…pleonism. From today’s dictionary.com word of the day, which gave me a good laugh. It means ‘the use of more words than are necessary to express an idea.’ True, that, though not on this post.

I’ve ranted about this before, but since Wired ran a piece recently, I’ll rant again. How many times have you cut your fingers on the blister-style plastic packaging so many things come in these days? I could care less about retailer’s shrinkage problems (ie theft) - there are better ways to solve this than subjecting all customers to risk and inconvenience because a small percentage of them will steal. This is an occasion where I actually wish for a ridiculous class-action lawsuit against one or more of the retailers to try and force them into changing their practices.

The article’s interesting in that it points out this packaging trend is largely about shrinkage. I had figured it was about protecting the product from breakage in shipping.

This has been making the rounds since this weekend, showing up on Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us/popular and elsewhere, but I’ll throw in my two cents since my windows box, just a week or so past a year old now, is suffering from severe signs of windows cruft - slowdowns, windows explorer ‘crashes (where the screen does a quick icon redraw - is it even possible to have a windows install older than a couple months that doesn’t do this?), registry corruption, etc. I have been considering but dreading a clean install from scratch on a new drive for some time now. Along comes this great post about how to use disk imaging tools and virtualization to back up your existing system before moving to the new one, assuring that you will still have access to all your old apps and data available to you on your new install, running under virtualization. The only gotcha to be aware of is the need to re-authorize Windows if you have a non-corporate edition because of the number of hardware changes windows will detect while running under virtualization. This isn’t an issue for me since I get a corporate license through my employer, but it seems to me this actually means you could have a licensing compliance issue on your hands in that Microsoft probably won’t allow you to have two copies of their OS running on your machine, which kind of sucks. Still, this is a worthy technique to check out if your machine is suffering from Windows Cruft and you’re considering a reinstall.

This week’s friday fun link is to a flash implementation of the classic though mostly overlooked arcade game Ladybug. The game is a riff on the gameplay concepts introduced in Pacman - manuever your ladybug through a maze, munching on dots to score points and eating special dots to turn the tables on your bug adversaries and eat them. It adds turnstyles to the maze, making it possible to block the enemy bugs and adding an additional element of strategy, and there are two kinds of letters strewn throughout the maze which enable scoring multipliers and extra lives if you manage to capture them to spell the appropriate words.

I loved this game back in the early 80’s, much more so than Pacman, and played tons of it - there was a machine adjacent to the pizza parlor near my house and a lot of my paper route money ended up in that machine. My neighbor also had the Colecovision version of the game, which was a reasonably accurate port of the arcade game and just as much fun to play.

So - check it out for a bit of nostalgia or a taste of an unheralded game from back in arcade gaming’s heyday.

Check out dot-invasion’s excellent flash-based gameboy style arcade game Meteor Busters for this week’s Friday fun link. There’s nothing complicated here - manuever your ship, blast enemies, score points, repeat. What’s cool about it is how effectively it mimics the old original Gameboy’s aesthetics whilst subtly updating them. If you don’t get 5 minutes of fun and a grin out of this one, you’re not a gamer at heart.

This runs in your browser and is cross platform so long as you’ve got the flash plugin.

Ever run into any of the following messages when you try and delete or move a file in windows?

• Cannot Delete Folder: It is being used by another person or program.
• Cannot delete file: Access is denied
• There has been a sharing violation.
• The source or destination file may be in use.
• The file is in use by another program or user.
• Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.

I run into these quite a lot, most frequently with media files, .avi especially. I’ve linked before to a utility to deal with this but in its case you frequently need to restart to effect the ‘unlocking’ of the file. I’ve also encountered a batch file you can use on windows to deal with this, but it’s clunky. Enter Unlocker, a donationware Windows utility to address this problem. When you encounter a spuriously locked file, folder, whatever, right click, unlock it, and banish it from the system.

Now if someone would only release a utility to help manage Windows’ retarded usb device management (you can’t eject that device, it’s in use, Windows claims, even though it is not. Ugh. I get closer and closer to moving back to a Mac, I tell you, but for the damned games).

Anyway, check it out, and kudos to the developer for a simple and effective solution to the problem. One wonders why he can figure this out while Microsoft can’t seem to.

Have you got text files sitting on your computer with things like bank account info or usernames and passwords for websites? You might find Steganos’ LockNote useful. It’s a free, open source text editor for Windows with encryption tools baked in. Stuff a text file full of sensitive data, lock it with LockNote , and no one will be able to access it without knowing the password. Simple, a clean interface, and a tiny download. Check it out.

Neomem is pretty interesting. Macs are really far ahead of Windows in this application space, with a ton of tools (Mori, Tao, MyMind, Omnioutliner, Process, Dossier, Devonthink, to name just a few) available. There are plenty of windows outliner/todo apps as well, but the majority of them are clones with little to distinguish between them and most focused primarily on outlining. Neomem offers something more - it’s basically an outliner combined with a word processor and a free form database. It’s free, open source, and under active development. Check it out of your desk is overflowing with stickies, or if you’re a longtime Keynote user who needs something to move your data to now that Keynote’s not being developed anymore.

Assuming you know the url to use anyway. Courtesy of Digg, go get started with Google Notebook. This is immediately useful to me and will displace my personal wiki for some of the kinds of things I end up dumping into it (things to blog, for example) and also will displace some of my uses for the social bookmarking sites. Note that you’ll need to already have an account with google, and you’ll need to be using Firefox because it installs a (very slick!) extension to firefox that makes it drop-dead simple to dump content into your notebook.

I suppose I should explain what this is - it’s an online notebook that you can dump text and urls into. It’s sort of a combination of a bookmarking tool and an online note taking tool.

Free, open source, cross platform and a reasonably intuitive interface - the Sqlite database browser is all of these things. It’s also a tiny download, a desktop application, and well worth checking out if you’re dabbling with sqlite but come from a gui background.

dqbooks.com has put together a pretty slick flash-based book-like interface with generally unobtrusive background soundtracks, great art and photography, and a great user interface. Check it out if you’re an even occasional fan of avante garde flash stuff.

Back in the day Warzone 2100 was one of the really fantastic Real Time Strategy games. It was overshadowed by Total Annihilation, and rightfully so, TA was a great game. Warzone 2100 was great in its own right though, and did a number of things really well, including being 3d with 3d units and allowing you to custom build your units from a very deep pool of elements. You could custom build units from various components - chasis, weapons platforms, propulsion systems and so on.

Unfortunately there’s never been a sequel, but the developers did release the source code a couple of years ago, and the result of that has been a community effort to keep the game alive. It’s today’s friday fun link - check out the sourceforge site for the game, and if you feel up to it, challenge me. I’ve got a very rainy weekend to look forward to and welcome the chance to beat upon someone.

Check out this tutorial on how to configure the firefox ViewSource extension. It focuses on using Vim as the external editor, but you can easily use other programs, so for example I’ve used these instructions to make it possible to right click inside any form element (including my weblog) and pass the contents to Textmate, where I can use a real full-featured text editor to work with instead of the bare bones traditional HTML form area. The same principle applies to images - configure it appropriately and you can right click on any image you’re looking at in your browser and pass it to your favorite image editor. It doesn’t sound like much, I know, but it’s actually really handy. The only downside is there’s no way to pass things back to the browser so you’re still stuck copying and pasting, but even so this is a time saver for me and made it much more likely that I’ll do things like spellcheck my weblog postings.

Here’s a great fan history of videogames, starting from the very beginning (pong played on oscilloscopes) and running through the mid-80’s and the heart of the 8-bit generation. This is great stuff for folks around my age who grew up as videogames did. There are tons of great old pictures of the games, the people who made them, and the companies who sold them. Fun stuff and a great friday read on your lunch break. There are also tons of links throughout, making this a really rich source of material on the era.

Remember that episode of the Simpsons where Homer gets a chance to design a new car for his long lost relative’s car company, and ends up building a monstrosity with every bell and whistle imaginable, and how that car ends up bankrupting the car company?

I think Homer works at Sony now. They announced the pricing on their new console last night - $500 at a minimum, and $600 for the deluxe model. They’re trying to justify these costs by saying the thing is a blue ray HD DVD player as well as a gaming console, but the $500 model doesn’t come with the requisite HDMI video connector to even allow video to play at HD levels (well, depending no how Hollywood chooses to use the DRM built into blue ray - which way do you think they’ll go? I think you better buy the $600 model if you want to play HD movies). Meanwhile the console is huge, late, full of features of questionable value (why does it need built in wifi?), and in a true demonstration that Sony’s lost its way, it blatently copies the central scheme that Nintendo is rolling out with the Wii (motion sensitive controllers), which Sony appears to have tacked on in a last ditch effort to play ‘keep up with the Jones’

This means Microsoft (whose console is $200+ cheaper) or Nintendo (who may be as much as $400 cheaper) will own Christmas this year, and I think it also means Microsoft owns this console generation - I just don’t see a $600 console becoming a mass market item, and in fact there’s historical precedent with the 3DO, which came out at a high price and tanked.

Meanwhile, Sony has bet the company on PS3. They’re not going to go out of business, but if the PS3 tanks as badly as I think it’s going to, Sony is in real trouble. They’re already struggling with their PSP, which is getting its head handed to it by Nintendo’s DS, and while PS2 revenues will sustain them for the next couple of years, they’re going into decline already. This is a catastrophe for them on almost every level. It will be interesting to see how they respond to the inevitable backlash against their announcements last night.

Meanwhile, my prediction was off. No Diablo III announcement at their press conference. Shows what I know, though I did call it as a very long shot.

I often tell folks I’m cursed when it comes to dealing with the DMV, and most often they shrug, as if to say - we’re all cursed, it’s banal. To which I assert that you’ve seen nothing till you’ve seen the trouble I’ve been through. My latest story:

I moved to MA. I go get insurance, they charge me an extra $80 a year for driving without insurance in ‘92, which I did not do, it’s a paperwork error from NY that I discovered when I moved to NY 2 years ago.

Anyway, next I go in to MA DMV, take a ticket, wait 45 minutes, and get my turn at the window. Some minutes later, I am informed that my right to drive in MA is suspended, and has been since 1992. Why, I ask. Turns out I had a ticket which I paid, but which they claim I paid late. Suddenly I remember what happened 14 years ago - I got a ticket returning to Maine from NY after Thanksgiving. I paid the ticket. A year later I get a letter informing me I did not pay, and that my right to drive is suspended. I dig up the canceled check and send it via registered mail to MA, saying ‘I did pay, here’s a copy of my check you cashed.’ They respond - ‘ok, but you paid late,’ because they calculate the payment not by when the check was cashed, but by when I responded via registered mail (!!!). I write them back a registered snarky mail which amounts to, fuck you, your system is mistaken, look at the date again, you cashed my check before the due date of the ticket.’ They respond ‘no. Pay up.’ I start ignoring them, and 14 years pass. We forget about each other.

Until this past Friday. It costs me 4.5 hours and several hundred dollars to resolve this, get my new license and registration, and escape DMV. I go home. As I am putting the registration into its pouch, what do I notice? They’ve issued me a license with my Dad’s name (David C. Hamilton instead of the correct David L. Hamilton). This despite me having provided multiple forms of ID with the correct identity on it (NY License, Passport, Birth Certificate, Social Security Card).

So, back to DMV for me today. What do you want to bet this costs me hundreds to resolve? And trust me, you don’t want my Dad’s identity, he has creditors looking for him, they sometimes end up calling me. Now that my license says me is him, I almost guarantee they come looking for me.

I’m cursed when it comes to the DMV, I tell you. Cursed!

(I never wrote about my last run in with them, when I moved to NY, but it was similar. Failed to turn in license plates when I moved to maine in ‘92, so NY recorded me as driving without insurance, which I had not done (I had simply failed to turn in my plates), so NY recorded me as driving unregistered and uninsured. For 13 years. I say fine, how much will it cost to fix this, they say ‘$25′ I ask to pay, and they say ‘you can’t do that here, this is a regional office, go pay at the central office.’)

!!!

Fucking DMV.

So this week is the biggest gaming convention of the year. This year I’m going to offer up a dark horse prediction which I have not seen anyone else mention - Sony and Blizzard will announce that Diablo III is a Playstation 3 exclusive. There are a few things which suggest this to me -

• Blizzard is hiring console networking programmers
• Blizzard is known to be working on Diablo III
• Rumors and other hints (tradeshow promotional materials and the like) that Diablo III would be featured at the show appeared then were quickly quashed
• It makes more sense that it would be Diablo III that is announced, than Worlds of Warcraft, since WoW is not well suited to console play and since it’s a pre-existing title that doesn’t show a lot of promise for selling PS3 consoles (ie, folks are not going to buy a ps3 to play it - with 5 million customers, they’re already playing, and may even be bored of it by the time the PS3 ships) and
• Sony needs something huge at E3 to make a splash with. Few things would make bigger splashes.

We’ll see if I’m good at reading the tea leaves in a couple days. I’ll post afterwords about it.

If you grew up during the 80’s and played arcade games during that time, chances are very good that you have an appreciation for the games that came out of Williams during that era - they produced a string of great games that came to define the twitch arcade game, and their penultimate game, Robotron 2084, was the best of the lot. For today’s friday Fun link I’m linking over to this Robotron 2084 fanpage, with tons of info about the game. I still play Robotron regularly using M.A.M.E. and recommend it to anyone who’s a fan of twitch arcade games.

Is it physics processing? Before you scoff, try and remember back when the first 3dfx 3d graphics acceleration cards were shipping. They cost $100’s of dollars, few games supported them, and very few people believed they were worth the expense.

Until they actually saw one in action.

If you’ve played Halflife 2, you’ve seen somewhat effective physics modeling and the effect it can have on gameplay. Imagine then that you could accelerate and accentuate that to the nth degree - if you could, you’d have something like the Ageia PhysX PPU (warning - dumb flash-intensive site…and yeah…stupid name, but anyway), a ~$300 product designed to offer physics acceleration to gaming engines in the same way 3d cards offered graphics acceleration.

It’s very early days on this stuff - the cards are just showing up at retail this weekend the only game you can buy that supports them is the just-released Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, a well reviewed game, no doubt, but not something that’s going to convince many folks to rush out and buy a $300 piece of hardware to enhance it. There’s more to come, though, including the next Rise of Nations game (shipping in a week or so) and more importantly the entire Unreal 3.0 engine. That last is the real deal, the system that can potentially make the physics PPU a worthy addition to your gaming rig. Unreal Engine 2.0 is the most licensed 3d engine of the current generation, showing up in dozens of games each year for the last couple of years, and there’s a great likelihood the same will be true of version 3.0.

I won’t be rushing out to buy one of these cards, but I do have high hopes for this. I also hope the price drops, just as they have for 3d accelerators, and that more developers latch onto them.

There’s a pretty good review of the now-shipping cards over on hexus.net - for those who can’t be bothered to read it, their conclusion is similar to mine - shows promise but it’s early days.

Oh, and there are movies from a variety of games (including GRAW) demonstrating what physics processors can add to games at the Aegia site I linked to above. Unfortunately they focus on eye candy when I really think it’s in gameplay mechanics where these devices could prove the most interesting. Generally eye candy is what the masses go for though so I can’t fault them for focusing on it. Definitely check them out - whether it is this product or one from some other vendor, I think the concept is here and will begin to emerge as a selling point in gaming over the next couple of years.

So I’m sitting at work, writing up notes for a meeting tomorrow. My office is dark - I much prefer indirect lighting to overhead lighting so I never have it on. I have a dual monitor setup and on the second monitor, I notice what appears to be a bug crawling across my web browser’s screen. I think to myself ‘evil javascript!’ figuring it is some dhtml/javascript deal, and slide the mouse over to the other screen to investigate, trying to click on it, and when that doesn’t work, loading the source code up in another tab to see what’s what. Finding nothing, I launch spybot seek and destroy, worrying that I’ve got something worse going on. As I do this, I observe the bug crawl outside the browser window and suddenly it dawns on me - it’s a real bug! A vile tick, to make matters worse, which I quickly snatch up with a post-it, then seal it to it with some tape.

It turns out that in a dark room a bug crawling on my screen is silhouetted by the back lighting, making for a perfect little optical illusion. I had a good laugh over it, though it still freaks me out that a tick randomly showed up in my office. Soolin hasn’t been with me at the office for several days because of the weather so it seems likely it came from somewhere else.