Author: Dave Shevett

A wandering geek. Toys, shiny things, pursuits and distractions.

Brain… hurts!

Last night Rosa and I sat down to finally watch Memento. Now I had not seen this particular gem yet, but Rosa had, so she kept quiet on the details.
To me this came out in the same series of ‘movies with a secret’ mystery / thriller films, like “Sixth Sense” and “Fight Club” the like. I knew the basic premise (fellow has lost the ability to make new memories), but not much else.
For those who -have- seen this movie, you know the feeling it gives you.
“WHOAH!”
This movie seriously messes with your mind. And not in a ‘lets show lots of abstract imagery and disassociated bizarreness like Blue Velvet or what haveyou, but this was told with finesse and skill, and still leaves you at the end going, as I said, “BRAIN! HURTS!”
If you haven’t seen it, go see it. Its not scary or jumpy or anything, it’s just a beautifully done movie. If you have seen it, I now know why you walk around with a lost look on your face going “wait… but if he… but wasn’t she… ”

Review : Kobo Deluxe

It’s rare that I get totally addicted to a game under Linux. I mean, the
environment isn’t really conducive to totally immersive gaming. Back in my
Windows days I’d have a serious game every week or two I’d play pretty
constantly until I either beat it or got tired of it. Since I’ve gone totally
Linux, that just hasn’t happened. Now, many would consider this a -good- thing,
since games can in fact be total time sucking life suckers, but gosh darn it,
sometimes ya just have to take a break from the full time job and just blow things up
for a while.

I’m not a cutting edge sort of gamer. If I like something, I’ll play it for
a while. And I mean a while. I’m still playing Quake 3 Arena just because
durnit, it’s a fun game, and lets me, well, you guessed it, BLOW THINGS UP!
When I shifted over to Linux, Q3A wasn’t really an option anymore (yes, I know
it’s possible, but I just wasn’t up for the hassle.

Continue reading “Review : Kobo Deluxe” →

How can people use IE?

This is a rant.
How can Microsoft possibly market a browser as ABYSMAL as Internet Explorer? Aside from stomping on standards left and right, and putting out plain old BROKEN implementations, ths browser is a menace to every system.
I have to run it on the Win2k box to test things I’m running for a client. On that w2k box, I normally just use my Firefox installation. Anyway, running up IE, and I -immediately- get a pop-under advertisement.
I have run IE perhaps 5 times since I set this machine up.
Microsoft, you’ve built a product that is unuseable without third party tools (such as Spybot and Ad-Aware) that fix the faults in your product. Sheesh.

Communications device, Phase 2

I think I’ve settled on the Handspring Treo 600 as my phone of choice. It has a tremendous amount of goodies in it, and with an SD slot, I can punch in a half a gig of storage space for MP3’s. Bonus!
Now for the next step. The Treo 600 apparently works with AT&T Wireless, Cingular, Sprint, and T-Mobile. My current phone is workin with AT&T Wireless, which as far as I can tell has the -worst- phone support on the planet, but the service and coverage has been outstanding.
My requirements are unlimited data access (even as a ‘wireless modem’), and decent phone coverage in the Metro Boston area.
Here’s an outline of the services offered. Unfortunately it looks like AT&T doesn’t offer an unlimited plan at all, so that leaves Cingular or Sprint for this area (no T-Mobile?)
I’m leery of Sprint because they have a ‘custom’ network – their PCS stuff. That’ll lock that phone to the Sprint network only, right? But Cat has a GSM Cingular cell phone, and the coverage is cheezy as all git out. She has a terrible time holding a signal.
I’m leaning toward Sprint. Thoughts / commentary?

Mmm, first real bike ride

Today after I dropped Zach off at school, I hied over to Bedford to hop on the Minuteman Bikeway This is one of the longer bike trails in the Boston area, and stretches 11 miles from Bedford into Alewife. From there, there’s an extension that wiggles its way across Somerville, ending up in Davis Square.
In Davis I locked up the bike and settled in for a couple hours of work at the Diesel Cafe, a lovely wireless-enabled space on a busy street. I’m sitting in the open front doorway (it opens like a garage door), watching traffic go by, people walking by, and listening to Dave Matthews, and typing up a quote for services for a client.
This afternoon I’ll be riding back to Bedford, so if anyone is around and wants to come along, drop me some mail or just come by the Diesel.

Hanging out up in Maine.

Having a nice relaxing weekend up in Maine, which is always good for the soul. Course, would’nt be escape time unless I had some toys to play with. This weekend it’s games on the laptop.
Course, I’m running Linux, so that really cuts daown what’s available. One of the things I’ve been noodling with for a while is getting all the components together to build a MAME cabinet. (MAME is Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator – a way of playing virtually every video game every made on a single machine – what games do _YOU_ miss playing? :.) Course trying to do this on a non-existent budget has meant it’s taking a while. But I’m to the point of having the monitor, a motherboard, the games, and some real motivation, so things are starting to come together. Next step is the trickiest, and that’s designing / building a controller panel that has all the controls necessary for all the games I play.
Course, while working / thinking about this, I really get into playing games. I’ve been playing Robotron 2084 on the laptop a LOT, which is tricky with just keyboard controls, but it’s really making me jones for the cabinet.
Along these lines, Ben the fiend that he is, has turned me on to Kobo Deluxe, a thoroughly addicting space blast-em-up for Linux. The bum.

My Wishful Want for Connectivity

So I’m going to ask the Body Geek Politic here, because frankly I’m out of
the loop on this technology.

I’m doing enough mobile work on my IBM Thinkpad T23 that I
think it’s time to consider wireless service options. I’ve signed up for an
account with T-Mobile for wireless access
in the various Starbucks so liberally
strewn about the area, but that only gets me WiFi access within the cafe(s).

Continue reading “My Wishful Want for Connectivity” →

Rant about Popcap Games

Remember Popcap Games? They wrote these
really wicky cool games like Bejeweled and Rocket Mania and Alchemy and all
those other nifty things.

One bit I liked was that all their games were in web-enabled form, so I could
try things online before buying or downloading. The downloadable versions were
just Java VM apps, which could run anywhere, so I could play it on my Linux
machines anytime.

Popcap has TOTALLY sold out. Not only are they selling out, they’re
completely misleading their userbase.

G’head. Try one of their ‘online games’. You can play from the Web! Click
through and check them out.

Oh, btw. Make sure you’re running windows. Because their so called ‘web
games’ won’t work on anything but a windows browser environment. Why? Because
they’re all ActiveX games.

NOWHERE do they mention this. Their slick marketing-speak pages go on and on
about wonderful web-games and ‘play now!’ and everything, but at no point do
they mention that they only support Microsoft. Ashamed? Perhaps. Why don’t
they mention that? You know, maybe it’d be bad for business if they proclaimed
that their webgames only work on one monopolies’ platform.

This is part of a disturbing trend. Had a look at Shockwave.com lately? Lots of interesting
games and toys over there. Oh, very few of them are actually Shockwave / Flash
games. They’re mostly downloadable executables for… wait… I’ll let you
guess.

Something’s shifting back into the Microsoft camp, and it’s really beginning
to make me twitch.

Review : Mozex plugin for Mozilla / Firefox

I’ve been having hassles doing some of the major editing on
the blog, due to the
fact that it’s difficult to do serious editing in HTML Textarea
windows. There’s a couple ways around it, such as having an an intelligent client
to edit in. I’m still searching for a good client, but it’s sort
of weird when we already -have- one, that being a web browser. Gotta be
a better way!

Continue reading “Review : Mozex plugin for Mozilla / Firefox” →

Remember that Chernobyl motorcycle trip?

Apparently huge chunks of it were fabrications. A posting in Neil Gaiman’s blog from a reader in Kiev points out that there were some serious problems with the original photo essay. The writer, Elena, has since massively revised the photo essay to take out some of the more blatant falsehoods. (actually, at the moment I can’t find the original site – it seems to have been taken down)
Jeez, what was the point? Wasn’t Chernobyl horrific enough? Why -make up- stuff about it?

The saga of the laptop

Folks know that I’ve been doing much of my development work on an IBM Thinkpad T23 for quite a while. It’s an older machine, (manufactured 3/01), but in many ways I’m quite attached to it.
Yesterday at Diesel Cafe in Davis Square, I was looking forward to a few hours of focused work time.
The laptop wouldn’t boot. Just locked up on the BIOS screen. My main work machine had died during a particularly wretched emotional and financial time for me. I was betrayed.
[this story has a happy ending, read on for details]

Continue reading “The saga of the laptop” →

One small victory.

Since I’m doing a bunch of spam analysis, I decided to watch inbound traffic of spam coming to me. Of the 5-6 mails I saw, 4 were from obviously comrpomised Windows boxes that were acting as active relays.
I tracked one to Megapath, so I sent mail off to them with the IP address of the machine spewing the spam. An hour later:

Subject: You have an active spammer.
Discussion Thread Response (Eric B.)	05/25/2004 02:47 PM
Thank you for the notice. We have stopped the traffic.
MegaPath Abuse Department

It’s not much, but gosh it feels good.