Category: tech

I had the pleasure of trying out one of VIA Rail Canada‘s new VIA Express automated ticket kiosks on Tuesday, and I’m pretty impressed. It had the fastest, simplest user interface I have ever seen on any kiosk. Using it to pick up a prepaid ticket, I just had to touch the screen to have the kiosk exit its screensaver and snap to attention, slip my credit card in and out of the card slot, and out came my train ticket, two seconds later.

No redundant verification screens asking you to type stuff, or “Please wait because I have a slow CPU” dialog boxes. I spent more time taking my credit card out of my wallet than using the machine. The machine does not eat your credit card until the transaction is finished – you just push it in and pull it out – meaning you never let go of your credentials.

Valve Software’s ambitious online subscription and multiplayer service, Steam, was released recently. If you’re not aware, Valve developed the 1998 Game of the Year “Half-Life”, the anticipated soon-to-be-released “Half-Life 2”, as well as “Counter-strike”, currently the most popular multiplayer game in the world. So Valve (made up of ex-Microserfs) has a pretty good pedigree.

So it may be a good idea for content delivery providers to take a look at Steam, which could possibly revolutionize the game industry. Steam allows players to connect and battle each other, but also allows players to purchase games online and download them. Patches and bugfixes also are downloaded automatically. Game installations can be scanned for cheats and pirated versions can be disabled.

It’s a tall order. You need secure servers, big pipes, low latency games. By using distributed file servers push content to end users, Valve can cut out the middle men – publishers and stores, laminated cardboard boxes and jewel cases.

That is, assuming this works. Steam has been in beta for over 12 months already, but its stunning debut seems to have fallen short on expectations. The Steam client is sluggish, unresponsive and the UI was not designed to give much user feedback – the client occasionally takes a minute or two to load, but without a splash screen or progress bar, it appears as if it has crashed. Of course, a lot of these weird crashes and slowness can be attributed to the unprecedent server load of thousands of people trying to connect and download game caches, which can be over 300MB in size. Releasing a new version of Counter-strike two days later only added to the feeding frenzy.

Steam also lacks a few features. Currently, to play a singleplayer or LAN game, you must be online. So no blasting headcrabs in Half-Life on the train with your laptop, at least for now.

So was Steam a failure? I doubt it. No one has ever attempted this before, on such a grand scale. As for the load, well, Steam is offering some very popular games. And as the mad rush dies down in the coming days and more servers will be added, the Steam network should become more responsive.

Gamers are screaming for Gabe Newell’s head, but then again, the gaming demographic was never known for its compassion or reception for change. They just want to play their games, right now.

In several days, Valve will be closing down its old multiplaying stomping grounds, the World Opponent Network (WON), for good. They’re not looking back.

This article pretty much sums up the wonderful world of so-called industry reports. And it doesn’t just happen in arcane techie matters – PR agents are trying everyday to twist the worldview to their particular political, religious, or commercial interests. Once again, it is always important to think clearly and consider all options.

Other than odd short-lived novelties like OpenCola, open source generally means free, collaboratively-made software. MIT introduced the idea of OpenCourseWare last year. However, unlike other distance learning programs, MIT’s courseware, lecture notes even video recordings of lectures are all free. And it’s still going strong.

Budding students in faraway places get invaluable learning materials that enhance their own studies and help them be more educated. Professors can observe MIT learning techniques to help make their own lectures more informative, accurate and most importantly, interesting and engaging.

And MIT? They get massive advertising on a global scale. You still have to attend MIT to get an MIT degree, and now they’ve given the masses a taste of how good of a school they are.

Ernie Ball, world-famous guitar-string manufacturer, was a Microsoft shop. Then, in 2000, the BSA raided their premises, found a few dozen unlicensed programs. With legal costs mounting, Ernie Ball settled for $65,000 plus $35,000 legal fees.

But it doesn’t stop there. In a move that would make a mafioso proud, the BSA humiliated Ernie Ball in public, making an example out of them.

But unlike other companies that had been stepped on like ants, CEO Sterling Ball fought back. “I don’t care if we have to buy 10,000 abacuses,” recalled Ball, who recently addressed the LinuxWorld trade show. “We won’t do business with someone who treats us poorly.”

Now running Red Hat, Mozilla, and Open Office, Ball spends less money on hardware and software, and less time chasing down viruses and technical issues. And he’s not looking back.

Finally, after over a year of this curse, I have managed to tame my personal chimera, my shrike, my nemesis. Since March 2002, my laptop’s 3com network driver failed to load in W2K intermittedly. The annoying part was, it didn’t do it all the time; it only did it once out of three boots. But when it did it, no IP is assigned, and trying to get an IP results in crashing ipconfig.

I finally traced it to a…bad network driver. But since 3com’s oh-so-dedicated software department have only released two drivers in the three years this accursed NIC has existed on this earth, I had to revert to a driver created in November 2000.

I’ve tested this new (old) driver for a few weeks, so far the problem has not reappeared. Looks like a keeper, folks. That’s what I get for listening to Windows Update.

Last month, MS announced they would stop support standalone IE. Now, Microsoft kills off Outlook Express. They have decided to push Hotmail and Outlook 2003 instead.

If you just want an email client that filters spam, does not have 50-100MB of extra stuff, and that just *works* and not, you may want to look into Mozilla Mail, or the experimental Mozilla Thunderbird mail client.

I think I’ve figured this out. It only took about a month. I’ve setup MovableType, some choice plugins (like MTWeather and MTMacros), a cron job, and PHP Gallery. And boy, was it a pain in the ass.

Open source projects is great, it’s free and wonderful, but it will never approach mass approval because they lack one thing: DOCUMENTATION. You will be hard-pressed to find a Perl script that even has a readme.txt in it. I don’t understand why, except when I did programming, I loathed having to document my code too.

But come on. Some of these scripts don’t even tell you what directory they must be put in. And then they’re the assumptions: that you own your own webhost and have full shell access. That you are a Linux guru. That you don’t require precompiled binaries.

The worse ordeal was getting NetPBM to work. While the MT documentation was terse but informative – as long as you read it several times over – they never mentioned how you could tell it was actually working. And there are no error messages if it doesn’t. And MT doesn’t auto-detect it. It took me several email exchanges with my webhost until we found the right directory it was in.

Then again, if I went the ASP route, the code would probably cost $50 and require Microsoft Access.

In the D drive currently: Racer, an open source OpenGL car simulator. I hesitate to call it an actual game, since it’s primary goal is to simulate the handling and physics of cars as much as possible. Still pretty interesting, if a little buggy at the moment (don’t fall off the track!), and of course, lacking in documentation.

If you’re not moving forward, you’re standing still: Comments for: Half-Life 2 Bundling? – ja.zz

#8 By: Gmd [ Reply ]
Damn, time to sell 9800 pro 256mb, anyone want it?
Aug 3rd, 2003 14:23:43

#8, 50 bux shackmsg me : armybob (#9)
#8, 51 bux shackmsg me 🙂 : Optimus Prime (#10)
#10, fuck : armybob (#14)
#14, lol! i’ll chip in $1.25 to your cause. armybob is now at $51…. : lichee (#21)
#8, my arm + my leg. deal? : SlamDunk (#20)
#20, throw in your head and ill sell you my detatchable penis! : Snifter_42 (#36)
#36, Do it! It’s a good deal! : Aubrey Philipsz (#56)
#8, who would want that old obsolete thing? : mrtony (#43)
#8, 52 bux shackmsg me :):) : inkninja (#54)

Fishy – your true enemy is your own impatience.

Crypt Raider A throwback to those silly puzzle games ala Chip’s Challenge.

In the PlayStation: Bushido Blade 2. Because I lost my savegame.