Plaidophile

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When I got the mover's estimate the other day, I asked about the transport of my wine. The mover said that unless I had a heck of a lot, he'd move it, but he wouldn't guarantee that it'd be any good afterwards, due to the lack of climate control on the trucks and in storage. So I will probably want to just take it in my car, which is starting to get rather a lot of "I'll just take it in my car" items clamoring for space.

Anyway, I decided to just go through my inventory to see what I have, since some of it is probably coming due to being drunk anyway.

Today my realtor (Kerri) had an open house at my condo. She said there was a lot of interest in my unit. Also when I got home from my "the owner shouldn't be present" exile one couple was still there, and the guy was another musician and he asked me how noise was. Fortunately I was there to fill in a detail which Kerri couldn't: basically no noise ever gets in, except through the front door (if someone's in the hallway) or through the windows (if they're open).

Meanwhile, Kerri also met a lot of my neighbors and can now espouse at length about how awesome everyone in the building is.

I dreamt I was living in a piece of "edutainment" software. My job was to help the two young goldfish (who were living in a deep river) keep their ecosystem in balance. Apparently they liked burying the Chaos Emeralds (which they stole from Sonic the Hedgehog) under giant planks of plywood which they couldn't lift and so I had to solve their dumb puzzles to know where to position this specialized plywood-sheet-lifter. Also I lost the clues for how to unlock the padlocks they put on the last plank, but fortunately the locks were cheap and/or there was a bug in the game so I could force them open by just putting the key into the second hole first.

Apparently, when goldfish get all seven Chaos Emeralds, they are rewarded with electric guitars. Their electric guitars are tiny and hard to play and have built-in cheap reverbs which you can't turn off.

I don't know why there's suddenly a critical mass of cilantro haters on the Internet, but I thought I should point out that just because it tastes like soap to you doesn't mean that cilantro sucks. You suck. To most people, cilantro tastes like a cross between parsley and mint. It is quite nice.

I still haven't done anything to get my condo ready for its MLS photo shoot or open house. It's amazing how drained I feel after doing nothing at work all day. The unmerciful crushing force of pending doom is something to be reckoned with, I suppose.

I decided for some reason (which seemed like a good reason at the time though I can't remember it now) to change my main site's permalinks from category/sub_category/basename.php to category/subcategory/basename/. It's what all the cool kids are doing. Of course since I do some pretty wonky stuff behind the scenes some of the relative links and stylesheet references and so on may be messed up... I think I caught everything but if something looks wonky and it didn't look wonky before, let me know.

The other thing I found is that Dreamhost has some wonky PHP-injection-detection stuff which makes POSTs fail if it sees various unsafe function names inside a <?php> block. Although this is generally a good idea, it did make it rather difficult to add some logging code to the permalink redirect script (so I can track where old-style permalinks are being visited from, and fixed if possible).

Oh, and sorry for spamming peoples' RSS readers yet again.

• The PS3 really likes being on a lot. It'd be nice if you could turn it off (well, to a power-saving mode, obviously) and have it still finish up background downloading
• It's way too easy to accidentally turn on while moving the box, and then you can't turn it off until it finishes booting
• It'd be nice if you could turn the console off from the controller (like on the Wii) Oh, okay, you just hold down the PS button for a few seconds and it prompts you.
• It'd be nice if the controller were to turn off automatically after a period of inactivity (like on the Wii)
• In PS2 mode it always tells the game that you have a 16:9 screen, which would be fine, except the few games on the PS2 which pay attention to that do the totally wrong thing; for example, Beyond Good & Evil letterboxes it on a 4:3 frame. This wouldn't be so bad except that in upconvert mode this means I always have a border around it (just like on a mis-encoded DVD), and while I can get my full screen used by just turning off upconverting, then it looks even worse than on a real PS2
• Also, Beyond Good & Evil seems to have some framerate and shader problems, and occasional timing weirdnesses. (Yes, on the 1.90 firmware.)
• Okay, you know how the Wii's games are mostly the same gesture-based minigames with different skins? The PS3's downloadable games are mostly just Robotron with occasional tilt controls.

I am not a hardcore gamer. I also don't play many console FPSes, because the controls tend to suck. FPS controls don't have to suck; look at Metroid Prime, for example. Metroid Prime has great controls on a controller which essentially only has six buttons and one analog stick, as far as the game is concerned. It also ramps up in difficulty as you progress and familiarize yourself with those controls.

Even if you insist on having controls which are basically a direct port of WASD and a mouse to two analog sticks, please don't make the tutorial impossibly difficult. Good games ramp you up in difficulty, especially when the controls are a bit tricky. Tutorial segments in particular should be fairly easy to get through, since the whole point to them is to learn the controls. Additionally, tutorial segments more than any other should be free of sequence bugs (like being able to fall off an elevator which you can't recall), and if you're going to make deaths restart at the most recent checkpoint, it sure would be nice if there were checkpoints other than the very beginning of the tutorial.

While you're at it, if you're going to put such a focus on dialog and close shots on characters' faces while they're talking, you should try to make their mouths move at least remotely convincingly. It would also be nice if the characters had motions other than "talk while gesticulating wildly" and "die." (For bonus points, learn to write dialog which is intense without relying on every other word being a profanity. Yes, I realize they're mobsters, but I'm not exactly Miss Manners but pretty much every line in the intro made me blush. Consider the concept of dynamic range.)

I was really looking forward to your game but now I'm thinking I wasted $60.

Love,
fluffy

Since I'm moving to San Francisco in about a month I need to cull some possessions, so for anyone in Seattle who's interested:

I now have a PS3. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My PSN username is 'plaidfluff' (same as on AIM). Add me as a friend. Or don't. Whatever.

So, I got sick of this new Linksys constantly dropping my connections and its general sucktitude, and the current state of consumer routers is pretty depressing. I did notice that OSX supports one-armed routing, however (where you basically pull stupid VLAN tricks to have both the public and private networks routed on a single piece of cable).

So, I set up some one-armed routing, with my Mini acting as the router on Ethernet, with it on a hub connected to the DSL modem, along with my Airport Express access point and a few other devices. The ARP table looks clean on both my Mini and my G5 (I don't see any evidence of ARP entries for things which shouldn't be visible to other things, even after doing a broadcast ping), so I'm assuming that my DSL modem is smart enough to not forward packets to anything other than the upstream gateway (which it acts as an ARP proxy for, I think — it's a bridge rather than a PPPoE modem).

Am I setting myself up for disaster doing this?

While I was in San Francisco I didn't get around to doing most of the stuff I thought I'd do there, but I did at least do the things I went there for and hung out with various friends there.

Also I'm moving down there in a month, as I got a rather cool job.

So now I have so much stuff to do in the next month, like selling my condo, finding another home in the area (probably Oakland), getting moved, quitting my current job... argh.

If anyone's interested in buying my place (a nice, spacious 2bed/1bath condo in a nice part of Ballard, in a really awesome location if you work on the west side), let me know and I'll put you in touch with my realtor.

So now the touchpad on my laptop (which I never got around to upgrading the hard drive of) has stopped working well (basically it acts as if there's always a finger pressing it right in the middle, so I can't really move the cursor effectively). So I guess I should consider a new laptop after all.

I think the lowest-end MacBook is probably sufficient. I wish Apple had an ultraportable subnotebook though.

I guess I should take advantage of my EPP discount while I still can. (Not that the EPP discount is any more compelling than just, say, ordering from SmallDog though.)

As far as that 120GB hard drive goes, I guess I'll be upgrading my Apple TV!

1:18 AM My cunning plan worked. Writing a weblog entry threatening wendigo with replacement caused the problem to clear up (after a reboot). Mwahaha.

So, my sister and brother-in-law have an HP all-in-one printer/scanner. I needed to print out a single document. OSX didn't recognize the printer. So I went to download the driver.

It is 118 MB.

MEGABYTES.

Just when Standoff was getting really good, Fox goes and cancels it.

House has gotten progressively worse and more formulaic and less-credible in terms of plots and medicine and so on, while Standoff has been getting better and better, and the last several episodes have had plot twists which were actually surprising and credible. And I actually care about the characters and enjoy their interactions with each other. And Fox is canceling it.

They really need to get their priorities straight. They keep getting rid of their good shows, putting more and more mass behind their crappy shows, and replacing fiction with retarded "reality" and game shows.

At least Bones is still alive and well though, right? (Though that show's also gotten pretty bad ever since they decided to turn it into a romantic drama with occasional science, ugh.)

Once again it's time to obsess over cellphone service.

Not to be confused with Pounced, Pownce is yet another social networking site which I happen to have a bunch of invites for. If anyone's interested.

You know the drill: point me to something sufficiently cool that I haven't seen before, and I'll give you an invite. Unless I know you in which case I'll just give you one right off.

The reason I liked Linksys so much was that the WRT54G used Linux and didn't use timeout-based NAT crap. I knew that after v5 they switched to vxWorks (because obviously switching from something that's free to something that's expensive is a good idea, right?), but vxWorks also supports stateful NAT — but the WRT54G doesn't use it. What shit.

I wonder if my old Verizon DSL modem + router (which ran vxWorks and did use stateful NAT) supports bridging... I seem to recall that it did. Though it doesn't have wireless and so I'd need to get another access point and blah blah blah. And if I'm going to get an access point I'd might as well just get an Airport Extreme and have 802.11n for the future (even though none of my systems have any way of adding n support for the time being) or something.

Thank you Linksys for taking something good and making it retarded for no particularly good reason.

The DD-WRT folks like the new Buffalo routers, particularly the WHR-G125 (which they say is even better than the original WRT54G in terms of range and power). Maybe I'll return this shitty WRT54Gv8 and get one of those.

I will be in San Francisco from July 15 - 21. Most of the time I will not be in the presence of anyone I know and can hang out with. I don't like going somewhere just to hang out in stores or museums or libraries or whatever, and I've already been to Alcatraz and seen Lombard street, so other than that, what is there to do that I couldn't just do at home?

Monday afternoon and all day either Tuesday or Wednesday are spoken for, and I guess afternoons/evenings I can hang out with the various people there that I know, but that can easily get old.

Also I don't think I'll be renting a car, since parking will be a problem where I'm staying (my sister's place, in the Haight-Ashbury area), so whatever I do will probably need to be in walking distance of mass transit. (Though I might just sign up for Flexcar anyway.)

I thought I was being cutting-edge and standards-helping by making all my new stuff XHTML instead of HTML4, but it turns out I was only contributing to the mess that is Internet. So I'm making all my stuff HTML4 instead.

Generally this means fixing my DOCTYPEs and removing all />s from my various pages, which is more or less automatic but something might have gotten messed up, so if you see something wrong, please let me know. Also I may have been overzealous and actually messed up a couple of truly XML things (like RSS feeds).

So, I noticed that I was having network problems, and that my PowerMac wasn't noticing the Powerline Ethernet anymore. After a bit of experimentation I figured out that one of the Powerline nodes (D-Link DHP-300, which I bought in February) died. I opened it up and obviously what happened was one of the capacitors overheated and blew, and it probably took lots of other stuff out with it.

Since I'm no longer hosting websites from my home connection I figured it was as good a time as any to finally install one of the third-party firmwares on my Linksys WRT54G. So I investigated and figured out which one was best, and I followed the installation instructions to the letter — but the firmware update tool just said "Update are failed" (sic). But it continued to work — sort of. Another post on a forum led me to find that the update process doesn't have enough free space to store the new image to flip to, and so you have to actually install an image which is smaller than 3.4MB. So I found a minimal distribution (intended specifically as a migration path to a larger firmware), and tried installing it, and got the same "Update are failed" message.

Okay, so there's been a lot of work into single-sign-on systems, such as Passport, TypeKey, OpenID, etc., and those are all well and good, but I just thought of a really simple way to do single-sign-on which would really lower the bar to such systems working: message-based authentication.

Pretty much every Internet user has email or AIM, and Jabber is getting a lot of uptake. So, how about this for a sign-on mechanism (in addition to OpenID, TypeKey, etc.): when you want to log in, you just tell the system some way of contacting you (and this becomes your account ID), and it sends a message to that contact (via email, Jabber, AIM, etc.) with a URL which completes the login via randomly-generated session ID.

I dreamt that I was poking around on the Dreamhost control panel and found a little tutorial about how to make a metallic bezel for tables on your webpage. They had a little table-design applet and an accompanying video to explain the process — after designing the table, which involved manually coming up with a connectivity graph, they would use this graph to set up an electroplating rig (by hand) and lovingly plate the table bezel by hand and then take a digital photograph for you to use.

In theory, the best way to IM me is via Jabber at fluffy[at]beesbuzz[dot]biz, although in practice AIM is still a bit nicer (in that it doesn't bind a conversation to a single client so I don't lose out when someone's still messaging me and I'm using a different computer). It's actually been working since DNS finished propagating but I forgot to post an update.

My bike got stolen, right out of my garage.

I'm surprised it took this long, though. I'm pretty upset that the HOA still hasn't gotten around to figuring out a way of making it so we can keep our bikes secure. Every few months we'll have a little security issue and then there's a lot of "OMG we need to get security cameras and better lighting and a place to lock up bicycles!!!" and other such rattle and hum and then within a month, everyone's forgotten about this.

Stupid thing is that my neighbors all have bikes, many of which are much nicer than mine, but theirs didn't get stolen.