzarella. The calamari was good; it came with superfluous dips and such on the side. The mozzarella was great, but was swimming in oil and a syrupy sweet balsamic vinegar; it would have been far better without one.

Next up was a calzone, with fresh sheep’s milk ricotta, broccoli rabe, and sausage. This was the highlight of the evening. Mild, simple, and expertly prepared. The sauce on the side was good, but too strong — it would have overpowered the calzone.

The (baked) macaroni and cheese with truffle oil wasn’t bad, but it didn’t really need the additional oil of the truffle oil; the cheese was good enough on its own, the result seemed overdone. And slightly disgusting.

The linguine with clam sauce was decent, though it had a strong taste of butter and white pepper in addition to the subtler flavor of the olive oil, noodles, and clams. Way overdone.

Dessert was funny. It was supposed to be a souffle; instead it was a crater on the plate. The flavor was good, but I hope the pastry chef committed seppuku after it was served. It would be the only honorable way out of this miserable failure.

Service was pretty horrid. A guy kept peeking over at the table, but failed to ever refill water or tea glasses. Plates were bussed efficiently and new silverware brought appropriately, but that was about the only upside. Our waitress was flirty, but only showed up when it was absolutely clear it was time to order another course.

So! The general theme was that everything was a bit overdone, and inexpertly executed. I wasn’t too impressed; standing on its own, I’d give it a 6/10.

But here’s the thing. Pasta Nostra is just a few windows down the street. And it’s fan-fucking-tastic food and service for maybe only $5/plate more. Why bother going anywhere else for Italian when you’re already looking at paying a decent amount for a meal?

Sometimes, A Recruiter Is What I Need To Have A Good Day

28 October 2008 : rambling

I try not to answer most of the recruiter phone calls I get, but sometimes I’m in a funny mood when RESTRICTED starts flashing on my phone.

Today I told a recruiter that I was happy where I was, and I wasn’t interested in working with low end recruiting firms that wouldn’t even tell me who they worked with. To be fair, he’s at least a step above the guys that just war dial company directories, but not a big step. I apparently hit a nerve; his speaking became erratic and he started to defend both his position and firm as being high end.

Newsflash: If the most recent version of my resume you has is 3+ years old and you are calling me without having done any legwork at all, you are not a high end firm. If you don’t know where I work or what they do, you are not a high end firm.

In a follow-up email, he defended his earlier stance by providing a list of companies he works with, indicating that they are all out of my league (I indicated incompetence with multithreaded programming). My guess: these firms were companies he had worked with back when the buy side was being less selective about their hiring, since he’d mentioned already in the phone call that he was working with sell-side firms right now.

The icing on the cake was when he indicated that high end (oops, guess I was right about that) recruiters would have already sent my paperwork to the firms he mentioned.

As a consolation he offered a lateral move for less pay (which is funny, since he doesn’t know what my pay looks like) to break into something I don’t want to do.

Gosh, that sure sounds tempting, let me think about it.

Empty Work

28 October 2008 : photo

These all feel somewhat hollow, after looking through some of my old work, but I went to New York on Sunday. Visited the Guggenheim and walked up and down fifth avenue a bit. Dipped into the park. The Guggenheim was almost entirely stocked with photography exhibits. Much more accessible than epoxy-resin-fly-carcass but nothing that really blew me away.