Sometime after Space War and Asteroids, but before color was widespread in arcade games, there was a 2-person vector-graphics game in which you and your friend drove "tractors" around and grabbed little diamonds (or whatever) from a pile in the center of the screen and dragged them back to your base. You could shoot the other guy a la Space War, but I think there were also bad guys flying around to shoot a la Asteroids.

Name that Arcade Game!

Update: KSharkey rocks! He correctly identified Rip-Off -- with graphics like this, it's no wonder I was enthralled:

With the advent of color, there was this game involving a grid of city blocks. A dozen or so triangles started moving from one side (or all sides?) through the grid. I don't recall if you controlled the triangles or you controlled a car trying to get away from them, but over time the triangles would end up crashing into each other and being destroyed. And you either were trying to destroy them all before time ran out or you were trying to keep them alive until you achieved some goal.

Name that Arcade Game!

Update: WillC2 Rocks! Targ it is!

Well, guess I'm going to have to renew my XNA Creator's Club membership...

"I wrote an encryption algorithm with 612 bits of security." (I really like to imagine the 'notes' from the studio on this -- "I like how this establishes that Hansen is a very talented programmer, but let's bump it up 100 to show he was really good.")

"We need Linux servers..." (In the year 2000, he expected the FBI to run its infrastructure on OSS? No wonder this guy got nowhere!)

Other than that, the movie was okay, even if it had the cliched cop-out "Why did he do it? Well, in the end it doesn't matter. He did it. And that's what counts." That may be what counts in the real world, but in a story the 'why' is central to the job.

Put down your pencils...

Philip Greenspun

Governments at various levels have decided that they have to bail out people who spent more than the houses turned out to be worth and the financial companies who weren’t wise enough to notice that the U.S. is in fact not short of forests that can be cut down for more sprawl.  Where will the money come from?  You, me, and everyone else who did not participate in the bubble.

So… we missed buying real estate with a lot of leverage back in 2000 and missed the big ride up through 2004 or whenever.  Now we get to buy that same real estate at a much higher price and without any upside at all since we won’t actually own any of it.

Yeah, what he said.

Of course I can appreciate the misery of someone who's underwater on a $400K mortgage, but my sympathy goes away awfully quick when I hear them say "We just never imagined this!"

Didn't you notice that that whole "closing" business involved you signing, like, 100 pages of documents that were all variations on "YOU OWE LOTS OF MONEY"?

Giving and receiving multi-hundred-thousand dollar loans is adult stuff. I have friends who are not homeowners because they looked at the risks and decided not to take one of these nonsense loans. Now apparently my tax dollars are going to go to help out the imprudent people who caused my friends to be priced out of the market and, in so doing, my tax dollars will help prop up the prices and keep my friends locked out of the market. This is good for society how?

If the November elections are anything like the Democratic caucus I just attended, it will really be something. Turnout was 4-5x the 100 or so expected and the workers ran out of Democratic party registration forms. There was lots of visible support for Obama (native son, true) and none for Hillary.

If Obama gets the nomination and can somehow bring out the disenfranchised ... well, wouldn't that be something.

Based in the S3 Cloud (of course).

Every book has a unique Wiki based on ISBN.

You annotate via a Kindle-browser-friendly blogging engine.

You can view threads chronologically (normal blog view) or if they incorporate references to Kindle "positions," they can be threaded by location in the book.

Server-side stuff is easy enough; Kindle-friendly blogging editor/display reasonable; barrier to entry is difficulty getting from Kindle reading to Kindle browser (Home -> Experimental -> Web -> Bookmark). Also, positional permalink should be easy but will be hard ("Remember your position in the Kindle book" H->E->W->B -> Note Editor, add text, enter position in field).

Also, links ought to be two-way ("Read Now" ought to open that page in Kindle), but impossible with current firmware:

This photo was taken by Ron Dahlquist yesterday off Maui.

Personally, I got up early to go for a swim in a whale-rich bay this morning and the surf was up and I forgot to shave so my mask kept flooding. It sucked (for sufficiently small values of "sucked").

The seas are filled with humpbacks, both breeding and nursing. If you go in the water, you can hear them a little if you're on the surface, but if you can swim down 5' or so, it can be unbelievable.

Yesterday, we were at Kekaha Kai and a whale swam by about 50 yards away (did I see it underwater? No, I did not. Darn.). They were breaching and slapping tails all over.

Plus, we get surf, but it's very user-friendly (maybe 2-3'). So tall enough to ride, but small enough to swim through very safely. Kekaha Kai is a hot place to go boogie-boarding and I was actually swimming around inside the waves, watching people take off.

Which was cool until my camera flooded. It was just a cheap submersible disposable from Longs, but still, what a rip. Good thing that whale didn't swim by!

I used to live several miles from Harvard Square, which was (a) a destination in and of itself and (b) the last stop on the Red Line (back in the day). I used to live about 5 minutes from the Belmont Center route, which ran occasionally, and about 15 minutes from the Waverly Square route, which ran more frequently. However, if I went to the Belmont Center route and walked another 20 minutes, I could get to an intersection served by the Arlington buses as well as the Belmont Center bus. However, doing so involved abandoning the Belmont Center route for about 5 minutes, during which, of course, the bus for which I had been waiting might very well drive by... 

Aside from trying to figure out if you got more, less, or identically wet by running or walking through the rain, the question of how best to get to Harvard Square was a central preoccupation of my teenage years. Mathematicians have concluded that I should have waited for the bus.

This is a photo by Wayne Levin, an incredible photographer who stars in a new video for Hawaiian tourism

While I'm at it, this is one Wayne took of Tina, bluewater freediving near a fish-aggregating buoy:

I'm now reading Dan Simmons' The Terror on my Kindle. He's a very competent writer, and perhaps it's his very slow, very claustrophobic build-up (which he'd d*** well better pay off) that makes it so noticeable, but I have to say that I'm very aware of a certain "running on a treadmill" sensation when reading on the Kindle.

I turn pages, click click click, and the story progresses, but the only token of my progress is a bar at the bottom (the same length for all material, no matter the word count) that occasionally deigns to darken another pip. Like the animated plane on the in-flight display, this is almost worse than no indicator at all ("We still aren't past Nebraska?" Wait for it... wait for it ... tick it moves a single pixel...).

Especially with thrillers, the book-reading experience includes the sensation of the story moving from right-hand to left. It includes the canny appraisal of the upper-right corner, when the remaining pages become individualized -- "An hour more, then! I can miss the sleep!" The force of will to read every clause as the thumb holds down only the last 3 pages...

U. of Arizona researchers have built a robot that's guided by the brain of a moth. I assume the resulting rampage can only be stopped by cantilevering a lightbulb over the rim of the Grand Canyon.

While reading the latest ThinkGeek ad copy, I find:

[W]e're jealous of today's students. They can now go online to find out if any washers are open, pay for the laundry with their student ID, and then receive an e-mail alert when the washer and/or dryer is done.

Is this true? If so, that is the greatest freaking innovation since the relational database!

You've got friends visiting. They're in town for 9 days. One day involves driving 4 hours to go to a botanical garden which you've been to before and flowers aren't really your "thing" anyway. Do you do it, because, you know, they're your friends, you'll enjoy being with them, etc.? Or do you not do it because, you know, it's a day of travel and affirmatively nodding every time someone says "OMYGOD LOOK AT THOSE LEAVES!"

What do you do?

Just hypothetically, I mean.

Apple is apparently refusing to accept cash for iPhones. I have a feeling this policy will last less than 24 hours, as there's significant intersection among the set of people who would purchase iPhones and the set of people who will get into quite a snit about "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private."

Update: Neil Bartlett points to this Wikipedia article that says companies can refuse cash if the debt doesn't already exist at the time of payment (as would be the case when purchasing an iPhone). That's what I get for getting my legal advice from 30 Rock.

My nephew Jake went to a friend's bar mitzvah at the Radisson in Scranton, PA. Apparently, the cast of The Office is in town doing a little goodwill and presumably shooting some exteriors (although I don't know why they need to -- the scenes they've been using look totally like Northeastern Pennsylvania. (Sarcastic smiley tk) ). Jake spots Craig Robinson (Daryl the Warehouse Guy) tickling the ivories on the Radisson piano and snaps this EXCLUSIVE photo:

Via Sue Schmitz comes the sad word that Alex, the amazing Gray Parrot whose cognitive abilities were literally incredible, has died. Supposedly (there I go with the doubt), he had a vocabulary of 150 words, could count recognize quantities up to 6, could identify 50 objects, understood concepts such as "bigger" and "smaller," and knew better than to call virtual methods within constructors.

I'm not surprised that Wikipedia has criticisms, but even there it only actually quotes one direct criticism, which in context (in the referenced NY Times article) is pretty clearly simply skepticism, not a repudiation.

I know I should qualify this with "of course, it's terribly irresponsible. If someone had died, what kind of possible excuse..." etc.

But he didn't kill anyone, so I'll just point to the link:

http://www.wired.com/cars/coolwheels/magazine/15-11/ff_cannonballrun?currentPage=all

This must have been bitter-sweet. Sure, you want to get your rocket back, but talk about going out in a blaze of glory...

The only thing that's worse than ignoring a cause is doing something absolutely trivial and patting yourself on the back about it. Apparently if you blog about the environment today, you've done your part. I think there was a day last week when you were supposed to alter your CSS style sheets to decry the slaughter of monks in Burma.

You want to do something for the environment? Don't blog about how much you love pandas: reduce your waste stream. You want to support the troops? Don't put a sticker on your SUV: drive a high-mileage car.

Philosophy Bites

In Our Time

I would say that these have nothing to do with software development, but there was actually a great "Philosophy Bites" on vagueness that touched directly on fuzzy logic (which I think Williamson dismisses too quickly -- I'm not at all sure that the absurdity that he says "follows from fuzzy logic" does, in fact, follow according to the rules of fuzzy logic).

A year ago I said that HDTV didn't make sense for me. But with the arrival of Tivo HD, the dollar weakening and making dramatic price drops less likely, and the Red Sox making the playoffs, I decided to make the jump and bought a Philips 42".

The biggest problem is that once you see high-definition channels in your own home side-by-side with standard definition, the standard definition channels look horrible. We actually had the TV for a couple days before I got the HD cable package and we were like "OK, definitely more noticeable compression and blurriness on the bigger screen, but that's fine." And then I got the set-top box and saw how much better the pictures look.

Then, all the trouble started. I chose to stick with Oceanic Time-Warner Cable rather than satellites because to receive HD satellite programming in Hawaii, you have to place two 2.5m dishes in your yard! Our neighbors have them and they're huge and ugly -- a non-starter for us. Plus, my Tivo HD was winging its way island-ward. All I would do is order some CableCards and life would be good.

Well.

Oceanic TWC no longer provides CableCards for HD. You can get a CableCard for SD channels, but if you want HD, you have to use one of their set-top boxes or DVRs. I was a little stunned, but I figured "OK, Tivo had this figured out from the start. So I'll take the set-top box, hook it into Tivo, and use Tivo's magic IR blasters to control the set-top box."

Well.

Turns out that Tivo HD has no facility for inputting HD other than CableCards. (And, just to make it complicated, some people are saying that Oceanic TWC can not legally convert-to-incompatible-form the HD streams of the networks, which provide the majority of the HD content I'd be looking to Tivo (at least until Battlestar Galactica restarts).) (If you thought that forbidding just this kind of practice was the whole point of CableCards, join the crowd.)

So I left my Tivo HD in the box and set up my old Tivo to control the set-top box with IR blasters. "If I need to watch HD, I'll watch it live." Which ticked me off no end. Not only is watching live TV unthinkable after you've gotten used to a DVR, watching live sports in Hawai'i is difficult due to the 3 hour time shift.

Even worse, the picture quality on shows recorded via the set-top box is noticeably worse than shows from the previous week, when they were recorded straight off our previous non-digital cable service. I suspect this has to do with double-compression: we had been recording analog and applying Tivo's compression to it; now we have a digitally-compressed stream decoded by the set-top box, sent to the Tivo and recompressed, naturally resulting in many more artifacts and general degradation of quality.

So to summarize:

• HD picture quality is mind-blowing, but we only get about a dozen channels in HD (networks, TBS and TNT, Discovery, and National Geographic, and then two showcase/movie channels).
• If I want to time-shift HD, I have to use Oceanic's DVR, which if it's anything like their set-top box interface, will be hideous
• I can use Tivo, but only on SD channels.
• I can use Tivo HD, which will probably record SD channels better, but I'll still have to keep the set-top box near the TV in case I want to watch HD. Plus, Tivo HD has a monthly fee.
• I can use my old Tivo, in which case
• Picture quality via the set-top box is hideous, or
• I can go back to basic cable and never be able to see HD broadcasting
• Oh, and then when I went to watch a rented HD DVD movie last night, I ran afoul of what smells tremendously like some form of DRM .

I'm definitely going to live with the status quo through the playoffs (or at least through the Red Sox run). Manny Ramirez' homerun last night looked awesome in HD.

But after that, I have no idea what I'm going to do.