blog.erik.rainey.name

    I'm glad to be back in Dallas, and I'm looking forward to the weekend. We got to our major milestone today at work, so I can rest easy over the weekend.

    Last night I received my Logitech Harmony 880 Remote in the mail from OnSale.com and I am impressed. I've never had a stateful remote, which remembers the current state of the various electronic components and it is also able to operate at an "activity" level rather than the "fancy macro" level I've been slumming at with my current remote, the Home Theater Master MX500. My new remote even has a sleek recharging station and the software works on MacOSX. The only problem I had with the software was that it's suppose to detect when a new config file has been downloaded, but this feature never seems to work. I'm pretty sure there's a "Find Last Change" sort of API in MacOSX (Win32 had one). Anyway, I just double clicked the files and the programmer launched and took care of entering the data into the remote via USB.

    On the gaming front, I've been renting Gran Turismo 4 from Gamefly. I know it's supposed to be a *real* driving simulator, but, and maybe I've not been paying attention to my driving since I was 15, it doesn't seem right. I've found it very difficult to pull off drifting (which is probably very hard in actuality) on the normal tracks. I also have found that it's quite hard to just do a 180. Realistically if you are going down the road at 80 mph and cut hard and hit the parking brake, you'll flip or break something on your car. In a video game I would expect that doing this manuveur would result in at least an uncontrolled spin. Neither happens. Instead of a spin or flip, the car just turns to the direction of the cut (but only up to about 100 off forward) begins sliding forward (slightly askew), and slowly rights itself back into the forward direction, though not completely. Maybe I'm playing with some safety mode on. If I continue to play these racing games on my plasma, I think I may invest in a driving wheel, since driving with a controller in most of these games is a little "wonky".

Have you heard about Monad? It's going to be Window's new CLI in longhorn, though it's not specific to longhorn, it's specific to .NET. The great thing about it is that it's basically an object based CLI instead of a text based CLI. Conceptually it's got some similarities to Apple's Automator; though I don't know if it will more or less powerful. After watching the video, I was motivated to sign up for the beta. The video presentation is pretty good from a technical perspective although the lead architect is a bit of a goofball. Who honestly uses the phrase, "all the way to 11", or describes things as "rich" (other than chocolate)? Goofballs; that's who.

I also ended up playing God of War for the PS2 quite a bit over the weekend and I've come to the conclusion that I really don't like the genre of platform 3rd person games with fixed cameras for a variety of reasons which I'll get to but I wanted to cover GoW first. The story of GoW is actually quite enjoyable, the graphics are awesome, the art direction and theming greatly remind me of the Time Bandits movie. The part that is completely putting me off is the incessant, and repetitive fighting, pointless puzzles, fighting *during* pointless puzzles and the horrible preplaced camera angles. I had the same likes and dislikes with Prince of Persia, and Prince of Persia 2 too (heh, i just said tutu) though I did enjoy it's puzzles quite a bit more because they made it more naturally flwo with the game. For the large majority of playtime in GoW, that I've experienced, there's just a steady dribble of monsters who come at you in the game within formulaic ambushing, pointless, plot interrupting "pen" fights (where they errect magic red barriers within an area so you can't skip these fights) with enemies who just appear out of the ground. Now, the game depends upon you "leveling up" your abilities, like swordfighting, through the acquisition of these "red orbs" which you get by killing monsters, or causing proptery damage (breaking pots, baskets, statues) which when enough are acquired unlock bigger and better ways to smash and kill. So they've given you an incentive to mindless kill things (and you'll need to kill alot of stuff to get the really cool special effects too). This is like many games in many genres, for example, like practically every MMORPG out there, although they typically have a weaker main story and a stronger and more diversified power set. One of the other problem I have with platformers in general is the more linear nature of the game. All games have to be linear in some respect through a main story arc, but platformers tend to be the worse about it. And finally the fixed camera. This is nearly inexcusable to me. The game has such beautiful graphics but I don't get to see enough of it because the stupid camera will not move. The game designers then took advantage of their craptacular design flaw and hide stuff in relatively easy places to reach, like above you on a rafter, but you'd never know it's there becase again, you can't move the stupid point of view. You can't even switch into first person and just look around! Argh! In retrospect, I think if they had made this game into an RPG, it would have been one of the greats. It had the potential with it's story and the world they created to be an excellent RPG experience. It could have easily beaten Fable, even Morrowind, or even the KoTOR series, but perhaps that's too optimistic. Well, I'll probably just play a bit further in the game, become more frustrated, and turn it back into Gamefly and move on to the next game, Jade Empire.

I just got my Verve Remixed 1 & 2 CD's in the mail today. Quite nice. I highly recommend them. It's a fusion of jazz/soul/electronica, but good. You can pick them up off Amazon.

I'm level 11 now in Guild Wars. If you manage to get the game and want to meet up to play my main character is named "Feyna Thorvald". She's a Warrior/Mesmer, who enjoys reading maps, long walks in idyllic pastures, and beating the living hell out of Charr.

There are no "servers" per se, in Guild Wars, everyone gets dropped into the same towns, there's just like 80 instances of them. Think of it as a dynamic number of servers per city, where you can jump servers quite easily in the interface.

Scott and I went to Tower Record on Friday to browse the CD collection. Now normally I would finish that statement with a glib remark or a jab at archaic business models but I found out something that I didn't know about. Dual Discs. Scott pointed them out to when he picked up the new Bens Fold CD, Songs for Silverman, which features the CD on one side (which may not play on all CD/CDROMs) and a DVD on the other side, which featured the enitre album in 5.1 sound along with a video! Now I like to think of myself as current in the scene but this caught me off guard. How did I miss something this startling in the CD store business? I mean, it's not like I read the trade journals or keep up with whatever the most recent vomit band out of LA is but I should have seen, no known that they were going to do this. It's quite a neat concept and a great way to keep me going back to the place that I thought was headed for the crapper, a retail store... that is, until amazon carries these. Also, I picked up a copy of Verve Remixes 3 which I really dug while listening to it at a listening station. We couldn't find the volumes 2 and 1 at the store, so of course I checked on line. Amazon carries both. We'll one less of each now :). Basically, the album is a series of old Verve label recordings by what would be considered "classical" (read 50's/60's/70's) artists which have been remixed by modern DJ's to be phat. While not fresh, per se they are still funky.

I'm liking Guild Wars. It's fast, simple and I can see that it'll be quite complex once you get up into the PVP battlefield. If you're interested, head over to their site. You can also track all the sites that I have put in my del.icio.us bookmarks for Guild Wars here.

I'm really digging my Mac now, so much so that I've even contemplated, though not seriously, getting a full blown desktop or laptop. This might be a bit extreme, since I just met Mac OSX, but when you have a sweet set of these, how can you not like it? I mean, those widgets go up to here. Smokin'!

After reading through some feature lists of Mac OS X.IV (10.4 for those of you who have forgotten your Roman Numerals) and now being a Mac user (see mini order below) and reading some of the typical blather from Slashdot about why they conceive of 10.4 in a good or bad way, I thought I'd throw my 2 cents in. Particularlly I wanted to talk about Launchd, the new system "init" process that manages launching programs and their dependencies in 10.4. (Is it just me or is it syntatically odd to put a decimal number at the end of a sentence?) On a standard Unix, or even Windows, computer there are always text based configuration files for some particular service or another. Each of these files supplies information to a program to be used to configure the state of the software so that it may function properly. Without them you quickly find that you can't get information without having some first. This isn't necessarily a true paradox or contradiction it's just an dependency. But simply put, there is always some bit of information you need to know so that you can then find out more bits of information. This is, as I will refer to it as, the Big Picture Problem of Configuration. In the early times, every one agreed that this was an issue that needed to be addressed. Everyone agreed that there should be some way to have this information written down somewhere in the persistent memory of the software so that it could be known. And every one set off solving this problem in their own way, which was fine because their problems were not inter-related yet. Years pass. Services mature and have more features. Computers run more services. Services become ever more complex. Configuration languages evolve to match this complexity and become whole areas of study unto themselves. Now we have a meta-problem. That is, we have lots and lots of solutions to the same problem; each service reimplements a text file parser with similar levels of complexity, similar features and with similar requirements. So why don't we have one large-scale well thought out solution? Obviously we have "historic reasons", which is the same as saying "don't fix it if it ain't broke". Obviously we have a culture of DIY, where we don't like having a standard imposed on us. And lastly we have a mentality to "keep it simple, stupid", which means we don't want seemingly superfluous complexity in our solution. Launchd was created to solve these meta-problems. The meta-problem is not entirely accurately described as a congolmeration of smaller problems, but more of a problem about configuration problems. Since we have all these disparate solutions and so many services solving the same problem in roughly the same way but with unqiue deviations, there's just a great deal to learn about configuration. Granted, even if or when launchd style solutions do prevail, each service will still have it's own type of data, just not it's own way of storing it. By using XML launchd can provides a uniformly parsable configuration file for every service that is self-validating. This means it provides enough information within itself to tell the parser if there has been an error in that file; not only a syntatic error, but some forms of sematic errors. It still can't detect logical errors (humans can't do this either, reliabely at least). You may be for or against this. Most of the "debate" about using XML comes down to either pro) it's understandable by humans and machines or con) it's barely understandable by humans and slow to parse by machines. You may note that the con is subjective, while the pro is factually stated; objective. How hard or easy it is for you to read XML is based solely on your own experience with it. I tend to like it because I've used it. Your Mileage May Vary. In the end, launchd's conceptual purpose of consolidating the configuration landscape of the computer is a useful meta-problem to solve, regardless of the language or syntax to do it with. XML simply provided lots of benifits that other less developed methods couldn't provide.

I'm currently listening to "The 8th Habit" by Stephen Covey, a follow-up to his original title, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People". I originally began to read the first book when I was in high school during my time in Boy Scouts, before I got my Eagle Scout (which is a whole other discussion in achievement under false pretenses that I only now realize). However I stopped for one reason or another and never picked it up again. I recently found the book on Audible.com and having run out of other things to listen to with my monthly subscription I decided to give him a shot. Mr. Covey's book is a semi-rational approach to learning how to be a more effective person; how to train yourself to become what you want to be. I'd say that 60% of what he says I would agree with little modification (mostly by using more precise terminology that I can only assume he did not use in order to remain accessible to the general populace). For another 20% I'd say that I agree with it but for completely different reasons, sometimes the opposite reasons that he states. And finally there's another 20% that I think is too far into a mystical notion of the universe, stemming from Mr. Covey's religious background, for me to relate to, much less understand (i.e. his idea of "connecting with the infinite"). For the 20% that I agree with but for other reasons that he states, I feel he suffers from not having a consistent perspective on his issues. At the same time he talks about free will and choice he quotes famous people who make statements to the opposite. He is a religious man, as I mentioned before, which places him in the groupings with the "mystics". How one can synthesize the pre-determinism of deities (i.e. God's Divine Plan) and free will and choice, I don't know. But he talks at great length about the concreteness of reality (we'd call it the Primacy of Existence) and repeats, but does not quote, Ayn Rand's statement (and I'm recalling from memory here) "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed". (I have no idea if he's read Rand). He agrees that there are axioms, though he does not name them (like: to be Conscious is to Identify).