Category: tech

There are several reasons for the prevalence of “pursuits.” First, L.A. has a strong car culture. Its residents spend so much time in their cars that they’re like second homes, and nobody likes to be told what to do in his own home. Second, the county has some twenty-two thousand miles of highways and streets, and this gives a suspect the illusion of endless escape routes. Third, local police forces have been much quicker to initiate pursuits than many municipal forces…And then there is Los Angeles County Sheriff Leroy Baca’s theory: “We have more idiots here than anywhere else.”

– Tad Friend, __New Yorker__, on the art of police pursuits

I am now playing __Need for Speed: Most Wanted__, the eighth sequel in a franchise that stretches back eleven years. EA’s stance on videogame sequels is similar to that of the Roman Catholic’s stance on child-bearing: no regrets and keep pumping them out.

Intriguingly, EA seems to also be starting a soap opera serial of sorts, as you reprise the silent, nondescript character from __Need for Speed: Underground__ and __Underground 2__.

Once again, evil and presumably moustache-twirling rivals have once again deprived you of your car, which without it you are even more nondescript than usual. There’s a new, well-textured city to drive haphazardly in, new cars to drive haphazardly in, and a fresh female population to impress with said haphazard driving. But this time, you have to deal with the local law enforcement.

All in all, it’s a well executed package. The madcap police chases, complete with roadblocks, police chatter and smashy-smashy is worth the price of admission alone.

But some lingering questions remain. What is with your allure for mechanically and mammary inclined sidekicks anyway? How do you do it? Perhaps it’s the size of your cupholders. I had originally suspected that you were, in fact, a woman, but all the new graphical enhancements have put that rumour to rest: you can see yourself inside the car! Unfortunately, you look like __Star Trek__’s Odo, but in a hoodie.

And how do you fuel your racing habit? Perhaps you work at one of the many Burger King or Best Buy establishments that plague the landscape. Perhaps we will find out in the next installment.

Google’s recent release of Google Pack, got me thinking about the digerati dilemma; unless you feel like wading through tens of thousands of programs listed on software libraries such as Freshmeat or Sourceforge, it’s nearly impossible to find the free, good stuff. Google Pack is basically just a grab-bag of quintessential freebies with an intelligent auto-updater thrown in, and yet it’s ingenious in its simplicity in giving users what they want, pronto.

It made me think of the other resources I use to find free, good Windows software. Some of it is open source, some of it is freeware, but they’re all great and the price is right. Here they are:

* TheOpenCD.org – A CD compilation of only the creme de la creme of open source software. They aren’t kidding either – they carry less than 20 titles. They make up for it though with their friendly CD install wizard user interface that comes complete with detailed descriptions of each piece of software.

* The OSSwin project – A comprehensive list of links to the best open source software in dozens of categories, from programming tools to educational software to CAD designers.

* Software For Starving Students – Seems to be more for starving arts students who like to procrastinate, considering its emphasis on music ripping, video editing, graphics design and arcade games, but still a good compilation. Besides, you can download this CD-ROM compilation easily via BitTorrent.

* Neowin’s Freeware Alternative List – A rather lengthy link list updated by the Neowin community. It’s unique to the others above as it contains many little handy one-off tools and programs you may otherwise may never have known about.

UPDATE Jan 26th: Lifehacker posted their own list of free quintessentials as the Lifehacker Pack.

For my own sanity, and everyone else’s, here’s my modified Diggler extension that is compatible with Mozilla Firefox 1.5. I only changed the maxversion value. Everything else is the clever creation of former Netscaper Adam Lock.

Instructions:
1. Download Diggler 0.91
2. Drag it into your Firefox window to install.
3. Enjoy! It will automatically upgrade your old Diggler version if you have it installed.

UPDATE: I understand that Diggler has some sort of conflict with Tab Mix Plus v2.0. Since I’m not an extension developer nor do I use Tab Mix Plus, I can’t really say what the fix would be (maybe a shared variable name?). Besides, Diggler was released first.

UPDATE #2: Extension maxversion has been tweaked to support Firefox 1.5.0.1 onwards to v1.6.

UPDATE #3: Diggler is now compatible with Firefox 2.0. Please go to this entry to get it.

I got Silverlotus Animal Crossing: Wild World^* for her new Nintendo DS. While it’s a whimsical game accessible to both your young’uns and your pretty spouse, I suspect that many of the gameplay decisions were made very deliberately and with purpose. It’s not just a happy-sappy Barney land: when Lucy the Cat quizzed Silverlotus’s avatar on her personality and found her to be “sweet and noble”, she immediately warned her to be wary of those who may take advantage of her disposition. And what kid’s game you know that features mortgages and museums?

Things that AC:WW is attempting to teach your kids:

• *Money management*. You start off the game with a house and a mortgage, which you pay off with a variety of odd jobs. If you pay off your debt, you can obtain a second mortgage to perform home renovations, and the cycle starts anew. You can place your savings in the town bank, and your account accrues interest.
• *Economic development*. Spend money at the general store, and the store will renovate itself into a succession of larger stores with a wider variety of merchandise and services. The store also implements a membership discount plan, with your discount growing along with the store itself.
• *Social interaction*. The NPCs range in temperament from friendly to rambunctious to curt. To advance your social status, you must converse and write letters to everyone. If you make friends, they will send letters and gifts in kind. If not, they may ostracize you or even leave town.
• *Biology and philanthropy*. Blathers the curator will give a brief summary of each fossil, fish or insect you donate to the museum. More encyclopedic facts on each artifact are available in your menu screens.
• *Indemnification*. Sooner or later, you are presented with the option to purchase an insurance policy. Insurance guarantees you compensation if you are stung by bees while bug hunting, or if you have purchased counterfeit artwork from the flea market.
• *Proper care of computer hardware*. If you shut your Nintendo DS off without saving your game, the next time you load the game your character will be berated by a mole named Mr. Resetti. If you continue to prematurely abort the game, Mr. Resetti will become more and more flustered and make you perform mnemonic-like activities before you can resume play.

^*The game is pretty interesting. Everything happens in real time. There is no urgent objective except to live in this small, idyllic town and interact with the wacky anthromorphic townsfolk.

A “campaign” to make “games look like games again,” called _Blue Sky in Games_. Here’s an excerpt of their manifesto:

We want music that goes PLINKY-PLINK AND DOOPY-DOO not “motherfucking west coast mother fucker, y’all”! We want to fight WEIRD MONSTERS not drug-dealing criminals!

“Everytime I load Firefox on a new computer I think to myself: “Hah, I’m giving it to the man. Sticking him in the back. I’m gonna show him who’s boss.”

Then I remember: I am the man.”

– Robert Scoble, Microsoft evangelist and #1 blogging employee

Firefox 1.5 was released recently, and it pulled in 2 million downloads on its birthday. Even ex-Microserf and Internet Explorer program manager Scott Berkin caved. How is it that other grizzled open source products, including its big brother Mozilla Application Suite, languishes outside of the limelight? It’s just a web browser, after all.

I think it’s the incredible detail placed in developing a clean, intuitive interface design. The masterstrokes are subtle, but everywhere: notice how all the “Clear Data” buttons in the revised Privacy Options panel are all on the bottom right corner, so one can rapidly go through the settings?

And with good reason: Firefox faces an uphill battle. One Forrester analyst quips, “Getting Grandma to switch over from Internet Explorer, which is already installed on her computer, to this open-source thing on the Internet that she needs to find and download, will be hard.” Boing Boing also theorizes most of IE’s marketshare probably stems from homogeneous adoption by corporate IT departments.

But there is one other thing the Mozilla Corporation does so well compared to other FLOSS: marketing chutzpah. I wish FF all the best.

One casualty of progress, however, is my old version of ForecastFox, which was not compatible with Firefox 1.5. I held onto it because of its crappy and accidentally hilarious weather graphics. Just look below for the reason why our household now calls thunderstorms, “It’s raining witchhats!”

My globe trotting ways have put a damper on my game plays, but I’ve had a chance to sneak some game time behind the PS2 and PC. Thanks to a new SATA hard drive, I’ve been mostly going through the gauntlet of entertaining demos, such as _Fahrenheit_ (different), _Total Overdose_ (funky), _Serious Sam II_ (it’s hard, still haven’t finished it), and _Need for Speed: Most Wanted_ (cops _and_ customization?! yay).

In the PlayStation: _We Love Katamari_. In a market that has a dozen shooting games, a hundred sport franchises, and a thousand regurgitated sequels of both, Katamari Damacy stands as one of the most innovative games since Tetris and Bejewelled. Ironically, it is the sequel, We Love Katamari, that outshines the original. The two minor problems of the original – lack of variety and short game time – have been addressed, making this game bigger, better, and more outlandish than before. BTW, its creator, Keita Takahashi, recently floored GDC Europe with his whimsical answer to their discussion question, “What do grannies like?” Takahashi won hands down with his cat-shaped controller social RPG thingamabob…

On Steam: The multiplayer “_The Hidden_”:http://www.hidden-source.com/ and the singleplayer “_Halloween: Pumpkin Night_”:http://home.r-ben.com:8000/~halloween/?s=home. Both spooky, both intriguing ideas. In The Hidden, you and the entire server hunt and attempt to bring down an invisible, superhuman mutant. In Halloween, you play a trick-or-treating teenager who accidentally unleashes supernatural forces from a creepy house on a hill. It has a few maddening puzzles made opaque due to lack of instruction and bad programming, such as figuring out how to pull the dumbwaiter and yourself up to the attic of the spooky house, but it was still a fun, short diversion.

OK, we’ve back from Mexico for two weeks now, and to post our exploits here, I’ve had to resort to a few small repairs on this blog. I normally don’t like talking about my blog maintenance work – it’s a bunch of navel-gazing I say – but it’s important that people know.

I’ve bit the bullet and bought a copy of Movable Type 3.2. Did I upgrade because of 3.2’s new whizbang features? No. It’s because Movable Type 2.661 and my hodgepodge of anti-spam defences kept crashing my web host when the relentless tide of spam crashed onto my shore, and that tends to make one unpopular with the sysadmin. It was a fundamental flaw in v2.6 and MT-Blacklist, that SixApart had no financial incentive to fix.

In an open source product, this would never happen. Demand drives supply; if enough people used the product, development would be forked and bugs would be fixed. So why not WordPress? It’s still a diamond in the rough, but I’ve used it with incredible success on a corporate site. The problem is, it requires MySQL, and it would double the price of my hosting. In the end, Movable Type with its legacy support for BerkeleyDB (which is free) was the more cost-effective option.

Not that upgrading was pain-free. None of our custom templates converted, despite the fact I selected the option. So that had to be fixed manually.

Ask anyone with a blog, and they will say their #1 issue is comment and trackback spam. Despite this, it took SixApart four years to implement a spam filter that works right out of the box. And SpamLookup as it’s called, MT’s first, last, and only line of spam defence, is already showing its deficiencies. There is zero documentation on how to configure it; I had to rummage through the web to find instructions on how to convert your MT-Blacklist blacklist.txt into SpamLookup Word Filter patterns. I paid $81 Canadian for this?

So a big monkeyshines to those inconsiderate spammers out there, and a medium-sized monkeyshines to SixApart, for essentially extorting me to upgrade, because they are unwilling to support their existing userbase.

I went to a party the other week and discovered that I actually like Labatt’s Blue.

“It’s definitely not Evian, but it is better than most city tap. Certainly more palatable than many light beers I’ve had, and not at all, uh, urinous.”

– Wired reporter Tom Nichol, giving a thumbs up to drinking his own urine after being filtered through Water Security’s new purification system

“We are not brewers, we are monks. We brew beer to be able to afford being monks.”

– Father Abbott of the Belgian abbey Saint Sixtus of Westvleteren, whose _Trappist Westvleteren 12_ beer has recently been voted the world’s best, and became promptly sold out.

Shane Schick of ITBusiness believes that _Star Wars_ holds a hidden parable on the powerful role of an intelligent technology strategy in your organization. Schick muses that Jedi and Sith should have ganged up against their common foe, that crappy Holonet:

I like to imagine that a consortium of vendors in the Star Wars republic created a standard to make holographic conversations a reality. Maybe they called it Wow-Fi, or something like that. Then, even though it didn