Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: Computers

  • jawdropping

    (Pure geek post.)

    This is sick (not in the gross sense): 6502 compatible compiler and emulator in javascript.

    In JavaScript.

    If you don’t know what any of this means, that’s okay. I can’t hardly get my head around it either.

    Via JWZ.

  • Akismet

    I’ve started using the spam-killing service Akismet to handle comment spam on my three blogs. That, and instituted a basic moderation system for comments. I can’t say as I’ve been dealing with as much comment spam as some people, but I just got sick and tired of dealing with the problem myself and decided to offload the work.

    So far Akismet is pretty slick, though I’d guesstimate that it has only caught 50% or so of the spam comments I’ve received since activating it today. I’m hoping it gets better.

    It took a little bit of work to integrate it into my custom software, but I was able to crib a PHP class someone else had written and get it all integrated fairly smoothly. If you’re running one of the standard platforms like Movable Type or WordPress, though, there already exist handy plugins that you should just be able to drop into your blog directory.

    So if there’s any comment weirdness over the next few days as I monitor the activity and work out the kinks, bear with me. If you post a legitimate comment, it should show up right away, unless it was incorrectly flagged as spam. That’s where the moderation comes in; I’ll make sure to approve legit comments ASAP.

  • Commodore 64 emulator… in Flash

    Okay, geek levels are off the charts on this one: FC64, a Commodore C64 emulator for Flash. And it’s open source. This is just mind boggling…

    …because, among other things, what this means is that I could embed a Commodore 64 emulator, games and all, right here on my blog. Because it’s in Flash. And Flash in installed on nearly every browser these days.

    So not only could you play C-64 games here… if you know BASIC, you could write and run your own programs for it. So then I wonder if those are saveable? I bet that would be easy to hack… Talk about a community project: everybody writing programs for everybody else to run without having to install software or trade files at all. Hmmmmmmmmmm…

  • Dell computer fun

    Simone noted the humor/frustration level I was having with Dell this week at work. Of course, anytime I mention “Dell” around her she shakes her head in disgust, so perhaps she’s not exactly the most objective observer. :)

    What happened was, at work this week one of the newish Dell PCs started making a high-pitched spinning/whining noise. At first I thought it was a fan, so I opened up the box, eliminated the fans as a source of noise, and quickly concluded it was the hard drive. Sounds emanating from the hard drive are, generally, a Bad Thing. And sure enough, when I tried to boot the machine up again in order to copy the data to the network (most of the user data is already on the network, except for a few things like email and some accounting data), I got the Windows blue screen and problems booting.

    So I got the person set up with a temporary PC (an older one), pulled the hard drive, and called Dell.

    (Let me disclaim in advance that in fact all the people I talked to at Dell were very professional and helpful, and the overall service they performed was very good. It just turned into a minor comedy of errors.)

    First of all, the machine’s out of warranty; it was purchased one year and one month ago. Of course! Even assuming I’d bought the one-year service plan warranty with it, it still wouldn’t matter.

    Nearly 45 minutes later, after talking to three different people (a woman from India; some fellow with an unidentifiable accent in Tech Support; and a woman from Roseburg, Oregon in Sales), I was finally able to get the order placed for a new hard drive that matched the specs of the machine and drive in question: 80GB Ultra ATA, IDE interface. Pay attention, that’s an important detail.

    They tell me that yes, even though I ordered the drive with Next Day delivery, it still may not even ship out until Friday the 14th. That’s fine, I say, just get it here ASAP. And guess what? They surprise me by delivering the hard drive the very next day! Woo-hoo!

    Open the package, mount the drive into the PC chassis, go to plug everything in… and it’s the wrong type of drive. They sent me an 80GB Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive, which is incompatible with the IDE interface in this computer.

    So there’s not much else to do but get on the phone with Dell again, spending exactly 31 minutes on the phone this time (our office telephones have a call timer). I spoke with the Customer Service department (again a woman from India, as near as I can figure), got the return processed (UPS would pick it up in the next three days), then transferred to Sales, where I made sure to order exactly the right type of hard drive. I hope. This was Thursday.

    The new drive hasn’t arrived yet, so the speedy Next Day delivery that accompanied the first hard drive hasn’t recurred. Hopefully Monday? But, the UPS guy did pick up the return Friday morning, so that’s something.

    Simone did warn me.

  • Bad PHP! Bad!

    If you’re familiar with web programming and AJAX and PHP, check out this item about Client-side PHP on The Daily WTF. Go ahead, take a look. I’ll wait.

    Done? Good. Now, if you’re familiar with what’s happening in that code, I’ll wait while you convulse in horror. :)

    Holy expletive, that code makes me angry and want to laugh at the same time. I’ll just reiterate Deane’s headline: Someone please fire the person who wrote that.

  • What about a local PHP user group?

    Last week I met with a local businessman who was interested in finding a local PHP expert/consultant for a project that he’s expanding. He already has a long-distance PHP guy doing work for him, but also wanted someone local. This got me to thinking; aside from myself and a few isolated individuals, and Alpine, who are the PHP people for Central Oregon? Are there any PHP-specific shops or consultants who are available for this kind of thing? If not, why not? And how would anyone find out about them?

    My next thought, invariably, was We need a local PHP user group for exactly this kind of thing. A local organization where any and all of the PHP programmers/users can get together, and perhaps build a directory of services and maybe even host events.

    Would this be of interest to anyone? I’m actually pretty ignorant about the user group thing (it’s probably been close to a decade since I’ve been anywhere near a user group type of function), so I may not actually know of which I speak. For instance, is there already a Central Oregon PHP user group that I’m totally unaware of?

    I’d be interested in getting involved one way or another. What says the community-at-large?

  • PHP contest: Texas Holdem

    I thought this sounded interesting considering how popular poker is these days (you know who you are): PHP Editors is holding a PHP programming contest for a Texas Holdem game. I might try it out. It wouldn’t be anything like most commercial poker sites out there, but it would be an interesting programming project.

    …Not unlike being back in school, writing a program for whatever computer course I’d be in. Those were the days; they were still teaching Pascal at the time. I remember writing a Hangman game (it mostly sucked), and an algorithm for storing shuffling a deck of cards (which might have been a precursor for a poker program).

    Of course, handling and “shuffling” a deck of cards that only exists in a computer program is trivial. You simply need to have a structure representing the cards, and draw them randomly. (And a method for keeping track of what’s been drawn.) Each subsequent “shuffle” is simply a different random number set selecting the cards.

  • Interactive fiction

    Every once in awhile, I duck into the world of interactive fiction (IF; also known as the world of “text adventures,” for those of you who are appropriately old-school), one of my all-time favorite computer game genres, to get an idea of what’s new in the field and what’s been happening. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go read that Wikipedia link; it gives a much better summary than I could and goes into fantastic detail.)

    I love interactive fiction, going way back—we had a bunch of Infocom games when I was a kid and for my money, those were some of the best computer games around, bar none (still are, to a large extent). My two favorite Infocom games are “Planetfall” and “The Lurking Horror,” though of those two I only ever finished “Planetfall”… but I digress.

    Infocom games were the shizzle (who says that anymore?), but I even enjoyed simpler text adventures, and even crafted a few of my own, in Commodore 64 BASIC. I actually designed, on paper, many more text adventures than ever made it to the computer; this is the same love of creating/world building that drives my desire to write fiction for a living, among other things.

    Anyway, back to the here and now. Interactive fiction exists today in a kind of unique space; here’s what the Wikipedia article says about it:

    …interactive fiction no longer appears to be commercially viable, but a constant stream of new works is produced by an online interactive fiction community, using freely available development systems… these systems allowed anyone with sufficient time and dedication to create a game, and caused a growth boom in the online interactive fiction community.

    Today, the games created by enthusiasts of the genre regularly surpass the quality of the original Infocom games, and a number of yearly competitions and awards are given out to the best games in the field….

    Yes, strange to say, there is a small but thriving community surrounding this arcane game form. None of them do it for the money—okay, maybe some who enter the competition for the cash prize ($500) do—which is what makes it truly remarkable (nearly everything about it is free—the games, the programs to play them, the authoring tools, the documentation—everything). They do it for a love of the craft.

    What’s weird is this week, the Wall Street Journal Online published an article on text adventures: Keeping a Genre Alive. Total coincidence; in fact, I was checking out the IF sites before I saw the article. That’s kind of a freaky wavelength. At any rate, it’s a bit of a look-down-the-nose take on the genre and IF community, but it’s not all bad.

    So, having “rediscovered” interactive fiction (and downloading and checking out the latest authoring tools), writing some will be added to my perpetual list of Things I’d Like To Do But Don’t Have The Time For. This like many other interests will fall off the list at some point (probably in the near future) and then be re-added when I rediscover it again. It’s a big list. I’ll post it sometime.

  • Geekiest. Music. Ever.

    Okay, this will permanently brand me as the geekiest dork ever (I fully expect a “geek” comment from Shannon), but perusing WinAmp’s SHOUTcast Radio list today, I found the ultimate station:

    …wait for it…

    Commodore 64 remixes. From SLAY Radio.

    Yes, you read that correctly. Commodore 64 remixes.

    I’ve been letting it play in the background. It totally kicks ass.

    This strikes me as being a real Long Tail kind of thing.

  • Master Builder user interface – poor

    A couple of months ago I blogged a bit about Intuit Master Builder software and some of the problems that come with it. One of the things I wrote was, “It’s got a low barrier-to-entry user interface that makes it easy to learn and use for non techie types.”

    While that statement is (for the most part) true, it’s also true that the UI for Master Builder is completely ridiculous—especially for a Windows application in this day and age. Just how ridiculous it truly is struck me last week when we were at a user group meeting for Master Builder (they don’t happen often), and the consultant/expert was showing off some of the newest features.

    So, here are two examples of the poor UI that plagues this program. Both are from the “Equipment” screen, and are completely typical of every screen in the system. Click them for full-size images.

    Thumbnail image of the Equipment screen in Intuit Master Builder

    Thumbnail image of the Equipment screen in Intuit Master Builder

    Pretty horrible. But my particular favorites are the totally non-standard menu bar at the top (“Exit” is the first item?) and the garish, circa-Windows 3.1 toolbar buttons, also in a totally non-standard layout and position.