The Brad Hole

I haven't seen the new G5 towers since they officially started shipping, but I did get to play with some Dual 2.0GHz boxes at WWDC. Since the machines are shipping now, I suppose it's fair game for me to post my impressions.

First off, let me just say that I really don't like the new enclosure. It's metal, it's heavy and it's big. Those handles? Yeah, wear gloves if you're gonna lift this box - with the weight of the box and the sharper-than-G4-tower edges, they cut into your hands pretty fierce. I guess some people really like the new look of the G5 tower, but sadly, I am not a fan.

Speaking of fans, the G5s I played with are quieter than my DP 800 G4 -- most of the time. We ran Dungeon Siege on one, and it handled itself very well, comparable to equivalent PCs, IIRC. That was sweet to see. I also ran EverQuest on 2 different Macs. Here's where I should add a disclaimer: the OS we were using was a pre-release version of 10.2.7, so what I experienced may not be representative of the shipping boxes. When I ran EQ, it ran proportionally faster, which was nice. It also turned on what seemed like every single freakin' fan in the box. When those fans are all going, the G5 is significantly noisier than my QuickSilver to the point of being distracting. I'm not sure why EQ triggered this and DungeonSiege didn't. Maybe the shipping G5s don't have this problem. But if it happens that there are a number of apps (I'm thinking games here) that frequently trigger a Fan Blast, then I'm sure we'll be hearing about it from Mac users in all 4 corners of the globe soon.

Posted by bradman at 12:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Mac gamers are a sensitive bunch. They pretty much want every game on their Mac, right now. In itself, this isn't a bad goal, but it is pretty unrealistic, considering that the average Mac game sells maybe 2-10% of an equivalent PC title. This number isn't surprising, since that's about what the current Mac market share is compared to Windows.

It is through this frustration that petitions are born. Recently, two such petitions caught my eye: one that petitions Westlake to release Halo editing source code, and another to petition LucasArts to release the source code for Jedi Knight 1. Unfortunately, both of these are stillborn petitions; petitions for Mac software in general fail because usually they have a fundamental misunderstanding of the software development process. Usually with a petition, you are trying to convince someone that a market exists for which the recipient is completely ignorant. And usually, Mac game developers are painfully aware of the demand for feature parity.

Let's take the Halo petition first. These folks want Halo editing tools. That's certainly a reasonable request. They want Westlake to release the source code if we don't port it. That's where things fall apart. For one, it implies that Westlake has a) the editor source code, b) some sort of unenforceable contract to port the tools such that we can shrug off this responsibility, c) no interest whatsoever in doing the conversion and d) the decision-making power to release the source (or engine specs) to a third party (never mind that one with demonstrated ability to get the job done does not exist yet). First off, the decision to bring Halo editing tools to the Mac starts with the Mac publisher. If they want it, they're gonna pony up the dough for someone (like Westlake) to do the job. Second, commercial companies (particularly big ones) hate giving out the source code to their crown jewels. You'd be better off reverse-engineering the important details. Usually if you show even the remotest hints of competence, companies in a position to do so will try to help out with specs. Bungie did this with the third-party Marathon 1 tools, and LucasArts did this with the Dark Forces editing tools (of which I wrote one back in the day). Even ignoring all that, most editing tools are written in the most unportable, Win32-specific code you can possibly imagine. For the man-months involved, it typically would cost 2x as much just to do the editing tools as the game itself, unless the tools are somehow integrated into the game engine (a la Age of Empires 2 or Alpha Centauri). And having said all that, we pretty much almost always want to do the editor if it's even remotely possible. The only time in recent memory this has happened has been with Civ3, where I did a Mac editor in Cocoa, with some hairy MFC-to-Cocoa glue code to make the port remotely possible.

The Jedi Knight 1 petition is a completely different ballgame. On the surface, this passes my "petition check" - it's not immediately apparent that a market exists for JK1 on the Mac, given that the game is almost 6 years old. So ideally, a strong showing here could make a difference. Unfortunately for this particular petition, such an effort was made (by yours truly no less) right around the time I started on the Jedi Knight 2 port for Aspyr. At that time, the JK2 port wasn't announced publicly, but my hope was that we could get the Collectors Edition of JK2 on the Mac (which would mean DF1 and DF2:JK1). I offered to do the port for free, and managed to summon up a petition with 3000 some signatures, which was enough to get Aspyr's attention. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to get LucasArts' attention, so the effort failed. At this point, the best solution for this problem is to focus on just reverse-engineering the engine from scratch. For someone with a lot of time, this probably won't be too hard; the engine isn't particularly complex with regards to 3D. Scripting might be a whole different ballgame though.

I'm amused in particular at this petition because the person organizing it claims to have no programming skills, but would love to be a "project manager". Really, what that says to me is "Hi, I really love this game and would love to involve myself into the process even though I have nothing to add other than a near-pant-wetting level of enthusiasm." Hey, when it comes to Jedi Knight 1, the pant-wetting begins and ends right here. :)

Posted by bradman at 12:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As I was battling with XML in "Russell" last night, I found that CodeWarrior would totally lock up with the spinning beach ball at some random point while debugging my shiny new XML code. Obviously, having the debugger die is not a preferred way to debug your own program.

After an hour or so of frustration, I considered that perhaps this was another case where the CW debugger just wasn't up to snuff, and whipped up a small subset of code that I could test in ProjectBuilder, to see if I could find the source of my trouble. Sure enough, PB didn't die and found the bug for me. Here's the kicker: it's a totally blatant bug in some Apple sample code that I had done a massive cut-n-paste job on to get the XML code to work. Their sample code takes some CFString constants and disposes of them with CFRelease - an absolute no-no. This caused "Russell" to crash and CodeWarrior to light on fire, but ProjectBuilder was able to cope. And I pay $250 a year each year to renew my CodeWarrior license. Hey look at that, it's time to renew again.

Posted by bradman at 09:46 PM | Permalink

I've given up on precompiled headers in "Russell" for now. Something is seriously busted having to do with templates and constructors, and the link table seems all kinds of whacked out. I'll suffer with the slow build times for now.

I've made some progress getting the MSXML SDK working on top of the CFXML stuff. It now loads and parses XML, but nothing fancy beyond that. Hopefully in a day or two (barring an EQ flare-up) I should have it moving through more of the loading process and into some Hot Byte-Swapping AXXXtion! Giddyup.

Posted by bradman at 09:51 PM | Permalink

I'm about 30 minutes away from going clinically insane.

It all started innocently enough...Beth and I decided to change our cell phone plans to fit into our New World Order, and we wanted to find the best deal. What follows is a diary of my personal descent into Hell.

Right now, I have Sprint PCS, and a $30/300 anytime minute monthly plan from years ago. It has served me well, but has no provisions for nighttime/weekend minutes, free calls to other Sprint phones, etc. Beth has Cingular and a cell sporting a Texas area code. Cingular doesn't have a presence in Arizona, so trying to get customer service out of them just breaks their brains. ("You live in Arizona? You can't possibly be a Cingular customer!") With taxes, we both pay roughtly $40 each for cell service each month. On top of that, our house has a land-line, and our bill there averages around $50-70 a month, depending on long distance, with the usual voicemail, caller ID, and call waiting.

After some math, we found that there's some fat to be trimmed. We could, without losing much, totally strip down (or eliminate) our home land line. About the only thing we _really_ need it for is TiVo, but some experiments with TiVoNet could eliminate that dependency. The only x-factor is how many minutes we currently use a month on our land line. Ultimately, we decided to go for a plan with as many minutes as possible, with a strong tendency towards a plan with shared minutes between two phones (e.g. a "family plan"), and free calling between two phones on the same plan. We estimated our sweet spot to be roughly 800 minutes a month, for $80 including two phones.

With this in mind, we decided to do some comparison shopping. No sane person can be prepared for the sheer volume of information involved. For starters, any google search on "cellular" will lead you down a twisty maze of web sites, of which there must be hundreds if not thousands, all selling the same crap, all appearing equally shady. Some (most?) have links to other similarly shady business ventures, like "Top 100 Downloads", "Top 100 Searches" and other dregs of the web. If you used only the web as a gauge, you'd think the cell phone business was one small step above porn in legitimacy. There needs to be a serious thinning of the herd among cell phone proprietors on the web.

The only sane thing to do was to visit each company we were aware of and start comparing their plans. And let me tell you - this is no small task. Take NexTel for example: if you can distill their offerings down into something easy to explain, you're a better man than I am. At some point early on, it became apparent that if a plan seemed overly complicated, it likely had all kinds of hidden gotchas and problems. AT&T Wireless wasn't really price-competitive, and they do a piss-poor job of explaining how their plans work on their website (their family plan is surprisingly light on details). Sprint PCS is probably the least competitive in price of the ones we surveyed, so they're out too.

T-Mobile stood out as having a very clear and easily understood plan. They also seemed to offer the best bang for the buck. So we were ready to start picking out phones - not so hard, since T-Mobile has a craptacular selection, and we found that we could order the phones on Amazon (along with the plan) and have a phone such that we made money after rebates, getting paid up to $100 for a phone if we chose the right one after all the rebates. Definitely a better deal on Amazon than in T-Mobile's store or on their website.

That's when I started to search online for reviews and discovered the "catch" - T-Mobile has extremely limited coverage. They say they have no roaming charges, and that's true. You can't roam because if you leave a major metropolitan area, you have no service whatsoever. You're totally boned. Stuck on I-40 between Flagstaff and Albuquerque? Sucks to be you.

That's when our eyes turned to the next-best choice: Verizon. We could get a plan with similar minutes as T-Mobile, and with a stuck-in-the-sticks roaming fallback for $10 more a month. 800 minutes, $80 bucks a month, 2 phones. So far so good, and now time to choose the phones.

This is where the wheels fell off. Unlike T-Mobile, Verizon has a staggering amount of phones to choose from, but no partnership with Amazon, so no amazing rebate deals. However, dozens of these shady websites do sell Verizon phones with the amazing rebates. How to pick the right phone and online vendor to get the best deal and not get ripped off? Beats me. I'm exhausted from trying at this point. All these choices are a nightmare, and I'm goddamn tired of looking at brochures and websites with 20-something kids all smiling, with their mouths in blow-job poses.

The cellular industry strikes me as a seedy, soul-crushing business whose sole purpose is to shake the consumer down for every last penny by both nickel-and-diming you for crap features you'll never use and by offering choices that are so bewildering that your only reaction can be "please make it stop."

Posted by bradman at 01:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Earlier this week, Beth was having some workout-related motivational issues, so I agreed to do one of her DVDs with her. As you can imagine, she practically ran to put the DVD in and was itching to get started. That should have been my first sign that trouble was afoot.

We did this "Lotte Berk" method something-or-other. Basically, it's these 3 women in tights, 2 of whom are, oh, 20 years old while the lead instructor is a 45-year-old Sarah Jessica Parker look-alike. The whole workout is geared towards "strengthening, then stretching." It's clear from pretty much the first moment that this is entirely geared towards women. No Men Allowed. They do some crazy-ass stretches that pretty much involve some very vulnerable and compromising positions, like on my back, with my legs spread apart as wide as possible. A number of the exercises involve gyrating your hips, or air-humping or squatting with your legs spread wide open. Honestly, just about every exercise involves the most un-masculine pose you can imagine.

If I keep it up, I may end up with a real tight ass and some killer abs. Let me hear your body talk!

Posted by bradman at 03:14 AM | Permalink

Sony finally pushed a patch for EverQuest on Wednesday morning to fix the lockups with the craptastic Miles library when sound was enabled. In one of fate's more cruel turns, the new patch caused instant and repeatable crashes if sound was disabled. Unbelievably, no one caught this until after the patch was live. So later on Wednesday, I whipped up a patch for the patch, which was pushed on Friday. I'm told that all is well now. There's probably some limit to what I can say before I get myself into real hot water, so I'll stop talking about EQ now. :-)

"Russell" takes for-freaking-ever to compile, close to an hour to do a clean build on my 800MHz DP Mac with CodeWarrior. The main reason is that it doesn't use precompiled headers (on the PC or the Mac). I gave a shot at implementing precompiled headers for it on the Mac tonight, and I got the compile time down to a sprightly 20 minutes, but something is not quite right - it totally craps the bed inside some template code inside a constructor and doesn't even get to main(). I'm certain this is going to be a mess to sort out, but given that there's roughly a 40 minute compile time difference, it may be worth my while to spend a few more hours on it. Unfortunately, I'm to the point now where I won't be doing too many more clean compiles, so I may cut my losses and get back to implementing the XML code.

Posted by bradman at 02:52 AM | Permalink

The SoBig virus seems to be spreading unabated. I've got some pretty good e-mail rules set up to filter out actual instances of the virus and bounced e-mail from forged instances claiming to be from me to some false e-mail address. Unfortunately, I can't easily filter SoBig messages forged from me to some support e-mail address, and so I get a lot of auto-responder e-mail back to me. In fact, yesterday I was subscribed to some church music mailing list because of the virus, and I actually received several list messages (around 10) in the span of 30 minutes before I was able to successfully unsubscribe. Most e-mail lists have an opt-in e-mail to avoid having friends subscribe you as a prank, but this list apparently did not.

But the thing that blows my mind is this: I'm receiving at least 1.5 e-mail messages a minute related to SoBig, according to my filters. That's almost 90 an hour. How many fucking morons out there have not bothered to patch their installs of Windows since this flaw was fixed almost 2 years ago? I tend to agree with Microsoft and their recent initiative - users should be forced to install critical Windows updates. It's one thing if you're only hurting yourself by being behind, it's quite another if your apathy causes widespread problems.

Posted by bradman at 02:39 PM | Permalink

Beth and I recently got into a rhythm where she'll do the cooking one week and I'll do the cooking for the next week. As it happens, this week is a Beth Week, so last night she made some garlic-seasoned chicken and rice.

The thing about this is that Beth definitely has more experience in the kitchen than I do. I can boil water and attempt to follow a recipe, but in my single days, I was more likely to make a run to Wendy's or some other fast-food place. So in general, I don't really question Beth's prowess when she's behind the stove. It was with that same attitude last night that I didn't think to question why she put a paper towel over a small pot of rice while it was on one of our gas burners. That is also why I didn't question her when said paper towel caught on fire. Apparently the rice instructions called for a tight seal on the lid, and Beth had seen her mom use a paper towel between lid and pot to help form a seal. Of course, the difference here is that this strategy works well for large pots, not so well for small pots. Edit: I'm told that the actual problem here is that you're supposed to remove the paper towel before removing the pot, to avoid it catching on a hot burner.

Coincidentally, Beth was talking to her parents at the time of this incident. I should also point out that her dad is a volunteer firefighter. It's safe to say that they gave her a hard time. Immediately after the flames had been extinguished, Beth asked me if I was going to rush to update my blog. I'm pleased to say that I was able to resist for a little over 12 hours.

Of course, part of that resistance came in the form of karma. I woke up in the middle of the night with a very upset stomach. Well, that's not quite true. My stomach seemed fine, it was everything below it that was in distress. Luckily (or not), my intestinal antagonists were seeking the fastest and most direct route out, which by that time was decidedly not up. I share this bit of joy with you, dear reader, so that you may learn from my mistakes - never mock the Food Bringer.

Posted by bradman at 01:03 PM | Permalink

Last week, I finished off the rest of the Boca Burgers. At the end of it all, I have to say that I didn't really mind them. Sure, they'll never taste as good as the best hamburger, but they certainly taste as good as an average burger, and that's better than what I was expecting.

I've determined that I'm the world's wimpiest vegetarian. I love the taste of meat, but if I stop and think about the fact that I'm eating an animal, it does bother me. Left in the wild, I know I wouldn't have the stomach to kill an animal myself, and that includes fish. However, my fever for the flava is far too strong for me to give it up. Meat is just too damn tasty. After 4 trips to WWDC, I've definitely learned what it's like to be fed vegan meals on a daily basis, and let me tell you - it's not pretty. Vegan food is like a Nazi form of vegetarianism - no dairy products or really anything that comes from an animal. From a philosophical standpoint, I can't see the point. Slaughtering animals for meat is one thing, milking cows and eating eggs from chickens is another. Sure, you can argue that cows are kept in inhumane conditions while they are being milked, but here I use the "could I do it myself?" argument, and find that I could indeed sleep well at night after having milked cows and harvested eggs.

Having said all that, I can see weaning myself off meat in a bigger way than I thought possible. We were at the store over the weekend, and I decided to experiment further in the Fake Burger department. For variety, we picked up some Gardenburgers, Garlic-flavored Boca Burgers and some Boca Chick'n Patties. Peter had recommended some Franklin Farms burgers, but Albertson's didn't have any. They did have some Morningstar Farms stuff, which is apparently Kellogg's foray into the veggie space. Maybe some other time.

Of those we bought, so far I've tried the Gardenburger and the Garlic Boca Burger. The Gardenburger tasted a whole lot like the plain Boca Burger to me, in other words the flavor and texture of your average McDonald's hamburger. The Garlic Boca Burger was surprisingly tasty. The garlic flavor adds just enough flavor to distract you from the fact that this isn't a juicy real-meat burger. This may have come at a heavy price though. In the middle of cooking this burger today, "George" (our Foreman grill) stopped heating. The light was on, but the heat was not. I unplugged and re-plugged George and that seemed to fix it. I hope this was just a one-shot glitch, because a life without George is not worth living.

One other thing I've noticed about these soy burgers is they make me gassy and bloated in a big way. Oh yeah! In a weird way, that's not all that bad - it definitely cuts down my appetite later in the day and I definitely eat less overall. If I could drop 10-15 pounds, I'll be at the same weight I was when I was 21. That would be a nice side effect.

Posted by bradman at 02:08 AM | Permalink

Well, not really. But Microsoft's implementation MSXML 4.0 SDK is a PITA. "Russell" uses this, so I have to write a Mac implementation to keep things moving forward. It doesn't look too hard, but it does look time consuming. Luckily, Ken laid some groundwork for Age of Mythology, so I can build on that.

In other news, it looks like Sony is at long last going to push an EQ patch this week. I've got my fingers crossed that it goes well.

Posted by bradman at 03:26 PM | Permalink

Today's big web news is that another strain of the Sobig virus has leapt out into the wild. This virus preys on a flaw in Outlook for Win32, forges e-mail headers (including the sender) and mass-replicates itself to infected addresses on the host machine.

Luckily, most people have good virus protection, so when they get these infected e-mails, they're safe and don't spread it. Unluckily, most virus-checking e-mail apps helpfully send a reply back to the sender, telling them that they have sent an infected e-mail. Here's where the trouble starts. For the Sobig virus, the "from" field is forged (as is the case with most e-mail viruses). In practical terms, this means that I've been deluged with "helpful" e-mails telling me that I've sent out the Sobig virus today. Literally dozens upon dozens of emails have landed in my inbox today. (Insert rant about how "if everyone used Macs (or hell, a decent e-mail app), we wouldn't be in this mess" here.)

So here's a helpful tip for all those people writing e-mail virus checking apps - don't send out "you are infected" e-mails for viruses where the "from" field is known to be false. It just makes things worse.

Posted by bradman at 03:23 PM | Permalink

"Russell" reached the "Limping Along in the Debugger" stage today! This is the part of the project I like most, because at this point, it's basically a race to get it drawing stuff. That first moment when it puts recognizable stuff on the screen is one of the most rewarding of each project. Hopefully it won't take too much longer to get there!

Posted by bradman at 04:39 PM | Permalink

As I'd hoped, I've now moved "Russell" into the Land of 101 Linker Errors - that odd phase that starts when a project compiles, but fails to link. If you have 100 or more linker errors, CodeWarrior only shows you the first 100 plus a generic "failed to link" error for a total of 101.

When Glenda and I were working on the ill-fated Porsche project, we were lost in this Land of 101 Linker Errors for weeks, mainly because we didn't have the EA Canada library code and had to write a lot of stubs just to keep things moving forward. I think we figured out in the end that there were somewhere between 3000 and 4000 missing routines. I'll never forget the day we finally broke the 100 barrier and the end was finally in sight (although in hindsight, that takes on a different meaning now).

But "Russell" isn't nearly so bad. I've actually got it down to 88 linker errors, and a large chunk of those are things we don't need for the Mac port. With any luck, I'll move to the next phase - "Watching It Limp Along in the Debugger" by Monday. Booyah!

Posted by bradman at 12:01 PM | Permalink

Work has kept me hellishly busy the past week. EverQuest simply won't die, and I've been cranking out betas almost every other day. Maybe someday it'll actually get patched. ;) "Russell" (our Westlake codename) is actually the main focus at the moment. Development on it has just started, so I'm in the "Trying to get it to compile" phase. I've already got it from 2000+ compiler errors to a little over 400 in the past 2 days, so I'm hopeful (EQ permitting) that I'll have it to "Linker Error Hell" phase by tomorrow. That's when all the shortcuts I took to get it compiling come back and bite me. :) It's a pretty big project, a little over 500 source files of Concentrated Evil.

"Russell" is different from most of our ports in that it makes pretty heavy use of the Win32 Unicode calls. It looks like I'm going to have to do some beefing up in our porting library to get things to work properly. Russell also contains a ton of x86 assembly, but fate and fortune are with me, since 90% of the code is in libraries I've already ported twice. I think if I mentioned the ports, that would give Russell away, so I won't. :)

Posted by bradman at 08:29 AM | Permalink

Continuing today's hippie theme, I had a Boca Burger for lunch. It was surprisingly tasty - color me impressed.

Posted by bradman at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

While reading an article on Discover, I ran across this website. Now I've got a new desktop wallpaper. There are a lot of cool Earth pictures on that site. It really makes you aware of just how beautiful our planet is.

Posted by bradman at 02:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I happened to be searching the logs for the webserver today, and I noticed that 2 different people had recently searched my blog for "civ" and "play the world" respectively. Not wanting to disappoint, I feel I should include them in a blog entry. So here goes: Play the World! Heck, I'll name-drop Civ3: Conquests too!

There, now those searches will return a hit. :)

Posted by bradman at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Apparently, Scottish researchers have found a way to render radioactive waste from nuclear fission inert in a matter of hours, using laser-beam emissions. "w00t!" as the kids say nowadays.

In related news, after eating 6 tacos at Del Taco the other day, I told Beth that I now had a Weapon of Ass Destruction!

...

Well, I thought it was funny.

Posted by bradman at 05:45 PM | Permalink

I was chatting online with Corey earlier today and he mentioned that he was in a Starbuck's cafe, near a bookstore called "Chapters". You see, Corey is Canadian.

One of the things that always strikes me about Canada is that it's like the US, only slightly different in ways that make it seem more like an alternate-reality version of the US. A perfect example is their use of the metric system. While it's easy to realize that everything is metric there, it's still jarring to see the road signs. That feeling of odd was reinforced today when Corey mentioned Chapters. I immediately got the sense that in this Bizarro World, all Barnes and Nobles/Borders bookstores ceased to exist and were replaced with Chapters. It's quite a humbling sensation.

Canadians also have alternate-reality candies, like Smarties. For whatever reason, these aren't available in the US, even though the Nestle corporation sees fit to ship most of their stuff here. I think this is mainly to reinforce the fact that Canada is, in fact, "different."

It makes me wonder about all the bizarro things in Canada of which I'm unaware. Is Burger King called something different, like Burger Prince? Do they have different flavors of Pepsi that are beyond my ken? My mind boggles at the possibilities.

Posted by bradman at 03:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

On our way to dinner earlier this evening, I had a "driving incident."

We were motoring down Ray (a 6 lane divided road) when the light in front of us turned yellow. As it happens, there as a Nissan Sentra in front of us who came to a halt at the yellow light, and a very short while later, I came to a screeching halt on his bumper. As luck would have it, there was literally no damage - not even a visible sign of dirt being smudged on either car, so he waved it off and we went on our way. I would guess that we impacted him at perhaps 5mph - enough to make a noise and to feel an impact, but not enough to do anything more.

In hindsight, this isn't totally unexpected - I've known for some time now that the brakes in the Mustang are pretty close to shot. It's time to get those looked at before my luck takes a turn for the worse. I'm also pleasantly surprised that the guy we hit waved this off. I was fully expecting a full insurance rundown and whiplash, even though this was a non-event. After all, we live in a world that loves to blame and sue rather than forgive and forget. Perhaps there's hope for us as a society after all.

Posted by bradman at 03:11 AM | Permalink

When Beth and I married, our two cats became step-brothers to each other, as these things go. Ian was my cat before the marriage, and Bagheera was Beth's. And now Ian is trying to kill us.

He's an attention slut, so he demands to be at your feet - lying down - whenever there's action. This is especially dangerous in the kitchen, where he will sneak up behind you and plant himself, waiting for you to turn around and trip over him with a pot of hot water or a heavy casserole dish. Even though he is missing one fang in front, he still bites pretty damn hard - much harder than Bagheera, who has a full set of teeth. He also likes to pee in clothing piles that rest on the floor. I've known about this little trick from way back, but Beth learned the lesson the hard way this weekend while doing laundry. (Technically, we don't know for sure that it was Ian, but Bagheera tends to spray back and stain walls, whereas Ian sprays down.)

I'm not sure what he hopes to gain from this - he's not listed as a beneficiary in our life insurance policies. The only human food he has shown an interest in is french fries, so causing a kitchen spill seems an unlikely goal as well. I think it's part of his alpha-male domination over Bagheera. If he offs one of us, it'll be a way to further reinforce to Bagheera that, yes, Ian is the Master of the House. Perhaps he senses that I'm not really a cat person.

I always catch him in my office chair when I get up, so I would not be surprised to find him reading my blog in the future. Well, I'm on to you buddy.

Posted by bradman at 08:28 AM | Permalink

One of my pet peeves with society in general is the over-marketing and shoveling of crap down my throat that happens on a daily basis. Take for example this fine Nestle Crunch bar that I bought in one of those Costco mega-packs. It contains something called "Rocket Cash" which prompts you to visit their website, enter your secret code and try to win a prize. Take a moment to visit the Nestle Crunch website right now.

What's the first thing you see? Shaq, and an assload of Flash. And this is a veritable Metric Assload. This website contains all kinds of crap. Sounds, interactive voting for hot-button topics like "car-mel vs. car-a-mel", you name it. God help you if you are actually interested in Nestle Crunch bars. All this makes me wonder - how much money is Nestle spending on this website and all this crap? They're probably keeping a small industry of people busy and paid to create what is essentially CRAP. Totally useless CRAP. CRAP whose appeal ends when you turn 15 years old. On some level, it bothers me that money is being spent on fairly useless promotion like this. It's not necessary to spend a ton of money on Flash and Shaq to sell candy bars. Kids are fairly impressionable, but give them some credit.

Soft drink companies are another big offender. Coke and Pepsi products are literally assaulting your eyes at all hours of the day. I am driven to actively not buy Mountain Dew after being subjected to 2 minute commercials before movies. It doesn't help that these commercials attempt to be funny, but have literally no edge and come off as committee-written "comedy" that can only solicit a smile if you're drunk and will laugh at anything.

I guess what it boils down to is that I like a lot of substance in my advertising. I hate fluff. If you're going to sell me a drink or a burger, do me the favor of at least telling me why, rather than throwing a celebrity and a bunch of non-product related crap my way. And for god's sake, have some quality control with your marketing and give your customers some credit for being intelligent.

Posted by bradman at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So tonight as I'm surfing the web, I got caught up in a wave of nostalgia for the Apple II. I found several useful websites: a2central.com apparently is the cream of the crop.

So as I'm surfing, I'm naturally drawn towards sites that sell used/new Apple II stuff. Now, I'm no HTML genius, and I don't claim to be the authority on web-page design, but I have to ask: what makes people with amateur web sites want to use colors that make me want to claw my eyes out?

Here are two examples: a price list for Apple II stuff from some guy in San Antonio, and another vintage computer store website. Cyan and yellow backgrounds are not by any stretch easy on the eyes. Maybe it's just me. And speaking of bad design, check out the "buttons" on this page. Trying to read these things is almost like a game. Maybe they animate slower if you're using an Apple II web browser. :)

So here's a tip to all the mom-n-pop web-based stores: if you're gonna sell stuff online, make it so your customers can actually read your site without being subjected to sights that could cause seizures.

Posted by bradman at 04:39 AM | Permalink

So as I wrap up my nightly web-surfing, I'm reminded of a few things I ran across earlier this week.

The first is the uDevGames 2003 contest, which starts on Monday. I scrounged up 3 spare games that I've got and donated them as prizes on behalf of Westlake. I'm hoping a few of the other Westlake guys might chip in a couple too. This is the third year of the contest, and last year they had some pretty good entrants. I expect the quality of this year's submissions to be better still.

I am a big fan of the Ultima series, so I was happy to find that xu4, the Ultima 4 reverse-engineered remake, was updated this week to version 0.7. It's looking quite good now. There's also the beginnings of a similar project for Ultima 6 - the first game in the series I didn't play (because it didn't come out for the Apple II or Mac) - Nuvie. I'll be watching this one very closely. The current standard-bearer for open-source Ultima remakes is Exult, which plays Ultima 7 and its expansion pack. However, I've held off playing that until I've played Ultima 6. I'm just anal that way. :)

Posted by bradman at 03:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've just finished up my first pass at rewriting the sound engine of a game that recently shipped. What a massive pain in the ass.

We had relied on a third-party sound library which shall remain nameless, but said library is incredibly buggy under OSX, and this particular game seems to bring out the worst in it. Back at WWDC during the "game programmers get-together", I was surprised (well, not so much) to find out that pretty much everyone who had used this third-party library had run into almost the same problems. The general consensus seems to be to avoid it like the plague. This advice game too late for this particular game, but not so late that we can't still do something about it. Hopefully we'll be able to push a patch soon for said game, because we know the current users of said game are getting hit by this bug pretty frequently.

I also found out yesterday from Suellen that I've joined the Westlake Royalty. That's right, I've received my very first royalty check for a game! I probably can't say for which game, but I couldn't be happier about this news or the game that it's associated with. This particular title was a labor of unconditional love for me, and to get royalties on it is just icing on an already tasty cake. :)

Posted by bradman at 02:18 AM | Permalink

Best Buy has introduced a new program called the "Reward Zone." Basically, you pay $10 a year to join, and for every $125 you spend at Best Buy, you get a $5 coupon. So really, you break even if you spend $250 a year at Best Buy. And you save a whopping $10 if you manage to spend $500 a year at Best Buy. Even though I buy a lot of stuff that Best Buy sells, I usually split my business between them and Fry's. And given that the "rewards" come at $125 intervals, I'm frankly not interested in something like this.

A similar program exists at Barnes & Noble - you pay $25 a year and get 10% off (5% online) each purchase. Like the Best Buy program, you break even at $250 if you do all your shopping in-store rather than online. As it happens, we've got one of these cards, and we've actually managed to pass the break-even point. I'm not entirely convinced that it's worth it to renew for next year, but at least we don't have to wait for $125 increments to get any benefit from it - it's all gravy until our card lapses.

Posted by bradman at 02:00 AM | Permalink