»A Search for Fun I had planned a post on emotional design, and how it reflects my experiences with D&D, Rock Band, and Guitar Hero, but I left my book at home, so you get this instead.
Don’t worry, it’s just a musical about mad science, made by Joss Whedon, and starring Neil Patrick Harris.
And that other post? Coming in serial form the rest of the week, I hope.
I’m sitting here totally awestruck by Spore. And I want to tell you all about it.
First, no there’s no Sporn here. Second, I don’t even have the Creature Creator yet, so I don’t have some non-obscene thing to say. I’ve got very little to say about tools I haven’t used or anything (although I’ve watched you youtube vids of people making things.) I don’t want to talk about the DRM in Spore, either, except that I’m probably going to suck it up and buy it when things come out.
No, today I saw something technically awesome. Something that made me look at the glorious obviousness of it, and know that I was in the presence of greatness. Something so simple that no one had thought of it before. I haven’t even read about this, but maybe I haven’t been sucking on the Spore Hype teat long enough. But I still saw it today, and I’m stunned. In a word, sporestruck.
Crystaltips, aka Alice of Wonderland blog, did some searching for her own name on Sporepedia. And someoen had made a creature with that name. That was cool, and I was having trouble viewing it, so I went to the Sporepedia myself to see what was up. I hadn’t been there yet.
I went, and was met with this absolutely wonderful amzing tip:
How do you see one of these Creatures in your Spore Creature Creator? Right Click on the thumbnail image of the creature. Save the image to your desktop. Drag the saved image from your desktop into the Spore Creature Creator. Voila! The Creature is in your game.
Okay, so I did that. What did it download? A .png file. Not some bizarre .xml file. Not a .spore (.spr?) file. No, just .png. An image, just like it says. Something I could put on my website. Something I could print out, or set to my desktop. Just that, an image.
Yet, I can drag that image into the creature createer and the creature is in my game. “Voila!” Indeed.
My first reaction was that they were using steganography to accomplish this. That would be stupendously cool. Steganography is the study/practice of storing secret information inside of images. If you think of a computer graphic as an array of bytes, where each byte (or more) has color information for each pixel in the graphic, then you have more bits than you need to store graphical information (especially on a lower quality image, stored in a higher quality format). You can then use these higher-order bits to store extra information in some pre-agreed upon code. That would mean the image would be all that’s required to pass on the full info of the creature.
However, on reflection, I think they are using the filename as a key index to look things up in the Sporepedia. That’s still pretty impressive, and allows for me sharing things, so long as I don’t change the name of the file. I want to experiment some with it, as there’s a potential for exploitation with a filenaming convention. The advantage here, is that Spore, and EA get to control what’s really available. So, if I make a penis monster, and they don’t want to store it, then it’s gone from the shared universe. And that’s why the steganography idea is so much cooler.
I’ll probably mess with this Wednesday night, and update how it’s working.
She’s a Hispanic resistance fighter-photographer with green lips, and star of a cult hit (if poorly selling) video game “Beyond Good and Evil”, and she’s back. All hail Jade!
Destructoid has the roundup of Ubisoft’s announcements, which include a great deal about Far Cry 2 (an FPS), the announcement of a new Prince of Persia game for Christmas, as well as the announcement of Beyond Good and Evil 2. Jade is one of my favorite characters (possibly my favorite female player-controlled character). She’s witty, strong and passionate; that and she has a mysterious past that’s not completely explained in the first game. I mean, while it does wrap up the major story line, BG&E ends with Jade rocketing off into space, after who knows what, trying to find out what the larger story is, and if her parents are alive (and how they are certainly involved.)
I’ve played it through twice now, which is a rarity. One of the few other console games I feel similarly to is Prince of Persia:Sands of Time (which is a stronger, more innovative game than BG&E). The new PoP, according to Kotaku, is not going to be in the trilogy started with Sands, and it looks strikingly different. It’s interesting to see that they say they are going to include “stuff that worked in Assassin’s Creed” as part of the game. I’m not sure whether to be happy or cautious about that, since AC was supposed to be a spiritual successor to Sands, and I’m not sure it succeeded.
Still, fairly interesting and exciting news from Ubisoft, enough to distract me from 4e, anyway. Oh… and for those interested in trying out Sands, or the original Beyond Good and Evil, both are available for PC on GameTapкомпютри втора употреба.
I’ve used Open Source Software for a long time. As part of my position at work, I get to advocate and select solutions, and I’ve been moving us away from the IIS/ColdFusion proprietary licenses to Apache/PHP. It’s more cost saving all around, and for our application, we are actually stabler on Apache. (IIS required weekly reboots f the CF server, but it runs a bit more nicely under PHP). I’d like to get rid of the Windows license altogether, but that may not be an option in the long term. There are just too much .Net software out there I might have to support.
My client side is completely OSS, with Dojo Toolkit forming the basis of my web applications. Most of my stuff is driven by my PHP templating library, but I found that I wanted people to work with the data at their end, and produce the reports without needing to pass data back and forth. That means some sort of Javascript reporting library, which, unfortunately, wasn’t built into Dojo.
I found one called EJS, or Embedded JavaScript. I spent some time with it, it’s templates are pretty basic, and it doesn’t require a huge framework (after all, I’ve already got one of those). It’s technically part of JavaScriptMVC, which I’m not using so much (since my MVC mostly lives on the server itself). I got it mostly working, but then started having some odd problems with it.
JavaScript is a funny language, with functions as basic data types, and the ability to write and modify (and evaluate) it’s own code as part of the language. EJS does this for it’s templates, basically converting them into a function which it later calls — that means you can use JavaScript within the templates itself. I seized on this to make recursive templates (which works for recursive multiple group-by reports like I was creating). My recursive templates came out really weird, with part of it right, and part of it just … missing.
What sort of amazes me was how quickly I was able to find the problem (and my correct identification of it as a scoping problem). It’s hard to explain to non-programmers, but JavaScript is fundamentally different than most languages, and learning it has been kind of mind-expanding for me. My first brush with it was sort of distasteful, it was a poorly named bastard stepchild of a language.
Today, it runs the web. Google Apps, Flash (via ActionScript), any sort of web interactivity,really, is done with JavaScript, so it’s a good language to learn. Both practical, and mind expanding;) (Now I just need to learn LISP.)
Anyway, I fixed the problem, and got my reports working, and kept meaning to let the EJS folks know about it, and subscribed to the list to hear more about it as I worked. A day or two later, someone had the same problem, so I posted my patch. It was four characters long, just “var ” at the right place in the code, but it fixed the problem.
They wrote me earlier this week, as they merged my “patch” into the primary JavaScriptMVC code, and they wanted to give me credit. That’s pretty awesome, and not why I did it, but there I am, a padawan and everything.
OK, so this isn’t necessarily a cool thing of this week. But it is a cool thing. The Sexy Wife and I were looking at a craft consignment shop here in town, called Wholly Craft. We were checking it out to see if she wanted to sell some of her bags, cards, or other craftilicious items.
The shop is odd, with fun stickers, amigurumi, weird re-crafted stuff. They have a myspace page, and if you live in Columbus and are remotely retro-crafty, you should check it out. We originally found them by way of Sublime Stitching (by way of BoingBoing). So we went to the back where the kits were, and looked at them — they didn’t have the one SexyWife wanted, but they had some other things.
I wasn’t so interested in the embroidery (although they did have two private-parts cross stitch patterns that looked simple enough). What grabbed my attention (I don’t know why) was the latch hook rug kits. I think it was the expression on the woman’s face (the photo used here is of the kit that caught my eye). Something about it just said “porn face” to me.
Turns out I wasn’t really wrong. A glance around the shop and I discovered an advertisement card for Made With Sweet Love, which sells the kits. They’ve got several smallish rug kits for sell, but I admit my interest now is in something bigger (they have a picture of someone lying on a huge floor rug). I’ll never do the whole kit, I admit, but it had me looking. There’s places to buy precut flesh colored thread, and I could probably photoshop up some graphics once I have the palette squared away.
Of course, I don’t have time for this. But I accept gifts. Really. (as if)
So, after purchasing Girl an Apple Laptop as a graduation present, I’ve realized that what used to be true no longer is — Apples don’t run on different hardware, they run on the same PC based hardware as the rest of the desktop world. The only thing keeping OS X (which I say ‘X’ no matter what Steve Jobs says) from installing on a regular PC is a special chip that says “Yes I was made by Apple.” Well, that and the license agreements.
That didn’t stop MacWorld’s editor for making a FrankenMac, though.
I found two things of interest in the video. The first was that the parts listed for the clone were pretty much the same ones I have planned for our PC upgrades. Which makes me say ‘hmmmmm’, and think evil thoughts. (Just not fun evil thoughts, Girl).
The second thing was, well, the level of disgust the MacWorld editors had for the boot up sequence required to boot a PC. (It’s a dual boot system, OS X and Vista). I don’t boot my computer often, and having been in the PC world for many many years, I’m used to it. It doesn’t even feel like an aesthetic component of the system. That doesn’t happen until I see the system itself — so obviously, I’ve separated the hardware parts and software parts in my mind.
Apple is probably right to incorporate those — most of the devices I use start up with a logo and go right into the OS, no dilly-dallying. Still, it’s interesting what you can get used to and never notice until someone shows you a different way. This disparity between functional designs and elegant ones is a problem — and doesn’t need to be quite so divisive. I appreciate objects which are both useful and elegant. Sometimes in the press to make something one way or another, something gets lost.
I admit I’m tempted to try to install a copy of OS X on one of our new PCs, when we get them. I’d even be willing to buy a copy of the OS, despite the fact I’m breaking their EULA. I’d have to obtain an illegal copy of the software to do it, and I wonder how the editors of MacWorld got away with it, myself.
Of course, the Psystar, which is mentioned in the video above –and which has precipitated the discussion of OS X on non-apple hardware — has started shipping, according to Slashdot. No doubt MacWorld will have something credible to say about it soon.
Okay, I don’t know how cool it is, but it has my attention.
One of many links you could easily find.
Nothing struck me this week as a particularly ‘cool’. The gamerblogs are all talking about racist imagery and resident evil 5, based on a trailer I haven’t seen for a game I don’t want to play. I’m interested in the social angle, I grew up in a region where racial tensions were constantly obvious and never mentioned by polite people. (I’m not saying this is right, one of my interests here is that I don’t really know what is right and wrong, except that people should be judged on their own merits — but that doesn’t mean I don’t have reactions based on the surface impressions of others.) I’ve got quite a few links for this, but haven’t spent the time looking through it yet. But, whether it’s true or not, it isn’t cool.
Another interesting link that showed up in my rss feeds this morning was a discussion about housing and transportation costs. Basically, with the cost of transportation these days, living in suburbia isn’t really that cost effective. Because of the epilepsy I had as a teen/tween, I gravitated from living in a small town to living in a large town. In Charlotte, we lived in a development, and I drove over 60 miles a day (without leaving town). That was usually in a carpool, but it was crazy, and back then gas was less than a buck a gallon (sometimes). Today, I figure my transportation costs are around $120 a month — half of that is gas, and the rest is parking fees or bus fares.
The article suggests that people spend (on median) 19.1% of their income on transportation, but that some people spend as much as 40% of their income to travel. I discussed this at one point with my employee, who over the course of the increase in gas prices from 1.50 -> 3.20 / gallon, switched from an SUV to a more economical car. That, and switching to a four-day schedule, and today he spends half as much on gas as he did before. (So he’s using half as much gas.)
This problem has always been there — it is merely that people notice because it is hitting them in their pocketbooks. Environmentalists may have known that gas is bad; peak oil rabble-rousers have been shouting about the fact that oil is finite, but nothing is going to happen until it hits the pocket of John WhiteCollar and Susie SoccerMom. Maybe I’m grumpy today.
I just finished John Varley’s Rolling Thunder, the third in his Red Thunder series, which are genuinely good mostly-hard science fiction, with powerful Heinlein influences. Really, these three books are homages to Heinlein’s juvies, without being juvies themselves. Varley’s later work is obviously strongly influenced by Heinlein, but he has his own voice that’s clear throughout, unlike another author I might mention.
So, last night I went to the stack of impulse-checked-out library books, and grabbed Bright of the Skyby Kay Kenyon. I wanted to highlight this passage, and this slashdot article.
These diversions, selected by each occupant and reinforced by data agents, created a feedback loop that created odd, individual realities. Psychoneurologists claimed that people were unaware of their choices — that their subconscious generated the “choices” using its hidden logic. By this theory, people were biological machines, driven by subconscious processes always a half second ahead of what we consciously “chose” to think. So you could walk into any child’s bedroom, any couple’s parlor and, by seeing their virtual environment, look into the jungle of their minds.
Looks like I’ll be going through a science fiction reading phase. The Kenyon book has a sequel, and I have a hold on Varley’s Steel Beach sequel, The Golden Globe, which I only recently discovered. That should keep me busy for a while. Or a week or so.
And that’s all I’ve got today.
This is an interesting thing, and something I’m not particularly surprised by. It’s also a warning and a vision of what the future will be like. Think that trading mp3’s is bad? What happens when we can trade physical objects with the same (or similar) ease as electronic documents? And as a herald to this idea, the open source motivated, self replicating 3D printer.
Anyone with a modern fabricator knows that they can use it to fabricate parts to build another (even perhaps better) fabricator. And anyone who knows much about materials science will know that the printer talked about here is limited to working with plastics and (eventually, according to the article) low melting temperature metals. And even so, you’re probably stuck putting the pieces together once you have them printed out, as it were.
But the article does talk about printing out circuit boards, and doing things in 3D so that things like cell phones, and other electronic gadgets don’t have to be flat. They also talk about how a researcher in New Zealand can print some object out and have it be on the desk of a fellow scientist halfway across the world. It’s practically science fiction, but our days of the Internet and instant communication make me think this isn’t so strange or far-fetched.
Eventually, these things will get easier. Easier to use, easier to build, and easier to share. And we already really know how to share things. What is happening is that physical objects are becoming ideas. They are information just like word documents, web pages, and hit singles.
In truth, they always were: any man made thing we see was an idea in someone’s mind. Information was formed on how to build the thing, and then some other humans processed the information into making the thing. Doing that efficiently and well is something that requires expertise and skill. While I’m not saying that will go away — in fact I think we’re looking at a further division of cheap consumer goods (now printed out instead of bought at Wal-Mart) and hand-crafted quality goods. And just like with music, some people are happy with a lossy mp3, and others want original recordings played on high definition, gold plated cable stereo systems.
And we also get into the phenomenon that it only takes one person. One person to create a file that says how to make something, and then anybody can use it. It can be scary; I don’t want bomb-kiddies blowing up my building, the way they pwn my windows server. But, it is coming. As with most science it comes with honest, good intentions. And it will change how we live, but not who we are.
The article makes this clear:
“We know that people are going to use the printer to try to make weapons [and] sex toys and drug paraphernalia,” he says. “This is obviously not what we’re hoping they are going to build. We are hoping they are going to build more and better RepRaps.”
And some people will do one, and some the other. Eventually people will use it to print out one-offs of stuff they need, tools, phones, computers, glasses for tonight’s party with that cool new emblem. You name it. It’s coming; I hope I’m here to see it.
The hot thing of the week is my bath water.
I know, sounds all silly, but I have a very real problem. See, I like my bath water hot. Not scalding hot, which is what comes out of our taps normally (not quite as hot as in Charlotte, where I could brew tea with our tap water, but still quite hot). But I like it hot. I take my showers hot, I take my baths hot. Yummy wakefulness-inducing hot water massaging away all the little aches and pains and starting your day right. Or soothing (especially now with the deep water bath my wife got) deep hot water while reading a book.
Now, that’s not the problem. The problem is, we live in an old house, and that house has only one bathroom. As an old house, it has that weird problem where if you flush the toilet, then all the cold water is used up and anyone else using the water (say, taking a shower) is treated to our scalding hot tap water. I could turn down the gas water heater, but like I said, I like my water hot. I don’t want lukewarm just so I don’t get scalded now and again.
And admittedly, the folks I live with don’t usually do things like flush the toilet when I’m taking a shower. But there are three adults (not the most that have lived there, but then this has been a problem for a while now) who have to share the bathroom. And I do like my baths.
So, I’ll take a bath in the evenings at least half an hour, maybe a full hour. Now one of our roommates will patiently wait (I try to check with him before I take a bath), but my wife is less shy. I mean we’ve been together for nine years now, she’s not going to let a little thing like my taking a bath get in the way of things. And that’s not a problem. Maybe it’s TMI to you, but it’s necessary to my story.
The thing is, I’m in my bath, and then she flushes the toilet. And all that scalding water. I mean, I know it was hot before, but now that she’s flushed, it’s scalding hot. And to quote the old commercial “I’m soaking in it.”
So, I just don’t know what to do. I tell her about it, but she doesn’t believe me. I thought about maybe running cold water right before she flushes, but that destroys the hot beforehand, and while things are fine during the normall-scalding phase, once the toilet fills, I’m back in the cold water again.
Anyone have any ideas?