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Aug 17, 2008 — I have a long history with Infocom games (“text adventures” was what I called them as a kid, and “interactive fiction” is the new name). People still write these games, did you know that? There’s a big archive and an annual competition. I haven’t played any of the non-Infocom variety, though I think I ought to try one. I have copies of all the data files for all the original Infocom games from the 80s, and for years there has been an open-source program to load these files and let you play the games. It’s called Frotz. I’ve had a version of Frotz on all my computers for the last 12 years, including my various Palm PDAs. The only Infocom game I’ve ever finished in my life (making it one of like 5 games of any variety that I have ever finished) was “Enchanter”, which I played on the Palm. The latest incarnation of Frotz is for the iPhone, and so of course I downloaded it right away.

Jul 23, 2008 — The iPhone does not display any progress bar or countdown to let you know when the song you’re listening to will end. If you tap the screen, such a bar is temporarily displayed, but it isn’t there all the time. On the classic iPod, in iTunes, and in most other software-based music players, we’ve been getting used to having these indicators. I don’t like them because I think a song should set its own pace. I think it detracts from the listening experience to see there are 30 seconds left, because when I see that, I start thinking about how short a time that is, and will the rest of the song really fit because they have a whole other chorus to sing, etc.

Jul 20, 2008 — I’ve owned a Palm or Clie device (which used the Palm OS) for 8 years. I used them as my PIM and as an eBook reader. My very first blog post was about eBooks, back in 2001. But my needs for a calendar are slim (but not zero), and my need for contact information is confined to making phone calls, which my devices couldn’t do, or sending Christmas cards, when I’m at home. So eventually my latest Clie, the TH-55, sat on my bedside table as my bedtime eBook reader.

Jul 16, 2008 — I bought an iPhone 3G this past weekend (and waited 4 1/2 hours for the privilege). One of its functions is to play your music/movies like an iPod. You access this feature through a button labeled “iPod”. It has a picture of an old, non-iPhone iPod on it. This struck me as funny (haha funny). I think of the iPhone as subsuming the iPod in a device with extra functionality. But to explain to the user what this button does, it has a picture of an old iPod on it. And it’s not called “iTunes” or “Music and Movies”, or “Media” – it’s called “iPod”. So the iPod has become a piece of software, and the hardware has just become an icon.

Jul 10, 2008 — I grew up assuming that people make their own way in the world. I thought it was up to me to make every decision, plan every move, open every door, and find my own way in my life and career. Only much later did I learn that I was doing it all wrong. Not only is my way much harder, it’s also completely miserable to be so isolated. Here’s an example. The place where I started making these wrong decisions was in college. I attended my classes, which in some cases were way below my capabilities, and in other cases were way above. Either way, at the end of class, I packed up my things and walked back to my room. I dreamed of being a scientist, just like I had since I was 10 years old. But all I did was go to class, I never spoke with any professors, nor was I ever approached by any. My talents started to appear in my sophomore year, but I was still doing things in this retarded way. Then in my junior year the first consequence of my nihilistic lifestyle happened, and I didn’t even really notice it for what it was until years later. I switched my major from Astronomy to Astrophysics, then I added a concentration (minor) in Math, and then I made Math a second major. This all happened within a couple of months. Even these bureaucratic thrashings didn’t raise any red flags in any administrators or professors. No one cared. So, I shifted my focus to math, threw away the pile of physics grad school applications I had, and requested a bunch of math ones. I went to graduate school for a year at Stony Brook, then transferred back to Columbia for the rest of my Ph.D., because my then-girlfriend, now-wife, was continuing on from Columbia undergrad to grad school.

Jun 20, 2008 — Microsoft Excel was released in 1985 for the Mac and in 1987 for Windows. Today I was using the 2007 version. After 20 years of work by countless engineers, it cannot open two files with the same name, and the dialog is quite shameless about it. That’s a good word: “shameless.” Details are everything. Click to see the full size.

May 18, 2008 — As you know, I want to stream movies and music from my PC to my TV. I have an all-star lineup of tools: * PC running Vista with Windows Media Player 11 (WMP11), iTunes, and Zune software * Xbox 360 * PlayStation 3 * TiVo * Airport Express And a selection of Xvid, Divx, MPEG 4, MP3, and AAC files to stream. These are all extremely widely used formats, the most popular in their categories (the first three are video, the last two are audio). All the players I mentioned play these formats, at least after installing some popular codec packs.

Mar 16, 2008 — Alison was interviewed on one of our favorite podcasts, Jumping Monkeys. Here’s the episode page. She discusses home archives and how to approach saving your family’s stuff for the future. Cool!

Mar 16, 2008 — Robert X. Cringely, my favorite tech pundit, had an interesting aside in this week’s column (which is otherwise about Apple and Blu-Ray). He ran across a use of the term ‘bug’ to mean a glitch in a technical system in a magazine article from the 1930s. I found this fascinating, since we always assume “we” invented the term when computers came along. He closes with this:

Dec 30, 2007 — Over this holiday break, I played through all the tutorials in one of my newer DS games Panzer Tactics. It’s a very engrossing turn-based war game, very much along the lines of Advance Wars. Panzer Tactics clicked much more with me, though, and I grasped how to deploy my units intuitively pretty quickly. I think I can take this experience back to Advance Wars as well, and have more fun with it, too. But first, I’m ready to start the real campaigns in Panzer Tactics. Then maybe I’ll go back to Korsun Pocket, which is more complicated.

Dec 13, 2007 — Over Thanksgiving, I was complaining about people who crowd forward when boarding a plane, even if their row hasn’t been called, so that when it is called, they get on first. And if they can get away with boarding before their row is called, they’ll do that too. Someone close to me retorted, “competition made the human race what it is today.” I haven’t stopped thinking about that remark ever since. Can this person be right? I dearly, dearly hope not. Because all I can think of in reply is, “yes, it did make us what we are – especially the World Wars and the Holocaust.”

Nov 30, 2007 — I’m listening to The Return of the King: The Complete Recordings at work, and I’m at the point near the (first) end when Frodo and Sam have just destroyed the ring (with Gollum’s unwitting help) and they’re escaping the flowing lava by standing on a rock, feeling a relieved. With all the events of the story to back up the scene, I think it’s truly moving to see these two regular guys, who together destroyed a great and senseless evil power. I actually see it as a very tragic moment, when two of the world’s great forces are being presented to us via the heightened drama of this point in the story: senseless evil/destruction/chaos on the one hand, and the fortitude and perseverance and good of the common person on the other hand. You can ask all sorts of questions at this point, like if the common person is so good, where is all the evil coming from? Why must the most ordinary and good people sustain such injury and sacrifice to ward off the worst effects of the evil?

Nov 19, 2007 — Has Masterpiece Theater always just been some British TV show? Lately they’ve been showing The Amazing Mrs. Prithcard, which felt like an American TV show that happened to be British. Is it a masterpiece? Did they pick it because they felt it was a masterpiece? Maybe they should rename Masterpiece Theater to “Some British TV Show”.

Nov 14, 2007 — The Zune software turned out not to be so great at working with iTunes playlists. It’s not a dynamic synchronization, just a one-time thing. So after asking the Zune to read my iTunes playlists, it did so, but after I changed my playlists in iTunes, the Zune did not see the change. Also, the Zune does not attempt to pull in the smart playlists, just the static ones. Even just treating the smart playlists as regular ones and pulling in their current contents would have been great, but no.

Oct 8, 2007 — Microsoft includes a Windows-based desktop media player with their Zune portable media players, to manage your music and sync it with the Zune. It’s a lot like Windows Media Player, which I despise, but actually if you own an Xbox 360 there are two reasons to install the Zune software even if you don’t own a Zune:

Sep 27, 2007 — Recently I bought all the bits and pieces to build a new PC for home. My old one is a few years old now, and isn’t up for all the video transcoding I throw at it these days (mainly converting Xvid and Divx TV shows into MP4 for use on Xbox). I’m not a real hardware guru, but every few years I read enough to know what the state of the art is and roll up my sleeves for a few weeks. This time I had one small snafu which was that nothing powered on after I put it together. It turned out that the problem was the CPU was not completely seated. I had to twist it off of its heatsink, straighten a bent pin, and re-seat it. Wow, it worked!

Sep 27, 2007 — Ars Technica is a wonderful tech news site that’s fast becoming more and more like a real news source, with journalists and investigation and everything! Anyway, recently they reviewed Amazon’s new MP3 store. It sounded very positive because they sell straight MP3 files with no rights management, and so the files will play on my iPod.

Sep 27, 2007 — A while back I wanted to read The Lord of the Rings aloud with my wife. We’ve read lots of books together this way, and I’m a huge LOTR fan, so I really wanted to share it. The problem is it’s very long and many people consider lots of it boring. So, I took a clever (if I do say so myself) shortcut! I went through the books and dog-eared ranges of pages where the plot differed from the movies in a way I thought significant or noteworthy. For example, I read the entire chapter “The scouring of the shire” because this was left out of the movie. I highlighted the differences in Denethor’s character as much as I could, as well as Faramir’s. Both were substantially diminished in moral quality in the movies.

Apr 25, 2007 — Makers of software demonstrate their values in their products. Each decision they made along the way is visible to the user in one way or another. Most Windows users I talk to don’t even grasp this idea. They claim that Mac users are nigglers, and are too detail-obsessed. But I believe these issues can have an effect on everyone’s daily life, in a much bigger way than we generally acknowledge. This post presents a great example of this, namely OS updates.

Feb 4, 2007 — Within the last year, I’ve purchased both an Xbox 360 and an HDTV (a 37" Sharp Aquos LCD). I have a TiVo, a home network, a Powerbook, and a fast PC with lots of storage. Surely somewhere in all of that is a viable, clean, easy to use method of expanding what I can enjoy on my home entertainment center to include my iTunes music, any downloaded video files, saved TiVo videos, and personal photos.

Dec 4, 2006 — I’ve bought my first computer wargame, called Korsun Pocket, from Matrix Games. I wanted to share a short section from the manual, because it gets me pretty excited to play and so I thought it would be a good illustration to share:

Dec 1, 2006 — My interest in the World Wars, and my recent reading of The Guns of August (Tuchman), led me somehow to look into the wargaming universe. I learned that there is of course a sizable community of computer wargamers and developers, and I took a look around the landscape and selected a few to zero in on. Some of these are on my Christmas shelf, and some I pirated so I could read the manual and get a feel for how it goes. It turns out the more detailed ones are more appealing so far, such as the one pictured above, The Operational Art of War III.

Aug 10, 2006 — I recently heard of a book called The Jasons at the blog of a former colleague, Peter Woit. Since I spent the summer of 2004 doing classified math research for the government, I was very interested to hear of another such group. In a way, the Jasons are a sequel to the very successful Manhattan Project, and there is lots of overlap of personnel. The Jasons came into being in the aftermath of the Soviet launch of Sputnik, in 1960 to be exact.

Jul 26, 2006 — “Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”

Jun 28, 2006 — I came across this site while looking for card tables. It made me laugh out loud.