Jeffrey Roberto Concerto

Dog vs Robot...

2011-11-01T16:59:00.000-07:00

I'm been watching Brian's dog Dottie for a couple days. She's a sweet little double dapple dachshund (which means she has a spotted coat and two different colored eyes). She is super-easy to watch, except that she is super-particular about where she goes to the bathroom.

Yesterday, for example, we walked through the park for ten minutes, and nowhere was acceptable - she turned up her nose the whole time. Then, while walking back through Pike Place Market, she drops trou right in front of the iconic bronze pig, as if to say, "let's see you throw the fish over this."

Anyway, this morning, we are both asleep in bed when Dottie stands up and starts shivering. I figure she is just scared, so pull her over to me to comfort her. And then she starts making the "Hrk, hrk, hrk," sound.

The "hrk, hrk, hrk" sound is a sound that all dog owners know as the "Sound Before the Puke".

Scrambling, I go "NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!," scoop her up and start running for the bathroom, holding her in front of me like a Gears of War Lancer gun.

Hrk, hrk, hrk! She's contracting in my arms like an accordion. "NO, NO, NO!!!"

---

And now, if I may, I'd like to interrupt the story for a second to talk about my toilet.

I have this weird Japanese toilet that is all automatic and puts all these electronics right where you definitely don't want them (near the nethers). It can do all kinds of stuff that I'd rather not talk about (except to say that they are gross), but one of these features is that it automatically opens and closes the lid when you approach or leave it.

And now, for the first time, in an emergency situation... I was depending on this feature.

---

Hrk, hrk, hrk!, as I round the corner into the bathroom, expecting the toilet to happily pop open as it usually does, and save me.

The seat does not open.

Hrk, hrk, hrk!

I kind of dance around trying to trigger the sensor, with Accordia the Contracting Dog in my arms...

Hrk, hrk, hrk! Finally, the toilet...

...does nothing, and Dottie pukes all over the lid. ARRRGGG!

I put her down, and walk into the kitchen to get some paper towels. Dottie follows behind, feeling much better, and expecting breakfast. I sigh and say, "hold on, wait a second, Dottie, let me clean this up," and walk back into the bathroom...

...where the toilet happily opens upon my arrival.

Which, of course, dumps all of the Dottie puke back into the gap between the toilet and the wall. ARRRRRRGGGGGGGG!!!

I look back through the door at Dottie who is sitting politely, watching the spectacle. She then raises her eyebrows, as if to say, "pretty dumb machine, can we eat now?"

Not helping...

2011-10-27T20:19:00.000-07:00

Because of yet another online ordering fiasco, I recently received 32 pairs of underwear when I meant to buy 8. No biggie, these things happen. Seems like it happens a lot to me, but whatever.

I open them, and, hey, every pair of underwear had this little picture card of a underweared muscle dude attached with one of those little white plastic string things. I break all of them off, and now I have this huge stack of mostly nude muscle dudes cards.

So, I'm walking them out to the garbage, and, BING, the elevator opens, and my neighbor's dog runs out of the elevator, jumps up, and knocks all of the nude muscle dude cards out of my hands! They flutter slowly to the floor like snowflakes on gay christmas.

Then, of course, the dog's owners walk out and I'm just standing in the hallway among zillions of nude dudes spinning to the floor.

...awkward smiles...

I can tell that the neighbors are all trying to figure me out anyway. This is going to add a lot to the speculation.

Awkward Mornings...

2011-10-03T23:10:00.000-07:00

So, I stayed up way too late on Sunday reading Casey's new book (which is hysterical), and while I was reading, I also used the time to wash all my whites.

Now, my dryer is one of these new digital, green dryers which is code for doesn't-fucking-work, so my clothes are always damp. So, my strategy for dealing with this is that I just run the laundry once and then hang the clothes over every hangable surface in the house. All of this is my own code for my-underwear-was-hung-up-all-over-the-house.

So, no biggie, up late, just sleep in a bit. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that workers were coming to measure stuff! So, I'm sleeping away, and hear the front door open, and then my lights go on (the switch by the front door turns on every light for some reason - go X-10).

SHIT!

I then do this absolutely amazing, out of bed, full speed run through the kitchen and living room at 900 mph, my stocking feet sliding on the hardwood floor like a speed-skater, picking all my underroos - all before the workers get down the hallway.

I pull it off - it was AMAZING!

I finish the circuit and then I crawl back into bed and pull the blanket over my head. They are working on the living room, so everything's cool.

Only of course, they walk directly into my bedroom and start measuring for a desk. Note that I am fully covered under the comforter, eyes-wide, mostly naked, under the covers, FREAKING THE FUCK OUT. I hold completely still, knowing they will notice me "sleeping", go OOPS, and exit abashedly.

This does not happen. They measure for like 5 minutes. After 30 seconds, I can't just pop up and go, HELLO LADIES! So, I just freeze there. WAITING. EXCRUCIATINGLY WAITING. Eventually, they finally leave. I am covered in sweat.

OK, shake it off.

Get ready, go out to the elevator, and wait. Eventually the doors open, and there is a couple in there.

But exactly at this moment, I realize I left something in the condo. Also exactly at this moment, I lock eye-contact with the lady. And I'm thinking, I forgot something. And, I'm staring at her. What did I forget? Why are you staring at me? What am I forgetting? Is my hair weird? It's like dueling thought-flows, and I'm not making progress on either of them.

But more importantly, I'm just stopped, not moving into the elevator, which is just weird for them.

So, I'm standing there, thinking about forgotten items and also thinking about the fact that I'm thinking too long!! Then, the doors start to close in front of me. I continue to stare directly into the lady's eyes, frozen and confused and terrified.

Finally, my brain unlocks, and decides I should say something.

So, right as the doors shut, I yell this directly into the now scared lady's eyes:

"IT'S OK!!"

The doors slide closed.

Too late, and to no one, I yell: "I FORGOT SOMETHING!"

Kill me.

He Lumpy.

2011-09-19T22:42:00.000-07:00

So, I bought some shirts recently, and after trying them on, the clerk dude was like, "hey, that's a little baggy, let's have Anton tailor them for you." After a few minutes, this Italian fellow measures me up and tells me to come back in a week.

Sure enough, the shirt fits a bit better when I get it back. Cool.

Then I think, hey, I should just get all my shirts tailored! I scoop them up and walk over there and ask for Anton. They tell me Anton's not here today, but Lou will help you out.

So, I go into the dressing room waiting for Lou, expecting another burly Italian guy. I'm waiting and waiting, and finally this absolutely ancient Chinese woman shuffles in slowly. Like, seriously old; an apple doll, basically. Glasses two inches thick.

Anyway, the clerk points at me, and "Mrs. Lu" comes over and then just stops. She makes this pucker face like she's sucking a lemon. I mean serious pucker face.

She rotates around me, first left, then right. Looking at me, looking at the shirt, looking at me in the shirt in the mirror. All the while, making this terrible face.

Finally, she turns away from me, facing the clerk, and then points back over her shoulder at me with her thumb, and says loudly, "HE LUMPY."

I go, "hey!," kind of laughing.

Then she squints and half-turns to me, so she can point directly at me. Louder now, "YOU LUMPY!"

Finally, she approaches me and says, "we fix". She then starts gathering the fabric and begins kind of singing to herself, "lumpy, lumpy, lumpy".

Everyone in the changing thought this was the funniest thing ever.

God damn it.

More ancient stuff...

2011-09-13T19:04:00.000-07:00

I'm finding this old stuff on a long forgotten backup drive.

This is a walking tour of Kirkland that I made for my relatives when we moved here from Salt Lake City. I made it 13 years ago or so, on Christmas day.

It's funny to see Kirkland 13 years ago - it's not that different.

RAD is pretty different, I guess. We are now in another building (having moved 3 times since these pictures). Casey had only started working for us about 3 months before these pictures. We have a bunch more people.

But, man, look at the size of those monitors on our desks!

The Last Panel...

2011-09-13T17:55:00.000-07:00

I did these about 5 years ago - I did a few other strips as well, I'll try to get around to posting them...

The Last Panel: For Better or For Worse

Most of these jokes won't make any sense unless you read this terrible comic for, like, decades.

And yes, there was a storyline where an attempted rape actually brought two characters closer. Yikes.

Drobo update post...

2011-08-04T00:36:00.000-07:00

So, one of the very first things Casey and I podcasted about was me trying to rip all my DVDs and Blu-rays onto a Drobo. It didn't go well initially, and I had to copy back and forth off multiple RAID sets, multiple times - it was pretty much a comedy of errors. Well, 3 (4?) years later, I thought I should give an update.

First off, I pretty quickly transitioned off the Drobo 1s onto Drobo Pros once they were available. I did this originally for the more drive bays, but it turned out that the big win was moving from USB to iSCSI.

iSCSI is just a scsi interface routed over ethernet. It's soooo much nicer - fast, reliable, and I can stick the device where ever I want (anywhere with an ethernet port). USB just doesn't work - it's too slow, and too unreliable, and worse, it exaggerates the problems that Drobos inherently have. I believe even their lowest-end products now have iSCSI - it's the way to go.

Now that I'm used to them, I have to say the Drobos have been pretty darn good - I've had 3 drives die, but the Drobo raid set kept rolling right through everything. It's impossible to know that everything is perfect (until Drobo switches to something like ZFS, but I've played many random movies over the years, and it's always been fine).

Drobo's big feature (growable volumes) is a clear win - I have migrated from 12 1TB drives up to my current 16 2TB drives. And I can still move to 3TB drives when I need the space with no new Drobo hardware (I will need to split to more volumes, though).

Drobo's other big claim to fame is actually it's biggest problem: it's simplicity. It is true, that almost anyone can use a Drobo (especially a small RAID set). But, that said, every problem that I have had with a Drobo can be traced to it not giving me enough information about what the fuck it is currently doing.

With large drive sets, it can take a long time to boot. Then, a long time for Windows to connect and mount the drive. This time is always terrifying - is the drive set gone? Because you can't tell - when it is booting up, it looks visibly the same as it not recognizing the drives!

After using these devices for years, that's my biggest piece of advice: JUST WAIT. Give everything plenty of time, and don't start doing stuff just because you are nervous. If something seems broken, leave it alone. If the device seems like it is off, then wait - it probably isn't, it's probably not seeing the USB or iSCSI device.

This waiting extends even to the simple lights on the device itself. For example, on the front of the unit, a series of lights show how full the drives are. If you delete some shit, then this display will take a long time to update. Don't panic - just wait.

[Sidebar: normally, RAIDs can't tell how full they are. Well, they can tell how much data has been written since being formatted, but if you delete stuff, then they don't know. This was one of the unique things about the Drobo software - it understands some filesystems and can reach in there and look at the file system to see when space has been freed.

That's cool and all, but now-a-days, if they just supported the TRIM standard, then they could be informed when space is re-freed, and they wouldn't need this clever, but slow (and somewhat scary) feature at all.]

Reliability-wise they have been pretty good. We had one Drobo Pro unit fail completely once, but they cross-shipped us a new one and I put the drives in the new box and it booted up perfectly. Support was nice to work with on this.

On another of the Drobo Pros I've had, one of the 8 drive bays didn't work. Other than that, they have definitely performed better than the cheap hard drives I've stuck in there. (3TB drives are supposed to be even worse, btw.)

The Drobo software is nice to look at (and I love me some visualization), but it doesn't really tell you that much. And it doesn't show *anything* until the drives are all booted up - which is when you really need some info! As an aside, all this RAID visualization and setup stuff should be in Windows directly by now, but hey, operating systems are more about the bundled apps today, than you know, operating system stuff. Sigh.

The Drobo software on the host PC has actually been pretty crappy. It has trouble connecting to multiple iscsi devices sometimes, it can't search a subnet for the iscsi drives, it's slow, if something goes wrong, I have to connect through USB to reset the settings, etc. I only really use it when I get a completely new Drobo device, though, so this isn't that important.

I still have performance variability issues that seem to plague most RAIDS. I get 100 MBps for a sustained 30 minutes, and then I'll hit some files or something that slows everything down to 25 MBps - no idea why. I'm not sure if the drastic slow-down I saw when you fill up a Drobo is still there - I've got enough drive-bays and hard-drive upgradability that I don't need to run close to the bone, fullnesswise.

One weird thing is that I have enough data, that I really don't have a way to back it up (other than re-ripping from my DVDs again). At my current usage of 28 TB, it would take about three weeks just to read all the data - let alone stick it somewhere else. I'm definitely relying on the data redundancy (I'm using two disc redundancy now because I'm nervous about this), so go-go-gadget Drobo, I guess.

So, overall, I have to say I'm happy with them - running for 3 years, no-data-loss that I'm aware of, reasonable performance, and great upgradability.

This week in unexpected fistbumps...

2011-07-30T18:19:00.000-07:00

Trapped behind two slow-walking Bros on a crowded sidewalk, I overhear this conversation:

Bro1: Yo, I have to move out of my apartment this week.
Bro2: That sucks, bro!
Bro1: Yeah, but the landlord is taking out the carpeting and putting in hardwood floors.
Bro2: No shit?!
Bro1: Oak, bro.
[FIST-BUMP]

Reading Twitter with an RSS reader...

2011-07-28T01:39:00.000-07:00

Twitter has gradually obscured how to read a Twitter user's posts without going through an official Twitter client. They used to have an RSS button right there, but it's history now. This is lame, because it was one of the cool, friendly things they did, that embraced the openness of the web (instead of walling it off).

Anyway, it's actually pretty easy to get an RSS feed for a particular Twitter user id. To do so, use a URL with the format:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/175624200.rss

Where the number is the Twitter user id (that number is John Carmack's). But you usually only have a Twitter username (@jeffatrad, for example). Fortunately, you can use this convenient site:

http://www.idfromuser.com/

Just type the Twitter name in (@rygorous for Fabian's posts, for example), grab the user id number, and then just replace the number in the link above with the new number.

These RSS feeds are actually better than most clients, because they include their global tweets as well as RTs and tweet-replies to other users (not DMs, of course).

Facebook isn't even a good Facebook...

2011-06-05T03:31:00.000-07:00

So, Facebook is billed as a way to connect and be social with your friends and family, right? (BTW, I stopped using it about a year ago, because I was being less social not more, but I'm a freak, so whatever.)

But it seems to me that Facebook isn't even good at what it claims to do. Does it remind you when you haven't talked to someone in a while? Does it change the way data is shared based on my interactions with people (pulling back or sharing more)? Can I set a reminder on someone to help me remember an important date (like when their father died or something)?

If I go on someone's page and notice they are in a relationship with a new person, can I look at their page when they got divorced, so I can call and comfort them without putting my foot into my mouth?

It doesn't do any of that - it can't even do what it's supposed to - it can't even search! It forces you to interact with your friend's pages in a creepy stalker daily-monitoring way where you look at their pics and eavesdrop on their conversations. And your outbound interactions are just spewing random updates to everyone - no one is special or real.

In this way, Facebook is really a form of social pornography - that is, a way to achieve a desired social sensation directly -- without all the work to earn it. You sort of feel connected to people without being connected at all. You get the pleasure of looking at the pictures of their life without having to talk to them about it.

I don't think this is an accident - like many creations, I think Facebook reveals a lot about it's creator (Zuckerberg) and how he interacts with the world. Many engineers (including myself, unfortunately, and I try to work on it) see social interactions as something to be optimized or streamlined, like a program, instead of something that requires effort and emotion to be expended.

This is why I think Facebook won't dominate forever, despite the network effect advantages that it currently holds. Someone will eventually make a social site that lets their users bend it to serve their own social fetishes and shortcomings, rather than those of the engineers that made it.

Now that could be worse, certainly...

But since it can be configured, it could also be something that helps you become a better human being, instead of just letting you feel like one. It could be a crutch that you eventually overcome instead of become addicted to.

But I guess that doesn't sell ads.

Hey, let's make stuff worse today...

2011-05-22T15:09:00.000-07:00

So, if I leave a browser up and then let my machine go to sleep, then, when I relogin, the video driver crashes like ten times in a row, and then pops back on, but all of my anti-aliased text is gone until I reboot (system-wide).

This all started when my browser switched to using Direct2D. Hey, you know what didn't used to happened when I left a browser open? Yeah, crashing ten times and then losing my cleartype!

But you know, it was worth it, because I was always saying to myself, "man, I wished the text in my browser would redraw 2 ms faster". Oh wait, no I didn't!

Why the fuck would you want something like the browser reliant on hardware drivers? What an awesome idea to make a crucial system component less stable, so that someday, some shitty HTML 5 game might run a little faster!

Did anyone look at real PC games and go, "man, that's pretty fucked up - maybe we shouldn't go there?" I mean, I had to install new motherboard drivers to play Portal 2, for fuck's sake - why are we doing this to the browser?!

That is not an interesting data point!

2011-04-28T07:44:00.000-07:00

Every time I see an iphone game funding pitch that breathlessly explains that with a $140k budget, Angry Birds made $70m, I think, "yeah, but that guy that won the $350m powerball lottery only had a $1 budget."

Look, how about showing me how you are going to turn $140k into $200k?

How about showing me how you are going to run a business instead of a VC honey pot?

How about showing me how you are going to be noticed without name-dropping Twitter and Facebook, since everyone else is doing that too?

How about introducing me to your sales guy? No, not your business guy. No, not your marketing guy. Who is going to sell your product?!

What Guys Really Want...

2011-04-16T21:19:00.000-07:00

So, I was having lunch with some indie buddies and we were talking about games I played at GDC and I mentioned I played an early version of Erin Robinson's new game.

I'll try to get the conversation that resulted as accurately as possible:

"Wait, you know Lively Ivy?!," says guy 1.

Guy 2 perks up, but doesn't say anything because he almost never does.

"Yeah, sure, I guess..., " I answer.

"I am so going to marry her!" As he says "marry", on the MMMM sound, a fragment of lettuce flies out of his mouth.

"Yeah, you're a real catch."

"Shut up!" He hunts around for the chunk of salad in his crotch, finds it, and then puts it back into his mouth.

I wince and say, "Well, hate to break it to you, but she has an awesome boyfriend..."

The guy replies, "yeah, Steve Swink." He says "Steve" slowly and "Swink" quickly - "Stttttteve Swink".

He goes on, "I'm just saying that if anything ever..."

Guy 2 quickly interrupts, "DIBS!"

I'm surprised both at the exclamation itself and that he has spoken at all.

Guy 1 snaps, "What? You can't do that. You can't 'dibs' that."

"Sorry man, I dibbed it," guy 2 says calmly, as guy 1 starts to get mad.

Trying to settle things down, I turn to guy 2 and ask, "OK, you too? Is it the red hair thing? Because, dude, engineers losing it on the red hair is getting way too cliche..."

"It is not the red hair," he says firmly.

"All right, spill girlfriend - what's doing it for you?"

Guy 2 looks around to see if anyone is listening, and then leans in close to me, and whispers, "it was the Portal earrings."

I raise my eyebrows, and look over at guy 1, and he is nodding solemnly.

Visual Studio for 64-bit asm...

2011-04-01T00:49:00.000-07:00

OK, let's just run down the ways that Microsoft fucked 64-bit assembly users in Visual Studio:

1) They took out the inline assembler. This is annoying, especially when you just want to handle something small and not call out to another function. But hey MS wants you to use intrinsics, so ok, whatever...

2) Only they compile intrinsics horribly - even on simple loops, there will be at least one or two pointless moves and at least one spill to memory for no good reason.

3) OK, but at least it will be compatible? Oops, no, they don't compile intrinsics that run on Win32. This is truly amazing. MS makes up intrinsics that don't even share the names of the instructions, so you have to keep another mental mapping, but then they decide not to support __m64 (for no reason). So I can't just recompile my Win32 intrinsics on Win64! Sure, I can convert to SSE2 - but the CPU can do these instructions, so why remove them out just to force me to rewrite something?

4) OK, fine, Visual Studio - fuck it, I'll just use MASM. Oh, on VS05, they don't install the 64-bit assembler EXE into the correct directory, so you have to manually copy the EXE up and over into a new directory (don't rename or that also confuses VS). Service packs and hotfix never fixed this.

5) Oh well, let's use VS08 - oops, they removed MASM completly. Oh wait, they added it back in, in SP1. ONLY THEY STILL INSTALL IT INTO THE WRONG DIRECTORY! Oh my god!

I assume VS2010 fixes this, but I'm not sure why I'm assuming that, maybe because it's almost April 1st.

->Jeff

When the Lights Went Off in Georgia's Bathroom

2011-02-01T20:37:00.000-08:00

Emotions due to the motion sensor in the bathroom turning off the lights while you are still in the stall:

1) Blinking, sitting in the dark: scared.

2) Leaning out waving your arms: foolish.

3) Having to step out with pants around knees: frustrated.

4) Being out with pants around knees and someone else enters (instantly flipping the lights back on): kill-me-for-both-our-sakes-embarrassment.

Meta-advertising FTL...

2011-01-16T17:19:00.000-08:00

I saw a commercial for some show called "Cougar Town" that said, "As refreshing as Dr. Pepper!" I mean, a) that doesn't even make sense, and b) why would I pay to advertise your shitty show? What was the pitch here? Is there a hidden pocket of Dr. Pepper drinkers that are just waiting for a show as refreshing as their beverage?

And how far can they do with this?

Desperate Housewives: As Leathery as a Buick La-saber!

Can they turn it around?

Apple iPod: As plastic as all these actress' chests!

Depressing Russian Literature...

2010-12-30T16:33:00.000-08:00

From from a bookstore, an email that I just received:

-----
Depressing Russian Literature

Russia has produced some of the greatest writers to ever put pen to paper. The likes of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have addressed misery and suffering with unequalled depth, feeling and brilliance.

Written by people who understand pain and sadness better than anyone, this selection of essential Russian literature spans wars, revolution, murder, betrayal and more.
----

Passive-aggressively loving your customers...

The Sad Irony of Censorship Complicity

2010-12-10T13:50:00.000-08:00

Games and movies use a voluntary rating system. That is, there is no law that says movies must be rated G, PG or R. Movie makers decided it was in their best business interests to rate movies (just like games did). Music also decided to do this to a limited extent when Al Gore's ex got her panties in a bunch.

Anyway, over the years, there have been various attempts to codify these systems into law. Now, they usually stay away from wanting to rate the media directly - that would be immediately struck down as a first amendment violation. Instead, they do it in sneaky ways - like passing laws to fine movie workers who let kids in, or game retailers that sell mature games to kids.

Almost always, the courts see through this ruse and rule that these laws are unconstitutional. Right now, such a law concerning video games in California is under review by the Supreme Court. This is a nerve-wracking battle for people like me who care about games, but I've been thinking lately that we have already lost the war.

There is a great new movie out now called The King's Speech. It's about a future king of England who has a stutter. His therapist helps cure this stutter through the unconventional technique of having the king unleash a huge string of obscenities.

There is no violence, sexuality or other swearing in the movie.

It was rated R, because it had more than one "fuck" in this short monologue.

Saw 3D is rated R. Hostel is rated R. The Terminator is rated R. A movie with less swearing that I will hear before lunch at my office should not be rated R. This situation should be embarrassing to everyone remotely involved.

Of course, the MPAA doesn't see this as embarrassing - instead, they stubbornly defend it. You can read about this stupidity here. You can also see the depressing documentary "This File is Not Yet Rated" if you really want to get angry.

Awesomely, in the LA Times article, the MPAA defends the rating because they claim that people in the south and mid-west get more upset at swearing. This is total bullshit (I'm from Utah and we had plenty of swearing even in the land of the mo's) - it's just trying to deflect the lack of context in their decision on some faceless crowd.

Because hey, new-flash: people swear now-a-days. They curse all the time and everywhere. There is not a location in the country where you won't hear a "FUCK" every couple hours.

And regardless, even if you did get letters, you can't base your rating system on lunatic shut-ins that don't apparently communicate with the outside world. Why are we worried about these whiny tribemen from the deep Amazon who haven't heard or used cursewords before?

I mean, you watch TV now, and the character don't talk like we do. The families on TV don't talk like real families do. How is art supposed to speak to it's audience when it isn't allowed to use the same goddamn language?! The world is ready to move on, except for some idiot stragglers that the MPAA has chose to cow-tie to (or invent) to justify their institutionalized caprice.

Anyway, this is all ridiculous and self-evident in the real world, but we also live in a world with the internet. A world with the internet is by definition a post-obscenity world. The worst curse I could possibly imagine is nothing compared surfing around for ten minutes. Read the comments on any random You Tube video and it will be way worse than the cunt, cunt, cunt song I sing to myself while I'm programming.

And by the way, that's just dialogue. Any kid with the internet has seen more porn than I saw by age 25. Every kid has seen more real violence than he'll see in any movie that he's allowed to attend. People have to understand that the world has evolved to a place where there are no limits to the reality that you can see, nevermind the fictional!

Any attempt to add restrictions and censorship to this world to protect children is just pointless. It has no meaning, because, like TCP/IP packets, kids just route around it. If they can't see it in the theater, they'll pirate it. If they can't buy the game, they'll download it. We can't stop this - it's already here - we already live in this world, and no amount of legislation will change it.

Whenever I've talked about this with folks (especially those with kids), the usual boogie men are brought up: "we have to do something so kids can't pee on hookers in GTA", or that, "we can't have kids see a torture movie", or that, "I don't want to accidentally see something scary", or that, "I don't want to feel weird watching that with my mom/kid/grandma".

Frankly, all of these issues are horseshit and have no weight when you push on them. Kids of today are long past your personal hang ups - they will play, see, and do everything on the internet.

And if you don't want to accidentally see something scary, then do some fucking research before you go to a movie theater. Don't be a lazy bones!

But it's that last issue that always really gets me.

You want to restrict any entire art-form, because you are worried that you will feel awkward watching something with a family member? Really? You can't just flip it off? Go see a fucking therapist, you fucking cowardly fuck! You don't deserve any entertainment, you huge pussy. Argh!

Whew, where was I?

Right, ok, so we have this situation there is this great movie, that will be seen by much fewer people and make a lot less money, because of this arbitrary two-fucks-and-you're-out rule. Maybe the talent behind this movie won't be able to make another? Who knows? But in any case, any rational person will agree that it's a terrible situation.

But the true irony is that the movie industry created this monster themselves! They were complicit in creating this weird toothless form of censorship that doesn't actually protect anyone, and yet hurts their own artists and business. How awesome is that?

Games have done the same thing. Our system is not as onerous as theirs, but it will be. Give it time. Bureaucracies thrive where ever pointless shit is allowed to fester. We'll eventually get fucked just as badly as movies, and probably worse, since most of the populace thinks games are just for kids.

So, while I'll be watching the Supreme Court decision (go Scalia go!), I think, like the ratings system itself, the final decision will be pointless - we invited our own monster in years ago.

Picasso at the SAM...

2010-11-30T19:16:00.000-08:00

Went to see the Picasso exhibit at the SAM this weekend and it was great. If you are in Seattle, you should definitely check it out.

I think his sculptures are the most interesting - his paintings are seminal (in both senses of the word, really), but that alone doesn't usually do it for me. The sculptures are cool because he does all this interesting stuff with 2D perspectives and then translates it back into 3D, which worked surprisingly well. You can walk around them and see different meanings.

Anyway, recommended! Probably should go on a weekday, since the weekends are packed (although there were soooo many art school hot girls there, that the weekend has other perks).

Episode 41 - Thanksgivingcast 2010 (Part 2 of 2) - SeaQuest DSV!

2010-11-27T22:24:00.000-08:00

Just when you thought you'd finished digesting part one of Jeff and Casey's Thanksgivingcast, the leftovers emerge from the fridge and it's time to gorge yourself on part two. In this full-length installment, Jeff and Casey attempt to recount another high-quality episode of SeaQuest DSV, in which the crew of the SeaQuest must investigate a diabolical plot to kidnap the leaders of the world using that most terrifying of villainous weapons: a room that moves up and down.

Topics: U2, United Nations, Happy November, underwater resort, Woodstock, lost keys, summit meeting, The Who, chewing gum, Luxor Hotel, Rolling Stones, WikiLeaks, sexual harrassment, Les Paul, iPhone, railing kill, The Spin Doctors, martial law, Darwin the Dolphin, Vietnam.

Get it here!

Episode 40 - Thanksgivingcast 2010 (Part 1 of 2)

2010-11-24T12:26:00.000-08:00

A new podcast from Jeff and Casey? It's true! They're not dead, they're just sleeping. Just in time for Thanksgiving, everyone's eleventh-favorite comedy duo brings you part one of an excruciatingly exciting double-length episode, featuring real-life superheroes and an in-depth discussion of how Batman could solve the mortgage crisis.

Topics: pope, Phoenix Jones, Dave Matthews Band, Bruce Wayne, The Golfer, mortgage crisis, Victor Savage, male prostitutes, Kia Fate, corporate rights, Justice League of America, superheroes, PacMed Building, Batman's penis, supervillains, Tiger Woods, oregano, comics, Nightmare Cane, Matches Malone.

Get it here!

Social games and meth...

2010-11-20T20:10:00.000-08:00

Social game developers trying convince you that the quality of their games will improve are missing the point. It's not the quality - at all! (In fact, I'm happy that they suck as much as they do because fewer people will play them.)

It's the manner in which they virally sell and monetize them that is so disgusting. It's the fact that they have no respect for their customers as anything more than vectors for more customers (like a broken pyramid scheme where only they win). It's the way in which they value the time spent playing their games more than the experience of playing them.

So, when they assure me that the quality will improve, it's like a drug dealer excitedly explaining that they are improving the packaging that my meth will arrive in.

Now, for the social game developers out there - let me help. You know that bad feeling you have in your stomach? That's not embarrassment. That's not inadequacy.

That's guilt - it's what other people feel when they are doing something shitty.

So, if you want to roll that way, fine. Just don't waste your time justifying it to the rest of us.

So awesome!

2010-11-19T13:09:00.001-08:00

Grandma Superhero!

An adorable short film...

2010-11-15T19:28:00.000-08:00

That is magical and funny, but that still has rules and follows them consistently.

Oh man, I shouldn't laugh, but...

2010-11-13T19:30:00.000-08:00

I did. I did a lot.

Then, someone remixed it and slowed it down and it was even funnier.

The first one we are focused on the girl in the gray T-shirt, and the funny part is all of the Courage stuff, and the song and, yeah, still the falling down.

But in the second one (slowed down one), you better notice the girl in red (who seems to hit every single hurdle and has one complete superman splat moment) and who still manages to beat the girl in gray.

Blu-ray, PS3, and how to annoy people right off your platform...

2010-11-12T16:26:00.000-08:00

So, I wanted to watch a movie last night, so I pop the disc into the PS3. Immediately, I get the "Oh, you must download new security keys to play this movie" warning. OK, no problem...

Argh, they don't let you get the keys without downloading the PS3 350 firmware, which is going to take an hour or so to download over my wireless!! I just want to watch a fucking movie! This isn't just a usability issue - it should be a legal issue. I paid for both of these items, and you are making me wait an hour to use them. So, I just immediately go over and started ripping it with AnyDVD.

Why are you doing this to your customers when you have already failed? Like, I could see this if the protection hadn't been broken, but it has! Completely!

As it was, I had to watch the stupid DVD version for 45 minutes until the blu-ray was ripped and then just watched the rest on the PC. So, in an effort to combat privacy (a battle which you have already lost), you inconvienced me, then forced me to accept shitty quality, and then finally drove me off your platform to finish the movie - well done!

That's a lot of face...

2010-11-09T16:06:00.000-08:00

Nothing else to say.

The Scat Mat Incident...

2010-11-02T01:18:00.000-07:00

So, my cousin got me this electrified fly swatter thing that zaps bugs when you hit them with it. It's like an electric tennis racket that you swing at flies to kill them more efficiently.

So, anyway, ummm, I had to try it personally, right - you know, for science... And it was only two AA batteries, so how much could it really hurt? Well, turns out, yowza, yowza, it can shock a LOT - my fingers are still tingling!

Before the finger-zap, there were suggestions of licking it - it was very good that I decided to start the experimentation small!! (I also considered jokingly hip trusting onto it - very good that that impulse passed - science and comedy sadly not served, but mini-Jeff intact).

Anyway, it reminded me of the story of the scat mat. One summer, Alicia and I noticed that something was nibbling on our packages of bread if we left them out, right through the plastic. So, we figured we must have mice or something.

So, I decide to setup our video camera to catch it. Next morning, sure enough: bread nibbled! To the video tape! I'm scanning through in fast-forward-mode, and I'm all nervous like it's Ringu or something, and then I see a flash! It was totally scary - just a flash of something!

Back up slowly, and it was not a ghost, or a TV demon, or a mouse - it was Hannah, our cat! Evil Hannah!!

So, next time we were at Petco, I'm like, "hey, let's get one of those scat mats!" (They are these pads that tingle when cats walk on them to scare them away!)

Alicia: "No, no, no Jeff, no, no, no, no, no!"

I buy it anyway.

We get home and Alicia says there is no way that you are using that, that she'll sneak out after I fall asleep and throw it away, etc, etc. I decide to prove to her that it is totally safe.

So, I unwrap the scat mat, plug it in, and put it down in a chair and then sit on it, like any good scientist would do. Clinical trials, right? No problem! Every ten seconds or so, it gives the tiny little zzt, nothing bad at all.

Then, I look down (as I'm still sitting on it) and there is a little slider. It's currently set to the picture of a cat, and then there is a picture of a little dog, and then a big dog. Not thinking too much about it, I slide it over to big dog...

...about five seconds go by, since I flipped in mid-cycle, and...

ZZZZTZZTZTZT!!

HOLY FUCK! My entire body goes numb!! My mind spins around and I don't know what's even going on....

ZZZZTZZTZTZT!!

HOLY FUCK! What's happening? (Every shock seems to wipe out my short term memory back to before the first shock!!)

ZZZZTZZTZTZT!!

HOLY FUCK! Full numbness - what's going on? Where am I?

ZZZZTZZTZTZT!!

HOLY FUCK! (Some information is starting to leak past the shocks into my brain like deja-vu or one of those bad time-travel Star Trek episodes...) "WAIT, I'm on the scat mat, it must be shock...."

ZZZZTZZTZTZT!!

HOLY FUCK! Ok, where am I? What's my mother's maiden name? Who's the president? Wait!! I think I'm getting shoc...

ZZZZTZZTZTZT!!

HOLY FUCK! What's happening? Why am I all sweaty? Wait! OK, I'm on the scat mat - I NEED TO GET OFF!! Start standing up...

ZZZZTZZTZTZT!!

Legs go numb - fall back onto the scat mat!!! Where am I?

...At this point in the story, let's pause for a moment to note that since Alicia (still explaining that "I am to never deploy the scat mat, no, no, no") is facing away from me, she doesn't see me in electrical experimentation distress!!!...

ZZZZTZZTZTZT!!

HOLY FUCK! Where am I? Wait! Panic is starting to set in - might die on the scat mat! OK, since I can't stand, slide down, off the chair!

ZZZZTZZTZTZT!!

HOLY FUCK! Right in the kidneys! Kidney shot! Came about a millisecond away from peeing my pants on that one. Whew!

ZZZZTZZTZTZT!!

HOLY HOLY FUCK! Right on the neck and back of the head! Colors, stars, double rainbows...

And off the chair...

Roll onto the floor - panting. Completely drenched in sweat. Groggily coming back to reality.

Alicia turns around, put her hands on her hips, and goes, "What now?"

Needless to say, she threw it right in the trash after a reluctant recounting of my findings.

(BTW, I still maintain the problem was a lack of a control group, which she ludditely refused to participate in...)

My favorite Halloween costume disaster...

2010-10-31T19:19:00.000-07:00

My hair cutter lady and two of her girlfriends decided to go to Las Vegas for Halloween. They wanted to do a combo costume, of course. After a lot of discussion, they decided to go as the Dixie Chicks.

Now apparently (and I don't know this, since I don't know the DCs), there are apparently two cute Chicks and one ugly one (their words, not mine). So, they drew straws to see who was going to be the odd chick out.

Anyway, my hair-cutter lost, so she decided to just go for it, and just worked the ugly angle. She claims she looked hideous.

As these things always go, it comes to Halloween, and she's at the airport when her friends call and say that they have to bail because they have no money!

So, she was just sitting there, crying, at the airport in her horrible looking costume (that no one even understands, because apparently, you can't figure it out without seeing the other two Chicks - who are apparently more iconic).

She claimed everyone was looking at her the whole way there. I was like, "no, they weren't, you were just being paranoid."

But no - once she got to the hotel, she realized that her mascara had run down her face from crying, so she looked at least ten times uglier/crazier than she even imagined. She said, "picture the ugliest, but still slightly slutty, Tammy Fay Baker in history, carrying a fake guitar".

Bite me, Microsoft...

2010-10-29T16:05:00.000-07:00

My Windows ID is used for (among other things):

1) Online access to my MSDN downloads.
2) Viewing my stocks with MSN Money.
3) Giving me access to my Xbox 360 developer downloads!
4) Various super-restricted beta programs.

5) Xbox Live.

And yet to cancel Xbox Live Gold, you have to call them, because it's the only way to "be sure that it's really you".

Of course, when you call you get routed to a slimy guy that tries to not take no for an answer. Scummy, scummy, scummy!!

It's not worth the savings...

2010-10-28T01:56:00.000-07:00

Don't buy it!

Charlie B...

2010-10-27T23:50:00.000-07:00

Is there anything more horrifying than Charlie Brown referring to himself as "Charlie B" and then rapping in those commercials for "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown"? I was shocked.

And then I thought, these characters have primarily existed in our minds as spokespeople for whole life insurance (Metlife), snackfood (Chex) and other gross, pointless things, so why I am worried about this latest act of debasement?

Instead, I should just look forward to the next rung as they keep climbing down (branded inter-species pornography, probably).

But, man, those early comics were so good...

Mash up!

2010-10-19T23:40:00.001-07:00

Playing The Witness with Casey's wonderful song "Tea Time for Assholes" from our animated cartoon, "Jeff and Casey Time"...

Mandelbrot stories...

2010-10-17T02:42:00.000-07:00

I have two Mandelbrot stories!

First, my uncle Mike is a chemical engineer, and he invented these fractal diffusers to mix chemicals rapidly. Mike was at a conference on fractals giving a talk about their system, when an old man stood up in the back, in the middle of the lecture and said, "Excuse me, is this REAL?" Mike answered, "uh, yes," and then showed some slides of the diffusers themselves, which made Benoit very happy! Mike ended up on a Nova program with Mandelbrot too... HAPPY Mandelbrot!

But now, GRUMPY Mandelbrot: in 97, I was at a conference in Denver that had some fractal compression stuff. I listened to the presentation, and thought it was pretty bad, so I waited for my turn to ask a question. I posed the standard, "how would you do this without an intern doing the mapping for you?" question, and I heard this big grunt from behind me in the audience, and Benoit ambled out. I didn't even know he was there!!

So, my family is one for two in pleasing Dr. Mandelbrot...

Stay awake music...

2010-10-15T23:04:00.001-07:00

Sean played fast songs on my guitar while I was programming last night so that I wouldn't fall asleep. Live music is way better at staying awake to!

I'm embarrassed to say I'm listening to "The One that I Want" (from Grease) on loop right now...

Console output in Windows apps with redirection...

2010-10-15T18:22:00.000-07:00

You can find lots of docs on the net for hooking up console output to your Windows apps. Usually, you want to see if your parent is a console app, if so, use that one, if not, create a new one. Then you need to reassociate your crt handles to the new console. This looks something like this:

if ( AttachConsole( ATTACH_PARENT_PROCESS ) == FALSE )
{
// No parent process with a console, allocate one.
AllocConsole();
}

freopen("CONOUT$", "wb", stdout);
freopen("CONOUT$", "wb", stderr);

No biggie - lots of places show how to do this. But this doesn't allow the user to redirect the output to a file (because we are reopening the output handles).

So, to handle this, you want to look at the stdout handle to see if you are being dumped to a file. The only weirdness is that you have to check for the redirection before you attach or allocate a new console. So, you do:

int is_file = ( GetFileType( GetStdHandle( STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE ) ) == FILE_TYPE_DISK );

if ( AttachConsole( ATTACH_PARENT_PROCESS ) == FALSE )
{
// No parent process with a console, allocate one.
AllocConsole();
}

if ( !is_file )
{
freopen("CONOUT$", "wb", stdout);
freopen("CONOUT$", "wb", stderr);
}

You can also not allocate the console at all in redirected mode, but you might want to still output via stderr, or whatever.

Strict aliasing...

2010-10-14T20:54:00.000-07:00

RAD stopped fighting strict aliasing about a year ago, and from time to time we get asked about this. I thought I'd review my reasons in the face of the new-level of retardedness in recent GCCs (strict-overflow, wrapv, string-literal const). The tl;dr version of this is that the C compiler writers have no idea who their users are, so they keep fucking up working code, while the C standard committee is busy worrying about Fortran. (BTW, a lot of this rant applies to both C and C++, but I'm mostly talking about C here, as it is the more system-y of the two languages.)

So, the problems with strict-aliasing:

1) It breaks previously working code, and, even then, only at some optimization levels, and, even then again, only when the code around it forces the optimizer's hand. This is *death* - you can't possibly test all the combinations, so you end up waiting until something fucks up, and then hopefully fixing the problem, because, who knows, you might just have rearranged things to avoid it.

2) The compilers that seem to be embracing this shit have so many other things to fix code-gen-wise that even if this actually did help (which, for non-straw-man code, I'm skeptical of), it's just buried in the noise. Once ICC or GCC code-gen is running at the same speed as Microsoft output (which *doesn't* do strict aliasing) - then start looking at this shit. Right now, GCC is 20 to 25% slower on the exact same C code as MSVC. I look at the output of GCC, and Codewarrior from ten years ago is doing better data-flow analysis (and Codewarrior fucking sucks).

3) Time spent dealing with strict-aliasing code problems is time that you aren't making something else faster! If you don't spend time on bullshit like this, then you could simd up something else that will make an actual difference.

4) Strict-aliasing helps the part of the code that generally doesn't matter anyway - hey, hooray that you save two instructions in the middle of a complicated, branchy pointer dereferencing code path! Who cares - that code is slow regardless! In the places that you do care about, you just add __restrict to the pointers, and you can skip the strict aliasing randomization.

5) They added strict-aliasing and didn't add a way to easily say "this pointer dereference will alias." Or put it another way: they added __restrict and didn't add __alias! How can you add something that will break code, where you don't also add a trivial way to turn it off!? (EDIT: there is "__may_alias__" but it doesn't apply to the deference, but to the type, which means it's no better than the union trick in item 6...)

6) And because there is no __alias, getting rid of aliasing errors is non-trivial. First off, 90% of web pages on this are wrong. They cast through (void*) or (char*) to hide the warning message, but not the code gen problem. Or they cast through a union pointer - which also hides the warning but doesn't fix the problem! You have to copy in and out of the union...

7) And because you copy in and out of an union, you have to count on the compiler to optimize this away. Hey, compiler people - anything you think of adding that requires your optimizer to work is WRONG. There are 8 million real-world examples of this kind of faulty logic - starting with RVO. You can't make language idioms that slow down code, but that you think your optimizer will remove, because it sometimes *WON'T*. I mean, you have a situation where you want to exploit the C standard so your compiler can optimize better, but to do that, you want us to rewrite working code in a way that requires your optimizer to remove it. If you think like this, then you should stop writing compilers and go be an advertising exec (or a pimp).

8) It's more likely to screw up optimized, expert code. This is the code that is the most valuable at any company. Like, I don't care if my UI code gets a tiny bit faster, if you fuck up my optimized DSP kernel loops!

So, here at RAD we just turn it off, along with the strict-overflow, as-if, total-license horseshit. And we haven't regretted it. All of this only hurts the systems-level programmer (and I claim is of dubious value to the high-level guys).

Which is why I insist that the compiler writers don't know their own customers. C is a systems-programming language! Why do you want to screw the systems-programmer to help the high-level programmer, when the high-level guy has long since moved to C++ and is bumbling around with STL?

The standards committee could fix all of this, but they've been tilting at their own windmills. C99 added all this crap to entice Fortran programmers. Seriously, Fortran programmers? (Oh, and it didn't work, btw.)

Like, why is complex in C99, and not vec4 (which directly represents the cpu hardware that you are supposed to be providing a thin layer over)? Where the hell is a CV modifier for specifying endianness? How about standardizing a CV modifier for pointer alignment? My goodness, how about integer rotate? Or even forget all that "craziness" and just lock down that ints are twos-fucking-compliment!

Everyone is fired.

Seriously, Apple?

2010-10-09T03:30:00.001-07:00

You want to spend time on this?

It's hard out there for an ICP...

2010-10-09T01:19:00.000-07:00

"Like the narrator in "I Stuck Her With My Wang, they're examples of people you shouldn't be?"

Icelandic Ultra Blue

2010-10-08T12:38:00.000-07:00

I missed this somehow (from Sean)....

Like a thousand tiny fingers urging you to let go...

Boingers and Ligos...

2010-10-06T10:01:00.000-07:00

Bouncy chewy stuff in meat (which I call boingers and ligos) is/are the primary reason that I'm vegetarian. So, you can imagine the evil in this can...

Taxes!

2010-09-29T17:57:00.000-07:00

Finally getting around to doing taxes, and it stuck me that this is such a JRPG...

Jeff casts: HSA and 401K.
IRS counters with: AMT.

IRS casts: missing 1099.
Jeff counters with: closed account status.

Jeff invokes: off-shore shelter.

etc, etc.

Lovely short film, "I'm Here"...

2010-09-27T17:51:00.000-07:00

So good!! (ignore the advertising).

You're so cute when you're angry...

2010-09-26T16:56:00.001-07:00

Hop.

Uninstall to reinstall...

2010-09-25T18:53:00.001-07:00

Software that requires you to uninstall the old version before you install a new version sucks.

Software that requires you to uninstall, reboot and then install the new version really sucks.

Software that requires you to uninstall, reboot, install the new, and then reboot again really really sucks.

I'm looking right at you VMWare...

Another great video...

2010-09-25T18:04:00.001-07:00

I have this one on loop...

Amanda Palmer...

2010-09-25T16:27:00.001-07:00

Oasis got my letter in the mail...

Such a happy video (her friend's expressions are great throughout).

Soldiers and Jesus

2010-09-24T19:53:00.000-07:00

Holy shit, this song is hysterical. "God only knows where we'd be without soldiers and jesus..."

'Cause if we didn't have soldiers, then jesus probably wouldn't have been killed by those roman soldiers, right? I mean, at minimum, we probably should have got some clarification on what soldiers we're talking about.

Every single line in this song is awesomely dumb.

David Cross couldn't make fun of this - it's too self-absurd.

T-pose for the win...

2010-09-24T10:25:00.001-07:00

He standing there, in the middle of the court, like jesus...

More Google voice recognition awesomeness....

2010-09-22T11:56:00.000-07:00

From Casey:

This number is good for nothing, absolutely nothing, because I never reach the real Jeff Roberts. If I wanted an answering machine, I'd just call my own!

Google voice:

You know a good part, good mapping. I love you. It's like financing seeing you call the same. I have to mountain anyway, me.

Great video...

2010-09-17T18:10:00.000-07:00

The frame rate aliasing on the hands looks cool too...

One more...

2010-09-17T01:10:00.001-07:00

pretty picture...

Let's do this!

2010-09-17T01:06:00.000-07:00

3 more weeks!

I don't understand...

2010-09-15T21:53:00.001-07:00

I can't fathom doing this job.

I have received this video 8 times today...

2010-09-15T16:42:00.000-07:00

and yet it still rules.

OMG, I'm an awful racist...

2010-09-14T16:58:00.000-07:00

So, I was helping out @checker with @spyparty last week, and it reminded me of this old movie called "Murder by Death", so I decided to rewatch it a few nights ago. (BTW, Spy Party is absolutely amazing, and Chris should release it tomorrow, because it's that good.)

OK, first off, has Neil Simon ever written a good script? This is really bad writing and it has aged terribly. But, geeze, the worst was Peter Sellers doing his horribly racist chinese character as the Charlie Chan detective. Oh man, you just cringe every time he comes on screen - it's hard to believe this kind of stuff was once in mainstream movies.

Anyway, it was bad, and so whatever. But later that night, I was programming along -- and I am always signing stupid songs and stuff to myself while I'm thinking, btw -- and somehow, without consciously thinking about it, I began saying one of the Peter Seller's line from the movie: "what's happening". But, of course, he didn't just say "what's happening", it was more like "ahhh, whassa happening?" - and forgive me, but I was mindlessly singing this to "Here comes Santa Clause": "whass-aaa happening, whass-aaa happening, right down happening lane, etc."

Now, of course, that wasn't enough for my subconscious - my subconscious decided, "you know what, Jeff, what we really need here is... more racism." So, I had slowly evolved to singing the theme from the Jefferson's TV show (Moving on Up), but in full Peter Seller's awful chinese accent. Now, let me pause here to say that I was not aware that I was doing this at all!!

And because I wasn't really aware, I was just as surprised as our japanese janitor and his two black assistants, that I was bellowing "TO A DERRRUXE APARTMENT IN THE SKKKKY!," as they walked in to empty my trash.

KILL ME!

3 hours in on The Witness...

2010-09-12T21:27:00.001-07:00

I agree with Casey - it's going to be better than Braid...

Fucked again by Windows headers not using pragma pack...

2010-09-12T21:06:00.000-07:00

3rd time in three months that I've found a Windows header that defines a structure and doesn't set the packing, and gets screwed by a non-VS default setting. Like, is that beyond them now? It's two line. Shit, they could wrap windows.h and it wouldn't happen. Lazy.

Skype exposed me!!

2010-09-12T00:04:00.000-07:00

So, I called an acquaintance of mine on this logitech skype phone I have, and then I hung up.

The next day, I realized the phone was clicking (I thought it was Moshi) - it hadn't hung up! It wasn't connected to my friend any more, so hopefully they had hung up. I say hopefully, because after the conversation and some ramen, I was visiting some, ummm, sites. You know, sites... where the ladies are noisy...? Yeah, those ones.

So, now I'm going to eventually have to ask this person whether they had hung up or not, and ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh - kill me now!

Ugh, this lady is so horrible...

2010-09-11T14:21:00.001-07:00

Wait, did she say, "especially for foreigners"?

Sometimes when I order something for myself online, I choose gift wrapping because it's fun to open...

2010-09-11T01:43:00.001-07:00

The Prime Noodle.

2010-09-10T01:29:00.000-07:00

When you make ramen, you have to check when the noodles are ready by trying one. When I do this, I take the test noodle out and then dip it into the flavor pack first - so it's SUPER salty! I call this the Prime Noodle.

I always look forward to the Prime Noodle.

The Prime Noodle is delicious.

Threads are a good place to hide global floating point state changes.

2010-09-07T21:48:00.001-07:00

I love this video

2010-09-02T05:57:00.000-07:00

So slow, so awesome!

File under: @Checker says the darndest things...

2010-09-01T19:49:00.000-07:00

"Good news, Jeff, the diarrhea I get from staying up too late is counteracting the constipation I get from traveling."

I yelled, "NOOOOO!" and then plugged my ears and said, "la la la la," as he elaborated...

Buried in @Spyparty and @MonacoIsMine PAX setup insanity!

2010-09-01T09:29:00.000-07:00

Chatroulette...

2010-08-29T18:05:00.000-07:00

United in the quest to show a stranger their unit!

Might go see Piranha 3D tonight

2010-08-28T21:09:00.000-07:00

But I'm worried about the creepo factor of seeing it by myself.

I suppose I could embrace it and go in a raincoat. Or a Pee Wee Herman outfit.

OS Versioning

2010-08-28T20:19:00.000-07:00

It's so broken that the version of the OS that you are running on has *anything* to with the version of the OS you are building for.

I can see MacOS getting this wrong because Apple has no respect for it's customers and just assumes they will upgrade like sheep.

For Linux, it's just an embarassing legacy that should be fixed.

One never knows when the homosexual is about...

2010-08-28T19:39:00.000-07:00

I think that word doesn't mean what you think it does.

Scumbags all around us...

2010-08-27T18:01:00.000-07:00

Seriously, Paul?

Regardless of how you feel about patents, I think that anyone would say that a company that just patents random stuff that anyone would think up -- without trying to make any of it -- and just waits for someone else to come along and do the hard work, and then sue them, is just complete shit.

Fuck you, Allen.

Scumbags all around us...

2010-08-27T17:57:00.001-07:00

http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/27/microsoft-co-founder-paul-allen-sues-apple-google-facebook-ao/

Telemetry...

2010-08-26T01:26:00.000-07:00

We probably should have called it Dirty-Laundry. Ever tester is excited by all the goofy things it uncovers...

Linux

2010-08-25T00:20:00.000-07:00

Linux is getting pretty darn good - interestingly, I think it's better for end-users than developers now, which is kind of funny.

Man, but the debugging is so bad that I can't help but think it's the only thing holding them back from winning completely. Has anyone over there ever used a debugger made after 1995? Like, Visual Studio is crap, but it's like 20 years more advanced/bug-free than the stuff on Linux. I finally just bagged everything and flipped to printfs.

Anyone know how to build with GCC to use old versions of the C runtime? Is there anyway to build and say, use whatever version of glib that you can find? I'm barely using any of the runtime and none of the function prototypes have changed...

Two Buffy things...

2010-08-20T17:35:00.000-07:00

1) I'll write more about this later, but between the end of Season 1 and the beginning of Season 2, the Buffy writers all took writing-steroids (cocaine, I assume) because the quality of the writing doesn't just improve - it's night and day better. It's still not a great show to me, but the level jump they made is crazy. I wish I knew what happened behind the scenes.

2) Buffy has seriously hairy arms. I didn't notice until a bunch of scenes with backlighting, and now I can't not notice it. Then I looked on the internet to see if anyone else noticed. Just a heads-up, don't look up anything like "hairy Buffy arms" (or even just "hairy arms") on the internet. It is not the way it should go, and everyone is a freak.

I puzzled over the item "add dr. poopy" on my to-do list, before I figured out that I meant "add drop copy" - curse my late night handwriting...

2010-08-19T20:05:00.000-07:00

Ambiguity vs Novelty vs Learning (alarm clock reprise)

2010-08-19T18:27:00.000-07:00

I've got a bunch of feedback on my alarm clock post. Still wading through a lot of it, but some overdue responses:

Brian wrote an interesting reply about latency and how modern Apple products seem to becoming more latent. I think this is true, but I also think that latency isn't the primary evil - it's just a symptom of ambiguity. If your phone doesn't respond because the latency is high, then that's super bad, sure. But the phone could respond with *something* immediately (spinning beachball), and still leave you not knowing what's going to happen (will it eat my click or not once it wakes up? what does it think I clicked on and why did that cause a slowdown? has it crashed or is it waiting on the internet? etc).

So, yeah, getting rid of latency is *huge*, but it's only part of the equation. Systems need to be non-ambiguous as part of their design, rather than just something we shoot for. That's why being 99% accurate isn't the right question for natural interfaces - as soon as you are measuring percentages of intent, you have already failed. That's why keyboards on a phone instead of a touch screen are so important - you know you pressed the key, because you felt the physical response. Things might still screw up, but at least we started with the user feeling confident that their intent was made. That is, I think it's important psychologically, if you know that you were unambiguous and device screwed up, than if you don't know whether the device registered your actual intent in the first place.

There are some interesting philosophical discussions about latency here too - in general, the longer the latency, the more sure you can be about a user's intent (in the natural interface sense), but the longer the latency, the more annoyed people will get. That's the awesome part of having a real brain - you start having shorthand with your friends and family and they start knowing what you are doing before you even finish. Natural interfaces will never be good at this - they just add the latency to reduce confusion, but they never reduce the latency as they know you, because they don't. And if they try to know you, then it's at this superficial non-world-knowledge level that equally bad (more on that in a second).

I also think a big part of the allure of natural interfaces right now is their novelty. It's cool the first time you do a gesture that the computer understands. But then you get good at using the device, and the gesture system is still latent, waiting for you to make your intent clear. Novelty always wears off, and then you are just left wanting to get on with your work. That's what my alarm clock and Apple products get wrong - they are there for you during the novelty stage, and then don't give you a place to mature. You can't really use an iphone as an expert any differently than a beginner - that sucks, and you don't realize it until 6 months into a 2 year service plan.

Dave sent me this link recently that briefly hits on the fact that as systems start superficially knowing more about you, then companies are going to try to start "helping" you (whether you want it or not). This is really just another form of this same intent issue (as was the "my Tivo thinks I'm gay" guy). People try this same stuff over and over and over, and it sort of works, and someone thinks it's cool, and then the world is just a little shittier bit by bit. We need to be more skeptical about accepting these "innovations" into our lives.

Another friend of mine in Japan told me about this robotic air freshener in their house, called Mechazawa. Basically, it's an automatic system that turns on and lights up red when it detects odors. It has turned their home into a sitcom:

[changing a dirty diaper]
wife: oh, man this stinks
husband: whoa
Mechazawa: vroooOOOOOOM!!!
me: I guess it's unanimous.
-----
wife: boy, you stink of sweat!
Mechazawa: vroooOOOOOOM!!!
me: no one asked you!
-----
[in bed in darkness]
wife: sniff....hey, did you do something?
husband: uhhh, no...
Mechazawa: [Flashing red eyes in the darkness] vroooOOOOOOM!!!
me: ok, ok, I did!

So, this machine has become this sitcom character (complete with catch-phrase) in their lives. It's funny, but that's because it's actions are largely harmless (although annoying if you were just trying to watch TV or something after going to the gym). However, these systems are leaking out everywhere now - in our phones, alarm clocks, game consoles - everywhere - and almost always, the result makes our lives worse in the long run.

I think what we need is something like The Three Laws of Robotics only for human-vs-system interactions. Here are some off the top of my head (likely needing refactoring):

1) A system will always have a way for a human to make their intent 100% clear.
2) A system will always have an easy and clear way to be overridden.
3) A system will always have a way to revert back to zero knowledge about a human.
4) A system will never offer an interaction without specifically being asked by a human.
5) A system can never offer it's information about a human to another human or system without the original human's permission.
6) A system can always be placed in 100% manual mode.

More later...

Places that you don't want to be the Four Square Mayor of...

2010-08-19T02:15:00.000-07:00

10) Traffic court.
9) The Dollar Store.
8) The morgue.
7) Wasilla, Alaska.
6) BP boardroom.
5) Fox Newsroom.
4) Paris Hilton's gynecologist's office.
3) The Jersey shore.
2) Church.
1) Free clinic.

My alarm clock is cheating on me, and how it relates to Kinect and Larry Ellison...

2010-08-14T18:11:00.000-07:00

So, I mentioned on Facebook a while ago that I got a voice controlled alarm clock. I say "Hello Moshi", and she replies "Enter Command", and then I say, "set alarm, 11:00am".

After some initial communication issues (I didn't know how to pronounce Moshi, and after trying a hundred combinations, I realized that voice control doesn't work when running only on batteries, sigh), we eventually came to an understanding.

We still fight fairly often - the exact command to turn off the alarm is "Turn off alarm", which, when I'm sleepy, I turn into "Turn alarm off," "Turn the alarm off," or "For fuck's sake, turn the goddamn alarm off!" You know, we have our good days and bad days.

So, recently I was talked into watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and as an aside, omg, the first season is so bad, I don't know if I can continue). Anyway, about half the time when Angel says something on the show, Moshi replies "Enter command". It doesn't matter what he says, Moshi is ready to serve him - she is ready.

The problem is, if you don't enter a command, then Moshi starts listing her menu - "You can say 'Time', 'Temperature', 'Set Alarm'...". This takes like ten seconds to say, and you can't interrupt her! Then, if I don't pause the TV show, Angel re-programs my alarm or changes the temperature to celsius or something. So, not only is he the most annoying character on the show - now he's just fucking with me.

So, to avoid this, as soon as Moshi starts getting wet for Angel, I have to immediately pause the show, and then say "Time", or something, quickly, so that her menu doesn't start. And then, five minutes later, she's all like, "Enter command, Angel dear..." again.

OK, so here's the thing - that's exactly how Kinect is going to work. Shadows on the wall are going to rewind the DVD, kids asking for ice cream is going to accidentally order the latest Call of Duty. I'm warning everyone right now - I'm six months ahead of you, and I have a fight every other day with my fucking alarm clock. That's going to be your whole A/V system soon.

You know how cell phone quality has made us all comfortable with pauses and drop outs, and we just say everything again, only louder? Or how most people don't even notice DCT blocks because of Youtube? Or we press a button ten times on a phone because we don't know if the OS is running too slowly, or if the screen didn't pick it up? Natural interfaces are the next thing to make the world slightly more shitty. It's just another annoyance that we'll all eventually get used to.

This reminded me that Larry Ellison (the Oracle dude) had this super-fancy TV system (back in the day when you needed to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get something that you can now get from Target for fifteen hundred bucks). Now because that shit never works right (the controllers are all different, and the TV and mixer can get into different input states, etc, etc), Larry was famous for always throwing his $500 remote at his $10K TV whenever it wouldn't work, and breaking everything.

Now, Larry's a billionaire and an asshole, but honestly, this is the right reaction to have. We need to not accept this stuff unless it works every time, because otherwise we get used to yet more ambiguous control over the things that we're actually paying for!

So, what I'm saying is that everyone needs to throw their Kinect at the screen whenever it fails, and then submit it for warranty. Eventually that will teach them.

In the meantime, Moshi is headed right for the bathtub if she doesn't stop two-timing me.

"I am pleased to announce a proof that P is not equal to NP, which is attached in 10pt and 12pt fonts."

2010-08-09T18:14:00.001-07:00

Best sentence combining something so awesome with something so mundane EVER.

Guys are gross...

2010-08-09T00:11:00.000-07:00

So, I was at a stoplight recently, and there was a quite buxom young lady, who, bless her heart, was jogging across the street to make the light. Now, here's the guy admission: I was basically mesmerized as she hurried along, and was completely zoned out watching her run past - time had stopped. Now remember - she was hurrying to make the light, so in the middle of my reptile brain freeze, the light had changed back to my favor and I hadn't noticed at all.

Eventually, someone behind me honked, and I snapped out of it, and looked back in the rearview mirror at this lady who was totally disgusted with me, and I was rightfully shamed. But then I looked around and noticed that all lanes of traffic (going both ways) had all stopped to watch the girl jog. Basically, traffic had shutdown - the online USDOT cam should add a special color to mark that situation.

Anyway, ladies, I can assure you, no matter how gross you think we are, we're grosser.

In case you need a crazy example of Prop 8's absurdity...

2010-08-06T00:11:00.000-07:00

Forget marriage - let's talk driver's licenses....

Ahhh, 1970.

Monkey Annoyance Expert Wanted...

2010-08-03T06:34:00.000-07:00

I have received this link four times today already!!

This video could not be more @DAVID_LYNCH -ian.

2010-08-02T14:01:00.000-07:00

And I'll bet they are are completely unaware of it.

Even the musical notes dilate and bend slightly. And the lyrics are creepy and double-entendre feeling - definitely songs that can be hummed to yourself when being raped by your priest.

Also, I like the fact that one of the dolls is way more real than the others (and that she appears to be sweating).

Moving trucks everywhere in the parking lot today...

2010-07-31T08:25:00.001-07:00

I guess that means Bungie is moving into their fancy new offices today!

Star Trek, falling, and JJ Abrams

2010-07-29T06:07:00.000-07:00

You know, I just realized - JJ Abrams really likes things falling off (or into) other things!

In the new Star Trek:

1) Young Kirk's dad's corvette falls over the cliff.
2) Kirk, Sulu and the engineer all fall out of the shuttle to land on the drill.
3) Engineer falls off the edge of the drill.
4) Kirk almost falls off the edge, but retracts his parachute.
5) Sulu does fall off the edge, but retracts himself back up.
6) During the fist fight, Kirk falls off the drill, but holds onto the edge.
7) Sulu stabs the romulan (in the back), who falls off the edge.
8) The romulans drop red matter out of their ship into the hole they made.
9) Sulu then falls off the edge of the drill.
10) Kirk jumps off the edge after him.
11) Spock's mom falls off the edge of the cliff during transport.
12) Kirk's pod falls onto the snow planet.
13) Kirk falls off the edge of the snow cliff (Kirk's second cliff of the movie, and third overall).
14) The monster chasing him falls off the edge of the cliff after him.
15) Scotty falls out of water control system onto the ship.
16) The entire internals of the romulan ship is *all* fallable ledges - Kirk, Nero and other romulans all jump off the ledges to other ledges multiple times.
17) Kirk shoots the romulan choking him, who then falls over the edge.
18) Kirk almost falls over the edge, but hangs on and climbs up (this is Kirk's *3rd* edge save of the movie, btw).
19) Spock shoots the drill and it falls into the ocean.
20) Nero's ship falls into the black hole.
21) The Enterprise *almost* falls into the black hole, then Scotty drops the warp cores, which fall into the black hole and save the Enterprise.

Once you notice all this falling and dropping, you can't watch the movie normally again.

For a movie taking place in space, a huge number of the plot points involve gravity!!

Howl-le-lu-ya!

2010-07-28T23:01:00.000-07:00

This is the stuff of nightmares.

Seriously, IGDA?!

2010-07-28T16:41:00.001-07:00

"Mark Pincus Announced as a Keynote for 2010 IGDA Leadership Forum"

You guys should just go for it and have Tim Langdell give your legal keynote.

It is Happening Again link...

2010-07-28T01:08:00.001-07:00

With pictures...

From the "It is Happening Again" art installation here in Seattle...

2010-07-27T21:02:00.000-07:00

"Owls have many different meanings throughout cultures. They are seens as portents of death, carriers of souls between worlds, evidence of sorcery, obseverers, and alien surveillance drones..."

For It is Happening Again, Joey Veltkamp is installing a wall of 30 paper mache owls and a deer trophy roughly 3 times normal size. These sculptures directly reference Twin Peaks and speak indirectly to the hipster taxidermy motifs on Capitol Hill, the passe trend of deer art (now supplanted by the latest "it" animal - owls) and the artist's own sentimental attachment to anything related to deer."

OK, here's how hip I am - I didn't know there was even once a trend of deer art, let alone the fact that it is now passe. I've also never noticed the hipster taxidermy motifs around Capitol Hill either.

By the way, the pictures of the owls on this postcard look like something you'd make in 4th grade art class.

Celestial Soul Portraits...

2010-07-26T18:31:00.001-07:00

Brian said he would get me one of these for my birthday!

Clay for Change!

2010-07-21T20:49:00.000-07:00

Ftw!

Holy shit, Inception is so goddamn stupid...

2010-07-21T00:37:00.000-07:00

Take away the score and the sounds effects and it's 2 hours of Leo awkwardly saying stuff like:

"What's the most resilient parasite? An idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules."

or something like:

Human projections of the dreamer's subconscious become aware of the dream walker and begin to act against it like antibodies. (groaned here)

and my favorite:

If we die now, while we're sedated, we go to dream limbo and become stuck there, and then, when we die we'll wake up in the real world, only our brains will be scrambled. (I laughed out loud here).

Holy fucking cow, this shit was terrible. And it was all carefully, clinically, designed to make you think you were "getting" something deep. With ponderous music and effects. In my personal hell, I'll have to watch this and Avatar back to back, over and over, while the rest of the audience gives them standing ovations.

The Matrix 2 was better than this movie.

Unintentional comedy at Kirkland Uncorked...

2010-07-18T21:24:00.000-07:00

Went down for my weekly veggie tofu at 'I heart Teriyaki', but this weekend was the annual Kirkland Uncorked/Classic Car weekend. BTW, it's awesome that Kirkland combines wine-drinking and classic cars - old people already drink gallons of wine, and now they are out driving their muscle cars - that's going to end well...

Anyway, they always get some douchey radio guy to announce the awards for the cars and raffles and such. This year he was AMAZING! He was the worst of radio combined with the worst wedding singer combined with alcohol. And, no one seemed to notice how accidentally funny this guy was, so I was just me laughing (and later Casey went he came down) - so, I am just rolling and laughing and no one else is.

Some random awesome moments:

"OK, it's time for raffles tickets!!! WOO HOO! Emcee, put on We are the Champions from Queen!!!!" [long pause] [Theme from Ghostbusters begins playing]

Apparently everyone lost their raffle tickets, so he had to just keep calling numbers out. One time after like six numbers, he exasperatedly yelled, "YOU'RE KIDDING ME, RIGHT?!!!"

This one old codger won, and he was so slow coming up to get the crappy prize (an oil change at Jiffy Lube), that the announcer started making fun of him, "wow, someone got a wheelchair"?

Every cash prize was accompanied by the joke that the person had to use half the money to buy him a drink (he had had plenty already).

The big prize was $250 and he had the money in his hands, and he's arguing with his producer, "This is way more than $250 - what are we giving away here? This seems like more!" Finally, he goes, "Look this is a classic car show and old people are bad at math, so we're giving away way more than $250!!" And then it still took drawing 4 numbers to find a winner.

One guy won 3 of the raffle prizes.

Once the announcer dude said, "What's the next prize?," and when told (off mic), replied (accidentally into the mic), "Well, that's a shitty prize." (It was.)

When they got to the purple raffle tickets, he said, "ok, let's pull a random ticket!" And then he tried to say off-mic, to his producer (although we could hear), "What do you mean we only sold one purple ticket?"

At another point, he yelled, "emcee, give me a little 'Hit Me with Your Best Shot!'" [after a pause, 'I Want a New Drug' starts playing...]

He couldn't read any of the names of the car owners that won, "With 67 Camero, ummm, Bob something something." And then he said to the crowd, "I'm gonna have words with Al after this!" Al was his long suffering producer with apparently terrible penmanship.

He got to one name and said "Jane, James, ummm, OH!! Janis!! Janis won!" Janis comes up to collect her prize. "Janis, hey baby, how you doing? You look great today!" He's TOTALLY mackin on Janis - in front of the entire crowd!

It was absolutely amazing - I had tears from laughing so hard!

One of those days - sex act crash was NOT a carjacking!

2010-07-15T21:48:00.001-07:00

I hate when this happens...

Fox-it PDF Reader can kiss my ass...

2010-07-15T17:14:00.000-07:00

Installing Fox-it is like playing a game of Operation now - you have to turn off several double negative check boxes to avoid the Ask toolbar, and then at the very end there is an "Accept>" and "Decline>" which is below their EULA. It's is not to accept the EULA (there's a seperate checkbox for that), it's to accept the Ask plug-in for IE to be installed!

Fuckers!

And yet somehow that's still better than Acrobat Reader. I guess one is more of an explict fucking (Fox-it), vs. the implict fucking (Acrobat, which installs 8 million extra hidden processes, services, and auto-runs).

Breaking News! BP Oil hires Mel Gibson to be their spokesracist!

2010-07-15T13:43:00.001-07:00

New Zealand rules!

2010-07-15T13:18:00.001-07:00

Drops software patents!

Could we get Chris Brown and Mel Gibson to remake 48 Hours?

2010-07-15T01:37:00.000-07:00

Movie idea - A version of yourself from the past wants to destroy you, so he makes incriminating recordings and stashes them all over the internet! Oh wait...

2010-07-14T13:25:00.000-07:00