Ain't Windows wonderful?

So in general it's a good idea to do the O/S updates from Microstink when they are issued.

but not always...

and I got burned by that two days ago. I have two PCs, both are the neat little micro-boxes...I like the size, the lack of noise, etc. Anyway, one runs XP and one runs 7. I don't have space for multiple kbds and monitors, so I normally have XP open via Remote Desktop.

So these latest updates from M$ broke Remote Desktop. I cannot connect to XP from 7. This is awful!

Surely it doesn't take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure out these kinds of things before releasing software !?!?!?

I realize you can't test against all possible combinations of softwares someone else might have...but surely you can test against all your own stuff ?!?!

So Win 7 is now showing what are probably the same updates...maybe I'll get really really lucky and that will fix the problem...nah. not gonna happen.

Favorite restaurants

My favorite chinese restaurant in this area has closed: Hunan Lion. The facility has been stripped to the walls, even the lions are gone. That almost suggests they are moving...went by last night hoping for dinner, but no.

This is a sad day...there really isn't one as good that we know of around here.

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[Later: Sept 15] In a weird turn of events, I've changed employers, and I'm now going to be working in the building where Hunan Lion used to be. Same bldg used to have a TGI Friday's, but that's been gone for years. It is just now getting replaced by an Indian restaurant. If it's a good one, that will be like heaven.

Starcraft 2

Yeah, so I did the crazy thing and went to Best Buy at midnight to get a copy on opening day. Actually I went at 12.45, and there was no one there except the employees...so no waiting.

Fired it up at home...and did the tutorial. The gameplay mechanics appear to have not changed at all. It IS visually prettier--but it still needs the zoom way way out that Supreme Commander has. All the keystrokes are the same.

The EULA is a bit annoying...if I were to use the editor kit to make something, Blizzard owns it. Guess I won't be doing any.

It's good that this is finally out...been a long time coming. We'll see how it goes.

[later...]

It's a lot prettier than the first game. the cinematics are excellent...the way this works is that you do a mission, you end up back on Raynor's starship. If you did the side missions, you maybe have some money and research points to spend on things, which you do while on the ship.

The in-game animations are really good, too.

But what of the "story" ? So far it seems like the SC 1, the story takes place as narrative and cinematics while you blast aliens. One thing I don't like is that it doesn't let me finish blasting the aliens everywhere...Redstone was the first map where I did.

[days later]

I'll post a walk-through of sorts before too long, for the campaign.

There are four difficulty modes: Casual=you're new to RTS games, Normal=you've played RTS games, Hard=you've played through StarCraft 1 not too long ago, Brutal=you're a master at SC 1.

Even with that, the maps vary in difficulty: some on Normal are more difficult than others on Hard.

One story sequence has Zeratul appear, and then you actually play as Zeratul for a few missions--the last one of which is harder than anything else I've done in SC2 so far--this is primarily because I don't really know how to play as a Protoss, and doing the other missions isn't really going to teach you.

As you proceed through missions, new mission possibilities pop up, featuring different characters: Zeratul, Tosh, Tychus, Mengsk Jr. You are working towards a point where you are maybe going to be able to rescue Kerrigan !?

I'm not finished yet...

Latest on compy games

Played the Supreme Commander 2 demo earlier this year (figuring I'd get SupCom 2 when Steam has it cheap enough), and so I finally got motivated to buy the original...

With which I have issues...

1) It won't even install on Win 7 Pro. Grrr...It's not like this is from some little micro developer. Back to XP.
2) My XP box just barely has enough horsepower, despite being an AMD 2800+ dual-core, with ATI X1600 graphics.
3) It aborted really badly on me yesterday, and I cannot recover. I was in the middle of the final episode (#6) for the UEF faction, did something that caused it to crash hard, and I cannot get it going again...not for lack of trying, but none of the saved games will get going, not even the tutorial behaves properly.

SupCom1 is an update to Total Annihilation, from years ago. One extra feature is that your army can be A LOT larger, I think 400 buildings and fighting units, which is great (considering that Starcraft limits you to 200, which gets to pinch a little sometimes), but this does mean that extra compute power is needed. So with this crash, something is now wrong in that it seems unable to handle more than six or eight units/bldgs. So game saves just barely even load, and won't run.

This crash was so bad that I went and looked at services to turn off, startup apps to remove, and ultimately had to uninstall the game.

Fortunately, I only paid $3 for the game, on Ebay...but still. That is absolutely the worst software crash I've experienced. Ouch.

Steam games on mac

Hallelujah! Steam has come to the intel mac!

I now have Torchlight, Portal, and --TADA! Half-life 2 on my powerbook laptop!

Booyah! Vacation is going to be even better, whether the beach has oil residue on it or not!

Cars n such

Recall from earlier entries that I got a Jaguar XKE 18 months ago...joined the local Jag owner's club about that same time...last summer's picnic was good, and there was a couple there with an '03 XK8, sea-foam green (my mom's fave color). This car is a nice looker...probably the best-looking Jag after the E. And if you don't need a new one, a used one is a good bit cheaper than an E.

[here's where a secret is revealed] So my wife decides she really likes this one, and wants one of her own, except she wants a convertible. This took a while to manage, basically not until I had a chunk of $ come in as bonus money this year...so here's what we got:

I apologize that the size is wrong. Just click right on it and click "view image" in the popup menu.



it's midnight blue, with a nice light tan interior (ideal for when it's hot out, unlike my E, which has a *black* interior :(:( which I gotta fix one of these days)

So now we are a two-Jag operation...plus two other cars...altho the pickup is going to evolve into being my son's car, since he's 18 now.

It's the iPad

So I got an ipad ten days ago...this is a REALLY nifty device...going to change personal computing as we know.

What makes it different: you DO NOT interact with the operating system. Ever. This means you can't actually look at files qua files. Only as things you manipulate via applications...so when you "save an image" from Safari, it is actually copied directly into the "iphoto" application's storage and knowledge...no "find a folder, supply a name, click save, go to iphoto, open/import, find the folder, click the file". Anytime you need to enter text, you tap the field to do that in, the virtual kbd pops up, you type away...

What it does NOT do: well, it does not let me make these blog entries--the blog body text is entered in a javascript widget, not a regular text field, so ipad cannot see the thing, thus no kbd, no typing, no nothing...well, you can enter the title, and the label tags below...but that's it.

This is really bad--this device is ideal for a blog-on-the-go, and it can't be done.

What is really cool: last friday I saw a Tesla car just outside my office bldg, at lunchtime. Decided I needed to send my wife a text msg about it, I don't have my phone (just the ipad), how am I going to do it? when I got to the cafe with wifi, got logged in, looked online for help on this, it says "grab this free ipad app" by clicking on a link which takes me right to the app store, I click again to install it, that takes a few seconds, then tiny bit of setup and I can send a msg. Fabulous!

I actually bought the ipad app for Bento, as well as the G5 version, so I could see about converting my filemaker databases over to something I could sync with the ipad (had been thinking about having them on my android phone, but this is going to be better...once I can get the pictures incorporated (non-trivial: I have about 2000 images in those databases I want on the ipad).

Still...I love this gadget.

Computer games on Steam

Steam is a really nifty delivery mechanism, and a lot of older games are moving over there...just this past week, the entire Quake collection was available for $15. Hard to beat that...

Except that all too often, you can buy a game that literally WILL NOT PLAY. Is Valve actually testing any of this stuff?

I'm running Win7 x64, and I have some serious trouble with things. I have had several demos fail to run, and a couple of things I've bought also would not run. I think a couple of demos have even failed to install.

Surely it doesn't take an Advanced Degree(tm) to figure this out? At the least, the Steam client should be able to detect your machine properties and tell you that it won't run certain things.

computer parts

got some some bonus money from work a couple of months ago, so I bought myself this:

HP 21" Touch-screen monitor

which is just as cool as the name implies. works right out of the box on Win 7.

so imagine my surprise when i attach the other monitor and make this one the 2nd mon...yeah, the touch point x/y is assumed to be the primary monitor, so it does things on that monitor!

that's right, either the monitor or (more likely) Win7 does NOT know that the touch-screen might not be the primary monitor.

Looks like I'll have to switch them. Gad.

more gadgets

I'll probably get an IPAD next month...I've already ordered a fairly nifty looking touch-screen, it should be here in a few days.

Something else I've been thinking about recently is wearable computer. There's a reason why, but I had not thought about it for several years...I was expecting to be able to have one this year, and they don't look any more available than ever, maybe less.

The key reason I'd want one is that I want it to have what's called a Remembrance Agent, although I want it to be a lot more powerful than the discussion here. At another place, read the "Future" section, and that is more what I want (although this paper is ancient). I want it to be a regular computer, too, and do other stuff like watch RSS feeds for me and notify me when there's something I might be interested in. I've done some of the software work on that already.

Looking here, you can see this guy's interests are related, but he doesn't do any maintenance on his website.

and here's an enabling device I have to get

news you can use

or not...I did not know this: (see panel two)

Comic pic

new phone coming...

into my life...probably in a week or two at the most...

the Android phone. specifically, the HTC Hero, from Sprint.

why? because you can program it in Java, and it's not restricted the way the iphone is. and that means I can write my own apps and use them without getting Apple's approval for it...yay! that means I can figure out how to move my databases onto the phone, and finally ditch the PDA.

this is looking pretty nifty at this point.

Vancouver Olympics

I'm watching the gold-medal ice hockey game between Canada and the US men's teams...I watched the women's final as well...I had forgotten that USA had a good women's ice hockey team, but we weren't quite good enough this time. It's interesting watching hockey where checking isn't allowed. The hockey games have not been as challenging as one might hae wished, given that the US and Canadian teams are really dominant.

The Olympics have certainly been good this year. I watch nearly every minute that is actually broadcast that I'm home for, which is about 10 times as much tv as I can really stand. It is pretty high-res stuff, tho...watching the instant-replay for hockey the puck is really sharp on the screen, which is impressive considering that thing can be moving 100 mph.

I have something else going on this year, in that I wanted to track news stories about various events, because I need some additional input content for training a piece of software I wrote a year ago: it filters text content (stories, like news) based on training which is pre-categorized...i.e., I take various stories, assign topics, create a training model from them, and then use that training model to categorize new stories. The technique uses what's called "support vector machine", it's mostly about positive examples (where other trained systems used both pos and neg training). Anyway, I generally grab content from various RSS feeds, because they are slightly pre-categorized (like the Washington Post sports feed); this is not great because it tends to be limited content: NFL, NBA, MLB, and college equivalents. I need some other sources, but haven't looked very hard yet. Olympics is a fairly concentrated bunch of stories about skiing, skating, hockey, and curling. And it turned out that Vancouver has its own RSS feed, which is ideal for me: I have a separate tool written several years ago whose sole purpose is to grab stories from RSS feeds. This means I can continuously grab stories, not worry about them getting superseded or expiring, and then zip through a folder of them marking them for their training topics.

I should fire up a few more feeds for this, but I especially wanted to get the olympics because of the fairly unique set of stories I could get.

The only flaw in this is that I don't have a really good set of story topics that covers a lot of territory in a lot of detail. If I made more topics, I could probably get into more detail, but I don't know how much is really appropriate.

This whole idea, for me, dates back to some work in about the 1996 time-frame. You'd have a text-processing system where content would be brought in (like a large number of RSS feeds), you'd run them through a topic recognizer, and run that output through several differently-trained name-finders. From there you'd feed the names into a database, use some other correlation techniques.

I was trying to go this direction again in '08 with the pirates demo: could you find out what those guys are up to by any online content (in retrospect, I think not, that seems to be entirely target of opportunity, rather than any organized piracy with malice aforethought). Like drug-related stuff in Mexico, and Columbia, it's mostly about kidnapping, rather than loot.

----

The Canadian hockey team is outplaying us, same as the women's game. Sigh. We are not doing the passing we need to, and shooting too early.

interesting artwork

actually, amazing is more like it. You have probably never seen anything this before in your life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOhf3OvRXKg

(and note that there are other vids of her work--I gotta get these onto my ipod)

here's the background (as I rec'd it from a friend):


Dont dare to miss this amazing Video Clip . . first read it properly..

This video shows the winner of "Ukraine’s Got Talent", Kseniya Simonova, 24, drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table showing how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. Her talent, which admittedly is a strange one, is mesmeric to watch.

The images, projected onto a large screen, moved many in the audience to tears and she won the top prize of about £75,000.

She begins by creating a scene showing a couple sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated.

It is replaced by a woman’s face crying, but then a baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns and Miss Simonova throws the sand into chaos from which a young woman’s face appears.

She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier.

This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house.

In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye.

The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine, resulted in one in four of the population being killed with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million.


Kseniya Simonova says:
"I find it difficult enough to create art using paper and pencils or paintbrushes, but using sand and fingers is beyond me. The art, especially when the war is used as the subject matter, even brings some audience members to tears. And there’s surely no bigger compliment."


Please take time out to see this amazing piece of art.

click on the link below

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=vOhf3OvRXKg

on being a geek

This little top-ten list describes me a little too well...

http://www.gk2gk.com/topten/waystotell.asp

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words copied here in case that link goes bad. apologies for the cut-n-paste, but I'm not claiming I created this:

Top 10 Reasons Why Geeks Make the Best Catch

It’s not generally realized that geeks (male and female) are the best catches. Americans focus on the glamour of the good-looking, the male jock and the statuesque female, and tend to make fun of second banana characters like Urkel. Yet, geeks (a.k.a. nerds, etc.) provide the opportunity to have much longer, more stable, and happy relationships. Here are the top ten reasons:

1. Geeks don't cheat. Geeks know that the grass only seems greener on the other side. They instinctively stay devotedly loyal to their lovers through thick and thin. Their social skills are also not well developed enough to support an affair.

2. Geeks appreciate their mates. Since you are likely to be one of the first persons a geek has ever had a significant relationship with, you will be treated well. A geek knows that there aren’t a whole lot of other possibilities. Frankly, geeks aren't quite sure how they ended up with the person they have attracted. When you date a geek, you know that geek will be yours for as long as you wish.

3. Geeks haven't formed bad relationship habits. After years of dating other people, the socially successful have become too confident to be intimate, think of partners as being only for their self-gratification, and focus on making themselves happy. None of this is true of a geek. The lack of past romantic partners allows the geek to approach lovers with the zest of a neophyte. Geeks are not full of romantic confidence. However, once encouraged, they are eager to please and enjoy their relationship.

4. Geeks are good at the things they try. Every geek has skills passionately developed over a long period of time. It could be role playing, chess, hacking, playing video games, or the ability to properly assemble a computer. So you know that geeks won't quit until they have learned how to make their relationship the best.

5. Geeks are not interested in status. Geeks became geeks because they chose to spend their time doing things that would not necessarily make them popular with everyone else in school, like sports and fashion. The ability to resist peer pressure is important to geeks. This means that a geek is more interested in your happiness than in looking good to others.

6. Geeks have imagination. Boredom is important to avoid to the game playing geek. A geek will seek new and creative ways to play, and this translates to relationships as well.

7. Geeks are happy and successful in their chosen field. No matter what their education level, geeks are able to make good incomes doing work that they enjoy. That eliminates one of the most frequent causes of relationship problems, since people who don’t like their jobs may take it out on their significant other.

8. Geeks are analytical. If they don’t get it right the first time, they look at what they did and figure out what to change. And when they DO get it right, they still keep finding ways to improve on it.

9. Geeks can concentrate. Geeks can focus their energy on one task with total intensity. Granted, the task they are focusing on may have more to do with writing new software for their Blackberry, but the fact remains that a geek, once set upon a task, tirelessly sets about to achieving a goal.

All of which means that…

10. Geeks want to be the best at what they do. So they try harder. And they never stop trying.

© 2004-2007 by Geek 2 Geek. www.gk2gk.com Not to be used without permission and attribution

building a new compy again

So about the time I got Torchlight, there was also the announcement about the new 3D zero-gravity space shooter game (Shattered Horizon [shadoobie]) that is Win7/Vista/DX10-only. Arrgg!

The PC I built in early 2006 is not going to get the job done, without a lot of upgrade, in which case I might as well build a new one. Is that even going to be possible? I have some requirements: AMD Phenom II quad-core cpu, 3+GHz, min 4GB DDR2 RAM possible, PCI Ex 2.0, DX10 possible, micro ATX-size case.

Turns out that is just now doable, with caveats. Shuttle is now making a case/mobo combo that will take a Phenom II, but only certain ones: those needing < 100 watts of power. There's a sticker on the cpu socket that warns you about this...so the highest-end cpus can't go in there (940, 955, 965) because they are either 125 or 140 watts. I only found this out by reading some of the user comments at Newegg. I'd have found out when I opened the case, of course, but if I'd already bought the 965 I'd have been unhappy. Newegg offers those two as a bundle, but that's kinda stupid given that that cpu can't go on the mobo. I went with the 945, 3 GHz quad-core, 95 watts.

In addition, Windows 7 is available as a free beta for the next 5 months. I don't know what happens after that, probably they want money or it shuts down. Well, it's Win7 Ultimate, which is actually more than I really want; Pro is what I want...but for test-drive purposes, this is ok.

Bought some of the new pieces in person at MicroCenter, and mail-ordered the case/cpu pair from Newegg.

Things went together like a breeze, which was great. Win7 installed with ZERO hassles, and nearly zero personal involvement. Other drivers went in super-quick/simple, also good, and it ran the first game I tried out...which was, interestingly, Bioshock, which does not run properly on my XP box. Works great, so I need to try some other things out, too, like UT04 which has quit working on my XP box. Need to try out Oblivion (and when the hell is Elder Scrolls 5 coming out?).

Case/mobo comes with two monitor sockets on-board, and the video card (ATI 4670) has two more, so i could put four monitors on this. Think I'll see about getting another 24" one...four monitors. That's what I'm talkin' about!

Gotta put a carrying handle on top of this one, too.

Win 7 boots pretty damn fast, and the wake from sleep is damn fast, too. Hooray!

The trick will be to not install so much stuff that if I have to do a complete wipe/reinstall it won't be too hard...

A month or so ago I got a dual 1TB raid unit set to mirroring. I have pushed all the mp3 stuff from the old pc onto the raid unit. It's not real fast, but does ok to play music. And all the machines can see it. (actually this "not too fast" issue is alarming/weird--should be at least 100T ethernet going in the back, but it seems like no more than 10T at best)

See you again in 3 years or so on this same topic.

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Bioshock has behaved weirdly for me...Oblivion has been great, except when i was trying to run bioshock, which was having/causing some really weird audio problems. So long as I steer clear of BioS, everything else seems ok...which won't be hard to do, because I've reached a point in BioS where I literally cannot continue, there's some bug I'm hitting.

Oblivion plays quite fine on this system, even with a bunch of the graphics aspects near maximum (which, btw, are pretty but unhelpful: if you turn on nearby grass, there will be plenty of cases where an outdoor opponent drops a weapon and you can't find it).

I've been playing with some different techniques this time: You can run sneak to 100 on the very first guy in the tutorial, there's a sweet spot where, as reported before, you can set a weight on an arrow key and just walk away. You can do something similar with most of the magic schools, too, which is also interesting. I'm level 35 now, have done very little fighting overall, and I am absurdly easy to kill. I went with being a Khajiit, which is a weak character to begin with, so I'm mostly having to play by letting summoned things do the work. The reason I went ahead an leveled up is that I being so weak I needed to get to the point where I could kill/soul-trap grand-level souls (aiming at chameleon 100), and you can't even encounter them at level 2 (well, excepting that you kill some necromancers and get black soul gems). But I'm level 35, and I haven't even started the main story line, or gone very far with Mages Guild, or even the first task for fighters guild.

In addition to being a weak character, my armor and blade skill levels are low, which contributes to my being easily killed. Turns out that "fortify blade on self 100 pts for 30 sec" spell is far better than "fortify strength 100 pts".

Oh...the other reason I'm easily killed is that I set the difficulty to max, which makes for a really different game experience. At least until I got to chameleon 100, I got killed entirely too often. At normal difficulty, with sneak 100, you can sneak in the day without being seen...not even remotely possible at max difficulty.

So it's been interesting again...

TorchLight game

I have a Steam account, but I mostly have Steam not running...for other reasons, I had it on last week, and up popped one of their infomercial windows (a key reason why I don't run it), and the top thing was "TorchLight", and there was a free demo.

Steam is actually pretty slick overall, although it didn't start out that way. Now it's excellent.

Anyway.

I played the TorchLight demo...this is basically Diablo 2.5, or Diablo 2 with Warcraft graphics. So I bought the full game.

Pretty Nice. Many identical names for things, there's a good merchant system, each one has a brand-new load of stuff for sale when you return to town (a la Dungeon Siege). There are Town Portal Scrolls, Identify Scrolls, a nearly infinite qty of merch items with lots of recombination and predefined things (although their definition of "unique" is slightly different from mine...at one point I actually *did* have 2 of the same "unique" item). There are some health-recovery gems, you can fuse them for higher value, and pop them off to reuse.

There's a near infinite amount of play possible, because one of the things you can do is buy a scroll that will open a portal to another map--one not connect with anything else in the story--and it will be instanced to about your current performance level. Or you can buy them and hold them for a while, until they become easy walk-throughs.

The monster at the tail end is REALLY difficult. I think I got killed like 6 times while working him over. A key thing to have learned before going in there is how to summon a lot of helpers (Skel 6 seems best), and the Level 30 spell for seismic shock, which has this interesting advantage of being usable multiple times with no wait in-between (although you will run out of mana). It can take down a lot of opponents at once. [my son also played TL, and did the mage character and boosted his various summon skills to the point where he had a squad of 15 or so summoned things, meaning he didn't have to actually get close to directly fighting anything]

I think the idea of needing "Identify Scrolls" is stupid/pointless..

You have a sidekick/pet, which can help fight, but won't be as good as the skels, and is best used as pack mule...with one added bonus: when the pet is full up, you can send it to town to sell everything it is carrying, and it will come back with the cash. That's what I'm talkin' about!

The various map levels will reload with opposition creatures, if they don't have some special relationship to the main story line. This allows you to redo a level for more points or goodies.

I did have a couple of problems, one task just isn't completing for me...I think I did it, but it still registers as not done, which means I can't move on with the supplier of it (who probably has other tasks).

Apparently levels dynamically generate, so they should be different for a game restart...didn't look like that was true, though. Diablo 2 did do this--if you started over, levels were fairly different, other than some set locations that were quest-specific, but you could redo the entirety of all of them.

I thought the game was too short. I played the entire thing in just over a weekend. You can play as one of 3 character types, so I probably should go do one of the others...and it turns out that you can give a bunch af items to your other selves via the "shared items chest" which is a huge deal in your favor, if you actually know this. Too bad you can't give $. Still, it does argue in favor of keeping a variety of items on hand to pass on, covering a range of levels.

Taxes and government

It continues to amaze me how poorly so many people understand economics and government.

Where I live, as with very nearly every other state, we have budget problems. We have things that need money spent on them, and the state doesn't have the money to do so.

Services cost money. Plain and simple. We need road work. We need police. We need fire/emergency help. We want good schools. We want a working court system. These things cost money.

There are groups which advocate more government-run activities, and groups which oppose such.

I am in neither. Government should do some things, and not others. Government should do things where all citizens need exactly the same thing at all times, or as close as is feasible to provide. (By "do" here, I could mean "regulate", as well, where the actuality is performed by some other organization, like your electricity supplier).

If you want, for example, snow removal service during the winter...that costs money. That could be commercially provided, but how would that get done? I want all the roads I am likely to use to be plowed right away. And my driveway. I don't care about other people's driveways, nor do I care about roads I don't use...Except that maybe I need for others to be able to use those roads in order to make deliveries I will need access to, like the grocery store. "Stock up in advance" you might say...and that certainly works to an extent, given that where I live snow generally doesn't last too long (although it has been known for one single snowfall--a blizzard--to last a couple of weeks). But there was a time when I lived in Massachusetts, in 1994, and there was 9 (yes, nine) feet of snow that winter (two years later it was ten). That snow didn't all melt away for four months. Not really feasible for me to "stock up" (although the Pilgrims must have done so somehow). I can't get to work without plowed streets, so that blizzard here in 1996, which the county did not deal with effectively, kept me stuck at home for a week.

So I am willing to have some tax dollars go to providing this service. Lacking a county-funded provider of snow removal, I'd have to get all my neighborhood together, and we'd have to pool to hire someone, or buy the plows ourselves to fit the pickup trucks of those who live in the neighborhood. The question then is what do you do about the people who live in your neighborhood who don't want to pay for this? The government has some measure of coercion it can apply, but you do not. Do you just pile up the snow in front of their driveway? Suppose they need an ambulance?

So this is a thing that government should do, or regulate. It will work best if there's a single provider, for uniform results.

In contrast, trash collection is done differently. There are county-gov sanctioned providers of collection service, I pay the provider directly, there is competition, it's not too expensive, and I could change providers if I wished. What I can't really do is let trash pile up, if I wished to not pay for it at all, although that's mostly because I don't *want* it to pile up. I recycle a lot of stuff, but that's the same service provider there. I could take recyclables to the center, for free, and if I could keep my packaging-materials limited to paper, I could probably go without the trash service; paper I could burn, or compost to an extent. Could snow removal work the same way? Maybe...it's an expensive business to be in, you only need it a few times/year, whereas trash service is every week. I'd be willing to do some plowing of the neighborhood, and maybe bit beyond, but no way I'm plowing the highways. I think that could work, except for those folks who would want it done but not pay for it.

Government needs to do other things, too, but plenty of folks don't want to pay for those things.

So what I'd like to see...recall how we keep hearing that the "states are little experimental test areas where ideas can be tried out" ?

Let's try out the idea of zero government.

No taxes. No laws. No police. No courts. No water/sewer service (unless you dig well, septic). No electricity (except self generated). No roads except those you create yourself. No trash collection, no snow removal. No regulated businesses. What would that really look like? Who would live there?

Partly it would look a lot like "the wild west": the guy with the biggest gun and greatest willingness to do grievous harm to others will be in control. Most people would get along with each other ok, I expect, but they'd also become victims.

But it'd be an interesting experiment. Could it work?

This idea was triggered by a couple of things: one was some interviews with protesters in DC a week ago, and there was this one woman who said she wanted government out of her life completely. The guy with the mike/camera didn't pursue that far enough, but I suspect she doesn't *really* want government entirely out of her life, because she does want water, sewer, trash, snow, electricity, police, etc. She might want her taxes to be zero (who doesn't?) but she probably doesn't understand what all those taxes actually pay for. My impression is that most folks don't.

And of course going along with the "pay for it" issue, you also hear "waste, fraud and abuse". I really think that's a euphemism for "fire people", but since we can't seem to figure out who to fire, let's just fire them all.

Java 3D software

Was trying to do the 3D thing again a few weeks ago. It's got to be possible.

I was trying to get my wireframe globe working (actually, someone else's code).

So it turns out not to be too hard, but there are a couple of subtle parts, and I did not find the right explanation on-line anywhere.

There are four parts involved:

1. Your code
2. JOGL.jar
3. libjobl.jnilib
4. the O/S libraries

The online help doesn't mention those .jnilib files, despite their presence in the library downloads. Your java command-line has to mention the jar files, of course, but NOT the jnilib files, but the jnilib files have to be in $CWD, or the same folder as jogl.jar

So it's really not very hard, but I spent a lot of time not getting that figured out.

On windows/linux, there are also some .dll or .so files that appear relevant.

On my mac, just things in the list above. Works great, and instantly.


I also found this, http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/, which is like google earth (except older)... Except that there's a java version, with Swing and AWT versions of an embeddable panel that you can pop into your app. Works great!

So now I have NASA World Wind in an app. This is the other reason why I needed to figure out the 3D library files. It does, of course, use NASA's servers, but hey--NASA owns a lot of imagery n stuff, like the Blue Marble pix...have a look at the demos page. Lovely stuff.

That said, I don't like how part of it works...the part about making my own layer. I ought to be able to create a layer, populate with the items I want drawn, and it should draw them. That seems not to even be part of the concept. GAK! It appears that you have to serve results from a Web Feature Service, and connect a layer to that. NOT what I want, at all.

I have some other things I want to do in 3D, so I need to go back to the wireframe globe and start there...the first thing I have discovered is that OpenGL *still* can't draw a general filled polygon properly. This is fargin' horrifying. That is a solved problem, people. Use it!

recent reading, again

Guns of the South, by Harry Turtledove.

It's one of those alternate history things. Actually this is "MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE" redux. This is pretty detailed on the historical accuracy...imagine what might have happened if someone had time-traveled from 2010 back to 1864 and given Gen Robert E Lee 100 thousand AK-47s and unlimited ammo. Would the south have won?

Damn right. Those guns, while not 2010 state of the art, were 100 years in advance of the standard single-shot manual-load rifles of the 1860s.

So I found this book offensive...not the part about the south winning...given the AK-47 premise, that was inevitable. This seemed overmuch like "how to write a book in 1992 in which you get to use all those words and ideas from 1864 that are clearly offensive now, like the infamous 'N-word'".

It of course opens with some history, although not enough of the history that you remember what the fight was really about, from both sides. This is more just about the battles (quite lopsided with the arrival of AK-47, which was superior to hand-loaded single-shot Enfields/etc in every way you can think of, and not manufacturable anywhere in the world at that time (the south had insufficient manufacturing to make weapons/etc as it was, so there really was no way they were going to win). The suppliers of these guns are some unhappy white folks from South Africa, who are so resentful of the black takeover there, that they think altering history will help them. They pay in gold, which has serious value, as opposed to Confederate money, which, as the saying goes, "wasn't worth the paper it was printed on".

The author clearly doesn't understand time-travel paradox well enough to explain that part. He also misses the relevant background history (Missouri compromise [1820], Dred Scott[1857], etc); it's not like that info is hard to come by.

He also mostly bypasses the "why" of confederate secession. It was, from the southern side, presented as "those people can't tell us what to do", and "the federal government cannot tell the states what [not] to do"...the one thing the federal government was trying to do was tell the southern states they couldn't allow/continue/expand slavery.

(look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_events_leading_to_the_American_Civil_War, for the Wikipedia pages on this whole thing)

So: the south: "it's all about states' rights", the north: "it's all about slavery"

Really: it was both, of course. It was all about the right of southern states to sanction (and tax) the ownership of one human being by another.

Don't kid yourself, blacks weren't liked up north. They just weren't slaves.

So at the end of the book, the confederate government, now with Robert E Lee as president, learns how they have been manipulated by the South Africans, and learns a good bit about the future, decides that slavery must be eliminated. (That seems unlikely, to me, given that the elimination of slavery occurred because the South lost the fight. Dramatic military superiority would change the equation quite a bit--the military's strength is more or less untouchable.)

Like this is really somehow different from what the north had been arguing for some decades? "It's ok to eliminate slavery if WE decide to do it, not if THEY tell us to do it". So what happens when one of the southern states decides to secede from the confederacy? All the same arguments could be made over again ("we don't want some other states telling us what we can/can't do"). The southern states were not terribly unified amongst themselves; if you're willing to secede once, you're willing to do it again.

Author does cleverly manage to work in a variation of the infamous "battle of the crater" near the end. That was amusing...it's a little different, of course, because in the story the "civil war" is over by this time, so this battle is against the South Africans. Who, despite the radically superior technology (i.e., things more advanced than an AK-47), are numerically too small to win a war with any attrition. I actually thought this the best part of the book.

'twere better all around had no slaves ever been brought here. The real problem is that a lot of people are lazy enough want others to do their work.

Of course, the situation in the Confederacy wasn't nearly as simple as you were taught it in school. There were plenty of "Unionists" in the south who opposed the secession, and some actually fought against the South while living there.

And apparently there was something known as the "Twenty Negro Law" whereby one military-age male was exempted from serving in the Confederate Army for every twenty slaves owned on a plantation. Of course it was only the wealthier who owned slaves, and they tended to be those in state legislatures, too, and therefore could vote themselves these kinds of exemptions...resulting in the actual conscription being the poor, fighting for the rich, to preserve the rich folks' way of life of owning slaves. (see HERE, and HERE for the exact wording, which is a bit obtuse)