Eclipse: escape strings when pasting - off by default?

After a couple of years of occasionally having to paste a large multi-line string into Java source code and escape the hell out of it, I eventually searched for some kind of online tool to automatically do the job and quickly discovered that Eclipse automatically does this for you if a certain menu option is enabled (prefs->Java->Editor->Typing->"Escape text when pasting into a string literal").

So why on earth is this feature not enabled in Eclipse by default?

Integrity in snooker: empty pandering or meaningful measures?

When the John Higgins scandal erupted some months ago, I tried to keep an open mind and honestly hoped it was all a misunderstanding until I watched the video and heard some of the details of the case. It was very disturbing evidence, but even then I hoped for everything to turn out alright in the end, even if there was a good chance that he truly intended to carry out the promised match-fixing.

Flash forward a few months and Higgins' manager is banned from the sport for life (even though he had already resigned from his position on the WPBSA board) and Higgins gets a backdated six month ban and a £75,000 fine.
Then Barry Hearn, the recently-appointed chairman of World Snooker, appears on BBC2 today talking about the new anti-corruption unit being set up as a preventative - rather than curative - measure against betting fraud and match-fixing.

He was asked what role Higgins will have in this new light, and responded by basically saying that he would serve as an example to other players of how dangerous it is to give in to that temptation and appear to agree to dodgy deals without reporting them, especially now that there'll be some official, private channels for doing so. He also stated that Higgins made a silly mistake, by trusting people he shouldn't have, and was heavily punished and that £75,000 isn't pocket change.

That was a mistake, I think. For someone like Higgins, a backdated six-month ban and a £75,000 fine is chump change, especially when Hearn followed up those comments to assure of the seriousness of the new regime by saying "we're talking about lifetime bans here".
If we're talking about lifetime bans, Higgins got away very lightly and you should really acknowledge that. Why not just say something like "the case with Higgins could easily have ended up differently and he might have received a very lengthy or indefinite ban. But now we're drawing a line and making it very clear what you can and can't do, and specifying the penalties for breaking those rules"?

Another player, Quinten Hann, was handed an 8 year ban a while back, for agreeing to lose a match in the China Open. However, he resigned before the ban was decided, and never had a squeaky clean image to begin with. Also, his highest ranking was #14, where John Higgins has been #1 for a while and is one of the most consistent players in the game.
What if Higgins was a much lower-ranked player of less fame? Would he have been banned for longer (or even forever) and fined less?

What worries me is that much of the assurances about "hard measures" might be concerned more with convincing the public with tough-talking "draconian" plans than with actually stamping out corruption - that Higgins' real mistake was to get caught. But I'm still glad to see Higgins back in the game - it'd be such a shame for a master craftsman to be officially banned from his craft forever. I just hope that Hearn and the rest truly care about sport and its integrity rather than simply protecting the bottom line by telling the optimal story to the punters.

---

Oh and on a side note, I'm glad to read Hearn's comments on Ronnie O'Sullivan's odd attitude towards completing a 147 today: “I really don’t like to hear multi-millionaires talking about a few extra pounds for a 147 when that’s the game that’s given them their livelihood”.
Spot on, and a big "WTF Ronnie". Walking away from the table on a 140 break with the black on, or missing on purpose (which he very nearly did - the black nearly bounced off the table) would actually hurt the audience - remember Ken Doherty's missed black on a maximum attempt and the groans from the crowd, and try to imagine what it would be like if O'Sullivan missed one on purpose. I'd hate to be the guy giving post-match interviews with him - it seems like 15% of the time he enjoyed playing, 70% of the time he felt nothing, 80% of the time he says something really sad that makes you wonder if he hates the whole thing, himself, fans, other players etc.

But on the other hand, a 147 is still an amazing feat, even if it's slightly more common. The commentators seemed to only consider the case where there's no maximum break prize versus a £147,000 prize. Why not have a token but still half decent prize for a maximum - let's say £14,700 - which a) would not be sniffed at and b) would be separate from the high break prize, so that getting a 147 gets you a tangible reward. The amount isn't really important, as long as a maximum is distinguished from a high break of 145 or whatever.

Screen magnifier and Orca screenreader stuck on at login screen (Ubuntu)

Although Linux has improved immensely in many respects over the years, there's still a chance of running into bizarre problems, either during install or in normal use.

A while ago I wiped the old Mandriva 2008 partition on my Acer Aspire 1705SMi, a 7 year old juggernaut of a laptop which was sitting in a drawer for a year or so.
The first problem was that the Ubuntu Live CD could not even boot properly, since as soon as it loaded the splash screen the video adapter (a NVidia GeForce FX Go5600) went slightly insane and produced a screen which looked like a garbled moire interference pattern. Rough shapes (maybe that's a dialog box...?) were visible but it was basically unusable.

Getting past that required editing the boot command line for the kernel at the GRUB prompt (hitting 'e', IIRC) and adding the "nomodeset" parameter. I also removed the "splash" parameter but this probably wasn't necessary. If something like this can happen, why not offer a nomodeset boot option on the boot menu, rather than forcing the user to edit the boot command line?
This got as far as a failed start of X and dropped back to the shell, where I was able to edit /etc/xorg.conf and start the installer.

So that was okay. The install worked nicely, although both suspend to RAM (sleep) and suspend to disk (hibernate) completely fail to resume, requiring a hard reboot. No change from ~2004 when I had to download a fixed version of the buggy Acer DSDT and install it at boot, as well as tinker with the kernel source (maybe, not sure if it was necessary). Surely those problems could have been fixed in the mainline kernel though - if it was fixable by a layman like myself before, why does it still not work out of the box?

Then a 2 year old demon managed to somehow enable Orca (a screenreader), a screen magnifier and dreadfully annoying "slow keys" by randomly clicking around (from her own user account), and things got really weird on the next reboot: the left half of the screen is normal, while the right half shows a magnified cursor and a load of garbage (maybe due to the old NVidia card being a pile of arse). Trying to type in a password to login seemed impossible at first, until I realised that I had to hold each key for about half a second before it would register. Ugh.

Anyway, after logging in I made sure that all of the accessibility tools were switched off in every preference menu on the GNOME desktop. Unfortunately this didn't really switch them off, even though the gconftool-2 program declared that they were successfully disabled.

After much googling (for once, not very helpful except to confirm that other people in similar situations have solved the problem by reformatting and re-installing Ubuntu, WHAT!) and grepping, I found another set of gconf XML configuration files in /var/lib/gdm/.gconf, even though you need to be root to access them.

Anyway, these global settings could be unset as follows:

$ sudo su
# cd /var/lib/gdm/.gconf
# gconftool-2 --direct --config-source xml:readwrite:. -s --type boolean /desktop/gnome/accessibility/keyboard/stickykeys_enable false
# gconftool-2 --direct --config-source xml:readwrite:. -s --type boolean /desktop/gnome/accessibility/keyboard/bouncekeys_enable false
# gconftool-2 --direct --config-source xml:readwrite:. -s --type boolean /desktop/gnome/accessibility/keyboard/slowkeys_enable false
# gconftool-2 --direct --config-source xml:readwrite:. -s --type boolean /desktop/gnome/applications/at/screen_magnifier_enabled false

Some of these problems may be due to the laptop having a poorly-designed BIOS/DSDT, so this post may sound like sour grapes. But a natural response from anyone who uses such a machine would be "but it works in Windows?" - and if it does, why shouldn't it work in Linux?

Parisian driving

(saving a comment I wrote on a boards.ie thread)

I thought we had some crappy driving here (in Ireland), but visiting Paris for a week really put things in perspective.

Firstly, if you're a pedestrian walking at a crossing, even if it's a signalled one with a green light in your favour, drivers will happily continue to fly around corners and barrel through the crossing. Get in their way and either get knocked down or beeped into deafness.

Secondly, remember that two-second clearance rule here? The TV safety ads suggest that when the car in front passes a point, you should be able to say "only a fool breaks the two second rule" before you pass the same point. In Paris it's "only a foo- ARGHHH!", with cars overtaking you (from any side) and diving into your lane after having barely cleared your car. This happens all the time. The cars behind don't even brake when it happens, so the tacit understanding seems to be a) one or two metres of clearance is an acceptable distance at 100kph and b) overtaking drivers will never have to suddenly brake while directly in front of my car. Weird.

The two and a half hour trip from Amboise back to Paris really made this clear: drivers will gladly overtake a bus and pull in front with about two metres' clearance. Not only that, but the bus driver starts to pull into the lane they just left, while they're still moving into our lane with two metres' clearance.
All of this is completely normal there.

And as probably everyone knows, parking there means gently (or not) backing into the car behind you, then forward into the next one, then back and forth repeatedly bashing the surrounding cars until your car is wedged into a space with two inches to spare on one side, with bumpers touching on one side. Almost every car's registration plate and bumper is dented, scratched or missing.

So I arrived back in Dublin airport thinking "I guess the standard over here isn't so bad really", just as a shitestain of a taxi driver in a silver Merc floored it as soon as the green man started to flash, as I was already running across the pedestrian crossing pushing a trolley full of bags which missed his car by about two inches as it screamed past me.
If that thing didn't have its own brakes, you were getting a heavy iron trolley in the rear left wing. I was sorely tempted to just let it happen too, but settled for a rapidly-shouted "my light's still green, you stupid fucking bastard!"

Does the free software movement represent "true freedom"?

Someone commented on a Youtube video that:

Actually, free software represents freedom. The Open Source Movement just supports the benefits of source code being available. The Free Software Foundation supports true freedom."

To which my response was:

It doesn't support the freedom to sell software though, does it?

Almost all of the software I use is open-source, and I've made (miniscule) contributions to open-source software in the past, but I don't think it's fair to demonise those who wish to make money from writing software by selling it.

Stallman seems to characterise closed-source as unethical, but is it really wrong for someone to release a program without the source code so that they can profit a bit from their work?

I'd be interested to hear any insight from others on this issue. Free software provides some freedom, but obviously removes the freedom to sell that software, even by the author. As a big fan and user of free software, but also a programmer and tradesman, I recognise that other people may want to do programming as a living by selling their work (rather than doing unenjoyable coding tasks for a large financial company they dislike, say).
I don't see anything wrong with that, unless there are superior models that allow them to still get paid reasonably well for their work as well as allowing them to release as open source. For example, many open source project pages have a donation link which allows happy users to send any amount of money to the developer if they wish, but I'd expect that this isn't a hugely profitable source of income compared to selling the software (which would kind of require it being closed source or at least with a horrible restricted semi-free license).

Thoughts/enlightenments?

Why does Applescript suck so badly?

It's not like Apple is lacking developers or time or money or experience. Not only is the syntax for Applescript simultaneously verbose and vague, the API documentation sucks and the implementation appears to be buggy.
Not the language implementation per se, but the underlying hooks that allow it to do its job. For some reason, certain programs fail to respond to Applescript correctly, so scripts like the following don't work properly (and worse, the problem is sporadic):

tell application "Mnemosyne"
  activate
end tell

Fine, maybe the Python wrapper for Mnemosyne is a bit dodge. But why should it matter?

In Windows there are free third party scripting/automation languages like AutoHotKey and AutoItScript. I've never had a problem bringing an application window into focus with them - why would you? Perhaps Applescript's hooks are at a higher level, while those of AutoIt etc operate on a low level Windows message scheme: instead of applications responding (or ignoring, or bolloxing up) Applescript requests, they simply receive normal window/GUI events, just like when a user is manually clicking and typing.

These Windows automation/scripting languages "just work" - you can assume that a window is just a window and if you can activate one by clicking or alt-tabbing to it, you can activate it via a script - and the syntax is simple and intuitive for most programmers (although AHK's is a bit ugly IIRC).

If they can do that, surely Apple can do much better than Applescript.



Addendum: It seems that you can't even move the mouse from Applescript, without installing extra 3rd party software. Boo-urns!

Addendum 2: Well, it's not giving me error -9874 anymore when trying to activate the window. Also it's become apparent that when activating the Mnemosyne window with a modal dialog open (the "Add cards" window), focus will be on the application's main window, unless the mouse cursor is hovering over the main window. This happens when you manually cmd-tab to the application. Very odd - perhaps the GUI event loop isn't processed properly until the mouse cursor is moved over the main window? Ah well. The rest of my diatribe stands (or crouches) though - I still dislike Applescript in more ways than one.

Why is speeding so commonplace?

The root problem seems more that people are expected to drive at least at the speed limit, if not over. When a driver travels at 3-5kph under the speed limit, following cars tend to overtake as soon as possible or get angry and start behaving dangerously. There are very large number of people out there who will consider you to be a lunatic for doing 48km/h with a 50km/h limit. In Dublin at least, a 50km/h limit is tacitly interpreted as a 60km/h limit, a 60 as an 80, etc.

And it's not purely a social problem; it starts in the Rules of the Road, which says things like:

You must progress at a speed and in a way that avoids interference with other motorway traffic.

Avoid driving too slowly

In normal road and traffic conditions, keep up with the pace of the traffic flow while obeying the speed limit. While you must keep a safe distance away from the vehicle in front, you should not drive so slowly that your vehicle unnecessarily blocks other road users. If you drive too slowly, you risk frustrating other drivers, which could lead to dangerous overtaking.

While it does remind you to obey the speed limit, this comes into conflict with the greater message here: "keep up with the pace". Since it seems like the majority of other road users are almost constantly speeding, this reinforces the notion that you should never travel below the speed limit, and if anything, increase speed to match traffic in front.

It's frustrating - if you're driving within a city, given the time spent in traffic or stopped at lights and the relatively short distance, it doesn't really matter if you travel at 45 or 55. But it's considered a greater crime to err on the low side. Why?

Java verbosity again

(Repost of a comment I made somewhere on the topic of the verbosity of Java, and particularly its APIs)

The Reflection API is a fairly shocking example of the needless verbosity of Java. And I would consider the official API to be part of Java.

Here's a simplistic example in Java and Ruby, replacing characters in a string ("putty" => "puppy") first directly and then via reflective invocation:

// Java
String s = "putty";
System.out.println(s.replace('t', 'p'));
try {
  Class c = s.getClass();
  Method m = c.getMethod("replace", char.class, char.class);
  System.out.println(m.invoke(s, 't', 'p'));
} catch (Exception e) {
  e.printStackTrace();
}

# Ruby
s = "putty"
puts s.gsub("t", "p")
puts s.send("gsub", "t", "p")

This kind of verbosity is prevalent in Java's standard libraries, particularly when (anonymous) inner classes are involved. At the moment I'm struggling with "doPrivileged" blocks in some Java code which deals with sandboxing, and it is syntactically very unpleasant.

Ok, we could chain the Java calls together and knock some lines off, but it's still not nice:

try {
  System.out.println(s.getClass().getMethod("replace", char.class, char.class).invoke(s, 't', 'p'));
} catch (Exception e) {
  e.printStackTrace();
}

Ankimini audio on the iPod: can I hear it now?

Yes! But a small amount of manual muckery is required.

Here are the rough steps that I followed to get an Anki deck working with audio on my iPod Touch (2nd gen, on IOS4):

1. Jailbreak the iPod. This was actually so easy that it will be hard to suppress an ear-to-ear grin. Just going to that link and opening a cleverly broken PDF file exploits a bug (presumably a stack smash) to execute arbitrary code and install Cydia. You don't even need to reboot the device! Very different from the iPhone OS 3 jailbreak that I used last time, but this will probably become impossible soon (until someone finds the next suitable vulnerability).


2. Install Ankimini from the Cydia or Rock package managers. Easy peasy.


3. Create or download the deck in Anki (desktop). Get your deck working on a desktop machine as normal, then sync it with an online account.


4. Sync your deck in Ankimini. This should be straightforward.


5. Copy across the media files. From my Mac, the command to do so was scp -r ~/Documents/Anki/deckname.media/ mobile@ipod_ip_address:~/.anki

I then stopped and started Anki via an SBSettings button, but I don't think this step is necessary. Now I can learn and listen to spoken Chinese in "dead time" (i.e. when I'm on a bus or taking a shite). Brilliant!

On a related note, I would like to try the new AnkiMobile, but it's just a bit too expensive for me at the moment. I think the developer may be pricing himself out of the market - you don't see (proportionally) many iPhone applications that cost €20. At an uneducated, not-thought-through guess, I'd wager that more than twice as many people would buy the program if the price was halved. Hopefully it works out anyway, after the tremendous work he's put into Anki.

Abuse of software patents (what else are they good for?)

Check out the Wikipedia entry for Vistaprint (emphasis added):

The company recognizes that developing and protecting its intellectual property creates additional value in the company, and acts as a business moat to deter competitors. So far, Vistaprint has secured 15 issued patents and has applied for almost 40 more.

The company has described its objective as a "minefield of patents" and has been active in pursuing companies that it considers to be infringing on those patents."

If you think that's an unfairly exaggerated statement, check out the interview^* with Wendy Cebula, then Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer (now President of the North American unit) of VistaPrint (emphasis added in italics):

VistaPrint has always placed a strong focus on getting patents. Which one or two would you classify to be the most important?
We really look at patents as a portfolio approach. As different competitors may choose to enter the market in different ways, our strategy is to create a minefield of patents that would be difficult for anyone to navigate. That being said, our patents around our studio design technology, which is one of the ones we are defending right now in the public, and in our back-end aggregation and our bridge are two that have been issued and that are public that we believe that are very important to us. There are others pending that, clearly, we are excited about as well.

If that's not clear evidence that patent systems, and especially software patent systems, are purposely abused to stifle competition, then what is?



^* Note that the interview was taken down - I had to find it in the Internet Archive snapshot from 2008. Interesting...

Irish casual racism: an exchange of vitriol on Youtube

After watching a very disturbing Youtube video trying to make the point that our good Irish culture (and presumably, skin colour) are being diluted, I felt the need to respond to some of the worst comments, particularly those that seemed to assume that all immigrants are gaming the system and/or getting "free housing", benefits and other such nonsense.

There were many comments like this:

nomorefreebees 3 days ago
great video ,,, so we now have foriegn irishmen do we? i dont think so,
the foriegners are here for only one reason and thats to make ireland their land,,,,,while our stupit government gives them all the benifits available and deprives its own people ,, hospitals closing down to keep immigrants ,,, benifits cut to keep immigrants...... and all the while we say nothing ....... so are we going to act now or do we want to let immigrants take us over like they almost have now in sweeden ...

I was saddened to see that a greater number of commenters seemed to agree with these misinformed racists. But then entertained by a quite ludicrous private message sent to me by one of them:

From: nomorefreebees Subject: fool Date: Jul 19, 2010
You have some cheek to dictate to Irish people haven't you? You didn't even know where this country was a few years ago.
You hand out allot of meaningless advice about a dole office. I have a business and I don't know what the inside a dole office looks like but obviously you do. Furthermore many so called immigrants are illegal and work as well as collect benefits. The evidence is on my channel if you care look at my videos. But you won't will you? Because you don't want to know do you? Or should I say you already do.
If all immigrants are working as you claim then why is it costing the Irish people 90 million a year to keep immigrants in Mosney Co. Meath? Plus another 190 million to keep the rest of them in free housing, benefits all over the rest of our country,
I have my facts right so get your facts right before you comment on my channel.
Letting on your little Mr. Innocent and trying to let people think you're the oppressed while all the while you're bleeding our country dry,

And my response:

"You didn't even know where this country was a few years ago"

It hasn't moved much in the last few million years. Also, could you start out by not spouting such clearly useless drivel as this? A few years ago, I was right here in Dublin, so I know exactly where we were.

"If all immigrants are working as you claim then why is it costing the Irish people 90 million a year to keep immigrants in Mosney Co. Meath? Plus another 190 million to keep the rest of them in free housing, benefits all over the rest of our country,"

Excuse me? Where did I claim that "all immigrants are working"? I certainly said no such thing and by trying to build such a flimsy strawman argument you have instantly reduced your credibility to ZERO.

Furthermore, the "immigrants" in Meath and "the rest of them" with free housing are a tiny minority of the immigrants in Ireland.

Your argument is like saying that humans shouldn't be allowed to live here because we spend millions to operate prisons and hand out dole to scangers who never work a day in the life.

The people who unfairly game the system are the VAST MINORITY.

Unfortunately, racist idiots like you appear to be growing in number.

Is it just that Youtube brings out the worst assholes (like him and well... me) or is this really how a majority of Irish people feel now? Because it's pretty damn sad.

---

More from him:

This is a small country and you claimed 90% of immigrants were working thats not true how could it be when its costing our goverment or should i say the tax payer 90 million a year to keep immigrants in mosney not counting their benifit money. And how about all the others? there costing us another 200 million a year , they have free housing, benifits, free bus passes , and the rest.
your only kidding yourself not me, like i said i have the facts i dont speculate. wheres your facts? tell me it doesnt cost us that money will you?

Response:

"your only kidding yourself not me, like i said i have the facts i dont speculate. wheres your facts? tell me it doesnt cost us that money will you?"

You do not have all the facts. If you had the facts you would not say something like "that's not true, how could it be if the tax payer is paying 90 million a year to keep immigrants in Mosney"? That is you taking a fact (90 million a year "to keep immigrants in Mosney") and jumping to an unsupported conclusion (at least 10% of immigrants are spongers).
You can't just take a fact and suggest that it supports any claim. THAT is speculation, and it's what you are doing.

I note that you're trying to build another strawman argument: "tell me it doesnt cost us that money will you?". Do you not see how silly this is? I never said that it doesn't cost us money. Of course it does. My point is that it's a small number of immigrants/refugees that cost us the money. Not only that, but the vast majority of immigrants (there are more immigrants than just refugees) HAVE to work to be here, and they pay tax like every other worker. So the legitimate immigrants are also funding the spongers.

Yes, there are some sponger immigrants. Yes, there are some sponger refugees. Yes, some of those refugees somehow got free housing. A very small number of them (and most of that happened at least 10 years ago).

You talk as if the majority of immigrants have free housing, free bus passes etc. That is not true and you do yourself a disservice to suggest so.

Audio sync in DVD Flick

We were trying to create DVDs with the workflow Avid Xpress Pro -> (export Quicktime ref) -> Sorensen -> (convert to MPEG-2 DVD Pal) -> DVD Flick.

The output from Sorensen seemed okay when played locally, but the DVDs produced by DVD Flick had audio slightly earlier than video. After a long time searching, we stumbled upon a forum post where a guy (thank you, "dng"!) in a similar situation had resolved the problem in DVD Flick by going to Edit title... -> Audio track -> Edit -> Ignore audio delay. This worked perfectly for us, and showed that the audio delay in the MPEG from Sorensen was -160ms or so, which explains why the audio was slightly ahead of the video. Perhaps the media players we used (Quicktime and Windows Media Player) ignored this metadata which was why it seemed fine until burned as a DVD-video?

HTML5 video: WebM/VP8 vs H.264 on OS X 10.5

Trying to get away from the somewhat processor-intensive Flash for watching videos on the web, I just tried out the new codecs for HTML5 on Youtube in three browsers, getting the following rough reading for CPU usage (in the "top" utility):

• Opera 10.60: ~110% (i.e. hogging more than one core)


• Nightly Firefox build "Minefield": ~110%


• Safari v4: ~20%

For comparison, the "old" Flash player was taking ~50% CPU.

It seems that both Opera and Firefox are using the VP8 codec for video, which is currently not hardware accelerated (at least on OS X, due to Apple not standardising some API for GPU use). Safari is using the H.264 codec which clearly performs much better on this machine, but which is patent and licence encumbered.

So at this point, VP8/WebM is completely unusable for watching video on slowish machines like mine (a 3 year old Intel Macbook). Here's hoping that VP8 can take advantage of better hardware rendering soon...

* Minor addendum: Looking at this analysis of VP8, perhaps the encoder/decoder implementations are just immature at the moment and need to be optimised in a few areas. However, there are also some mentions of disturbing (in terms of possible future patent issues) similarities between the VP8 and H.264 designs.

Blinkenwords - Windows build

Following up on a previous post, a Windows build of Blinkenwords is now available here. I used a very impressive program called OCRA to automatically bundle the Ruby interpreter and required libraries into a single 4 megabyte (not enormous) packed executable.

On a minor roll...

Been fighting off a slight backlog of flashcards in Anki, pretty much due to downloading two French card decks as a refresher before heading to a conference in France next month.

After about 25 minutes going through some of the French cards, I had to leave them and pay some attention to the Chinese deck I've been building for a couple of years now. The cards are about 25% single characters (production), 40% multiple-character words (recognition) and 35% sentences (recognition), after switching sometime in December/January from production-only words/characters to make things more practical.

For some reason, it went really well today and I was on a roll, correctly answering some 83 cards in a row. No new cards, but a few recently-added ones which weren't completely familiar. Usually I'm happy to get 80-90% right, depending on tiredness.

It seems most efficient (at least if you occasionally create backlogs by not reviewing all of the cards on the day they're due) to review cards in order of their interval (i.e. if I don't finish all my cards today, at least I'll have dealt with the ones that were most in need of revising - seeing a 1 month card two weeks late is better than seeing an 8 day card four days late), so quit while I was ahead when asked to write the character for ginger (with an interval of around 2 months)^*.


Minor arbitrary happy moment!




* I've been told that I should use less parenthesised clauses when writing. Makes sense... Actually thinking about it now, if I extracted the bits in parentheses from that sentence into footnotes, and then saw how silly the result looked, it might make refactoring the text more obvious. On the other hand, it's 2am and I'm supposed to have a meeting at 9:30am :/

Ultima 9

Ultima IX was one of the ultimate letdowns in the history of game sequels. Pretty much all of the previous games improved as the franchise continued, with the arguable exception of 8 (but Ultima 7 "The Black Gate" and 7 part 2 "Serpent Isle" were superb and very hard to follow). Ultima 9 took the leap into a properly 3D, third-person adventure, with a very clever physics engine and pretty graphics.
Sadly, it was released as a buggy, unconvincing game, with unsatisfying combat, awful AI, a fairly linear plot and an unimmersive environment - especially compared to the Black Gate where you could bake bread, sew thread into cloth and cut cloth into bandages, deliver pumpkins and meat and really interact with an enormous number of objects, as well as watch NPCs carry out believable tasks on a real schedule.

Perhaps the most enjoyable thing about Ultima 9 was the ability to build ridiculous, gigantic bridges out of sticks balanced atop scrolls lying on bottles balanced on loaves of bread, and jumping along the bridge in stages to cross the unswimmable sea between islands (!!).

Worst Google machine translation ever

Chinese: "齐桓晋文之事"

Rough meaning: The story of Huan Jin Wen of the Qi dynasty

Google translation: "Renal calculi matter of cerebral infarction in rats"

(WHAT?)

Windows: still with the silly needless reboots?

Back when I used to use Windows 98 and then XP primarily, the phenomenon of having to reboot when carrying out a minor system change or installing an inconsequential update caused much exasperation, something which was far less of a problem on Ubuntu.

Then I moved to the Mac and was again disturbed by the occasional mysterious requirement to restart the machine merely because the web browser or worse, iTunes (which I do not even use) had updated itself.

And then I got a Windows Vista box and was reminded of the good old days:


Nice. I've never used Windows Mail, but now it wants to reboot the computer just because it's updating its own files? Piss awf!

Why you shouldn't multitask

Two great articles on why multitasking is not only bad for getting work done, but also damaging to our bodies and brains: here and here (yes, I know one of them is from the Daily Mail, pretend it isn't!). Well worth reading - I'm going to try to stop multitasking as much as possible (no more half-watching TV in the background, reading email/articles, talking, listening to MP3s all at once and so forth).

A couple of choice quotes:

"He found that just being in a situation where you are able to text and email - perhaps sitting at your desk - can knock a whole ten points from your IQ. This is similar to the head-fog caused by losing a night’s sleep."

"An American study reported in the Journal Of Experimental Psychology found that it took students far longer to solve complicated maths problems when they had to switch to other tasks - in fact, they were up to 40 per cent slower.
The same study also found multitasking has a negative physical effect, prompting the release of stress hormones and adrenaline.
This can trigger a vicious cycle, where we work hard at multi-tasking, take longer to get things done, then feel stressed, harried and compelled to multi-task more."

"Using brain-scans he’s found that if we multi-task while studying, the information goes into the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new skills, from where it is difficult to retrieve facts and ideas. If we are not distracted, it heads to the hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information."

Bertie Gummidge

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