Oldskooler Ramblings

the unlikely child born of the home computer wars

My favorite Casio product…

Posted by Trixter on October 31, 2007

…is not any of their keyboards (although I have very fond memories of playing with my Casio VL-Tone and SK-1). It’s their first digital camera; in fact, the first consumer 3MP digital camera, the QV-3000 EX.

Mine broke a while ago. I finally found a replacement at a reasonable price (ie. under $20). I am taking pictures again. I am happy.

Why so happy over a dumb 3MP consumer camera? Because I am not a professional photographer and I don’t take pro pictures. The QV-3000 EX has just enough control for a noob like me to take manual-focus close-ups:
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…without looking like a complete beginner. And it’s night mode surprised the hell out of me:

10300023_edited-1.jpg

That picture was taken at midnight with the flash and the two house lights providing the only illumination. I wasn’t even using a tripod and it’s not blurry! That’s insane.

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »

Trixter Gets Pwned By Son; Film At 11

Posted by Trixter on October 30, 2007

To gear up for finally playing Half-Life 2 (and all the other goodies in the Orange Box), I’ve registered my original Half-Life with Steam and started playing through the original HL, moving on to Opposing Force, and finally Blue Shift. I wanted to get reacquainted with the setting and atmosphere before I took the plunge. Yes, I am that thorough. While such practices always result in much good-natured mocking from my friends, I doubt any of them are surprised.

To try to bone my skills back up to where they were a decade ago, I occasionally take a break and play Half-Life Deathmatch. It was during one of these sessions that Max, my 8-yr-old, saw me playing. After the requisite talk about “the blood and gibs aren’t real, it’s just a game, you would never do this in real life, right?” etc., he watched me get into a particularly hilarious crowbar fight with an evenly-matched opponent. We were both howling, and then he asked the inevitable question, “Can I play?”

Could he? It’s a mouse-and-keyboard FPS with an ESRB rating of “M”. The required skill level and content are years beyond him. And yet, he’s a pretty well-adjusted kid; whenever he sees something in a movie he can’t handle, he knows to close his eyes and/or cover his ears until it’s over. He knows when things are fake and when they’re real. He’s intellectually curious; all this last week I’ve been teaching him chess because he saw a set-up board somewhere and wanted to learn. Not bad for an eight-year-old.

Hell, he’s the son of the co-founder of MobyGames. Why not?

I installed Steam on his machine and registered my copy of Blue Shift to his account; like Half-Life, everything popped up as being registered and in ten minutes he was going through the Hazard Training Course. 20 minutes after that, we were playing HL Deathmatch against each other, in a private local LAN server hosted on his machine. And about 30 minutes after that, he pulled something so clever and so beyond his sum of experiences that it completely floored me. I’m still in awe over it. It’s why I’m posting this entry. See if you can follow along:

One of the sneakiest weapons in Half-Life Deathmatch are tripmines. You stick one to a surface (usually a wall), and a few seconds later a laser comes out of it, sensing the other side of the room. If anything crosses its path, the mine blows up, usually taking the offender with it. On our first map, I was cheerfully placing these all over the place, and he quickly learned what they are and how to use them.

That’s not the cool part. The cool part is, on the second map we played, there is a large area with munitions you can get to by swimming in a small canal with a very strong current. The water in the canal is murky and you can’t see into it until you’re actually down there swimming in the water. The current gets stronger along the way, to a point where you can’t fight it and are swept into the giant room with the munitions. About ten minutes after starting the map, I dove into the canal to get to the bigger room. I swam until the current started to sweep me towards the room… and it was at this point I saw a tripmine placed in the canal, unavoidably in my path. He had not only hidden a tripmine in murky water that you can’t see into until you’re already in it… but had placed it after the point where it still might have been possible to swim out of the way. I had about 1.5 seconds to take that in before it blew me to bits.

Let’s review: Eight-year-old, with no past history of playing any FPS, online or not, accomplishes in less than an hour something so sneaky and clever it takes most young adults a few days of playing, against many other people, to pick up.

I was pwned by my eight-year-old son. In a clever way, not a young-kid reflex twitch way. Holy mother of crap!

Posted in Family, Gaming | 5 Comments »

You, sir, are no hero

Posted by Trixter on October 9, 2007

I loved the first season of Heroes, the X-Men-style soap opera that ran on NBC from 2006-2007 — that is, I tried to love it, but threw my hands up in despair at the last episode of the season. As a fan of comics and sci-fi, I grew increasingly disappointed that, throughout the run of the season, there were more and more moments of missed opportunities and direction. Sylar, a truly creepy villain with a streak of vulnerability, grew increasingly powerful; for example, he could stop bullets using telekinesis. Yet in the final episode of the season, he is killed by a slow-moving weak individual who runs at him for at least 3 full seconds before impaling him with a sword. He didn’t even have his back turned. How do you go from stopping bullets to being unable to stop a chubby nerd running at you from a distance of 18 feet? I’m not a hollywood writer; I’m just a fan.  But even I thought that killing Sylar using the chubby nerd’s power (the ability to stop time, and also teleport) would have been much more believable and satisfying. What about stopping time, wrestling with the decision to kill a human being, slowly and tearfully doing it after much deliberation, and then resuming time to see what must be his victim’s incredibly surprised reaction? Or hell, go the dumbass route and teleport Sylar into a brick wall or something? I know I’m just an amateur, but surely something better could have been done as a finale to the character.

The season had brilliant moments, such as properly resolving the Peter/Nathan storyline (brothers at odds), and also having the courage to show — graphically — what happens when you transmute your fist inside someone’s head. But as it dragged on, the number of missed opportunities started to outweigh the number of cool moments.  I am still waiting for the scene where Sylar picks up Claire using telekinesis and starts slamming her into everything, only to become more and more frustrated as she quickly regenerates.  I can dream.

Hey, it was a first season. Many first seasons suck; for example, we simply do not speak of the first season of ST:TNG in my household. So it was with high hopes that I started watching the 2nd season, the first episode of which I just now saw (thank you ReplayTV). In it, we see that the spectacular explosion of Peter (more powerful than Sylar; he absorbed everyone’s powers automatically) was survived by his brother Nathan, who could fly and flew him out of harm’s way before he (Peter) exploded as a result of being unable to contain one of his powers. Peter is assumed to be dead, as one would normally be from a crazy powerful explosion. Nathan, depressed and drinking in a bar, looks at himself in the mirror and for a split second sees not his own face but the face of his brother Peter, charred and melted (presumably from the explosion). He looks away, looks back, and his face appears normal in the mirror.

At this point I got really excited, because what that scene hinted at was that Nathan was actually Peter in disguise. Why would that make sense? Because Peter had absorbed a regeneration power, which would account for him surviving the explosion. He had also absorbed a power that allowed him to disguise his appearance. Masquerading as Nathan would be Peter’s way of dealing with the enormous guilt he must feel at being the cause of his brother’s death, as his brother gave his own life to fly Peter out of New York to go explode harmlessly over the ocean. It’s one of those brilliant MY GOD IT ALL FITS moments, and would make for one incredibly kick-ass storyline. I told Melissa what I was thinking, and, for a moment, we were in awe of how clever such a storyline would be.

And then ten minutes later, Peter is found, alive and well somewhere. So much for being clever. My hopes dashed, I kept watching, only to find that Peter has…wait for it… amnesia! Yes, amnesia. Most episodes of Full House have deeper revelations than that. Hell, I’ve seen Teletubbies episodes with more cunning and insight. So it’s now obvious that Heroes is pretty much a soap opera that appeals to nerds without them realizing it’s a soap opera, because nerds don’t (normally) watch soap operas.

I don’t hold much hope for the series. I would probably ditch it if it weren’t for the fact that my wife enjoys it, which is the closest I will ever get to her sitting down and watching Sci-Fi with me on a regular basis. But personally, at this point it’s just something that is keeping me from catching up on my Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, and Farscape.

PS: The best show you all missed the last three months was Burn Notice on the USA network. Torrent it, catch reruns, whatever — it’s clever, it gets better with every episode, and I’m thankful USA is giving it a second season.

Posted in Entertainment | Leave a Comment »

The Window

Posted by Trixter on October 2, 2007

My eldest son Sam, you’ll recall, is autistic. (Technically, it’s PDDNOS, which is a fancy way of saying “we don’t know” in an official-sounding capacity.) He has many issues, such as being lost in his own world for periods of time so long that he’s simply unavailable. Up to about a year ago, he would spend between 50% and 80% of his time in his own world, which makes it difficult to teach him how to read, how to write, how to behave… anything, really. Especially since, when you try to pull him out of his world and back into ours, he gets frustrated and angry. So naturally he’s fallen way behind his peers in school by several grade levels, and will most likely live with us for a few decades instead of going to college. I’m ok with this; I came to terms with it many years ago.

Once in a great while, there are moments that can floor you. For some unknown reason we haven’t discovered yet, there are a few times each week when something happens and he’s running at full capacity, for just a few seconds or so. For that brief time, when all synapses are firing, a mental window opens up and you can see that, yes, there really is a regular kid trapped in there. Sometimes they’re subtle, like using a slang phrase with perfect intonation at an appropriate time (autistic kids can’t empathize, so this is major); other times, it’s a fleeting moment of understanding, usually unspoken, about something you both saw or heard. (Laughing at the same slapstick routine at the same moments is a personal favorite.) You can never see those moments coming — there’s no warning or triggers we can notice — but for a parent, they are worth everything in the world. If I could sell every piece of software and hardware I own to predict when that window will open up, I’d do it without hesitation. If I could live completely without technology to force that window to last longer, I would start the Amish pilgrimage this very second.

About a year ago we were able to find a medication dosage that finally started to make some progress; it keeps him just a little bit more in the here and now, about 30 more minutes a day, with less consequences (for us) when we try to pull him into our world. This is just enough extra time to get him reading at a 1st or 2nd grade level. His reading is stilted, spotty, full of 5-second pauses, and doesn’t flow well. But it’s reading, and when he’s not frustrated, it is functional.

After a lengthy battle with the children to get them to bed, I was about to retire for the day when I heard noises coming from their bedroom area. Thinking it was Max, our younger son who has a motormouth stuck at 8500 RPM, I went over to tell Max to pipe down and get to sleep. I froze when I realized it was Sam. He was reading a 1st-grade level book, out loud, to himself, in bed. This act alone is a monumental first. But what knocked the wind out of me was that he was reading when his mental window was open, and what came out was a perfect understanding and command of the meaning of the sentences, their tone, their inflection, cadence, everything. The delivery was stilted, but the comprehension was easily a few years beyond his peers (who usually read aloud in near monotone).

He eventually noticed me standing in the doorway, and asked me why I was crying. I told him I had forgotten how beautiful the view through his window was.

Posted in Family | 5 Comments »

My love/hate relationship with the demoscene

Posted by Trixter on September 1, 2007

I haven’t watched many modern demos in the last 10 years; I usually watch maybe 1 or 2 a year.  My demoscene friends are always shocked when I tell them that, given my past involvement with all things sceneish.  In fact, they’re always shocked, no matter how many times it comes up.  I’m going to try to explain why, briefly, and then hopefully either I will change, or it will never come up again.

In a nutshell, I feel shame and self-loathing when I watch modern Windows demos.   Before that completely confuses you, I’ll hurriedly explain that I always regretted not having the time, skill, intelligence (my math has always been poor), and inclination to create Windows demos.  So when I watch one, I am reminded of how I have failed at that particular aspiration.  I have succeeded at others, but watching a 64K from Fairlight or Farbrausch just gets me depressed.  Yes, I’m screwed up.  The better and more impressive the demo/intro/4k is, the worse I feel.  I know it’s not rational.

So now you know.  This also conveniently explains why I have actually gone backwards in my democoding (I started out on 386+SB+VGA and my latest efforts are geared toward an 8088+PC speaker+CGA) instead of most people, who go forwards.  For example, I’m writing a small utility as a favor to a friend, but it needs to support long filenames in Windows XP and memory over 640K.  Regardless, I’m writing it in DOS, on the XT, because I feel safe and comfortable doing so.  Once it runs within the restrictions of DOS, I’m going to port the code over to WinXP and compile it with a WinXP compiler.

Related topic change: We’ve started talking about MindCandy volume 3.

Posted in Demoscene, Programming | 5 Comments »

Back on the grid

Posted by Trixter on August 25, 2007

Through the help of two good friends, I am now back on the grid, and (cue insidious music) stronger than before.  I finally have a dual-core rig, for one thing.

I have enough parts left over to construct a second machine to replace my ailing fileserver, so that’s my next project.  But before I start that, I’m going to write a curious new utility that will help anyone with digital picture frames.  More later.

Posted in Technology | Leave a Comment »

The truth about netopsystems

Posted by Trixter on August 19, 2007

I was first made aware of Net Op Systems (currently going by the name of NOS Microsystems Ltd.) when downloading Adobe Acrobat Reader about 3 years ago. I was struck by how small the compressed deliverable was, so, being a compression hobbyist, I did some preliminary analysis and found that they used a considerable about of context arrangement and prediction (ie. “solid” mode in rar/7-zip, or the content-specific predictors in PAQ) to get the size down. I recently ran across their product again when downloading the most recent version of Solaris x86; it comes in a 1.1G NOSSO executable package. The sole payload was a 3.1G .ISO image, which meant the compressed deliverable was 37% of the uncompressed size.  This is very impressive, given that the .ISO image is filled with a lot of .JAR and .BZ2 compressed images themselves. The successful extraction of a workable .ISO file from this compressed deliverable means that NOSSO has to perform the following to work its magic:

  1. Identify the various compressed files in the .ISO wrapper
  2. Extract those compressed files
  3. Decompress the content inside those compressed files
  4. Arrange everything by context (ie. all ASCII text in one group, all binary executables in another group, etc)
  5. Compress the entire thing to a proprietary stream, using content-specific prediction for various content groups
  6. Store the original arrangement of the compressed and uncompressed content

Upon extraction, the NOSSO distributable has to perform the following:

  1. Decompress everything and keep track of it
  2. RECOMPRESS the data originally found in compressed files, so that their effective format is kept the same. There may be small differences due to compression options and implementations, but as long as the end result is usable by the end program (ie. a reassembled .ZIP file is still able to be decompressed into the same contents) then there’s no harm done.
  3. Rearrange the end result back into the original container (in my case an .ISO file)

This is why they call their process “reconstitution” instead of “decompression”, because the end result, while functionally identical, is usually not bit-for-bit identical. By taking advantage of context and recompressing files from less-efficient formats into the more efficient format NOSSO uses internally, we can get these excellent compression ratios. (In fact, I’ll wager that, to speed up reconstitution times, they use a very fast and less efficient version of recompression of the files inside the target wrapper, which would inflate them slightly and result in even more “impressive” compression ratios :-)

What’s the downside? The downside is that this entire process defeats its own purpose. I’ll explain:

NOSSO is marketed as a delivery format that saves everybody bandwidth and, presumably, time. It’s that presumption that allows them to shoot themselves in the foot. While the compressed distributable only took 39 minutes to download on my 6mbit/s cable modem connection, it took a whopping 124 minutes to “reconstitute” on a 2.6GHz P4 with 700MB RAM free (out of 1G RAM total). My total time to get the end result was 163 minutes. (A 2.6GHz machine is not the bleeding edge in 2007, but it’s no slouch either, and is representative of the average system most people will use for everyday use.) At its original size, 3.1G, it would have taken me only 104 minutes to download it.

It would have been faster to get the end result had it not been compressed at all.

Now, 6mbit/s is a pretty fast broadband connection, so I understand that skews the results a bit. With a more common broadband connection speed of 3mbit/s, let’s check the numbers again: Compressed download + extraction: 202 minutes. Uncompressed download: 208 minutes. Okay, so it’s break-even at a 3mbit/s connection. But break-even still involves 100% CPU utilization as the thing is decompressed, resulting in an unusable system for two hours, so it’s still not “free”.

Is there strength in using any compression at all? Let’s check both WinRAR and 7-Zip on the original 3.1G unmodified .ISO file:

  • 7-Zip compressed size: 2.68G. Time to download at 3mbit/s: 187 minutes. Decompression time: 14 minutes. Total time to get the end result: 201 minutes.
  • WinRAR compressed size: 2.69G. Time to download at 3mbit/s: 189 minutes. Decompression time: 3 minutes. Total time to get the end result: 192 minutes.

So, at 3mb/s, the end result was just about the same, except our system was only tied up for 3 or 15 minutes instead of two hours. We’d get even more compression at the same decompression speed if we burst the .ISO like NOSSO does, compressed using WinRAR’s or 7-Zip’s “solid” mode, and then reconstitute it back into an .ISO when done with a small utility program.

My conclusion from all this is that there’s really no point in using NetOpSystem’s product, unless the end-user’s broadband speed is 1mbit/s or slower. But if it’s that slow, the user is already used to ordering DVD-ROMs for delivery instead of trying to download them, right? Or, if the user downloads them anyway, they’re used to firing them off before they go to bed, to download overnight. So, again, no need for the product…

…unless you’re the content producer and want to transfer cost (bandwidth) to the end user (time). Which is probably why NetOpSystems is still in business.

Posted in Technology | 16 Comments »

Bonez

Posted by Trixter on August 17, 2007

Can’t believe I forgot to post this:  Wednesday of last week, Max fell off his bike, landed directly on his right clavicle, and broke it completely in two.  Proof:

maxbreak.png

They don’t set bones like that unless they’re poking out through the skin.  It’s not a support structure (ie. he doesn’t need it to hold his shoulders up or anything) so he’s just walking around with it like that.  At least, somewhat like that — I’m hoping it heals properly.  He gets another xray next week, and we’ll see after that.

Poor guy!  I’m 36 and haven’t broken anything (yet)…

Posted in Family | 1 Comment »

BEEP

Posted by Trixter on August 2, 2007

My anality reared its ugly head — I couldn’t take this computer-in-unknown-state any longer, so I gathered up my birthday money and bought a new power supply and motherboard. Eight hours later at 4am, I finally heard my first BEEP — one long and two short, which was a memory problem. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was to hear the damn thing finally speak to me. Some DDR swaps, and we finally boot.

So the motherboard was toast. Problem solved. So why the new power supply? Because it didn’t quite pass the ATX power supply tester I have. You see, the tester is supposed to show lights and beep. The one I was given showed lights… but no beep. So it was flaky. New motherboard: $70. New power supply: $40.

Total cost of this free machine: free $50 $90 $160. And I still don’t have a PCI-e video card yet (my old Diamond Viper is currently driving the machine. Yes, that’s right kids, a TNT card from 1998 is sitting in an Athlon 64.)

The best part? I scraped off the thermal goo and found it’s an Athlon 64 3200 — as in, the original Athlon 64. It’s slower than my main desktop machine (an Athlon XP). I have now paid upwards of $160 for a machine that is effectively three years old and slower than what I already have. Viva l’irony!

Don’t get me wrong; I think the entire process has been a hoot, and I love solving PC hardware problems. Better yet, the motherboard supports Athlon X2, so when I scrape together some more cash (probably my next birthday ;-) I can swap in an X2 and finally join the world of multi-core computing. It’s all good.

Posted in Technology | 5 Comments »

But it’s FREE

Posted by Trixter on August 1, 2007

In sympathy to my financial plight, and possibly as a birthday present (I’m 36 today, whoopidy-doo), a coworker donated an Athlon 64 rig to me so that Sam could have a fast enough machine to run voice recognition software so he could email his family. (Sam has processing delays akin to autism and has trouble typing quickly.) I received a case, power supply, unknown Athlon 64 CPU hidden under a giant Zalman heatsink, motherboard, and RAM — which is more than powerful enough for voice recognition. All I need to do is add some spare hard drives lying around and it’s functional. It was a very generous donation.

It also doesn’t work.

It won’t POST, other than the fans spinning up; that’s it. No beeps, nothing. So, here begins the shopping list I’ve had to purchase in order to troubleshoot the thing:

  • 20-to-24-pin power supply adapter: $4

…because the PSU was 20-pin and the motherboard was 24-pin. No change in operation. Now we test the power supply itself:

  • Power supply tester for ATX 2.0 power supplies: $20

…confirmed that the power supply is functional. Moving on:

  • Motherboard POST code display and PCI power testing board: $26 (cheap!)

…which I’m still waiting to arrive in the mail. This will let me see any POST codes as well as making sure power is going through the motherboard and hitting the PCI slots. If it starts to POST but stops, then probably the CPU is bad. If it never POSTS a single code, the motherboard is bad. Either way, this “free” gift has cost a minimum of $50, with at least another $80 (CPU or motherboard, whichever I find is bad).

Still, the thought was nice. And heck, getting an Athlon 64 rig for free $50 $130 is a great deal.

I’m not down or anything, I just find the situation ironic (and, by proxy, funny).

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

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