Law and Order: SVU – What the heck?!

So I don’t really watch much network television, but I have to admit I’m a Law and Order junkie. All the spinoffs too. Between various cable channels, it’s a 50/50 chance that at any given hour, there’s a L&O episode on. Nowadays, you can pretty much run from 9pm til midnight just hopping from one show to another.
Last night there was a new L&O: SVU episode on NBC. Rosa and I decided to sit down and watch it – a new episode? Sure, why not! We were feeling pretty low key and it seemed like a nice thing to do.
The episode was quite good, really leaving us guessing right up until the last 5 minutes. No clear bad guy, no deliberate bias, some very interesting interplay in the characters – a good episode.
L&O is somewhat formulaic. At the end of the trial, the verdict is read, and there’s usually some pithy commentary afterwards by the trial lawyers, or something dramatic happens (fellow commits suicide, gets shot in the courthouse by an angry family member, whatever) – there’s about a 3 minute window there.
Last night, NBC -CUT OFF- the end of the show. “We the jury find the defendendent…” and stopped it! They flashed up a message “Do you think the professor is guilty or innocent? Go to NBC.com to find out!”
We were aghast! It totally destroyed the mood / interest of the show, and we were outraged that a story we were immersed in was now held hostage by a marketing ploy.
There was no completion, no ending to the story, they went on to the next show. Now, leave aside the fact that despite our digerati lifestyle, a huge percentage of the populatioin does NOT have net access, let alone ubiquitous net access. They have to dialup, or turn on their computer, or whatever.
Beyond this, the NBC.com website was totally swamped and unavailable. I gave up after a few tries, and wandered off grumbling. Today I hit the site, and had to dig a while to even get a REFERENCE to last nights show, and saw only a poll. “Do you think the professor was innocent or guilty?” – “Innocent” “Guilty” “Need more evidence.” – I basically picked one at random, it showed me the current results (most folks appear to think innocent, but who the hell knows), and that’s it. No explanation, no detail one way or the other. End of story.
What the hell is that all about? Is this like schroedingers courtroom? He may be guilty, he may not be, it depends?
How will this possibly play in syndication, which is where the show actually makes its money… will they fill in the missing dialog and show then?
I know that Rosa is planning on writing a letter to NBC about it, she was as incensed as I was.
Sheesh.

Planet Geek’s Guide to Modern Movie Attendance.

I’ve been avoiding going to the movies lately. What used to be an enjoyable experience has continued its slide into blatant commercialism and customer gouging. Skyrocketing ticket prices, indifferent service, and obscene concession prices make consumer action a necessity.
In defense of that age-old institution of the American movie experience, I bring you Planet Geek’s Guide to Modern Movie Attendance.

Continue reading “Planet Geek’s Guide to Modern Movie Attendance.” →

Why don’t I use the Livejournal Comments system?

I have a fairly large readership that uses Livejournal as a news aggregator for reading my blog postings. This posting is for them…
Ya’ll probably notice a tagline in the postings you see that ask not to use the Livejournal comments mechanism to post replies. The reasoning behind this is that I want to keep commentary on the postings in one place – on the blog itself. When you comment on the feed in Livejournal, you’re just commenting on ‘a copy of’ the article, not the article itself.
I do understand that there are elements of the Livejournal comments mechanism that I do not have available in Movable Type (my blogging software), such as threaded comments, etc. I’m working to add that functionality via plugins, but for the time being, I do ask that if you want to comment on my postings, please click through to the original article, and comment there.

Hyper-Geeking and field tests


Wow, what a day.
Yesterday I buckled down and finally reconfigured the CONGO servers to support the new workstations I’ve been accumulating to replace my iOpeners. It took a couple hours of noodling with LTSP configurations and SSH keys, but in the end I now have a cluster of 4 flatscreen workstations, all booting completely off a central Athlon 2.8gig Shuttle box.
The new workstations are Gateway Profile 1.5 machines. These are all-in-one K6-2/400 workstations with fantastic 1024×768 LCD screens. They are SUCH an improvement over the iOpeners in so many ways, but htey do have one drawback. They’re -heavy-. The iOpeners are maybe 4lbs each, and I can carry 6 of them in one carrying case without too much effort. The Gateways are closer to 13lbs each, and are larger, so they don’t fit into any of the road cases I have. That’s a challenge I’m postponing, but will have to address it at some point.

Part of the motivation for getting this stuff going was Tim’s birthday party last night. I had agreed to bring some machines over to his house so we could have some LAN gaming going on. The Gateways are a lot better than the iOpeners for this sort of thing as well, since they have very good, fast screens. The trick was to get the games installed on the server before I had to pack up the cluster and head out. I got everything running about an hour and a half before I needed to leave, so that didn’t leave much time. We ended up with 4 working Gateway Profile terminals, all booting properly off the network. Yay!
I rummaged through the Linux Gametome to get ideas, as well as asked some friends online about I should install. Of the 15 or so packages I finally ended up putting in place, a couple turned out to be real winners:

  • Tenes Empanadas Graciela is a Risk clone running under GNOME. The turn based system was a little time consuming, but the game looks to be quite good. Need more playing
  • Nethack is always the perennial favorite, even though it really -isn’t- multiplayer, it got some use.
  • By far, the favorite for the evening was Xpilot, which ran beautifully on the workstations. Ben did a great job figuring out the tweaks and fiddles to make the game runnable and we had a grand time chasing each other around.

The machines all behaved very well, and it was a great test of the new terminals. We had 4 running off the new Shuttle server, and everything just plain worked. Yay!

Power tools redux, or “Daves tears stuff up”

With thanks to Macthud, a jigsaw was found, and [de?]construction continued. Using a couple tricks I learned on various modding boards, I cut a 10″x4″ window in the left side of the casing, and a 3″x3″ window in the right side. This was done using 1/2″ bit in a power drill to cut the pilot holes, and a single-speed jigsaw to cut the lines. I had already marked the lines in pencil, and masked out the rest of the case with duct tape to prevent the sliding jigsaw from damaging the finish.
The panels popped out fine, and I only had one bad moment of the jigsaw jumping around slighly denting the case. Next time I think I’ll use a better jigsaw, but for now, this was fine.
The next step was using 1/4″ clear plastic tubing for the ‘framing’ around the holes. That involved cutting the tube to lengh and slitting it lengthwise with an x-acto knife. I pushed that over the edge of the cut holes, and that gave me an interesting ‘silicon putty’ look around the edges of the windows.
I then cut 2 pieces of lexan to the right size (did you know that when after scoring Lexan with a carpet knife, breaking it sounds _Just_ like a rifle shot? Woke me up.)
A couple pieces of velcro on the inside of the case and the lexan was mounted. Voila! Looks great. Time to reassemble the case!
And there the problems happened. The tolerances inside a Shuttle case are -miniscule-. There’s enough room on the left side of the case for the internal mountings, but the right side with the smaller window… nuh uh. The case is -right- against the bracing hardware and the power supply.
So, the right side window had to come out. I think I’ll do an external mount on it, so it takes up no internal space at all. But for now it’s an open hole. I’m keeping an eye on the heat in the case, just in case airflow has been a problem. I don’t think it’s been affected too much, but it’s definately on the radar.
I really need to get a new camera so I can share the project pictures. Stay tuned for more exciting updates!

Dude, where’s my jigsaw?

Well, my very first casemod project has come to a screeching halt. I decided to mode the case of one of my Shuttle PC’s to give it a little more glitz and glamor. Since this machines are taken to shows regularly, and tend to be on display, I figure a little more whiz-bang would be good.
For those who don’t know what a casemod is, it’s a way of customizing your PC case using colored lighting, lexan windows, and other doodads to make it look cool. Some examples: a normal pc, and a Shuttle box like mine, but with a blue tinted case.

Continue reading “Dude, where’s my jigsaw?” →

Review: Goldstrike


Game: Goldstrike
Language: Flash
Category: Puzzle / Arcade
Tested on: Debian Linux + Firefox
Rating: 3 out of 5
Offered by: Flash Arcade (link)

Goldstrike is sort of a cross between tetris and Frood. The object is to knock out continguous colored blocks in a wall that is slowly advancing toward you. Your character does this by skillfully flinging a pickaxe at the colored blocks. The more blocks you knock out, the faster the level is over, the more points you score.

This is a very simple game. What makes it so entertaining is the small improvements that just make it fun. The miner character does a little ho-down dance at the beginning and end of the levels, and the sound effects are cute and enjoyable. The game has a natural progression from ‘slow and comfortable’ up through ‘good, now that one there, and those, yes, got that one, okay good!’ straight through to ‘ahhhh! too fast! nooo! I screwed up again!’. To me that’s a mark of a well designed game. If the game gets unplayable too fast, it’s no fun. If it takes too long to get into the groove, you won’t want to invest the time.

The Zoomquilt

Many many years ago when I was playing with AutoCAD I made an image that had an remarkably large level of zooms in it. You could zoom in on the picture and find even more pictures, then zoom in on that and there were more, an unending series of images that were small only relative to where they were referenced from.
Someone has to put together the ZoomQuilt, a Flash animation that lends far more artistry to this comment than I ever could…
Check it out…
(Thanks to Molly for the link.)

Snarky Linux humor…

From Bioware’s notes on the Linux client for Neverwinter Nights, under ‘Things you will need…”

2. CD-Key: You will have to purchase a copy of the game to get a valid Neverwinter Nights CD-Key. Of course, with this purchase you also get a lovely Neverwinter Nights mapkin, a spiral-bound game manual, and three plastic-coated aluminum-reinforced W1nd0z3 brand coasters.

Planet Geek? Try.. PLANET CHAOS! AHAHHAHAH!

Okay, maybe not quite that bad.
Ya’ll may have noticed that I’ve been posting some new reviews, and made a new section just for Linux and Mac playable webgames. I was getting tired of going to websites that advertise WEB GAMES! Play online for free!, only to find the links for the games are either ActiveX applications or simply a downloadable .exe file. The net is far from homogenous, guys, get with the program.
Anyway, as part of my fight against The Man, I decided to start collecting the best of the online games that are not windows-dependent. As I started working through them, I realized that my Flash player for Firefox was not working. While this doesn’t affect Java based games, it really does limit access to some of the more entertaining stuff.
What followed was 3-4 hours of arguing with multiple Firefox installs trying to get the libflashplayer.so plugin to work. Firefox would recognize it, and ‘about:plugins’ would show it, but nothing would display. I’m still not running, so until I do, no more game reviews. (If anyone has deep insight in to configuring Debian Linux and Firefox to run this correctly, I’d love to hear about it.)
The other chaotic element is we’re going to move all the MovableType based blogs off Homeport and onto Dwight’s machine, which is a managed system located at Serverbeach. This’ll give us greater bandwidth, better support, and less dependency on our home connectivity.
This will affect Planet Geek (Yours truly!), Emergent Chaos (Adam’s fine blog!), HandsOffMyBag.com (Voice your rights!), and Stonekeep.com (Conferences are cool!). We’re planning to do it in a way that will generate zero downtime, so even the people running the blogs shouldn’t notice the change, but there may be a bump or two along the way.
Fun right here in river city!

Who is that guy?

If you met these two people on the street, would you be able to tell them apart?
My sister did a great post about my dad on veterans day. As part of it, she dug up an old picture of him in his uniform (she says ‘Navy’, I thought he was in the coast guard on tender duty, but I could be wrong). I actually haven’t seen this picture before (or if I did, I forgot about it), and I was immediately struck with the “Hey! That’s me!”
A little Gimp cutting and pasting, and there you have it.
Yes, I think this confirms it. I’m proud to say that man is definately my father, and I’m his son.
By the way, the source of the right hand side of that picture is this picture from when I was about 20, circa 1983.

Review: Cubis


Game: Cubis
Language: Java
Category: Puzzle
Tested on: Debian Linux + Firefox
Rating: 4 out of 5
Offered by: Yahoo Games (link)

Cubis is not a new game. I ran across it a year or two ago while trying to find games for my mom’s Mac, noted it was a Java game, and decided to check it out later. Now, while collecting pointers to webgames that will run on Mac or Linux machines, I went back and tried it out again.

The gist of Cubis is sort of a mix of Tetris, Sokoban, and Bejeweled. You are trying to match up colored blocks, par usual, but you do so by sliding them across a playing field. Blocks can bump into other blocks, push them out of the way, break them, or slide under them. Navigation is done via the mouse, with helpful highlighting marks showing where the blocks will slide

This is a beautifully rendered game. Sounds, visuals, and gameplay are very very well done. It has all the bells and whistles you’d expect from a complete game, with pause, tutorials, puzzle levels you can select, and so on. I found myself working through the tutorial again just for a refresher course, and playing more of the initial puzzle levels without succumbing to confusion or frustration. The game is just plain fun!

This is an excellent example of how a game can be written to be multiplatform, emminently playable, and quite enjoyable. Bravo to to Yahoo for publishing, and FreshGames for skill in writing such a well designed game.

Review: Jewel Quest


Language: Java
Category: Puzzle
Tested on: Debian Linux + Firefox
Rating: 2 out of 5
Offered by: Yahoo Games (link)

The world is full of gem-matching games. Since Popcap did their screamingly successful Bejeweled game lo these many years ago, zillions of folks have written similar “make 3 more of these thingies in a row” games.

Jewel Quest is a very simple adaptation of this game. It is well done, pretty, and easy to play, and in gameplay is identical to Bejeweled, except for one small change. To win the game, you need to turn all the squares in the game to gold. The squares change everytime you match up 3 or more jewels and score points.

I admit to being vaguely intrigued by the game because it had this interesting variation, which makes the game strategy more complex. You have to think ahead to find out what combinations will bring the little blinky skulls down to get rid of that last skull.

Alas, this small change to the basic structure of the game is not enough to hold the players attention more than a few minutes, and couple this with the games complete lack of any options whatsoever (you play or you don’t. You can’t pause, turn off the sound, change the skill level, or anything) makes this a quicky “Cute, but what else ya got?” game.