Posts
I don't know why this is, the solution seems absurdly obvious...Only recently did calendar and address book functionality become part of the operating system, but it's so basic you have to wonder why it took so long.
It's not like that kind of info is difficult to store and make available...
I was back on this issue because of getting the new MacBook (17") at the beginning of the month (3/09). I wanted to get it set to read the calendars on my G5 and wife's Mini. But I had lost how to publish those other ones, in the Leopard upgrade a year ago. So we hadn't been sharing calendars for months. And that extended to our PDAs.
The problem has several aspects: #1--I don't want my calendars out on the web. I put things in it that are only for her to know about. #2--I'm not buying Leopard Server for another umpty-hundred $ (apparently "LS" has built-in assistance for managing this). #3--I wasn't remembering the correct name for what I wanted to do; I kept thinking it was CalDAV, which it would be for "LS".
What I needed was WebDAV for iCal. Regrettably there doesn't seem to be any helper tool around to get you through the awkward need to use Terminal (cmd-line). Not that I can't, been a unix user for nearly 20 years...but there are more than a few tiny details.
Turned out that I still had the old setup properly in place, I just needed to do the Apache parts, which are about creating a userid/password and a httpd config block. Of course, this means YAPTR (yet another password to remember), which really means it has to get written down somewhere...
I'm still migrating from the old Powerbook onto the new one...there's built-in help for something that complex...why not for WebDAV? Mostly done, except for things like my old address book, the keychain, mail archive, and probably something else I don't remember. I did the manual drag/drop so far, haven't run the migration tool. (Why not? Because I had to completely reconfigure my home network again. Seems I have to start over every single time I add a new wireless device, because I don't remember how I did it before. Even after writing it down. Too many passwords.)
Spelling check should have been part of the O/S years ago, too. Why wasn't it? It's not like that is hard either...granted, a big dictionary is a good-sized file, which would have been problematic >20 years ago, but now? Should be a standard function so that any app can use it.
Built-in general-purpose database, too. That, too, would have been a problem in the 80s...but it ain't now. Granted, there is no shortage of free databases around, but they take a lot of work to do anything, even something simple.
Which is why Excel became the defacto database for an awful lot of information. I mostly use Filemaker for that sort of thing, for my own personal data. It's pretty friendly.
But a built-in database would be the right kind of place to store all kinds of stuff...you could argue that the filesystem IS a database, and in a very loose sense, that's true, inasmuch as you can store anything. But it doesn't really have any built-in organizing capabilities; limited sorting; usually doesn't handle large quantities of files in a single folder very well...
What other things should be O/S built-in capabilities?
Monday, March 23, 2009
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Text Processing etc, part 2
Been continuing on with another text processing tool. This one will be able to read in a story, and spit back the top several topics in that story.
Actually this is 3 tools. First is the training input creator. Second is the model creator. Third is the runtime document processor.
Training creator shows you an input doc (web-p, text file, etc; simple things), allows you to mark it with topics, and save the result. Hmm...just occurred to me: should I allow PDF as input? that's not actually too hard to accomplish, with a PDF ripper front-end.
Model Creator takes the training input and creates a recognition model. It's not a statistical model. I was thinking about using SVM (Support Vector Machine) in this, but that kinda wants actual percent probabilities, which I don't have. I probably could if I think of a way to normalize values.
Runtime processor receives the story you want to know about, and returns some topics.
I also use an english word dictionary in this (although I don't there's any requirement to do that). You'd think that finding a good one wouldn't be that hard...I thought that. But we are wrong! Finding dictionary files is not that hard, I have several. The biggest one I could find online had over 200K words, but you'd be amazed at the basic words that were missing... "cat", for example. And "horse"? You'd be likewise amazed at the really unusual words it DOES have: "catachrestically" -- what the heck is that? And why is "catawampously" in there? Have you ever even seen those two before?
This is a bizarre dictionary. And it's WAY bigger than the others I found...although it seems likely that the others have a lot more of the basic/common stuff and not so much the exotic words. Maybe I just need to merge them all...
But this weirdness has forced me to track unknown words, since a lot of them are fairly common.
Why can't we have a good, pretty complete, free dictionary word list? i.e., one that is better than the ones I've found recently...
Related to that: ever looked at WordNet? An interesting project. If you look around, you can find a number of browser-based WN viewers: enter a word, get a view of the words or phrases that are nearby in terms of some flavor of semantics. You also get use-type (noun, verb, etc). And some more exotic aspects that I don't quite know what they are.
What you don't get is also interesting, because I went looking for this. You don't get the root word for your word. E.g., if your word is "catawampously", the root word for that is "catawampous". So who cares about root words? Well, the topic-ID software would have a better model if I could convert training words and runtime-doc words into their root/stemmed form.
So I do of course know about the Porter Stemmer, I grabbed the java version, and have integrated that...problem is that it overstems, in my opinion. (I have read some of the more formal study work that compares stemmers; Porter is really good--for english--and really bad--for other languages. Porter is entirely suffix-based, and only knows english suffixes. (You could do the same thing for other languages, I'm sure.) Porter will make an error like stemming "heading" into "head"--where "heading" most likely means "direction" and "head" most likely means "part of your body where your brain is", although I suspect that both have less common usage that is exactly reversed. The formal comparisons suggest this is a small problem. So I don't know. It'd be easy enough to insert the Porter stemmer into the pipeline and try it out--except that I don't know how I'd tell if it was better...
Leads you to wonder why there's no serious dictionary-based stemmer...I've read about them, too, and what you seem to get is a hybrid that does a little of the Porter style, and more table-lookup.
So why isn't there a pure dictionary-based table-lookup stemmer? You'd base it off a really large dictionary (you see where this has been going now). That would not be perfect, you'd get some errors where the stem is different depending on noun/verb usage. You'd only need a hash-table to implement this. If you needed to be fancier, you could deal with the noun-verb-etc aspect, but figuring that out in the first place is probably more expensive than the error (and is itself an imperfect process, so you'd be introducing a different flavor of error into the answer).
This doesn't make sense to me...a pure dictionary-based stemmer would be time-consuming to create, but trivial to use. And it would work for all languages where root words exist (i.e., not chinese/japanese/etc). It'd be a little large, a complete english dictionary is a few megabytes, whereas the Porter stemmer code is a few kilobytes.
---
Further notes: this weird dictionary, "unabr.dict", appears to be associated with password-cracking...which might explain the missing common words. Might. Assoc with crossword puzzles, too?
This URL:
http://www.puzzlers.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=solving:wordlists:about:start
seems to say a lot more about word lists, and "unabr.dict" especially. I downloaded all the word lists mentioned there. Should produce a better set than "unabr.dict".
Should also point out that when I have written "dictionary" here, I really mean "word list", not a dictionary-with-definitions-n-stuff. That probably explains why I found "unabr.dict" early on.
Also to be noted: these lists aren't going to contain names, excepting when names are other words. Vaguely annoying, if you're doing what I'm doing with word lists, because "Bernanke" and "Greenspan" are going to correspond to several money/gov't topics, and probably nothing else.
Actually this is 3 tools. First is the training input creator. Second is the model creator. Third is the runtime document processor.
Training creator shows you an input doc (web-p, text file, etc; simple things), allows you to mark it with topics, and save the result. Hmm...just occurred to me: should I allow PDF as input? that's not actually too hard to accomplish, with a PDF ripper front-end.
Model Creator takes the training input and creates a recognition model. It's not a statistical model. I was thinking about using SVM (Support Vector Machine) in this, but that kinda wants actual percent probabilities, which I don't have. I probably could if I think of a way to normalize values.
Runtime processor receives the story you want to know about, and returns some topics.
I also use an english word dictionary in this (although I don't there's any requirement to do that). You'd think that finding a good one wouldn't be that hard...I thought that. But we are wrong! Finding dictionary files is not that hard, I have several. The biggest one I could find online had over 200K words, but you'd be amazed at the basic words that were missing... "cat", for example. And "horse"? You'd be likewise amazed at the really unusual words it DOES have: "catachrestically" -- what the heck is that? And why is "catawampously" in there? Have you ever even seen those two before?
This is a bizarre dictionary. And it's WAY bigger than the others I found...although it seems likely that the others have a lot more of the basic/common stuff and not so much the exotic words. Maybe I just need to merge them all...
But this weirdness has forced me to track unknown words, since a lot of them are fairly common.
Why can't we have a good, pretty complete, free dictionary word list? i.e., one that is better than the ones I've found recently...
Related to that: ever looked at WordNet? An interesting project. If you look around, you can find a number of browser-based WN viewers: enter a word, get a view of the words or phrases that are nearby in terms of some flavor of semantics. You also get use-type (noun, verb, etc). And some more exotic aspects that I don't quite know what they are.
What you don't get is also interesting, because I went looking for this. You don't get the root word for your word. E.g., if your word is "catawampously", the root word for that is "catawampous". So who cares about root words? Well, the topic-ID software would have a better model if I could convert training words and runtime-doc words into their root/stemmed form.
So I do of course know about the Porter Stemmer, I grabbed the java version, and have integrated that...problem is that it overstems, in my opinion. (I have read some of the more formal study work that compares stemmers; Porter is really good--for english--and really bad--for other languages. Porter is entirely suffix-based, and only knows english suffixes. (You could do the same thing for other languages, I'm sure.) Porter will make an error like stemming "heading" into "head"--where "heading" most likely means "direction" and "head" most likely means "part of your body where your brain is", although I suspect that both have less common usage that is exactly reversed. The formal comparisons suggest this is a small problem. So I don't know. It'd be easy enough to insert the Porter stemmer into the pipeline and try it out--except that I don't know how I'd tell if it was better...
Leads you to wonder why there's no serious dictionary-based stemmer...I've read about them, too, and what you seem to get is a hybrid that does a little of the Porter style, and more table-lookup.
So why isn't there a pure dictionary-based table-lookup stemmer? You'd base it off a really large dictionary (you see where this has been going now). That would not be perfect, you'd get some errors where the stem is different depending on noun/verb usage. You'd only need a hash-table to implement this. If you needed to be fancier, you could deal with the noun-verb-etc aspect, but figuring that out in the first place is probably more expensive than the error (and is itself an imperfect process, so you'd be introducing a different flavor of error into the answer).
This doesn't make sense to me...a pure dictionary-based stemmer would be time-consuming to create, but trivial to use. And it would work for all languages where root words exist (i.e., not chinese/japanese/etc). It'd be a little large, a complete english dictionary is a few megabytes, whereas the Porter stemmer code is a few kilobytes.
---
Further notes: this weird dictionary, "unabr.dict", appears to be associated with password-cracking...which might explain the missing common words. Might. Assoc with crossword puzzles, too?
This URL:
http://www.puzzlers.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=solving:wordlists:about:start
seems to say a lot more about word lists, and "unabr.dict" especially. I downloaded all the word lists mentioned there. Should produce a better set than "unabr.dict".
Should also point out that when I have written "dictionary" here, I really mean "word list", not a dictionary-with-definitions-n-stuff. That probably explains why I found "unabr.dict" early on.
Also to be noted: these lists aren't going to contain names, excepting when names are other words. Vaguely annoying, if you're doing what I'm doing with word lists, because "Bernanke" and "Greenspan" are going to correspond to several money/gov't topics, and probably nothing else.
Friday, February 27, 2009
New computes
Had a rare opportunity yesterday...buy a brand-new Macintosh at a seriously discounted price. MicroCenter sent me a sale flyer last week, special pricing starting yesterday. Mac Powerbook Pro was $1799, 17", 2.5 GHz, 2GB RAM, 250 GB disk. Intel dual-core processor. Nice machine.
Deal too good to pass up, like when I got my refurb G5 in 2004. Only problem is that NONE of my existing Mac software will run on this machine...going to have to download entirely new versions of the freebies, and pay for a couple of others. At least I can do it piecemeal, unlike if I replaced my G5. Dreading that day...
So I got it home just in time to find out that my internet access is dead for the next 18 hours...sob!
Deal too good to pass up, like when I got my refurb G5 in 2004. Only problem is that NONE of my existing Mac software will run on this machine...going to have to download entirely new versions of the freebies, and pay for a couple of others. At least I can do it piecemeal, unlike if I replaced my G5. Dreading that day...
So I got it home just in time to find out that my internet access is dead for the next 18 hours...sob!
Stephanie Plum...
my favorite funniest book character...new book "Plum Spooky" came out in Jan...why not before Xmas I don't know...that seems poor timing by the publisher.
Anyway...this is one of those "between the numbers" books. Previously they were a little different, there was more character development in them, and less going on. This one is actually a Number book sans the boyfriends, and with this "Diesel" guy instead.
Which is just fine, it is just a screamingly funny as the numbered ones, which the other "Betweens" were not.
Looking at the length of it: 300pp, just like the numbers books, and twice the thickness of the other "betweens" titles. I got it for 30% off at Borders Express at the mall, and read it over the next 48 hours...great fun.
You really gotta wonder why Stephanie hasn't been turned into a movie. (yes, Grafton hasn't either, and V.I. Warshawski was more like VI wash-out-ski, so maybe that's it--except that Plum would be a lot funnier than those others)
Anyway...this is one of those "between the numbers" books. Previously they were a little different, there was more character development in them, and less going on. This one is actually a Number book sans the boyfriends, and with this "Diesel" guy instead.
Which is just fine, it is just a screamingly funny as the numbered ones, which the other "Betweens" were not.
Looking at the length of it: 300pp, just like the numbers books, and twice the thickness of the other "betweens" titles. I got it for 30% off at Borders Express at the mall, and read it over the next 48 hours...great fun.
You really gotta wonder why Stephanie hasn't been turned into a movie. (yes, Grafton hasn't either, and V.I. Warshawski was more like VI wash-out-ski, so maybe that's it--except that Plum would be a lot funnier than those others)
found a free game...
called NEXUIZ
it's a pretty serious download, 380MB for the zip file...it's basically a deathmatch FPS game. runs well on my XP-64 box. (whereas UT04 has gone bad for some reason)
get it here
I've only played it a tiny bit...it's based on DarkPlaces, a Q1-source-derived engine.
and I am stuck at a seemingly simple low-grav level. It's instagib, which is not my fave, and I'm doing badly...and this is an early level. Have not figured out the rest of the weapons, so previously I've mostly been lucky.
it's a pretty serious download, 380MB for the zip file...it's basically a deathmatch FPS game. runs well on my XP-64 box. (whereas UT04 has gone bad for some reason)
get it here
I've only played it a tiny bit...it's based on DarkPlaces, a Q1-source-derived engine.
and I am stuck at a seemingly simple low-grav level. It's instagib, which is not my fave, and I'm doing badly...and this is an early level. Have not figured out the rest of the weapons, so previously I've mostly been lucky.
some online animation
http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/movies/
in particular you want to look at Big Buck Bunny (8min) and Murnau the Vampire (27 min). BBB was an easy download. Murnau was not; apparently there are torrents, but that seems to not work for me any more...despite a brand-new BT. Which is too bad, this is an exceptional bit of animation; not available in hi-def, tho.
fwiw, F W Murnau was the director of Nosferatu, the first, silent, vampire movie. Apparently you can see it online HERE.
in particular you want to look at Big Buck Bunny (8min) and Murnau the Vampire (27 min). BBB was an easy download. Murnau was not; apparently there are torrents, but that seems to not work for me any more...despite a brand-new BT. Which is too bad, this is an exceptional bit of animation; not available in hi-def, tho.
fwiw, F W Murnau was the director of Nosferatu, the first, silent, vampire movie. Apparently you can see it online HERE.
Monday, February 23, 2009
XML software
Can someone explain to me why it is that org.w3c.dom.Document (java api) does NOT have a method something like "writeToStream(OutputStream os)" which will dump the entire document to some stream (i.e., a file)?
Why? If the corresponding class "DocumentBuilder" can read a file (or URL), why can we not have a method to write?
I wrote one about 8 years ago, I know I can go find it, but sheesh...why?
(continuing here with man's favorite activity)
Why? If the corresponding class "DocumentBuilder" can read a file (or URL), why can we not have a method to write?
I wrote one about 8 years ago, I know I can go find it, but sheesh...why?
(continuing here with man's favorite activity)
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
My computers...
Being unorthodox in most things...
I have a day job at an interesting company, which can remain nameless...I get to do some exotic stuff. And some pedestrian stuff, that's often a need too.
I mostly get to do things I like, which is great.
One of the things I get to do (because I choose to): I have my own computer. Well, really, all the engineers do. The diff is that I build my own from pieces. Everyone else: std config whatever the company is buying (well, with some variations, but not much).
Mine: completely different. This way I get what I want (which is NOT a generic Dell, which has gone from best to pretty sucky in recent years), when I want, and can upgrade when/how I want.
So I have this:
It takes an AMD Athlon x64 X2, 2GB RAM. On-board video plus a good PCI-Ex card means three monitors, which is pretty dang cool. And it is *quiet*. It's now 3 yrs old, so what was hot at the time is less so now; this doesn't really bother me a lot, except that now I am doing some work where more power would be helpful. (At the least I want a quad core, and 4GB RAM.)
I'm also thinking about a touch-screen, having played with those new HP units a little. Touch-position precision is weaker than I'd prefer there...but a touch-screen would be a nifty thing to do some UI work with, and there seem to be some < $1000 in the 25-inch range.
The process at work for getting a computer is kinda broken, inasmuch as I could get the Dell, but not something as slick as what I have. So I bought/built it myself. Replaced a drive when the original boot-drive started doing that bad clicking thing (see blog late 08 on this), got a video card aimed at decent game perf, just the right RAM (2GB dual-channel). My preferred kbd and mouse combos. My preferred monitors. Etc. I buy my own software, too, so I get what I want when I want.
New machine coming probably a year from now. If I can get something in roughly the same form-factor. With a 4-core or better CPU, at least 50% faster clock-rate.
This is the machine I do all my programming on. And nearly all my game-playing. And not much else.
My Macintosh G5 is where I do all the other stuff, like music, photos, video, database, taxes, personal info--the non-game fun stuff...that's had a chunk of upgrade, too, but less. RAM (5GB) and disk (1TB).
I have a day job at an interesting company, which can remain nameless...I get to do some exotic stuff. And some pedestrian stuff, that's often a need too.
I mostly get to do things I like, which is great.
One of the things I get to do (because I choose to): I have my own computer. Well, really, all the engineers do. The diff is that I build my own from pieces. Everyone else: std config whatever the company is buying (well, with some variations, but not much).
Mine: completely different. This way I get what I want (which is NOT a generic Dell, which has gone from best to pretty sucky in recent years), when I want, and can upgrade when/how I want.
So I have this:
It takes an AMD Athlon x64 X2, 2GB RAM. On-board video plus a good PCI-Ex card means three monitors, which is pretty dang cool. And it is *quiet*. It's now 3 yrs old, so what was hot at the time is less so now; this doesn't really bother me a lot, except that now I am doing some work where more power would be helpful. (At the least I want a quad core, and 4GB RAM.)
I'm also thinking about a touch-screen, having played with those new HP units a little. Touch-position precision is weaker than I'd prefer there...but a touch-screen would be a nifty thing to do some UI work with, and there seem to be some < $1000 in the 25-inch range.
The process at work for getting a computer is kinda broken, inasmuch as I could get the Dell, but not something as slick as what I have. So I bought/built it myself. Replaced a drive when the original boot-drive started doing that bad clicking thing (see blog late 08 on this), got a video card aimed at decent game perf, just the right RAM (2GB dual-channel). My preferred kbd and mouse combos. My preferred monitors. Etc. I buy my own software, too, so I get what I want when I want.
New machine coming probably a year from now. If I can get something in roughly the same form-factor. With a 4-core or better CPU, at least 50% faster clock-rate.
This is the machine I do all my programming on. And nearly all my game-playing. And not much else.
My Macintosh G5 is where I do all the other stuff, like music, photos, video, database, taxes, personal info--the non-game fun stuff...that's had a chunk of upgrade, too, but less. RAM (5GB) and disk (1TB).
another Jaguar XKE note
having bought the car, I find myself noticing how many others ripped it off back in the 60s and 70s.
The original (this is mine):
It looks like nearly every sports car in the 60s was a rip-off of the style...without managing to look as good.
Felt like a blog on this, having seen the trailer for The Graduate go by last night on TCM. Didn't quite recognize Dustin Hoffman's car...it's an Alpha Romeo Duetto:
a little less curvy than the Jag, but clearly derivative.
As was the Corvette tear-drop:
which was clearly the previous body style updated to look like the Jag.
and the Datsun 240Z:
which did at least have a price advantage over the Jag (about half, actually).
Even the classic 1964 Aston Martin (the Bond car of all time):
which shows up briefly in the recent Bond film Casino Royale.
and of course the late 70s Mazda RX-7:
The original (this is mine):
It looks like nearly every sports car in the 60s was a rip-off of the style...without managing to look as good.
Felt like a blog on this, having seen the trailer for The Graduate go by last night on TCM. Didn't quite recognize Dustin Hoffman's car...it's an Alpha Romeo Duetto:
a little less curvy than the Jag, but clearly derivative.As was the Corvette tear-drop:
which was clearly the previous body style updated to look like the Jag.and the Datsun 240Z:
which did at least have a price advantage over the Jag (about half, actually).Even the classic 1964 Aston Martin (the Bond car of all time):
which shows up briefly in the recent Bond film Casino Royale.
and of course the late 70s Mazda RX-7:
Computer gadgets
I had the Logitech wireless kbd/mouse combo...I really liked the kbd feel. the mouse was ok, the good part about the pair was that they worked together off the same wireless, and the mouse had a recharging dock...but the mouse had not been working too well in the dock for a while now, so when wife and I went to Circuit City, I got the last Logitech Dinovo Edge they had, for windows.
This is a nifty kbd, has its own dock for recharging (which is going to cause a problem when it can't hold a charge any longer). I'd like it a little better if the arrow-keys combo was shifted to the right about an inch. It's not, and the home/end/del/insert combo is now vertical instead of horiz, which means my game custom keys are out of whack...
It's a bluetooth kbd, which means it comes with a BT/USB adapter, and therefore I could get a BT mouse now...but I have this nice Logitech Nano wireless mouse I like...the one with the micro-transmitter unit.
So my wife now wants the same kbd for her Mac...I probably do, too, for that matter...except that I don't have bt on my mac; I think she does, but turned off.
This is a nifty kbd, has its own dock for recharging (which is going to cause a problem when it can't hold a charge any longer). I'd like it a little better if the arrow-keys combo was shifted to the right about an inch. It's not, and the home/end/del/insert combo is now vertical instead of horiz, which means my game custom keys are out of whack...
It's a bluetooth kbd, which means it comes with a BT/USB adapter, and therefore I could get a BT mouse now...but I have this nice Logitech Nano wireless mouse I like...the one with the micro-transmitter unit.
So my wife now wants the same kbd for her Mac...I probably do, too, for that matter...except that I don't have bt on my mac; I think she does, but turned off.
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Software errors
Nothing worse than having a bizarre error creep into someone else's software that you have to use, and it's too complex for you to fix...
take this example: google for "eclipse ioconsole updater error" and see what you get. I just moved to eclipse 3.4 yesterday, because it looks like I'm going to have to do some C code soon (feh!).
tweaked an older program today, to try out an enhancement (from a friend), and suddenly I've got the below error. This is something that has gone wrong in eclipse, has to do with your doing too much System.out typeout. Most of the complaints (man's favorite activity) you find in google on this subject suggest it's something about line length, but it's not. It's just total typeout.
Here's the actual error:
!ENTRY org.eclipse.ui 4 0 2009-02-08 17:43:10.270
!MESSAGE Unhandled event loop exception
!STACK 0
org.eclipse.swt.SWTException: Failed to execute runnable (java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException)
at org.eclipse.swt.SWT.error(SWT.java:3777)
at org.eclipse.swt.SWT.error(SWT.java:3695)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Synchronizer.runAsyncMessages(Synchronizer.java:136)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.runAsyncMessages(Display.java:3800)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.readAndDispatch(Display.java:3425)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.runEventLoop(Workbench.java:2382)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.runUI(Workbench.java:2346)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.access$4(Workbench.java:2198)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench$5.run(Workbench.java:493)
at org.eclipse.core.databinding.observable.Realm.runWithDefault(Realm.java:288)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.createAndRunWorkbench(Workbench.java:488)
at org.eclipse.ui.PlatformUI.createAndRunWorkbench(PlatformUI.java:149)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.ide.application.IDEApplication.start(IDEApplication.java:113)
at org.eclipse.equinox.internal.app.EclipseAppHandle.run(EclipseAppHandle.java:193)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.runApplication(EclipseAppLauncher.java:110)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.start(EclipseAppLauncher.java:79)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:386)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:179)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.invokeFramework(Main.java:549)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.basicRun(Main.java:504)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.run(Main.java:1236)
Caused by: java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException
at java.lang.System.arraycopy(Native Method)
at org.eclipse.swt.custom.StyledTextRenderer.textChanging(StyledTextRenderer.java:1295)
at org.eclipse.swt.custom.StyledText.handleTextChanging(StyledText.java:5467)
at org.eclipse.swt.custom.StyledText$6.textChanging(StyledText.java:4850)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.console.ConsoleDocumentAdapter.documentAboutToBeChanged(ConsoleDocumentAdapter.java:302)
at org.eclipse.jface.text.AbstractDocument.fireDocumentAboutToBeChanged(AbstractDocument.java:645)
at org.eclipse.jface.text.AbstractDocument.replace(AbstractDocument.java:1148)
at org.eclipse.jface.text.AbstractDocument.replace(AbstractDocument.java:1176)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.console.ConsoleDocument.replace(ConsoleDocument.java:82)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.console.IOConsolePartitioner$QueueProcessingJob.runInUIThread(IOConsolePartitioner.java:533)
at org.eclipse.ui.progress.UIJob$1.run(UIJob.java:94)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.RunnableLock.run(RunnableLock.java:35)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Synchronizer.runAsyncMessages(Synchronizer.java:133)
... 22 more
So it's just an array OOB problem. It arrived in 3.3, and is still present in 3.4, which I just started using yesterday.
Looking at the reported msgs and responses, it seems to be a problem in more than one place in the eclipse source code.
Gad.
Looks like I'm going back to 3.2, I can't live with this. Will only do the C dev with 3.4. Not worth my time to try to fix it for them.
take this example: google for "eclipse ioconsole updater error" and see what you get. I just moved to eclipse 3.4 yesterday, because it looks like I'm going to have to do some C code soon (feh!).
tweaked an older program today, to try out an enhancement (from a friend), and suddenly I've got the below error. This is something that has gone wrong in eclipse, has to do with your doing too much System.out typeout. Most of the complaints (man's favorite activity) you find in google on this subject suggest it's something about line length, but it's not. It's just total typeout.
Here's the actual error:
!ENTRY org.eclipse.ui 4 0 2009-02-08 17:43:10.270
!MESSAGE Unhandled event loop exception
!STACK 0
org.eclipse.swt.SWTException: Failed to execute runnable (java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException)
at org.eclipse.swt.SWT.error(SWT.java:3777)
at org.eclipse.swt.SWT.error(SWT.java:3695)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Synchronizer.runAsyncMessages(Synchronizer.java:136)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.runAsyncMessages(Display.java:3800)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.readAndDispatch(Display.java:3425)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.runEventLoop(Workbench.java:2382)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.runUI(Workbench.java:2346)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.access$4(Workbench.java:2198)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench$5.run(Workbench.java:493)
at org.eclipse.core.databinding.observable.Realm.runWithDefault(Realm.java:288)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.createAndRunWorkbench(Workbench.java:488)
at org.eclipse.ui.PlatformUI.createAndRunWorkbench(PlatformUI.java:149)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.ide.application.IDEApplication.start(IDEApplication.java:113)
at org.eclipse.equinox.internal.app.EclipseAppHandle.run(EclipseAppHandle.java:193)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.runApplication(EclipseAppLauncher.java:110)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.start(EclipseAppLauncher.java:79)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:386)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:179)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.invokeFramework(Main.java:549)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.basicRun(Main.java:504)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.run(Main.java:1236)
Caused by: java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException
at java.lang.System.arraycopy(Native Method)
at org.eclipse.swt.custom.StyledTextRenderer.textChanging(StyledTextRenderer.java:1295)
at org.eclipse.swt.custom.StyledText.handleTextChanging(StyledText.java:5467)
at org.eclipse.swt.custom.StyledText$6.textChanging(StyledText.java:4850)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.console.ConsoleDocumentAdapter.documentAboutToBeChanged(ConsoleDocumentAdapter.java:302)
at org.eclipse.jface.text.AbstractDocument.fireDocumentAboutToBeChanged(AbstractDocument.java:645)
at org.eclipse.jface.text.AbstractDocument.replace(AbstractDocument.java:1148)
at org.eclipse.jface.text.AbstractDocument.replace(AbstractDocument.java:1176)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.console.ConsoleDocument.replace(ConsoleDocument.java:82)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.console.IOConsolePartitioner$QueueProcessingJob.runInUIThread(IOConsolePartitioner.java:533)
at org.eclipse.ui.progress.UIJob$1.run(UIJob.java:94)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.RunnableLock.run(RunnableLock.java:35)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Synchronizer.runAsyncMessages(Synchronizer.java:133)
... 22 more
So it's just an array OOB problem. It arrived in 3.3, and is still present in 3.4, which I just started using yesterday.
Looking at the reported msgs and responses, it seems to be a problem in more than one place in the eclipse source code.
Gad.
Looks like I'm going back to 3.2, I can't live with this. Will only do the C dev with 3.4. Not worth my time to try to fix it for them.
Man's favorite activity
not sex...just as well, we'd have overpopulated ourselves to death.
not tv, although we do spend a lot of time on that...
no, it's complaining.
That's right...complaining. Came to this conclusion a couple of years ago...
look at my other post about How We Learn, that was the genesis. We complain about things that have made us unhappy. Why? Because when we are babies, when we complain (i.e., cry), we get made happy pretty quick--fed, diaper changed, whatever. I suspect that folks who complain a lot probably cried a lot as babies.
not tv, although we do spend a lot of time on that...
no, it's complaining.
That's right...complaining. Came to this conclusion a couple of years ago...
look at my other post about How We Learn, that was the genesis. We complain about things that have made us unhappy. Why? Because when we are babies, when we complain (i.e., cry), we get made happy pretty quick--fed, diaper changed, whatever. I suspect that folks who complain a lot probably cried a lot as babies.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Oblivion, redux
Started a replay of Oblivion. Yes, I already put in over 1000 (yes, thousand) hours on this before...thought I would try out some alternate strategies.
1) How far can you level up in the training area? Well, sneak can be at 100. Block can be over 25. Other things can be in the 20s. How to get sneak that high: when you first encounter the "sneak" goblin, he never turns around, so you can level-up on that behind him. Thing to do is go to 25, so you get the damage bonus, then whack it and take the loot, and go into the next room, where there are the 4 goblins, incl the one on patrol. Wait until the patrol goblin passes by, then follow to find a stalagmite pair in the dark that you can get stuck behind. Now, put a weight on the forward key, and you can walk away for a while (this is going to take several hours). Come back when you need to approve the 50,75,100 level dialogs, and zowie! You are the Expert of Sneak. Unfortunately, you can't get Athletics up at the same time, you actually have to change position. For Block, you stand and let the rats attack you one at a time, and hold out your shield. This isn't fast, but it's effective. Heal yourself along the way, and kill the rats when you can't recover. Move on to the next one, perhaps with new armor. You'll want to repeat this routine again later, when you need to level-up on armor.
Bonus: pick a character type where Sneak is a major skill. This way when you leave the training area, you can go sleep somewhere and level-up 10-12 times immediately. (Course that might be dangerous, as the opposition is suddenly a chunk better than you, and you only have a punky weapon). If I could, I'd want to design a character type where all the things you can level-up on fastest/soonest are primary skills: Sneak, Block, Alteration,
2) Go straight for the Mages Guild, and do their tasks. Practice on some low-level spells that are not attack, while standing around. Your aim is to get to Alteration Level 50, because that is when you can use Chameleon--and you can enchant your armor with it. Along the way you have to either capture some souls, or find some loaded soul gems. IIRC, with Common souls, you can enchant Chameleon at 14%, Greater Souls at 17%, and Grand souls are 20%. You'll have to sleep-level-up along the way so you have enough Magicka to do the enchanting, but once you can, with Chameleon > 100%, you are undetectable by anyone, which pretty much makes you invincible. I found a couple of Grand Soul gems with grand souls in them, which is great, because you aren't going to encounter any for a while.
3) Good loot and interesting opponents don't really show up until about Level 10. Recall all the squawk when the game originally came out about how the opponents level'd up with you? i.e., the game does not ever get easier in terms of fighting...well, true enough, until you learn the trick about Chameleon. But the real problem is that you do need some money for buying things, but that's really only at the beginning, when you need to buy spells; you're going to find adequate armor on opponents. And excepting when you attack a clannfear which reflects damage, you don't even need armor when you have 100% Chameleon (other than needing to wear enough charmed items to reach that 100%).
4) Fast travel does nothing for your skill increases...but it lets you join Mages Guild sooner, and Chameleon.
5) Do the task about the missing brother in Chorrol/Cheydinhall, and then the follow-on about the missing sword, but DO NOT turn in the sword--you want to keep it and use it. This is the best sword you can get for a long time.
6) Clear out any relevant caves/etc BEFORE taking on any kind of escort assignment. NPCs all operate via Artifical Stupidity, so they are going to run into fights they can't win. Granted, official escorts can't usually be killed, but there's that one "take weapons to cave X and clear the goblins out" where they CAN be, and if one of them IS, later rumors mention your failure. Whats-er-name the orc and the Black Bow Bandits task, she can be killed too, but she does at least wait for you to say it's ok to tag along...and when you have Sneak 100 and Chameleon 100, you can kill anything anytime anywhere without taking any damage, so you don't want anyone else getting in your way.
7) Avoid starting the main story/quest line until you have Chameleon = 100. Fast travel around Kvatch to make certain...because once you start it, the Oblivion gates start appearing. They're fairly dangerous, but if you have Chameleon 100, you don't care.
8) Let summoned chars do your fighting. Until you have chameleon 100, this is important. Otoh, it does mean that your weapon attack skills atrophy.
9) When you go to Leyawiin, go to Rowena Galentius' house, and whack Everscamps to your heart's content. They won't attack you until you attack them, and even then only one at a time. I shot arrows into them for 10 Marksman levels. I whacked a bunch for ten Blunt levels. I punched a bunch for 20 Hand-to-hand levels.
10) Begin the game with "Bag of Holding" plug-in. This lets you carry an emormous amount of stuff, as opposed to going back and forth hauling loot to the merchants (which would otherwise be infuriating, and ultimately something you stop doing).
11) Do the paid training once you start having money. Granted, this is only 5 skill levels per major level, but you want to pay-train the major levels.
-----
Largely good strategies. I've played 120 hours, am level 12, Master of the Fighters Guild (didn't do that first time), near the top of Mages Guild, skill level ~50 on most (100 on sneak), Chameleon 100, have NOT begun the main story line so no Oblivion Gates yet, and I have not traveled too far or done too much yet. And I can continue to major-level-up for a while yet, probably at lest 5 more, maybe 10. MANY places to visit and explore.
1) How far can you level up in the training area? Well, sneak can be at 100. Block can be over 25. Other things can be in the 20s. How to get sneak that high: when you first encounter the "sneak" goblin, he never turns around, so you can level-up on that behind him. Thing to do is go to 25, so you get the damage bonus, then whack it and take the loot, and go into the next room, where there are the 4 goblins, incl the one on patrol. Wait until the patrol goblin passes by, then follow to find a stalagmite pair in the dark that you can get stuck behind. Now, put a weight on the forward key, and you can walk away for a while (this is going to take several hours). Come back when you need to approve the 50,75,100 level dialogs, and zowie! You are the Expert of Sneak. Unfortunately, you can't get Athletics up at the same time, you actually have to change position. For Block, you stand and let the rats attack you one at a time, and hold out your shield. This isn't fast, but it's effective. Heal yourself along the way, and kill the rats when you can't recover. Move on to the next one, perhaps with new armor. You'll want to repeat this routine again later, when you need to level-up on armor.
Bonus: pick a character type where Sneak is a major skill. This way when you leave the training area, you can go sleep somewhere and level-up 10-12 times immediately. (Course that might be dangerous, as the opposition is suddenly a chunk better than you, and you only have a punky weapon). If I could, I'd want to design a character type where all the things you can level-up on fastest/soonest are primary skills: Sneak, Block, Alteration,
2) Go straight for the Mages Guild, and do their tasks. Practice on some low-level spells that are not attack, while standing around. Your aim is to get to Alteration Level 50, because that is when you can use Chameleon--and you can enchant your armor with it. Along the way you have to either capture some souls, or find some loaded soul gems. IIRC, with Common souls, you can enchant Chameleon at 14%, Greater Souls at 17%, and Grand souls are 20%. You'll have to sleep-level-up along the way so you have enough Magicka to do the enchanting, but once you can, with Chameleon > 100%, you are undetectable by anyone, which pretty much makes you invincible. I found a couple of Grand Soul gems with grand souls in them, which is great, because you aren't going to encounter any for a while.
3) Good loot and interesting opponents don't really show up until about Level 10. Recall all the squawk when the game originally came out about how the opponents level'd up with you? i.e., the game does not ever get easier in terms of fighting...well, true enough, until you learn the trick about Chameleon. But the real problem is that you do need some money for buying things, but that's really only at the beginning, when you need to buy spells; you're going to find adequate armor on opponents. And excepting when you attack a clannfear which reflects damage, you don't even need armor when you have 100% Chameleon (other than needing to wear enough charmed items to reach that 100%).
4) Fast travel does nothing for your skill increases...but it lets you join Mages Guild sooner, and Chameleon.
5) Do the task about the missing brother in Chorrol/Cheydinhall, and then the follow-on about the missing sword, but DO NOT turn in the sword--you want to keep it and use it. This is the best sword you can get for a long time.
6) Clear out any relevant caves/etc BEFORE taking on any kind of escort assignment. NPCs all operate via Artifical Stupidity, so they are going to run into fights they can't win. Granted, official escorts can't usually be killed, but there's that one "take weapons to cave X and clear the goblins out" where they CAN be, and if one of them IS, later rumors mention your failure. Whats-er-name the orc and the Black Bow Bandits task, she can be killed too, but she does at least wait for you to say it's ok to tag along...and when you have Sneak 100 and Chameleon 100, you can kill anything anytime anywhere without taking any damage, so you don't want anyone else getting in your way.
7) Avoid starting the main story/quest line until you have Chameleon = 100. Fast travel around Kvatch to make certain...because once you start it, the Oblivion gates start appearing. They're fairly dangerous, but if you have Chameleon 100, you don't care.
8) Let summoned chars do your fighting. Until you have chameleon 100, this is important. Otoh, it does mean that your weapon attack skills atrophy.
9) When you go to Leyawiin, go to Rowena Galentius' house, and whack Everscamps to your heart's content. They won't attack you until you attack them, and even then only one at a time. I shot arrows into them for 10 Marksman levels. I whacked a bunch for ten Blunt levels. I punched a bunch for 20 Hand-to-hand levels.
10) Begin the game with "Bag of Holding" plug-in. This lets you carry an emormous amount of stuff, as opposed to going back and forth hauling loot to the merchants (which would otherwise be infuriating, and ultimately something you stop doing).
11) Do the paid training once you start having money. Granted, this is only 5 skill levels per major level, but you want to pay-train the major levels.
-----
Largely good strategies. I've played 120 hours, am level 12, Master of the Fighters Guild (didn't do that first time), near the top of Mages Guild, skill level ~50 on most (100 on sneak), Chameleon 100, have NOT begun the main story line so no Oblivion Gates yet, and I have not traveled too far or done too much yet. And I can continue to major-level-up for a while yet, probably at lest 5 more, maybe 10. MANY places to visit and explore.
Text processing concepts and tools
In the past 15 years, I have worked on text-processing software tools more than once, and I'm doing it again here of late.
While it doesn't take an Advanced Degree (tm) to understand *most* of it, some aspects do get pretty exotic.
How I started way back when I've used several of the mentioned tools. Most don't really meet my needs or wants.
I participated in some of the MUC episodes (6 and 7, I think), and have known about the MET and ACE episodes.
There are others, of course.
There are other tools around that do the named-entity job. I wrote one myself, because the one I had used most a lot had some flaws I didn't care for (one of which was occasionally a show-stopper), and some experimental purposes.
What I would consider an interesting set of text-processing capabilities:
Tokenizer (separate words from each other and non-words)
Reconstitutor (re-assemble words or other things from separate tokens)
Stemmer (separate root words from their suffixes; Porter Stemmer is the standard)
Pattern matcher (match word sequences)
Name lists (annotated/typed names of whatever)
Dictionaries
Topic Finding
WordNet
----
Other related tools whose value I'm not convinced of:
POS tagging
Sentence splitting/parsing
-----
Why are these tools of interest or value?
There is a lot of text/words content on the Web, and in databases. No possible way to read it all, and nearly no way to even find out what you might *want* to read. How do you find all the stuff you *should* read? Or stories that mention things of interest? How do you find stories that are on topics of interest but didn't happen to use the words you expected (i.e., defeating google)? What if it was in a foreign language--which REALLY defeats Google..?
You need some help.
Which leads to the two tools of interest.
1) Named-entity recognition. Find various reasonably-unique-meaning words/phrases
2) Topic recognition. Stories on any given topic are likely to use a lot of the same words.
A third tool of interest would do this: recognize relationships between words in the stories; this could include the simple concept of pronoun-references, but could also be more complex relationships, like "Barack Obama is the President of the United States" would have a person name, a location name, a job title, and the relationship between all of them. In the MUC bake-offs this was known as Template Entity Recog. It's dramatically much harder than the others.
Name recog is important because you can use it to mark up stories as being about that particular name, without necessarily having seen that name before. Topic recog is valuable because you can then find stories "about" something-or-other, without having to know any of the right keywords. Of course the list of topics isn't going to be tiny, so choosing the right topic is not necessarily trivial.
-----
Peculiarities:
There are a few, but not many, human language families. One group are the "Romance" languages, which are derived from Latin. Many european languages are this type. There are the pictogram languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. There are a few oddments, like Thai, which has no related languages (IIRC). Arabic languages are another family.
Writing direction: left to right, right to left, top to bottom...likewise varies, but probably corresponds closely to origin.
Use of an alphabet, and whitespace. The pictogram languages don't have an alphabet in the same way that Latin languages do, nor do they use white space as word separators. I'd argue that these are fundamental flaws in the languages' written form.
All these things complicate computing, because they lead to language-specific solutions.
-----
Words are important. Without them you cannot express concepts, and you can't really invent new concepts. Language has to be mutable. But let's have the computer do some of the work.
While it doesn't take an Advanced Degree (tm) to understand *most* of it, some aspects do get pretty exotic.
How I started way back when I've used several of the mentioned tools. Most don't really meet my needs or wants.
I participated in some of the MUC episodes (6 and 7, I think), and have known about the MET and ACE episodes.
There are others, of course.
There are other tools around that do the named-entity job. I wrote one myself, because the one I had used most a lot had some flaws I didn't care for (one of which was occasionally a show-stopper), and some experimental purposes.
What I would consider an interesting set of text-processing capabilities:
Tokenizer (separate words from each other and non-words)
Reconstitutor (re-assemble words or other things from separate tokens)
Stemmer (separate root words from their suffixes; Porter Stemmer is the standard)
Pattern matcher (match word sequences)
Name lists (annotated/typed names of whatever)
Dictionaries
Topic Finding
WordNet
----
Other related tools whose value I'm not convinced of:
POS tagging
Sentence splitting/parsing
-----
Why are these tools of interest or value?
There is a lot of text/words content on the Web, and in databases. No possible way to read it all, and nearly no way to even find out what you might *want* to read. How do you find all the stuff you *should* read? Or stories that mention things of interest? How do you find stories that are on topics of interest but didn't happen to use the words you expected (i.e., defeating google)? What if it was in a foreign language--which REALLY defeats Google..?
You need some help.
Which leads to the two tools of interest.
1) Named-entity recognition. Find various reasonably-unique-meaning words/phrases
2) Topic recognition. Stories on any given topic are likely to use a lot of the same words.
A third tool of interest would do this: recognize relationships between words in the stories; this could include the simple concept of pronoun-references, but could also be more complex relationships, like "Barack Obama is the President of the United States" would have a person name, a location name, a job title, and the relationship between all of them. In the MUC bake-offs this was known as Template Entity Recog. It's dramatically much harder than the others.
Name recog is important because you can use it to mark up stories as being about that particular name, without necessarily having seen that name before. Topic recog is valuable because you can then find stories "about" something-or-other, without having to know any of the right keywords. Of course the list of topics isn't going to be tiny, so choosing the right topic is not necessarily trivial.
-----
Peculiarities:
There are a few, but not many, human language families. One group are the "Romance" languages, which are derived from Latin. Many european languages are this type. There are the pictogram languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. There are a few oddments, like Thai, which has no related languages (IIRC). Arabic languages are another family.
Writing direction: left to right, right to left, top to bottom...likewise varies, but probably corresponds closely to origin.
Use of an alphabet, and whitespace. The pictogram languages don't have an alphabet in the same way that Latin languages do, nor do they use white space as word separators. I'd argue that these are fundamental flaws in the languages' written form.
All these things complicate computing, because they lead to language-specific solutions.
-----
Words are important. Without them you cannot express concepts, and you can't really invent new concepts. Language has to be mutable. But let's have the computer do some of the work.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Jaguar XKE notes
Have you seen this?
http://jaguar-xke.blogspot.com/2009/01/jaguar-xke-sports-car-have-you-ever.html
"You will pay less amount of money for second hand cars than for new cars. The difference in cost or price can going up to over ten thousand dollars. If you are thinking about buying a second hand car make sure to check the cost of a new car of the same type and see how much you can save."
(looks like ESL)
While that first sentence is generally true, it really isn't for an XKE. Not that you can buy a new XKE. You could certainly buy a different used Jaguar model, for a lot less. But a used XKE is *not* cheaper than a new car...cheaper than *some* new cars, but not many. OK, a cheap XKE might be more cheaper, but then it may well not be one worth getting, because you're going to have to do a chunk of work on it.
The rest of the blog entry is comparably off-target.
http://jaguar-xke.blogspot.com/2009/01/jaguar-xke-sports-car-have-you-ever.html
"You will pay less amount of money for second hand cars than for new cars. The difference in cost or price can going up to over ten thousand dollars. If you are thinking about buying a second hand car make sure to check the cost of a new car of the same type and see how much you can save."
(looks like ESL)
While that first sentence is generally true, it really isn't for an XKE. Not that you can buy a new XKE. You could certainly buy a different used Jaguar model, for a lot less. But a used XKE is *not* cheaper than a new car...cheaper than *some* new cars, but not many. OK, a cheap XKE might be more cheaper, but then it may well not be one worth getting, because you're going to have to do a chunk of work on it.
The rest of the blog entry is comparably off-target.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
On Dying
Turned 50 last year. The end of my life is closer than the beginning. I have two grandparents who lived to be 90+, but I am certainly past the halfway point.
Feels like my health started downhill 5 years ago, beginning with the kidney stone. Actually maybe it began a couple years earlier with some kind of bronchitis attack. Throat hasn't been the same since. May be having the occasional heart murmur trouble the past few years.
Leads you to wonder...but that's not what this blog post is about.
I'd prefer to die pretty quick, rather than gradually deteriorate. My mother-in-law has Parkinson's, that's a slow degeneration. Alzheimer's is too; dementia, etc...and you're not allowed to decide to just die, and by the time you really need to be able to, you don't even have the ability to make the decision.
My dad died of pancreatic cancer. Gradual deterioration for six+ months, and then fairly quick the last 30 days. (I have the feeling he had some Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam.)
Is this life all there is? Is there an after? What happens after? Should I want whatever it is? What would we be "reborn" as? Am I reborn as a human-shaped being? At what age? (i.e., am I reborn at age 25, or the same age as when I died?) Am I a more/less-likable person? Better looking? Am I still "me" physically and mentally? What about everyone else? Will I have to worry about job/income/housing/food etc? Just like now? Will I have to deal with the same amount of obnoxious other people? The same ones?
Read the comics enough, and the impression you get (at least from Family Circus) is that once dead and living in heaven, that is all about standing around on the clouds, talking. OK, that's not the daily struggle for food and shelter. But what happens when the obnoxious person decides he wants the cloud you're on?
If the afterlife is just like this one, I'm not too interested. I'm not going to be interested in fighting the same kinds of battles for all eternity. But I don't want to just stand around and talk. Reading on some religious-based websites you can readily find that heaven is not going to be much like this, but in ways that we cannot imagine, and that we shall all be made perfect. Which really means that a lot of us are not going to be the same person. Wants won't be the same, either, so one expects less inter-personal conflicts. Or maybe they are just different ones?
All unknowable. But you gotta wonder...
Feels like my health started downhill 5 years ago, beginning with the kidney stone. Actually maybe it began a couple years earlier with some kind of bronchitis attack. Throat hasn't been the same since. May be having the occasional heart murmur trouble the past few years.
Leads you to wonder...but that's not what this blog post is about.
I'd prefer to die pretty quick, rather than gradually deteriorate. My mother-in-law has Parkinson's, that's a slow degeneration. Alzheimer's is too; dementia, etc...and you're not allowed to decide to just die, and by the time you really need to be able to, you don't even have the ability to make the decision.
My dad died of pancreatic cancer. Gradual deterioration for six+ months, and then fairly quick the last 30 days. (I have the feeling he had some Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam.)
Is this life all there is? Is there an after? What happens after? Should I want whatever it is? What would we be "reborn" as? Am I reborn as a human-shaped being? At what age? (i.e., am I reborn at age 25, or the same age as when I died?) Am I a more/less-likable person? Better looking? Am I still "me" physically and mentally? What about everyone else? Will I have to worry about job/income/housing/food etc? Just like now? Will I have to deal with the same amount of obnoxious other people? The same ones?
Read the comics enough, and the impression you get (at least from Family Circus) is that once dead and living in heaven, that is all about standing around on the clouds, talking. OK, that's not the daily struggle for food and shelter. But what happens when the obnoxious person decides he wants the cloud you're on?
If the afterlife is just like this one, I'm not too interested. I'm not going to be interested in fighting the same kinds of battles for all eternity. But I don't want to just stand around and talk. Reading on some religious-based websites you can readily find that heaven is not going to be much like this, but in ways that we cannot imagine, and that we shall all be made perfect. Which really means that a lot of us are not going to be the same person. Wants won't be the same, either, so one expects less inter-personal conflicts. Or maybe they are just different ones?
All unknowable. But you gotta wonder...
Artificial Stupidity
I started through Spellforce 1 again, as mentioned last month. Played as a fighter, did maximum FPS before doing any RTS on any level--it's like a different game. Started on the first expansion. It does look good on a 24" monitor.
And then I got hammered by the NPC's Artificial Stupidity again.
I started this expansion as a wizard this time. Never played as that char before, because it seems too hard--primarily because you run out of mana, whereas a fighter never runs out of sword. Useful to have such in the group, but not to BE such. I don't remember how I played this one level before; it has some scripted behaviors I can't control properly.
I'm at this point where I have to escort a group of refugees. They don't move very fast, but they will fight; and they're weak. So they are probably going to get killed. A couple of levels back I had a team of Dark Elves, one class of which can summon things, and another can revive dead as skeletons. So you really have a lot of extra fighters.
It should always be the case that when you have an escort mission, you should be able to tell the escortee(s) "Wait here!" because you are going to go clear a path. And then you should be able to go back and say "Follow me!" and have that happen.
I start a new map with these refugees, it's an ice/snow location. As soon as I move, they start heading towards this locked gate. The key to the gate is on some giant wolves nearby. So I have to kill the wolves. I have some ice elf archers, but the group of us is not strong enough to swarm the wolves. I have to do the whole rope-a-dope routine in order to stay alive. This means that the wolves will get close enough to get the refugees to attack, meaning I lose half the refugees.
If I could have told the refugees to stay put a ways back, wolf problem can be solved. (ok , alternative: only send my archers forward, me and the refugees stay behind until wolves are dead.)
So on we go through the gate. The refugees slog onward, we encounter additional opposition, but I can deal with that, until we pass the ice-elemental-spawner. They start to attack, and while they are up ahead, the refugees halt and wait for me to kill the elemental spawner. Well, I'm too weak for that, and the refugees will NOT follow me to the next gate. Which is going to mean we are all going to die.
This is because of unrealistic behavior. Artificial Stupidity. "Let's attack the giant wolves with our bare hands! They're only five levels stronger than we are!"
And then I got hammered by the NPC's Artificial Stupidity again.
I started this expansion as a wizard this time. Never played as that char before, because it seems too hard--primarily because you run out of mana, whereas a fighter never runs out of sword. Useful to have such in the group, but not to BE such. I don't remember how I played this one level before; it has some scripted behaviors I can't control properly.
I'm at this point where I have to escort a group of refugees. They don't move very fast, but they will fight; and they're weak. So they are probably going to get killed. A couple of levels back I had a team of Dark Elves, one class of which can summon things, and another can revive dead as skeletons. So you really have a lot of extra fighters.
It should always be the case that when you have an escort mission, you should be able to tell the escortee(s) "Wait here!" because you are going to go clear a path. And then you should be able to go back and say "Follow me!" and have that happen.
I start a new map with these refugees, it's an ice/snow location. As soon as I move, they start heading towards this locked gate. The key to the gate is on some giant wolves nearby. So I have to kill the wolves. I have some ice elf archers, but the group of us is not strong enough to swarm the wolves. I have to do the whole rope-a-dope routine in order to stay alive. This means that the wolves will get close enough to get the refugees to attack, meaning I lose half the refugees.
If I could have told the refugees to stay put a ways back, wolf problem can be solved. (ok , alternative: only send my archers forward, me and the refugees stay behind until wolves are dead.)
So on we go through the gate. The refugees slog onward, we encounter additional opposition, but I can deal with that, until we pass the ice-elemental-spawner. They start to attack, and while they are up ahead, the refugees halt and wait for me to kill the elemental spawner. Well, I'm too weak for that, and the refugees will NOT follow me to the next gate. Which is going to mean we are all going to die.
This is because of unrealistic behavior. Artificial Stupidity. "Let's attack the giant wolves with our bare hands! They're only five levels stronger than we are!"
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Is our President read?
Just a week ago, Richard Cohen, writing in the Washington Post, reacts to an op-ed piece by Karl Rove some days earlier that I didn't see, asserting that apparently George W Bush reads A LOT. Apparently something like 100 books per year.
That's two per week. Really? Shouldn't take an Advanced Degree to figure this out...
For comparison:
I have been a heavy reader since about 1972 or so. Prior to that I just didn't have enough access. About 1970 or so I began to have enough of my own books that I was re-reading them a lot, in addition to new ones. Mom took us to the library fairly often, as she was a heavy reader too (from having been stuck in bed for a year as a child, apparently with TB, although apparently decades later that was debunked).
Since 1972 I've read about 3000 books. I still have most of them. That's almost two per week. The shortest ones are probably 125 pages. The longest, over a thousand pages.
I read fast. Damn fast.
In 5th grade I had a nearly unique experience in school--all the 5th-graders took speed-reading. This was in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1968/69, not a location you connect with advanced thinking like this...I'm not aware of this happening anywhere else, really. i was only there for a year, but this was almost unimaginably valuable. (I was back there in 10th grade, and took typing, comparably valuable.)
The scoop: we learn to read by reading aloud. (Think back on your earliest years in school, and before.) So we read at the same speed we talk. On average, this is about 150 words per minute. Everyone in my class started speed-reading training at 150 words a minute. The trick to going faster, in your brain, is that you have to decouple reading and speaking. This is doable by most folks, and pretty much everyone can progress to about 300 words a minute. This is roughly one page in a novel every minute (a page in a printed book usually has about 300 words, I've counted this a number of times in the past; it varies with font-size, but 300 is a good approx). I think I remember everyone in my class being at least at 300 by the end of the school year.
(Lacking speed-reading training, you don't read faster than you talk, and I don't mean the "Evelyn Wood" noise, that isn't really speed reading, but it too requires you to decouple from your speech.)
How was this done? They had a film-strip-like machine that would move a sliding box across a line of text, L to R, then repeat with a new line of text. (There's a computer program that more or less duplicates this, called "Ace Reader"; the sliding box motion is jerky rather than smooth, I found it jarring to try to read that way.) You have to move your eyes to follow the box, so you begin to separate eye movement and subconscious vocalizing. The complete text was a story. You'd take a quiz at the end. High enough score on the quiz, and you moved ahead 25 words/min the next week. The machine's speed incremented in 25 words/minute quanta. So we only did the jumps once a week. At the beginning of the training everyone is at 150. Next week, some still are, some have moved on. By the end of the school year, the spread has increased, and there are kids at most speeds. Nearly everyone has moved beyond 150. I am in the fastest group, at 625, along with 2 or 3 others. Yes--I read 4X faster than I did before.
Damn fast. I still read pretty fast now, but it's variable, depending on the content. A technical manual is a slow read; Janet Evanovich is fast, maybe even faster than 600...
Which means that most novels unfold for me at the pace of a theatrical movie. AND, it means that reading 100 in a year isn't that hard or unlikely. Altho these days I'm busy enough with other things that I don't read that many. Suppose you read one page/min. Suppose the average book is 300 pages, so Bush reads 600 pp/week. Roughly 100 per day, or 100 minutes per day. Does he actually have that kind of time?
But apparently in this Karl Rove article they've been keeping a list of them (which sounds a bit artificial to being with). I haven't seen the list, apparently Cohen has. Apparently the list content has its own interesting features, but that's his discussion. My blog entry argues against his even having done the reading, regardless of what it was.
I don't even have a list of what books I've *bought* in the last year, much less read.
But wait...what did Rove mean by "read"? Did Bush read every word? Or just the first paragraph in the chapters? Skim the chapters? If we assume he reads at 150, then he didn't read 600 pp/week. The President just would not have that kind of time, that's about 3 hours per day. Any more, *I* don't manage to have 3 hours/day for it (although 100 pp takes me < 1 hour).
Cohen's article is about the books themselves. Apparently they are biographies, and their thematic content is such that they would be reinforcing Bush's self-image, and offering some personal vindication for his actions as President. Are there in fact 500+ books like that so that one *could* read that many? That too strikes me as unlikely--but I can imagine it, and if there's really a list...
My conclusion: the mechanics of it indicate that Bush does not, and has not, read 100 books per year. (Of course, if he's had that same speed-reading training I have, well, maybe he did.)
(Aside: why I think this reading machine does this well: our eyes/brains are attracted to motion. Why? I think it's probably ancient racial memory--things that are moving could be predators, so we need to focus on them. There's an interesting bit of imagery/video I'm thinking of here; it begins with a still photo, mostly of non-uniform vertical lines, but when you see part of it move you are able to resolve that it is a tiger (vertical stripes) obscured by nearly-vertical vegetation leaves; no motion = no danger, motion means the tiger (danger) needs to be watched.)
That's two per week. Really? Shouldn't take an Advanced Degree to figure this out...
For comparison:
I have been a heavy reader since about 1972 or so. Prior to that I just didn't have enough access. About 1970 or so I began to have enough of my own books that I was re-reading them a lot, in addition to new ones. Mom took us to the library fairly often, as she was a heavy reader too (from having been stuck in bed for a year as a child, apparently with TB, although apparently decades later that was debunked).
Since 1972 I've read about 3000 books. I still have most of them. That's almost two per week. The shortest ones are probably 125 pages. The longest, over a thousand pages.
I read fast. Damn fast.
In 5th grade I had a nearly unique experience in school--all the 5th-graders took speed-reading. This was in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1968/69, not a location you connect with advanced thinking like this...I'm not aware of this happening anywhere else, really. i was only there for a year, but this was almost unimaginably valuable. (I was back there in 10th grade, and took typing, comparably valuable.)
The scoop: we learn to read by reading aloud. (Think back on your earliest years in school, and before.) So we read at the same speed we talk. On average, this is about 150 words per minute. Everyone in my class started speed-reading training at 150 words a minute. The trick to going faster, in your brain, is that you have to decouple reading and speaking. This is doable by most folks, and pretty much everyone can progress to about 300 words a minute. This is roughly one page in a novel every minute (a page in a printed book usually has about 300 words, I've counted this a number of times in the past; it varies with font-size, but 300 is a good approx). I think I remember everyone in my class being at least at 300 by the end of the school year.
(Lacking speed-reading training, you don't read faster than you talk, and I don't mean the "Evelyn Wood" noise, that isn't really speed reading, but it too requires you to decouple from your speech.)
How was this done? They had a film-strip-like machine that would move a sliding box across a line of text, L to R, then repeat with a new line of text. (There's a computer program that more or less duplicates this, called "Ace Reader"; the sliding box motion is jerky rather than smooth, I found it jarring to try to read that way.) You have to move your eyes to follow the box, so you begin to separate eye movement and subconscious vocalizing. The complete text was a story. You'd take a quiz at the end. High enough score on the quiz, and you moved ahead 25 words/min the next week. The machine's speed incremented in 25 words/minute quanta. So we only did the jumps once a week. At the beginning of the training everyone is at 150. Next week, some still are, some have moved on. By the end of the school year, the spread has increased, and there are kids at most speeds. Nearly everyone has moved beyond 150. I am in the fastest group, at 625, along with 2 or 3 others. Yes--I read 4X faster than I did before.
Damn fast. I still read pretty fast now, but it's variable, depending on the content. A technical manual is a slow read; Janet Evanovich is fast, maybe even faster than 600...
Which means that most novels unfold for me at the pace of a theatrical movie. AND, it means that reading 100 in a year isn't that hard or unlikely. Altho these days I'm busy enough with other things that I don't read that many. Suppose you read one page/min. Suppose the average book is 300 pages, so Bush reads 600 pp/week. Roughly 100 per day, or 100 minutes per day. Does he actually have that kind of time?
But apparently in this Karl Rove article they've been keeping a list of them (which sounds a bit artificial to being with). I haven't seen the list, apparently Cohen has. Apparently the list content has its own interesting features, but that's his discussion. My blog entry argues against his even having done the reading, regardless of what it was.
I don't even have a list of what books I've *bought* in the last year, much less read.
But wait...what did Rove mean by "read"? Did Bush read every word? Or just the first paragraph in the chapters? Skim the chapters? If we assume he reads at 150, then he didn't read 600 pp/week. The President just would not have that kind of time, that's about 3 hours per day. Any more, *I* don't manage to have 3 hours/day for it (although 100 pp takes me < 1 hour).
Cohen's article is about the books themselves. Apparently they are biographies, and their thematic content is such that they would be reinforcing Bush's self-image, and offering some personal vindication for his actions as President. Are there in fact 500+ books like that so that one *could* read that many? That too strikes me as unlikely--but I can imagine it, and if there's really a list...
My conclusion: the mechanics of it indicate that Bush does not, and has not, read 100 books per year. (Of course, if he's had that same speed-reading training I have, well, maybe he did.)
(Aside: why I think this reading machine does this well: our eyes/brains are attracted to motion. Why? I think it's probably ancient racial memory--things that are moving could be predators, so we need to focus on them. There's an interesting bit of imagery/video I'm thinking of here; it begins with a still photo, mostly of non-uniform vertical lines, but when you see part of it move you are able to resolve that it is a tiger (vertical stripes) obscured by nearly-vertical vegetation leaves; no motion = no danger, motion means the tiger (danger) needs to be watched.)
How we learn
A theory. Which I have, and that is mine. A-hem.
Yesterday I happened upon another paper about how infant learning takes place...it has long seemed to me that those who write about this didn't have kids. So they're inventing some kind of explanation. This particular paper was about learning language. Are we born with the ability to process or language, or is that a learned thing? (i.e., the classic "nature vs nurture" argument).
What I think we are born with is a pattern-matching feedback system. That's all.
In fact, I think that's all you need. Well, plus some chemical enjoyment feedback when patterns are matched and repeated, for positive reinforcement.
Think of it this way: what do babies do? They watch things. They wave their arms and feet a lot. They put things in the mouth (because the first thing that goes in their mouth makes them happy--getting fed). Imagine an audio and video pattern matcher, completely untrained, just receiving a huge amount of input all the time. Mostly it's junk, but it's not random junk--it's the parents, and the rooms in the house. Not much changes there, so there's lots of time for reinforcing imagery and sound.
Imagine that the waving of arms and feet is all essentially random motion--random neural firings (what else can it be, really?). But the mid-brain is aware of the nerve-firings that cause the arms to move, and the eyes will eventually see the motion, and the feedback connection will be made that leads to awareness of causality: "these nerves and thoughts lead to this visible motion". Patterns will match, reinforcement occurs, and thus memory.
Recall why it is that a deaf person doesn't learn to speak: the feedback loop for the pattern-matching is broken. No feedback, no learning, because the muscular control can't be tested.
Learning is all about pattern-matching. Learning something new is usually based on matching an existing pattern. Otherwise it takes a lot longer, because you have to generate new base patterns. Thus we always start with simple things.
Analogical reasoning is all about matching a pattern, and extending it.
So why haven't we used this approach to teach a computer to speak like we do? Beats me. Probably because it would take just as long as teaching a baby--years. So we have tended to take different approaches that go from zero to sixty in one leap, rather than zero to one to two to three...
We learn things when we are ready to learn them. Which means that we have to have enough base patterns to correlate against.
Some people are better about doing this pattern-match than others. They learn faster and earlier. We learn most things by watching others. I have personally observed this in action a couple of places: #1 being the DC Metro subway system. Watch someone who wasn't born here and doesn't read/speak english try to figure out how to use a farecard machine. Can only be done by watching what others do to get one--because you can't get through the turnstile without it. You observe what someone else does, then you try to do it too. Receiving a farecard = success, you are happy because you have the card, so there is positive reinforcement. Next time, you might have to watch again, but that is reinforcing a pattern, not creating one, so it goes faster.
When you hear someone speak and you don't understand them, you want them to go slower, or talk louder, because your learned patterns aren't being matched. If that person has an accent, you might have to hear unusual words (or words that match the sound but not the context) more than once in order to match the sound AND the context.
You'd think that this is an experimentally verifiable behavior. No one seems to have done (far as I've read, which hasn't covered this topic for a while).
How hard could it be to do it?
Yesterday I happened upon another paper about how infant learning takes place...it has long seemed to me that those who write about this didn't have kids. So they're inventing some kind of explanation. This particular paper was about learning language. Are we born with the ability to process or language, or is that a learned thing? (i.e., the classic "nature vs nurture" argument).
What I think we are born with is a pattern-matching feedback system. That's all.
In fact, I think that's all you need. Well, plus some chemical enjoyment feedback when patterns are matched and repeated, for positive reinforcement.
Think of it this way: what do babies do? They watch things. They wave their arms and feet a lot. They put things in the mouth (because the first thing that goes in their mouth makes them happy--getting fed). Imagine an audio and video pattern matcher, completely untrained, just receiving a huge amount of input all the time. Mostly it's junk, but it's not random junk--it's the parents, and the rooms in the house. Not much changes there, so there's lots of time for reinforcing imagery and sound.
Imagine that the waving of arms and feet is all essentially random motion--random neural firings (what else can it be, really?). But the mid-brain is aware of the nerve-firings that cause the arms to move, and the eyes will eventually see the motion, and the feedback connection will be made that leads to awareness of causality: "these nerves and thoughts lead to this visible motion". Patterns will match, reinforcement occurs, and thus memory.
Recall why it is that a deaf person doesn't learn to speak: the feedback loop for the pattern-matching is broken. No feedback, no learning, because the muscular control can't be tested.
Learning is all about pattern-matching. Learning something new is usually based on matching an existing pattern. Otherwise it takes a lot longer, because you have to generate new base patterns. Thus we always start with simple things.
Analogical reasoning is all about matching a pattern, and extending it.
So why haven't we used this approach to teach a computer to speak like we do? Beats me. Probably because it would take just as long as teaching a baby--years. So we have tended to take different approaches that go from zero to sixty in one leap, rather than zero to one to two to three...
We learn things when we are ready to learn them. Which means that we have to have enough base patterns to correlate against.
Some people are better about doing this pattern-match than others. They learn faster and earlier. We learn most things by watching others. I have personally observed this in action a couple of places: #1 being the DC Metro subway system. Watch someone who wasn't born here and doesn't read/speak english try to figure out how to use a farecard machine. Can only be done by watching what others do to get one--because you can't get through the turnstile without it. You observe what someone else does, then you try to do it too. Receiving a farecard = success, you are happy because you have the card, so there is positive reinforcement. Next time, you might have to watch again, but that is reinforcing a pattern, not creating one, so it goes faster.
When you hear someone speak and you don't understand them, you want them to go slower, or talk louder, because your learned patterns aren't being matched. If that person has an accent, you might have to hear unusual words (or words that match the sound but not the context) more than once in order to match the sound AND the context.
You'd think that this is an experimentally verifiable behavior. No one seems to have done (far as I've read, which hasn't covered this topic for a while).
How hard could it be to do it?
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Hamas and terrorism
So this latest attack by Hamas was entirely predictable. So is the next one. Hamas's legitimacy and public approval had dimished quite a bit in recent months, so they allowed the cease-fire to expire, and starting shooting rockets again. The Israelis did the predictable thing and fired back, quite a bit stronger, and now Hamas gets the benefit of sympathy for dead civilians. The locals is Gaza will have to stand behind their "elected government". Hamas is only legitimized by opposing/attacking Israel, so it had to do it. And it will do it again.
Make no mistake about this: Hamas has no intention of EVER concluding any peace deal with Israel. Not going to happen, any more than Arafat was going to. It's not what they want. Arafat's existence and continuation as PLO leader was permanently predicated on the ongoing suffering and victimization of the Palestinians.
Granted, Israel is being very heavy-handed about some things, like the blockade Hamas wants halted. That could be done differently--of course Israel is worried about the importation of weapons, which would inevitably happen, but then again it's already happening, isn't it?
By the endless self-victimization practiced by Hamas and the PLO, the Palestinians manage to be permanently the target of sympathy by the rest of the Arab world, and Israel continues to be hated. This is their goal.
But of course the rest of the Arab world is equally vested in this arrangement; witness the land blockade of Gaza by Egypt--that border is closed--if the Egyptians wanted to actually *help* the people of Gaza, it'd be trivial to do so. In some larger political sense, that's not in Egypt's interest, it'd look too much like peace with Israel, assimilation of Gaza, and the permanent existence of Gaza as separate from a Palestinian return--i.e., a separate nation-state--and the end of a good reason to continually harangue Israel about Gaza.
So the person quoted in the Wash Post yesterday: "why were my children killed? did they have AK-47s?" No, they were killed because the adults failed to report the presence of terrorists among them, and when those terrorists attacked Israel, Israel hit back. So I say to the people of Gaza: you want peace, stop shooting rockets at Israel. Report to appropriate authorities (by which I mean not Hamas) others in the population who would undermine or prevent that peace.
And be glad that it's not me in charge of the Israeli army--I would have been on tv saying "for every rocket launched at Israel, we will immediately flatten 3 buildings in Gaza. And the bulldozing of the rest will start after one week." I would raze Gaza to the ground, leaving nothing larger than a basketball standing. Push everyone out, into Egypt. Once Gaza is cleared, shoot at anything that moves. Turn Gaza into a live-fire bombing target practice zone, permanently.
Make no mistake about this: Hamas has no intention of EVER concluding any peace deal with Israel. Not going to happen, any more than Arafat was going to. It's not what they want. Arafat's existence and continuation as PLO leader was permanently predicated on the ongoing suffering and victimization of the Palestinians.
Granted, Israel is being very heavy-handed about some things, like the blockade Hamas wants halted. That could be done differently--of course Israel is worried about the importation of weapons, which would inevitably happen, but then again it's already happening, isn't it?
By the endless self-victimization practiced by Hamas and the PLO, the Palestinians manage to be permanently the target of sympathy by the rest of the Arab world, and Israel continues to be hated. This is their goal.
But of course the rest of the Arab world is equally vested in this arrangement; witness the land blockade of Gaza by Egypt--that border is closed--if the Egyptians wanted to actually *help* the people of Gaza, it'd be trivial to do so. In some larger political sense, that's not in Egypt's interest, it'd look too much like peace with Israel, assimilation of Gaza, and the permanent existence of Gaza as separate from a Palestinian return--i.e., a separate nation-state--and the end of a good reason to continually harangue Israel about Gaza.
So the person quoted in the Wash Post yesterday: "why were my children killed? did they have AK-47s?" No, they were killed because the adults failed to report the presence of terrorists among them, and when those terrorists attacked Israel, Israel hit back. So I say to the people of Gaza: you want peace, stop shooting rockets at Israel. Report to appropriate authorities (by which I mean not Hamas) others in the population who would undermine or prevent that peace.
And be glad that it's not me in charge of the Israeli army--I would have been on tv saying "for every rocket launched at Israel, we will immediately flatten 3 buildings in Gaza. And the bulldozing of the rest will start after one week." I would raze Gaza to the ground, leaving nothing larger than a basketball standing. Push everyone out, into Egypt. Once Gaza is cleared, shoot at anything that moves. Turn Gaza into a live-fire bombing target practice zone, permanently.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
another computer fix story...
A longish one again.
A few days ago the machine starting making the clicking noise that disks make when they are about to go bad. This noise indicates that the moving head spindle stepper motor is having problems engaging for some reason. O/S blocks while waiting for the disk to engage, position, and read. It had been happening every couple of weeks, in particular when the disks had been idle for some hours, for months.
Then all of a sudden it was ever minute, or every few seconds...pending disaster. Worst thing--it was the boot disk doing it, although I didn't know that right away.
So I went looking for a NAS unit that I could configure as RAID 1 (the mirroring approach, for fault tolerance). Figured I'd just start moving all the files that aren't part of booting onto the NAS. Cost of a RAID 1 NAS unit looked like it would be$300-$350, incl a pair of 500GB drives.
Best to get one with hardware RAID, if possible, and that has passworded control over access. Otherwise it's going to be open on my wireless net (well, not completely open, of course, I do have acess control set, and MAC-address limiting, but that stuff is spoofable/crackable).
So I evolved a plan whereby I would start with a 1 TB drive, use that as part of the copying shuffle, and order a RAID NAS. Then I discovered it was the boot drive that was failing.
This is a far harder problem--you can't just drag files around to make a copy of a boot disk. You also need the deep hidden things like the Master Boot Record, and some other low-level stuff that Windows Explorer can't get at. In addition, Windows Explorer can't copy files that are somehow in use (there are several things in your home-dir that are un-copyable that way).
So I used the new 1TB drive as a holder for data needing to be copied. At first I thought I'd just move drive E: content onto the 1 TB disk (ultimately this was right), and then clone C: onto E:.
I had plenty of space to shuffle things around...the real issue, and the centerpiece of this blog, is how do you clone a disk? What I want is to essentially make a new/different disk look exactly like the boot disk, then remove the boot disk and be back to where I was.
Earlier in the year I did it several times on my Mac G5. There's a nice convenient, easy to use tool for OSX that does this one thing: Carbon Copy Cloner. That's what it does. I did several disks this way, because I wanted to migrate from the original 160 GB disks (which were nearly full, because of MP3s and DVR) to 500 GBs, AND I wanted to install Leopard as well. So I figured I'd clone the boot disk, then install Leopard on the boot disk, and if I had to go backwards, that'd be easy. This whole process went just fine. Have had zero trouble with it, the clone was bootable, etc.
Windows is not so simple about this.
Well, ultimately, it kinda is, although not trivial. There appear to be two competing products for this, and some also-rans. And some freebies.
The big two are Acronis True Image Echo Workstation, and Norton Ghost. I also came across Paragon Disk Copy, which appears to be third.
What'd be ideal is if I could take the 1 TB disk, partition in two, with a smaller partition matching the boot disk, and have that regularly re-image the boot disk, and my old drive E: stuff on the bigger partition. That way I'd always have a safe partition I could use as emergency boot.
That doesn't seem to be one of the possibilities.
I downloaded the Paragon demo, but it doesn't actually work. Well, it does, sort of. You can walk through the mouse-clicks, see the dialogs, etc, but then it doesn't complete the task. You have to buy the thing to find out if it's going to work for you. So I uninstalled that immediately.
This is an odd issue here...online reading suggests that not all tools work for all people.
This URL provides a decent list of the available tools, but it's not complete (altho it did list things I didn't find earlier).
I did the acronis download, and knowing that Ghost was in use at the corporate office, I blasted an email there to see who used what, and how well it had worked. Responses mentioned Ghost and Acronis.
Acronis is a 15-day trial period...more than adequate for me to test-drive and see if it does what I need.
Answer is: yes, it did what I wanted, it went pretty fast...with one weird glitch that I didn't understand at first. My machine has motherboard onboard video, which it turns out is display 0, i.e., first in line for video, like the power-on self-test startup stuff you see. Acronis images your drive by a special reboot that then does the copying...which you can only see on display 0. Which meant that I was seeing nothing, because I didn't have the 2nd monitor plugged in. I could hear the disk activity (and the undesirable clicking), but I didn't know about progress. Or when it was done. This was getting alarming after a while.
Then during a phone call to a coworker who'd recommended Acronis, after he did his own separate test run and saw the right stuff, I realized that I would have too if I'd had the other monitor plugged in...too late at that point, I was already rebooting.
Anyway, it all went well, although it did take me nearly five days to get it resolved.
So: recommended tool: Acronis True Image Echo Workstation. Did the job for me.
I maybe still ought to do the RAID NAS thing...
A few days ago the machine starting making the clicking noise that disks make when they are about to go bad. This noise indicates that the moving head spindle stepper motor is having problems engaging for some reason. O/S blocks while waiting for the disk to engage, position, and read. It had been happening every couple of weeks, in particular when the disks had been idle for some hours, for months.
Then all of a sudden it was ever minute, or every few seconds...pending disaster. Worst thing--it was the boot disk doing it, although I didn't know that right away.
So I went looking for a NAS unit that I could configure as RAID 1 (the mirroring approach, for fault tolerance). Figured I'd just start moving all the files that aren't part of booting onto the NAS. Cost of a RAID 1 NAS unit looked like it would be$300-$350, incl a pair of 500GB drives.
Best to get one with hardware RAID, if possible, and that has passworded control over access. Otherwise it's going to be open on my wireless net (well, not completely open, of course, I do have acess control set, and MAC-address limiting, but that stuff is spoofable/crackable).
So I evolved a plan whereby I would start with a 1 TB drive, use that as part of the copying shuffle, and order a RAID NAS. Then I discovered it was the boot drive that was failing.
This is a far harder problem--you can't just drag files around to make a copy of a boot disk. You also need the deep hidden things like the Master Boot Record, and some other low-level stuff that Windows Explorer can't get at. In addition, Windows Explorer can't copy files that are somehow in use (there are several things in your home-dir that are un-copyable that way).
So I used the new 1TB drive as a holder for data needing to be copied. At first I thought I'd just move drive E: content onto the 1 TB disk (ultimately this was right), and then clone C: onto E:.
I had plenty of space to shuffle things around...the real issue, and the centerpiece of this blog, is how do you clone a disk? What I want is to essentially make a new/different disk look exactly like the boot disk, then remove the boot disk and be back to where I was.
Earlier in the year I did it several times on my Mac G5. There's a nice convenient, easy to use tool for OSX that does this one thing: Carbon Copy Cloner. That's what it does. I did several disks this way, because I wanted to migrate from the original 160 GB disks (which were nearly full, because of MP3s and DVR) to 500 GBs, AND I wanted to install Leopard as well. So I figured I'd clone the boot disk, then install Leopard on the boot disk, and if I had to go backwards, that'd be easy. This whole process went just fine. Have had zero trouble with it, the clone was bootable, etc.
Windows is not so simple about this.
Well, ultimately, it kinda is, although not trivial. There appear to be two competing products for this, and some also-rans. And some freebies.
The big two are Acronis True Image Echo Workstation, and Norton Ghost. I also came across Paragon Disk Copy, which appears to be third.
What'd be ideal is if I could take the 1 TB disk, partition in two, with a smaller partition matching the boot disk, and have that regularly re-image the boot disk, and my old drive E: stuff on the bigger partition. That way I'd always have a safe partition I could use as emergency boot.
That doesn't seem to be one of the possibilities.
I downloaded the Paragon demo, but it doesn't actually work. Well, it does, sort of. You can walk through the mouse-clicks, see the dialogs, etc, but then it doesn't complete the task. You have to buy the thing to find out if it's going to work for you. So I uninstalled that immediately.
This is an odd issue here...online reading suggests that not all tools work for all people.
This URL provides a decent list of the available tools, but it's not complete (altho it did list things I didn't find earlier).
I did the acronis download, and knowing that Ghost was in use at the corporate office, I blasted an email there to see who used what, and how well it had worked. Responses mentioned Ghost and Acronis.
Acronis is a 15-day trial period...more than adequate for me to test-drive and see if it does what I need.
Answer is: yes, it did what I wanted, it went pretty fast...with one weird glitch that I didn't understand at first. My machine has motherboard onboard video, which it turns out is display 0, i.e., first in line for video, like the power-on self-test startup stuff you see. Acronis images your drive by a special reboot that then does the copying...which you can only see on display 0. Which meant that I was seeing nothing, because I didn't have the 2nd monitor plugged in. I could hear the disk activity (and the undesirable clicking), but I didn't know about progress. Or when it was done. This was getting alarming after a while.
Then during a phone call to a coworker who'd recommended Acronis, after he did his own separate test run and saw the right stuff, I realized that I would have too if I'd had the other monitor plugged in...too late at that point, I was already rebooting.
Anyway, it all went well, although it did take me nearly five days to get it resolved.
So: recommended tool: Acronis True Image Echo Workstation. Did the job for me.
I maybe still ought to do the RAID NAS thing...
great quote
it's political...from Talking Points Memo, referring to the Blagojevich issue this week.
"What could be more patriotic than to distract a presidency from its first attempts at fixing a damaged nation?"
What do you bet there will be no Republicans who come out saying it is not ok to criticize the [new] President on a wartime footing. They certainly said it about Bush--will they say it about Obama?
It's ok to criticize the President anytime. Has to be.
That said...it needs to be a valid criticism. Distractions are dangerous time-wasters. This attempt to smear Obama with some of the Blagojevich crap is just that. I'd be willing to bet that the guy doing it, apparently Mike Duncan, head of the RNC, would be unable to be so obnoxious and strident if he actually had to say the words to Obama's face.
"What could be more patriotic than to distract a presidency from its first attempts at fixing a damaged nation?"
What do you bet there will be no Republicans who come out saying it is not ok to criticize the [new] President on a wartime footing. They certainly said it about Bush--will they say it about Obama?
It's ok to criticize the President anytime. Has to be.
That said...it needs to be a valid criticism. Distractions are dangerous time-wasters. This attempt to smear Obama with some of the Blagojevich crap is just that. I'd be willing to bet that the guy doing it, apparently Mike Duncan, head of the RNC, would be unable to be so obnoxious and strident if he actually had to say the words to Obama's face.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Economics
I had a shitty economics class in college. Engineering econ, it was called. Textbook written by the prof; class was Sept 27 to Dec 17 or some such, book did not actually get printed and to the Univ until Thanksgiving.
and on top of that, what it covered was essentially useless. Only thing I got out of that class was the trivial knowledge of how to calculate compound interest. We're talking 1978 (or was it 79?), so this was before advanced math calculators could to that, and before Excel or 1-2-3.
Class *could* have covered real valuable content, like how to cost and budget a engineering proposal, estimate manpower needs for a project, how to manage costs over time. But no.
and now it's 2008. Dec 2008. The economy is in a slump. Big time. Well, the economy was in a slump when I graduated from college. So it will come back.
But what's the deal? There's a really simple explanation you won't ever hear.
Economics, the world economy, our capitalist model, is basically a pyramid scheme. It requires that there be new products and new customers ALL THE TIME.
ok, so as long as the population is growing, there are new customers. But businesses have to keep growing lest the competition take their customers away. Which leads to the need to borrow money--and if there's a hiccup in that, the pyramid turns out to be a house of cards, and starts to collapse.
In addition to the greed. This is the essential flaw in Greenspan's thinking: it doesn't account for criminal behavior by the participants. Like this: when someone thinks up the "derivative" idea of bundling mortgages into a package that can then be "securitized" and resold to investors, the thing you most want to do is resell quickly--i.e., fast turnaround, with a sliver of profit in the sale. You can claim that the risk is low, because the securities are backed by real estate, which always has solid value. But there isn't anyone in the chain, other than the homeowner, who actually *wants* to own the property. The problem there is that once you put enough distance between the homeowner and the ultimate holder of the securitized loan bundle, the investor doesn't know whether the homeowners can actually pay the loans. What's worst is that the mortgage maker who originated the loan doesn't care, ultimately. Said maker wants to make loans, and resell bundles of loans, the fast the better. So you make it as easy as possible to get a mortgage loan, which leads to more people bidding on houses, prices going up, and eventually people being unable to really afford their houses, but have them anyway. The mortgage maker makes a little money from originating the loan, and more when it is resold. The faster that can be done, the better--and they can make new loans as soon as previous ones have been sold. So much for needing due diligence on the buyer's being able to afford the thing, why do you care? You're going to pass the risk on to someone else, that someone isn't likely to investigate the buyer.
But there is going to be a sort of ceiling in prices on houses. They can only go so far upwards before people just can't buy.
As soon as there's a hiccup...those loans turn out to be non-performing. Then you have to wonder about the value of the thing. Housing prices being cyclic, at some point they will be going back down, and maybe then you have the value inversion.
Which is why the screwup in how Treasury and Congress are handling this is happening. They aren't dealing with the loans issue. Banks have asked for money, but are paying operating expenses with it.
And this happens this way because it's a pyramid scheme. As soon as there stop being new customers (or customers able to pay), things start back downward.
A way to solve this for the future: require that mortgage originators hold the loan for a minimum of three years before they can sell it. You know that if the originator knows it has to hold the loan, it is going to be very careful about knowing the buyer can pay. As opposed to recent years, where that absolutely did not matter.
and on top of that, what it covered was essentially useless. Only thing I got out of that class was the trivial knowledge of how to calculate compound interest. We're talking 1978 (or was it 79?), so this was before advanced math calculators could to that, and before Excel or 1-2-3.
Class *could* have covered real valuable content, like how to cost and budget a engineering proposal, estimate manpower needs for a project, how to manage costs over time. But no.
and now it's 2008. Dec 2008. The economy is in a slump. Big time. Well, the economy was in a slump when I graduated from college. So it will come back.
But what's the deal? There's a really simple explanation you won't ever hear.
Economics, the world economy, our capitalist model, is basically a pyramid scheme. It requires that there be new products and new customers ALL THE TIME.
ok, so as long as the population is growing, there are new customers. But businesses have to keep growing lest the competition take their customers away. Which leads to the need to borrow money--and if there's a hiccup in that, the pyramid turns out to be a house of cards, and starts to collapse.
In addition to the greed. This is the essential flaw in Greenspan's thinking: it doesn't account for criminal behavior by the participants. Like this: when someone thinks up the "derivative" idea of bundling mortgages into a package that can then be "securitized" and resold to investors, the thing you most want to do is resell quickly--i.e., fast turnaround, with a sliver of profit in the sale. You can claim that the risk is low, because the securities are backed by real estate, which always has solid value. But there isn't anyone in the chain, other than the homeowner, who actually *wants* to own the property. The problem there is that once you put enough distance between the homeowner and the ultimate holder of the securitized loan bundle, the investor doesn't know whether the homeowners can actually pay the loans. What's worst is that the mortgage maker who originated the loan doesn't care, ultimately. Said maker wants to make loans, and resell bundles of loans, the fast the better. So you make it as easy as possible to get a mortgage loan, which leads to more people bidding on houses, prices going up, and eventually people being unable to really afford their houses, but have them anyway. The mortgage maker makes a little money from originating the loan, and more when it is resold. The faster that can be done, the better--and they can make new loans as soon as previous ones have been sold. So much for needing due diligence on the buyer's being able to afford the thing, why do you care? You're going to pass the risk on to someone else, that someone isn't likely to investigate the buyer.
But there is going to be a sort of ceiling in prices on houses. They can only go so far upwards before people just can't buy.
As soon as there's a hiccup...those loans turn out to be non-performing. Then you have to wonder about the value of the thing. Housing prices being cyclic, at some point they will be going back down, and maybe then you have the value inversion.
Which is why the screwup in how Treasury and Congress are handling this is happening. They aren't dealing with the loans issue. Banks have asked for money, but are paying operating expenses with it.
And this happens this way because it's a pyramid scheme. As soon as there stop being new customers (or customers able to pay), things start back downward.
A way to solve this for the future: require that mortgage originators hold the loan for a minimum of three years before they can sell it. You know that if the originator knows it has to hold the loan, it is going to be very careful about knowing the buyer can pay. As opposed to recent years, where that absolutely did not matter.
Spellforce update
started a round of this again...was suddenly feeling curious about whether playing the game from the beginning without making bases and armies was a winning strategy...
Yes.
In fact, on several of the maps ("islands"), you can run the table without ever activating one of the elf/human/dwarf monuments. You probably always want to do your heroes, but they don't attract attention, unlike the other monuments.
In fact, there was one map where I had a really hard time because I started building an army immediately, last time, that turned out to be pretty simple if I ran it by myself. You have to destroy five commanders, which opens the gate into the big enemy base; there's already an army in there, which you cannot take on, and there's no need to try. That army goes hunting around for you, but the cool thing is that as soon as that army leaves the base, you can stroll in behind it, and destroy the entire place. Solo.
The other thing I decided to do this time is play it from first-person view the whole time. Well, almost the whole time. Turns out that's not effective for certain things, like placing your base buildings, or click-n-drag-select an army team; yeah, you do have to have them sometimes, but generally you can do all the hard work yourself, making it a lot simpler to build an army without being continuously attacked along the way.
Yes.
In fact, on several of the maps ("islands"), you can run the table without ever activating one of the elf/human/dwarf monuments. You probably always want to do your heroes, but they don't attract attention, unlike the other monuments.
In fact, there was one map where I had a really hard time because I started building an army immediately, last time, that turned out to be pretty simple if I ran it by myself. You have to destroy five commanders, which opens the gate into the big enemy base; there's already an army in there, which you cannot take on, and there's no need to try. That army goes hunting around for you, but the cool thing is that as soon as that army leaves the base, you can stroll in behind it, and destroy the entire place. Solo.
The other thing I decided to do this time is play it from first-person view the whole time. Well, almost the whole time. Turns out that's not effective for certain things, like placing your base buildings, or click-n-drag-select an army team; yeah, you do have to have them sometimes, but generally you can do all the hard work yourself, making it a lot simpler to build an army without being continuously attacked along the way.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Science Fiction novels
I encountered this again this past week...having begun reading David Weber's "Off Armageddon Reef" -- it's clear where an author's real knowledge/experience are, and usually clear where it's not. His seems to be nautical, and naval, in the time-frame of 1400-1850...that era of human naval battles and tech advances plays heavily in the middle of the book.
What's also clearly NOT his expertise is at the beginning. Book starts in roughly 2430 AD. i.e., just over 400 years from now. Tech advances between now and then are only vaguely imaginable right now. Think backwards 400 years. Jamestown has just been colonized the year before. Shakespeare is still writing. Galileo has NOT yet published his round-earth and heliocentric writings--the earth is still flat, in essence. Electronics, computing, nanotech--all inconceivable and unexplainable. What tech will exist 400 years from now?
At one point Weber says something along the lines of "they couldn't smuggle a computer out because it was too big". I'm sorry, in 400 years computers won't exist the way we think of them now, and they darned sure won't be big. My guess is that long before then computers will have evolved into nanites that essentially exist everywhere, in unimaginable quantities. They will run through your veins. They will BE your clothes, and will dynamically change color/style/shape. Your nanites will be DNA-reconfiguring, protective. The internet won't exist as this separate thing we now have, it will be ubiquitous.
But his book is predicated on things not happening like that...which leads to my central complaint. If you are an author, but not a tech expert, HIRE someone who IS a tech expert, and have that person read your book from early on, so you don't write something that is so far off-target.
Weber's book is enjoyable enough, kind of a Hornblower-on-another-planet story. and the premise is totally dependent on things being pre-steam-era low-tech. So the story is really about post-Renaissance but still feudal politics and religion. You've read THAT before...
But the main character turns out to have to be a recorded personality installed in a very strong robot...if such robots exist, why did they not fight the battle against the aliens that's in chapter one? Said robots don't need O2, don't need food, don't sleep. So they don't need spaceships anything like what people would need...so they could be fairly bizarre looking, incorporate much funkier designs, no worry about things like life support, radiation shielding, low-gravity propulsion...your largest issue would be micro-particles ripping holes in spaceships.
So if you can't get the tech details straight, LEAVE THEM OUT! and don't base the story on premises that couldn't possible be true...this one: the aliens nearly wiped out humanity, and will be around to finish the job if they detect any RF signals from far far away. So I expect that by 2432 AD, or 3200 AD, there probably won't be any more RF anyway. What would be the point? Networks will have evolved from copper to fiber to quantum long before...broadcast will have gone from RF to cable to fiber to __? Satellite comm will be burst-mode laser soon, and quantum eventually. So no RF to detect anyway. Sorry--premise doesn't hold water from the get-go.
What's also clearly NOT his expertise is at the beginning. Book starts in roughly 2430 AD. i.e., just over 400 years from now. Tech advances between now and then are only vaguely imaginable right now. Think backwards 400 years. Jamestown has just been colonized the year before. Shakespeare is still writing. Galileo has NOT yet published his round-earth and heliocentric writings--the earth is still flat, in essence. Electronics, computing, nanotech--all inconceivable and unexplainable. What tech will exist 400 years from now?
At one point Weber says something along the lines of "they couldn't smuggle a computer out because it was too big". I'm sorry, in 400 years computers won't exist the way we think of them now, and they darned sure won't be big. My guess is that long before then computers will have evolved into nanites that essentially exist everywhere, in unimaginable quantities. They will run through your veins. They will BE your clothes, and will dynamically change color/style/shape. Your nanites will be DNA-reconfiguring, protective. The internet won't exist as this separate thing we now have, it will be ubiquitous.
But his book is predicated on things not happening like that...which leads to my central complaint. If you are an author, but not a tech expert, HIRE someone who IS a tech expert, and have that person read your book from early on, so you don't write something that is so far off-target.
Weber's book is enjoyable enough, kind of a Hornblower-on-another-planet story. and the premise is totally dependent on things being pre-steam-era low-tech. So the story is really about post-Renaissance but still feudal politics and religion. You've read THAT before...
But the main character turns out to have to be a recorded personality installed in a very strong robot...if such robots exist, why did they not fight the battle against the aliens that's in chapter one? Said robots don't need O2, don't need food, don't sleep. So they don't need spaceships anything like what people would need...so they could be fairly bizarre looking, incorporate much funkier designs, no worry about things like life support, radiation shielding, low-gravity propulsion...your largest issue would be micro-particles ripping holes in spaceships.
So if you can't get the tech details straight, LEAVE THEM OUT! and don't base the story on premises that couldn't possible be true...this one: the aliens nearly wiped out humanity, and will be around to finish the job if they detect any RF signals from far far away. So I expect that by 2432 AD, or 3200 AD, there probably won't be any more RF anyway. What would be the point? Networks will have evolved from copper to fiber to quantum long before...broadcast will have gone from RF to cable to fiber to __? Satellite comm will be burst-mode laser soon, and quantum eventually. So no RF to detect anyway. Sorry--premise doesn't hold water from the get-go.
Friday, October 10, 2008
On buying a Jaguar...
Mind you, that's a 3-syllable word. Jag-u-ar. Said with british accent.
Went and got the car last weekend, drove it home. $20k.
It is British Racing Green, of course. Not the original color, it turns out, which was a light blue. (See Jeff Dunham's comments on that color, on youtube).
I have a variety of things to do with the car, some percentage of which have to be done before I can register it for driving. Turns out, here in VA (and elsewhere, apparently), I can register a car as an antique, and it doesn't have to be safety inspected. Just by being 25 years old, it doesn't get emissions inspection. So I can work on it until it can pass safety, then I can have it be for regular driving.
So I've been making a list of what all to do. None of which is likely to be *cheap*, per se, but some things at least won't have to be TOO expensive. I hope.
Went and got the car last weekend, drove it home. $20k.
It is British Racing Green, of course. Not the original color, it turns out, which was a light blue. (See Jeff Dunham's comments on that color, on youtube).
I have a variety of things to do with the car, some percentage of which have to be done before I can register it for driving. Turns out, here in VA (and elsewhere, apparently), I can register a car as an antique, and it doesn't have to be safety inspected. Just by being 25 years old, it doesn't get emissions inspection. So I can work on it until it can pass safety, then I can have it be for regular driving.
So I've been making a list of what all to do. None of which is likely to be *cheap*, per se, but some things at least won't have to be TOO expensive. I hope.
Monday, October 06, 2008
something about religion...
on SEB, I found this interesting...
http://stupidevilbastard.com/index/seb/comments/why_would_god_bother_at_all/
I'd have a different/related take on the idea...I have to disagree with the notion that God knows everything past, present and future...life would be uninteresting...he'd be overmuch like Dr Bloody Bernofski.
Likelier: suppose you were God, and you *could* create the universe, why would you do it? I imagine that you'd do it because it would be an interesting experiment, and you'd do it in such a way that you *couldn't* know how it would go in advance...thus the laws of physics and chemistry that include creation-flavored processes, and entropy, and lots of randomness to prevent perfect prediction.
You'd create the universe with the explicit intention of having intelligent life evolve in it, even if that takes a while, and you'd watch what happened. You probably wouldn't take direct interest in any single individual life, you'd just watch things in general, see what they invent.
And you'd design/create the universe in such a way that life would be reasonably common. Not ridiculously so, but interestingly so. What would be the point of making a universe with a gazillion galaxies, each with a gazillion stars, if you were only going to have life on one planet?
I imagine that being the case because that's what I would do. In fact, I've thought about creating a "universe" of sorts, or rather a simulation of a tiny subset, as a computer program. It'd be some like Spore (computer game), but not identical, because I'd be in tinkering with various aspects (not being omniscient like God, I'd have to be changing the underlying "physics" of the simulation to cause more things to happen; i.e., more life, more variable life...let's face it, rocks orbiting/spinning around is not too exciting).
Life and evolution are so much more interesting than total predestination.
http://stupidevilbastard.com/index/seb/comments/why_would_god_bother_at_all/
I'd have a different/related take on the idea...I have to disagree with the notion that God knows everything past, present and future...life would be uninteresting...he'd be overmuch like Dr Bloody Bernofski.
Likelier: suppose you were God, and you *could* create the universe, why would you do it? I imagine that you'd do it because it would be an interesting experiment, and you'd do it in such a way that you *couldn't* know how it would go in advance...thus the laws of physics and chemistry that include creation-flavored processes, and entropy, and lots of randomness to prevent perfect prediction.
You'd create the universe with the explicit intention of having intelligent life evolve in it, even if that takes a while, and you'd watch what happened. You probably wouldn't take direct interest in any single individual life, you'd just watch things in general, see what they invent.
And you'd design/create the universe in such a way that life would be reasonably common. Not ridiculously so, but interestingly so. What would be the point of making a universe with a gazillion galaxies, each with a gazillion stars, if you were only going to have life on one planet?
I imagine that being the case because that's what I would do. In fact, I've thought about creating a "universe" of sorts, or rather a simulation of a tiny subset, as a computer program. It'd be some like Spore (computer game), but not identical, because I'd be in tinkering with various aspects (not being omniscient like God, I'd have to be changing the underlying "physics" of the simulation to cause more things to happen; i.e., more life, more variable life...let's face it, rocks orbiting/spinning around is not too exciting).
Life and evolution are so much more interesting than total predestination.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Health-related humor
You know the question: which is more painful, a root canal, or a trip to the DMV?
I recently had the opportunity to do both on the same day, which turned out to be a Friday.
The root canal is worse.
On a Saturday, it might be the other way around.
I recently had the opportunity to do both on the same day, which turned out to be a Friday.
The root canal is worse.
On a Saturday, it might be the other way around.
Time for some politics
It should be clear to anyone who thought about it hard that the North Koreans really had/have no intention of actually shutting down and dismantling/destroying the Yongbyon nuclear plant. The only reason I can think of that they would agree to allow the inspectors in etc is because they had already removed everything that they cared about that was portable...i.e., nothing to see remained behind.
And therefore bringing it all back would be relatively simple, as soon as it was appropriate to do so. Which it now seems to be...
You can figure the same will be true in Iran as well. Excepting that at the moment, they are busy bragging about all their centrifuges, when the time comes that they have to allow inspections, it will probably turn out that they tell us they were lying about how many they had...but that will be a lie too.
So don't be surprised by what's going on in North Korea. It was always going to happen this way. They have no intention of not having nuclear fuel processing capability, and will lie about it every time.
Personally, I think we should have gone with the invasion route a few years ago. You don't seriously think we couldn't invade NK and pound the crap out of them, do you? Station two carrier battle groups offshore, there's plenty of space there between NK and Japan, start the air assault, drop HARM missiles on their radar installations, continuous targeting of the DMZ, Patriot batteries to protect SK (because you know that NK's #1 target is Seoul (#2 targets are in Japan), not us, as in "if you attack us we'll hit your friends"), continuous air assault on all the military installations across the country (which, in fact, isn't all that big), a few diversionary sea landings along the eastern coast (also with close air support), and of course the final ground assault across the DMZ once it and all the troops on the north side have been pounded into rubble.
i.e., no land war until physical installations have been pounded flat.
You also have to figure that NK has left a few goodies behind that are going to blow up later, so we don't want to be standing around waiting at the DMZ.
Of course, what would actually happen would be that as soon as the first CBG started to get close, NK would go all crazy and launch missiles at SK, and probably throw some of their experimental stuff at us. We'd want to begin with a number of Patriot counter-missile batteries, brought in quietly. Then the CBGs. and eventually pound Yongbyon into rubble no large than peas.
And therefore bringing it all back would be relatively simple, as soon as it was appropriate to do so. Which it now seems to be...
You can figure the same will be true in Iran as well. Excepting that at the moment, they are busy bragging about all their centrifuges, when the time comes that they have to allow inspections, it will probably turn out that they tell us they were lying about how many they had...but that will be a lie too.
So don't be surprised by what's going on in North Korea. It was always going to happen this way. They have no intention of not having nuclear fuel processing capability, and will lie about it every time.
Personally, I think we should have gone with the invasion route a few years ago. You don't seriously think we couldn't invade NK and pound the crap out of them, do you? Station two carrier battle groups offshore, there's plenty of space there between NK and Japan, start the air assault, drop HARM missiles on their radar installations, continuous targeting of the DMZ, Patriot batteries to protect SK (because you know that NK's #1 target is Seoul (#2 targets are in Japan), not us, as in "if you attack us we'll hit your friends"), continuous air assault on all the military installations across the country (which, in fact, isn't all that big), a few diversionary sea landings along the eastern coast (also with close air support), and of course the final ground assault across the DMZ once it and all the troops on the north side have been pounded into rubble.
i.e., no land war until physical installations have been pounded flat.
You also have to figure that NK has left a few goodies behind that are going to blow up later, so we don't want to be standing around waiting at the DMZ.
Of course, what would actually happen would be that as soon as the first CBG started to get close, NK would go all crazy and launch missiles at SK, and probably throw some of their experimental stuff at us. We'd want to begin with a number of Patriot counter-missile batteries, brought in quietly. Then the CBGs. and eventually pound Yongbyon into rubble no large than peas.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
iPods
Apple announced a new round of iPods last week. Annette wants the new silver 16GB nano. I got the old 160GB classic, since it was discontinued and it sounds like they won't do another high-capacity unit again.
I have about 100GB of stuff on it at this point, so I have 60GB available...I probably won't ever fill that all the way...I'm not into video on the ipod, although I do have most of Strongbad on it (*that* is why you get a video-ipod).
This is my 3rd one. First I had a 20, then a 60, both of which got filled a little too easily...now, everything I have in terms of music will go to about the 3/4-full point.
Nice.
I have about 100GB of stuff on it at this point, so I have 60GB available...I probably won't ever fill that all the way...I'm not into video on the ipod, although I do have most of Strongbad on it (*that* is why you get a video-ipod).
This is my 3rd one. First I had a 20, then a 60, both of which got filled a little too easily...now, everything I have in terms of music will go to about the 3/4-full point.
Nice.
Jade Empire
Having done an upgrade (well, to Win XP) on the older PC, it turned out that Jade Empire installed ok and played. My son already ran through the game, in roughly a week.
Seems overly linear to me, and I have not figured out the combat system. Don't like it, though...I can't tell whether I am supposed to continue clicking on targets or what.
The voice acting is pretty good, but despite it supposedly being chinese people, they have clearly no accent whatsoever.
Otherwise, it's kinda a Crouching Tiger appearance...
Seems overly linear to me, and I have not figured out the combat system. Don't like it, though...I can't tell whether I am supposed to continue clicking on targets or what.
The voice acting is pretty good, but despite it supposedly being chinese people, they have clearly no accent whatsoever.
Otherwise, it's kinda a Crouching Tiger appearance...
Travel
What is it with women and travel?
You know the story...retirement comes around, and they want to travel.
*I* want to have retirement be my home time--where I can have plenty of hours to work my projects that don't get enough time now, and read, and so on. Travel prevents most all of that.
Travel via driving isn't so bad as travel via flying--I *really* don't like flying. Airports have become such a hassle. If I never fly anywhere again, that's fine with me. Driving, altho slower, I'm ok with.
What I don't know yet is how much she wants to travel when the time comes...part of the problem, I think, is that when at home they can't relax, really let go...gotta worry about laundry, dishes, phone calls, etc.
Gotta learn to let go.
You know the story...retirement comes around, and they want to travel.
*I* want to have retirement be my home time--where I can have plenty of hours to work my projects that don't get enough time now, and read, and so on. Travel prevents most all of that.
Travel via driving isn't so bad as travel via flying--I *really* don't like flying. Airports have become such a hassle. If I never fly anywhere again, that's fine with me. Driving, altho slower, I'm ok with.
What I don't know yet is how much she wants to travel when the time comes...part of the problem, I think, is that when at home they can't relax, really let go...gotta worry about laundry, dishes, phone calls, etc.
Gotta learn to let go.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Getting Old, and what to do
I'm going to turn 50 shortly...already got the letter to join AARP a month ago (and sent it back with the $, so I'm official)...and then, last week, when Annette asked me "what do you want for your birthday (besides sex)? You're turning 50, don't you want something special?"
and suddenly it struck me: The XKE! It's time for the mid-life-crisis sports car! And I've wanted one since I was about 10. Click here for a gazillion photos.
So I've been investigating them online...there's a fair amount of interesting info, history, tales of restorations, plenty of photos, and apparently plenty for sale, from junkers that were literally "found in a barn" to immaculate restorations that are probably *better* than they were when they left the factory; and of course the prices reflect all that, too.
And fortuitously, just this past weekend was the local Jaguar Club annual meet (with judging). About 10 XKEs were there, including the (apparently) #2 show car in the US (VERY nice looking).
It did come in a variety of colors, but British Racing Green is, imho, the only one to have; red, and a pale yellow seem next-most common; I'd be ok with the yellow, or a silver-gray. More convertibles ("OTS") were made, but I have never liked them as well, so I'm getting the hardtop ("FHC" or "2+2").
I'll be getting the series two (68-70) model, probably a 69.
One good reason to get a car like this: evidence that women are turned on by them
I'd probably go for a series 3 (the ones with the V12 engine) except that I really don't like the bumpers on them, those are stupid bumpers. The wire wheels are best, too.
Jags have a rep for problems and breakdowns. Not looking forward to that sort of thing, so it'll be important to start upgrading parts pretty soon.
I've found one this is almost exactly what I want...BRG exterior, but black leather interior (hot!) and no A/C (hot!). If I still lived in Texas, no way I'd buy this one. My first car, when I moved to TX, had black vinyl interior (Dad's fault), and no A/C (my fault). Never again down there.
A little higher-priced than I'd have preferred, but I think I won't have any issues with it right away, which is critical.
Plenty of new stuff to learn...fortunately, with an engineering degree, and some experience in car repairs on another car from '73, I have some existing knowledge...
Should be interesting.
and suddenly it struck me: The XKE! It's time for the mid-life-crisis sports car! And I've wanted one since I was about 10. Click here for a gazillion photos.
So I've been investigating them online...there's a fair amount of interesting info, history, tales of restorations, plenty of photos, and apparently plenty for sale, from junkers that were literally "found in a barn" to immaculate restorations that are probably *better* than they were when they left the factory; and of course the prices reflect all that, too.
And fortuitously, just this past weekend was the local Jaguar Club annual meet (with judging). About 10 XKEs were there, including the (apparently) #2 show car in the US (VERY nice looking).
It did come in a variety of colors, but British Racing Green is, imho, the only one to have; red, and a pale yellow seem next-most common; I'd be ok with the yellow, or a silver-gray. More convertibles ("OTS") were made, but I have never liked them as well, so I'm getting the hardtop ("FHC" or "2+2").
I'll be getting the series two (68-70) model, probably a 69.
One good reason to get a car like this: evidence that women are turned on by them
I'd probably go for a series 3 (the ones with the V12 engine) except that I really don't like the bumpers on them, those are stupid bumpers. The wire wheels are best, too.
Jags have a rep for problems and breakdowns. Not looking forward to that sort of thing, so it'll be important to start upgrading parts pretty soon.
I've found one this is almost exactly what I want...BRG exterior, but black leather interior (hot!) and no A/C (hot!). If I still lived in Texas, no way I'd buy this one. My first car, when I moved to TX, had black vinyl interior (Dad's fault), and no A/C (my fault). Never again down there.
A little higher-priced than I'd have preferred, but I think I won't have any issues with it right away, which is critical.
Plenty of new stuff to learn...fortunately, with an engineering degree, and some experience in car repairs on another car from '73, I have some existing knowledge...
Should be interesting.
Monday, September 08, 2008
an interesting blog by someone else...
Here it is (yeah, that's the guy with the goofy-looking beard/hair inversion I wrote about last week)
Pointing out some amazingly ridiculous things. Dangerous things.
Like this
and this
although that graph is clever, if you compared it against which party controlled congress, it'd be different...Dems controlled Congress while Reagan and Bush 1 were prez...and the President does NOT write budget bills--Congress does. An awful lot of people seem not to remember this (there was a fabulous ObviousMan cartoon on this topic ("The president can't make tax law!"); click here for the homepage)
Pointing out some amazingly ridiculous things. Dangerous things.
Like this
and this
although that graph is clever, if you compared it against which party controlled congress, it'd be different...Dems controlled Congress while Reagan and Bush 1 were prez...and the President does NOT write budget bills--Congress does. An awful lot of people seem not to remember this (there was a fabulous ObviousMan cartoon on this topic ("The president can't make tax law!"); click here for the homepage)
Friday, September 05, 2008
Facial hair
Can someone explain to me why it is that so many guys grow a beard when they lose it up top?
http://stupidevilbastard.com/graphics/seblogo.jpg
http://stupidevilbastard.com/graphics/seblogo.jpg
Monday, August 25, 2008
Far Cry
Got this yesterday for $10...and the specs aren't so hairy that my better machine can't run it (unlike some *other* games)
FC has a stellar rep, been waiting for it to be cheap enough for a while...
FC has a stellar rep, been waiting for it to be cheap enough for a while...
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Two Worlds -- another game
got this cheap recently...only to discover in the unreadable tiny print on the back, that it won't install in XP x64. Slugs.
well, after tribulations with the old PC (disk drive disasters, followed by new big disk), got it installed and running. A tad slow, however; I probably should reduce video settings.
Also on the box: "it's like Oblivion on steroids" -- must be those steroids that reduce in size, because it's less large...but it is still similar, probably the reason I bought it. Well, when I say "less large" I mean there are fewer "locations" to explore. In terms of distance side-to-side, that is probably comparable.
Fighting is pretty much a click-fest. One cool thing: if you find two of the same thing as loot (weapons, armor, spell cards), you can drag the new one on top of the existing/equipped one, and the stats are increased--you can stack them as high as you want; unfortunately, the stats don't increase as a simple summation, and there's diminishing returns. Eventually you find things that are good, or have the money to buy them with...
Opponent hardness levels up with you, and you don't get a choice about leveling-up, it just happens. So those 30-pt wolves at the beginning are later going to be 300-pt wolves. Some enemies seem just about unkillable, you'll need a Summon for some; others (Flesh Golem) seem just unkillable period, but I was able to run around them. Eventually I discovered the solution: once you have a big stack of a ranged attack spell (like Fireball (i'm at 52), or Poison Dart (36)), you want draw one near a mana fountain, close enough that you can stand next to it and shoot the opponent, and then pound it until dead, mashing the 6 key as often as you can. This works on dragons, golems, cyclops, ogres.
Your favorite spells are these: Heal, which you'll be using first, Summon XXX (Devil seems best), and Chaos Rage, which causes enemies to attack each other (and your horse, if it's too close, so always dismount a ways off before your attack). The Demon is an extra-strong summon, and combined with Chaos Rage, means you don't have to get in the fray too often (important with undead, whose hits poison you); unfortunately, you don't get the kill points if you or your summon doesn't do the kill. This is valuable if you attack a Tower of necromancers, let them kill each other, you just do cleanup. I found the Hell Master to be a lousy summon, it can't actually hit a target; swings and misses endlessly. When you encounter them as opponents, they are far better than that. The Soul Helper (? Air) has a bow, but mostly runs from danger.
Some quests oppose each other, so you get a choice about which groups you help out.
You can drag/drop a power-up magic enhancement onto a weapon, but only one kind...but you can keep on doing it, so you can also enhance that aspect, not just a second instance of the weapon.
There are entirely too few dungeons here. Oblivion had hundreds, it seemed, between caves, Ayleid places, houses... TW has a few dozen; I feel kinda cheated, but I am having fun with the game.
NPCs all do the Morrowind-style random bopping-around town behavior. No big deal, except that finding which ones you really need to talk to is harder than it should be. And made worse by the fact that the merchants tend to do the bopping around too. In an improvement over Oblivion, the merchants' stock changes over time, which means you can buy new stuff they didn't have before.
Visuals are pretty good...long-range seems better than Oblivion, but close-up seems worse. There's no real "night-time" behavior, but it does rain some, and the desert has sand-storms. and once I got rained on good in the desert, which is fairly improbable.
I have read that once you complete the main storyline the game terminates, so I'm not working too hard to finish that one. There's more than enough else going on to leave that alone.
There are certain weapons that seem pretty rare...they are of course high-end, but I'd like to find/buy them a little more often...I have the "chinese sword", it's class 3. ONLY class 3, and I've been using it for a while now...would like it to be more like class 10. This suggests that it may be better to go with lesser items that occur more often, so you can stack more often. And you can repeatedly add enhancement gems to weapons, although this too has diminishing returns, and eventually stops (if it didn't, I'd have the chinese sword of +6000 spirit damage). Not all weapons work equally well on all opponents, so you seem to need several. Turns out there's a non-obvious location for a couple of spare weapons, and a quick switch mechanism, which is nice, so you aren't carrying lots of weapons.
In the stacking, most (all?) items reach a point where you can't always add new ones. Apparently this has to do with the magical enhancements, some don't allow stacking others.
Creating potions is iffy. Sometimes when you are hoping to get a +10 potion of strength from items with permanent effect, instead you get a gem of +10 lightning or some such. More gems is the last thing I need. I have bunch of perm-effect potion items that won't do what I want (I have one recipe that creates +4 Will from ghoul-brains, I want that same behavior from other items). Could be I need more alchemy skill. Online reading: yes. Wish I could *buy* training skill levels, like in Morrowind. I have the cash...
Having been ill with a major toothache this month, I've had extra time to play during the night, since the tooth wouldn't let me sleep. Root canal coming, yuk.
Online game guide: the main storyline isn't all that long in TW, so definitely do the side-quests first.
Gor Gammar is interesting. I went once, looking for a special item for the main quest, cleared it out (lotta orcs). Then I found a magician who wanted to give me an orc-genocider gizmo to take to Gor Gammar. I can't tell him I already cleared the place, so eventually I went back and dropped it off, for the points. Back to the magician, only to find he's dead, by the hand of *another* magician, who say the first one has created an army of undead at Gor Gammar, with help from someone (awkward!). No, I was just there, place was empty. So I went back...sure enough, big pile of undead. I let them kill each other inside and out. But I wonder--if I had not cleared out the original brigade, would there have been twice as many? Ouch.
Armor and weapons appear to peak out about at the level I've been for a while. I haven't found anything new that is significantly higher in terms of HP or protection. Online elsewhere I've read of folks with apparently much higher numbers, but those comments are from a year ago, which is probably several game-updates back. It also sounds like potion ingredients were more common.
Magic appears more important at the high end. There are fewer attack spells than I think there should be (DS 1/2 had this right all along, with merchants having plenty, in fact always more than I could ever use).
As I'm writing this right now, TW was released exactly one year ago (Aug 21, 2007).
Uniquely, if you want to re-assign your skill points, you can, by finding someone who (for $) will undo them, allowing you to re-assign to something better. A good idea, imho. I haven't done it yet, but I will.
---
I finished, at about 73 hours of playtime (not even remotely close to the 1000 or so hours I put into Oblivion). Once you defeat the final two baddies (which is vaguely tricky at the start), game's over. You want to finish up some other things, you have to reload a previous save and re-kill the final two...Well, I'd about lost interest by this point, which was why I went ahead and whacked the last two bad guys. (so when I said tricky, you can't just attack the first of them, you have to actually talk to him, he says you've eliminated the magical protection for them, and then he's a pretty easy takedown--I'm level 65, and I continue to find Steel Golems harder than these two were.)
well, after tribulations with the old PC (disk drive disasters, followed by new big disk), got it installed and running. A tad slow, however; I probably should reduce video settings.
Also on the box: "it's like Oblivion on steroids" -- must be those steroids that reduce in size, because it's less large...but it is still similar, probably the reason I bought it. Well, when I say "less large" I mean there are fewer "locations" to explore. In terms of distance side-to-side, that is probably comparable.
Fighting is pretty much a click-fest. One cool thing: if you find two of the same thing as loot (weapons, armor, spell cards), you can drag the new one on top of the existing/equipped one, and the stats are increased--you can stack them as high as you want; unfortunately, the stats don't increase as a simple summation, and there's diminishing returns. Eventually you find things that are good, or have the money to buy them with...
Opponent hardness levels up with you, and you don't get a choice about leveling-up, it just happens. So those 30-pt wolves at the beginning are later going to be 300-pt wolves. Some enemies seem just about unkillable, you'll need a Summon for some; others (Flesh Golem) seem just unkillable period, but I was able to run around them. Eventually I discovered the solution: once you have a big stack of a ranged attack spell (like Fireball (i'm at 52), or Poison Dart (36)), you want draw one near a mana fountain, close enough that you can stand next to it and shoot the opponent, and then pound it until dead, mashing the 6 key as often as you can. This works on dragons, golems, cyclops, ogres.
Your favorite spells are these: Heal, which you'll be using first, Summon XXX (Devil seems best), and Chaos Rage, which causes enemies to attack each other (and your horse, if it's too close, so always dismount a ways off before your attack). The Demon is an extra-strong summon, and combined with Chaos Rage, means you don't have to get in the fray too often (important with undead, whose hits poison you); unfortunately, you don't get the kill points if you or your summon doesn't do the kill. This is valuable if you attack a Tower of necromancers, let them kill each other, you just do cleanup. I found the Hell Master to be a lousy summon, it can't actually hit a target; swings and misses endlessly. When you encounter them as opponents, they are far better than that. The Soul Helper (? Air) has a bow, but mostly runs from danger.
Some quests oppose each other, so you get a choice about which groups you help out.
You can drag/drop a power-up magic enhancement onto a weapon, but only one kind...but you can keep on doing it, so you can also enhance that aspect, not just a second instance of the weapon.
There are entirely too few dungeons here. Oblivion had hundreds, it seemed, between caves, Ayleid places, houses... TW has a few dozen; I feel kinda cheated, but I am having fun with the game.
NPCs all do the Morrowind-style random bopping-around town behavior. No big deal, except that finding which ones you really need to talk to is harder than it should be. And made worse by the fact that the merchants tend to do the bopping around too. In an improvement over Oblivion, the merchants' stock changes over time, which means you can buy new stuff they didn't have before.
Visuals are pretty good...long-range seems better than Oblivion, but close-up seems worse. There's no real "night-time" behavior, but it does rain some, and the desert has sand-storms. and once I got rained on good in the desert, which is fairly improbable.
I have read that once you complete the main storyline the game terminates, so I'm not working too hard to finish that one. There's more than enough else going on to leave that alone.
There are certain weapons that seem pretty rare...they are of course high-end, but I'd like to find/buy them a little more often...I have the "chinese sword", it's class 3. ONLY class 3, and I've been using it for a while now...would like it to be more like class 10. This suggests that it may be better to go with lesser items that occur more often, so you can stack more often. And you can repeatedly add enhancement gems to weapons, although this too has diminishing returns, and eventually stops (if it didn't, I'd have the chinese sword of +6000 spirit damage). Not all weapons work equally well on all opponents, so you seem to need several. Turns out there's a non-obvious location for a couple of spare weapons, and a quick switch mechanism, which is nice, so you aren't carrying lots of weapons.
In the stacking, most (all?) items reach a point where you can't always add new ones. Apparently this has to do with the magical enhancements, some don't allow stacking others.
Creating potions is iffy. Sometimes when you are hoping to get a +10 potion of strength from items with permanent effect, instead you get a gem of +10 lightning or some such. More gems is the last thing I need. I have bunch of perm-effect potion items that won't do what I want (I have one recipe that creates +4 Will from ghoul-brains, I want that same behavior from other items). Could be I need more alchemy skill. Online reading: yes. Wish I could *buy* training skill levels, like in Morrowind. I have the cash...
Having been ill with a major toothache this month, I've had extra time to play during the night, since the tooth wouldn't let me sleep. Root canal coming, yuk.
Online game guide: the main storyline isn't all that long in TW, so definitely do the side-quests first.
Gor Gammar is interesting. I went once, looking for a special item for the main quest, cleared it out (lotta orcs). Then I found a magician who wanted to give me an orc-genocider gizmo to take to Gor Gammar. I can't tell him I already cleared the place, so eventually I went back and dropped it off, for the points. Back to the magician, only to find he's dead, by the hand of *another* magician, who say the first one has created an army of undead at Gor Gammar, with help from someone (awkward!). No, I was just there, place was empty. So I went back...sure enough, big pile of undead. I let them kill each other inside and out. But I wonder--if I had not cleared out the original brigade, would there have been twice as many? Ouch.
Armor and weapons appear to peak out about at the level I've been for a while. I haven't found anything new that is significantly higher in terms of HP or protection. Online elsewhere I've read of folks with apparently much higher numbers, but those comments are from a year ago, which is probably several game-updates back. It also sounds like potion ingredients were more common.
Magic appears more important at the high end. There are fewer attack spells than I think there should be (DS 1/2 had this right all along, with merchants having plenty, in fact always more than I could ever use).
As I'm writing this right now, TW was released exactly one year ago (Aug 21, 2007).
Uniquely, if you want to re-assign your skill points, you can, by finding someone who (for $) will undo them, allowing you to re-assign to something better. A good idea, imho. I haven't done it yet, but I will.
---
I finished, at about 73 hours of playtime (not even remotely close to the 1000 or so hours I put into Oblivion). Once you defeat the final two baddies (which is vaguely tricky at the start), game's over. You want to finish up some other things, you have to reload a previous save and re-kill the final two...Well, I'd about lost interest by this point, which was why I went ahead and whacked the last two bad guys. (so when I said tricky, you can't just attack the first of them, you have to actually talk to him, he says you've eliminated the magical protection for them, and then he's a pretty easy takedown--I'm level 65, and I continue to find Steel Golems harder than these two were.)
Monday, July 21, 2008
Get Smart
yes, it's actually a post about a movie. I love movies, but I seldom go to the theater: there's no pause button, and the theater is likely to screw up something.
well, we went anyway.
This is hilarious. You do have to know the original tv show, however. Lacking that, a bunch of funny parts aren't going to even register.
This show is about CHAOS trying to take over (as usual on the original GS), and Siegfried is once again at the helm--played by Terence Stamp.
Spoilers: near the end, a car almost runs Max over as he's trying to get to California. The car is driven by Bernie Koppel. yeah, the guy from "Love Boat"--but before that he was on Get Smart, as the original Siegfried. He yells at Max. It goes by in about 3 seconds. If you haven't seen the show, it will mean nothing. Likewise, Agent 13 won't make any sense, and that goes on longer than 3 seconds. Hymie won't make sense either, at the end.
They managed not to beat certain jokes to death, which was good. "Would you believe...", "Sorry about that chief", etc. Although I think they could have done each of them twice...
it also manages to parody a few other things (True Lies comes to mind, with the dance scene, and James Bond with the "swiss army knife").
Two thumbs up, as they say.
well, we went anyway.
This is hilarious. You do have to know the original tv show, however. Lacking that, a bunch of funny parts aren't going to even register.
This show is about CHAOS trying to take over (as usual on the original GS), and Siegfried is once again at the helm--played by Terence Stamp.
Spoilers: near the end, a car almost runs Max over as he's trying to get to California. The car is driven by Bernie Koppel. yeah, the guy from "Love Boat"--but before that he was on Get Smart, as the original Siegfried. He yells at Max. It goes by in about 3 seconds. If you haven't seen the show, it will mean nothing. Likewise, Agent 13 won't make any sense, and that goes on longer than 3 seconds. Hymie won't make sense either, at the end.
They managed not to beat certain jokes to death, which was good. "Would you believe...", "Sorry about that chief", etc. Although I think they could have done each of them twice...
it also manages to parody a few other things (True Lies comes to mind, with the dance scene, and James Bond with the "swiss army knife").
Two thumbs up, as they say.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Free Music again
turns out there are a couple of classical music sites, I just learned...
MusOpen a bunch of these MP3s require either emusic or napster, which I don't want to mess with.
and
Classic Cat
Mind you, these two don't much include the great stuff we all know and love...what's available tends to be somewhat obscure.
Look up Rimsky-Korsakov. You don't get the entirety of Scheherazade, you get a couple of very short excerpts. Shubert: full Ave Maria, and a lot of others I never heard of (well, I'm hardly an expert, but I do like I reasonable amount of classical). And you apparently can get different versions of things: two complete Beethoven's Fifth's different in length by three minutes. Are these different arrangements, or different tempos?
Apparently Wikipedia can lead to some free classical...I haven't looked at that yet.
Jamendo and BeSonic continue to be favorites.
MusOpen a bunch of these MP3s require either emusic or napster, which I don't want to mess with.
and
Classic Cat
Mind you, these two don't much include the great stuff we all know and love...what's available tends to be somewhat obscure.
Look up Rimsky-Korsakov. You don't get the entirety of Scheherazade, you get a couple of very short excerpts. Shubert: full Ave Maria, and a lot of others I never heard of (well, I'm hardly an expert, but I do like I reasonable amount of classical). And you apparently can get different versions of things: two complete Beethoven's Fifth's different in length by three minutes. Are these different arrangements, or different tempos?
Apparently Wikipedia can lead to some free classical...I haven't looked at that yet.
Jamendo and BeSonic continue to be favorites.
Monday, June 23, 2008
a Great quote about economics
“No one in Asia wants to live in a Chinese-dominated world. There is no Chinese dream to which people aspire,” explained Simon Tay, a Singaporean scholar.
Esp not me. One only has to look at the gov response to the earthquake to know you don't want to live there...Complain about why the schools collapsed and you go to jail. Talk to your friends about it, and you go to jail. Yeah, that's quality of life.
Esp not me. One only has to look at the gov response to the earthquake to know you don't want to live there...Complain about why the schools collapsed and you go to jail. Talk to your friends about it, and you go to jail. Yeah, that's quality of life.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Friday, May 23, 2008
"alternative energy sources"
chatter about "alternative energy sources" has been around for a long time...I recall hearing this probably for the first time right after the original 1973 "oil crisis"...
what are these sources of energy? remember your physics: energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just converted from one form into another. That is not necessarily easy to do (atomic bomb), but it can be done.
(numbers used here: from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power) -- go look at this, there are some interesting numbers towards the bottom)
the sources you hear about:
1) Wind power. If you put a fan blade in the path of moving air, it will rotate. if you have the mechanical linkage from that rotation to a generator, you can draw electrical power from it. This is a conversion--you are taking kinetic energy from the air movement, and converting it into electrical energy. So what happens to the air as a result? It slows down. Or it cools down. Or both.
How much energy can you extract without causing some other problem? If you could remove 100% of the kinetic energy, the air would come to a stop. Well, what causes it to move in the first place? Energy from the sun, the daily heating and cooling cycle, rotational differences (you know, Coriolis). You'd also end up removing thermal energy, making the air colder; perhaps that would help with global warming :)
2) Ocean currents. Pretty much the same as wind--if you could put a fan of some sort in the water perpendicular to the Gulf Stream, the (albeit slow) ocean current would cause a rotation that could turn generators for electricity. What would happen to the water? The current would slow down, and it would get colder.
The bad thing here is that ocean life is super-sensitive to temperature changes. A drop of one or two degrees would be a disaster for marine life.
Fortunately, the engineering cost of doing this would be insane, so it's pretty unlikely.
3) Geothermal. Taking advantage of the thermal gradients underground. If the earth's core is pretty hot, as we've been taught, then this should work fairly well. I'd argue that the engineering cost is again way too high for large-scale use.
4) Solar. The biggest, and essentially inexhaustible, energy source within a light-year or two is the Sun. You can look this up (got my number from Wikipedia, so it's as trustworthy as that is): solar energy striking the earth is about 1300 watts/square-meter. I don't know if that's at the equator, the poles, or average over the entire surface, but let's use it anyway. ("1.366 kW - astro: power received from the sun at the earth's orbit by one square metre" -- sounds like equator to me)
Solar power conversion efficiency is about 10-15% right now (we've been doing this for >30 years, but that's all the better we are). So figuring other losses, let's say we can reliably get 100 watts/sq-yard. There are 3 million square yards per square mile. That means we can get 300 megawatts of electrical power for each square mile of solar cells we build. During daylight, mind you, which IS a problem. Let's suppose we gave approx 100 square miles of otherwise unused land per state to this (so Rhode Island probably can't do that, but Nevada could pick up the slack). That's 300 MW * 100 * 50, or 1.5 Terawatts. That's in the ballpark of total world electrical consumption (Wikipedia: 1.7 TW - geo: average electrical power consumption of the world in 2001 (presumably that's daily average)).
The current retail cost of solar panels is about $5/watt, which is kinda high. In large-scale construction quantities, let's say that drops to $2 installed. That means that our proposed qty above is $3 Trillion. We would not, of course, pay that all at once, and other costs would go down as that got phased in (oil consumption would drop quite a bit, because we could stop using it for power generation during the day (still need night-time--what to do?)).
The night-time issue is interesting...Options are to continue to burn fossil fuels (oil, coal) for this. Another alternative is have a lot of batteries underneath the solar panels; I doubt this is adequate for the entire night...A friend has suggested that excess power should be used to spin up large inertial masses that would thus be storing a lot of energy in their rotation (giant flywheels), and the night-time extraction would be far less than the daytime need, so they could hold enough for overnight every day, all year. This strikes me as having some real engineering problems: how big can these things be? how quickly do they wear out? what are they made of? can you spin them fast enough (material strength)?
Ultimately of course this leads (as it inevitably must) to the Dyson sphere, but we don't need to try to do that any time soon :)
But...imagine that we had spent $500 Billion on energy development instead of a war in Iraq, which has not made the cost of energy cheaper (the opposite, if anything). That's a relatively small fraction (15%) of the total needed, but it's a certainty that the process of having done so would change the world. I think it's engineering-feasible. and we MUST get off the oil.
what are these sources of energy? remember your physics: energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just converted from one form into another. That is not necessarily easy to do (atomic bomb), but it can be done.
(numbers used here: from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power) -- go look at this, there are some interesting numbers towards the bottom)
the sources you hear about:
1) Wind power. If you put a fan blade in the path of moving air, it will rotate. if you have the mechanical linkage from that rotation to a generator, you can draw electrical power from it. This is a conversion--you are taking kinetic energy from the air movement, and converting it into electrical energy. So what happens to the air as a result? It slows down. Or it cools down. Or both.
How much energy can you extract without causing some other problem? If you could remove 100% of the kinetic energy, the air would come to a stop. Well, what causes it to move in the first place? Energy from the sun, the daily heating and cooling cycle, rotational differences (you know, Coriolis). You'd also end up removing thermal energy, making the air colder; perhaps that would help with global warming :)
2) Ocean currents. Pretty much the same as wind--if you could put a fan of some sort in the water perpendicular to the Gulf Stream, the (albeit slow) ocean current would cause a rotation that could turn generators for electricity. What would happen to the water? The current would slow down, and it would get colder.
The bad thing here is that ocean life is super-sensitive to temperature changes. A drop of one or two degrees would be a disaster for marine life.
Fortunately, the engineering cost of doing this would be insane, so it's pretty unlikely.
3) Geothermal. Taking advantage of the thermal gradients underground. If the earth's core is pretty hot, as we've been taught, then this should work fairly well. I'd argue that the engineering cost is again way too high for large-scale use.
4) Solar. The biggest, and essentially inexhaustible, energy source within a light-year or two is the Sun. You can look this up (got my number from Wikipedia, so it's as trustworthy as that is): solar energy striking the earth is about 1300 watts/square-meter. I don't know if that's at the equator, the poles, or average over the entire surface, but let's use it anyway. ("1.366 kW - astro: power received from the sun at the earth's orbit by one square metre" -- sounds like equator to me)
Solar power conversion efficiency is about 10-15% right now (we've been doing this for >30 years, but that's all the better we are). So figuring other losses, let's say we can reliably get 100 watts/sq-yard. There are 3 million square yards per square mile. That means we can get 300 megawatts of electrical power for each square mile of solar cells we build. During daylight, mind you, which IS a problem. Let's suppose we gave approx 100 square miles of otherwise unused land per state to this (so Rhode Island probably can't do that, but Nevada could pick up the slack). That's 300 MW * 100 * 50, or 1.5 Terawatts. That's in the ballpark of total world electrical consumption (Wikipedia: 1.7 TW - geo: average electrical power consumption of the world in 2001 (presumably that's daily average)).
The current retail cost of solar panels is about $5/watt, which is kinda high. In large-scale construction quantities, let's say that drops to $2 installed. That means that our proposed qty above is $3 Trillion. We would not, of course, pay that all at once, and other costs would go down as that got phased in (oil consumption would drop quite a bit, because we could stop using it for power generation during the day (still need night-time--what to do?)).
The night-time issue is interesting...Options are to continue to burn fossil fuels (oil, coal) for this. Another alternative is have a lot of batteries underneath the solar panels; I doubt this is adequate for the entire night...A friend has suggested that excess power should be used to spin up large inertial masses that would thus be storing a lot of energy in their rotation (giant flywheels), and the night-time extraction would be far less than the daytime need, so they could hold enough for overnight every day, all year. This strikes me as having some real engineering problems: how big can these things be? how quickly do they wear out? what are they made of? can you spin them fast enough (material strength)?
Ultimately of course this leads (as it inevitably must) to the Dyson sphere, but we don't need to try to do that any time soon :)
But...imagine that we had spent $500 Billion on energy development instead of a war in Iraq, which has not made the cost of energy cheaper (the opposite, if anything). That's a relatively small fraction (15%) of the total needed, but it's a certainty that the process of having done so would change the world. I think it's engineering-feasible. and we MUST get off the oil.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
final on Spellforce 2
I played this through to the end, and there were nearly no crashes. I say "nearly", because there WERE a couple of crashes, but that seemed more a problem about how much other stuff I had running at the same time (which was generally way too much).
As you aren't the Rune Warrior, you don't auto-respawn if "killed", and if YOU get killed, your whole team likely will too; not always, but likely.
There's an expansion pack, but I won't be getting that. The only way it comes in the US is as part of the get-all-five-games-in-one-box-on-one-disc, for $30. Maybe not...unless I can find it used <$10 or something.
As you aren't the Rune Warrior, you don't auto-respawn if "killed", and if YOU get killed, your whole team likely will too; not always, but likely.
There's an expansion pack, but I won't be getting that. The only way it comes in the US is as part of the get-all-five-games-in-one-box-on-one-disc, for $30. Maybe not...unless I can find it used <$10 or something.
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