Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Thursday Mar 23, 2006

Filed under: Personal 25 comments

The Rampant Coyote has this bit on his first computer, the Sinclair ZX80.

I was 8 years old when this machine hit the market. At the time I knew – on some primal level – that I needed to get my hands on a programmable personal computer. However, I had trouble explaining to the adults around me why I wanted it. I already had an Atari 2600, after all. Doesn’t that play the games you want? What I wanted was a computer that I could program. I wanted a machine that I could understand and eventually bend to my will, but I couldn’t get anyone to buy me such a thing.

I know it sounds insane; what sort of parent wouldn’t buy a computer for their kid? But you have to remember, this is 1979 we’re talking about here, and the utility of home computers wasn’t a universally recognized truth. For a kid living in a home with a blue-collar father and a mother who worked in an environment where “computer” meant big-iron mainframes operated by gnomes, a computer was a strange thing for me to ask for. It was like a kid asking for his own cement mixer or printing press. What on earth would I use that for? Computers were expensive, and a sensible adult would fear that it would just be treated like a puppy: obsessed over for a week and ignored thereafter.

I remember one Christmas my best friend got a TI-99/4A. I was sick with jealousy. From that point I couldn’t even remember what presents I’d gotten. He couldn’t possibly want such as thing as badly as I did. I felt the way Homer Hickum might have if he’d gotten a BB gun and his friend had gotten a home rocket-building kit. It seemed like a grave injustice. For him it was just an interesting toy, and for me this was a gift of infinite possibilities.

When I found my friend with his new computer, he was doing the unthinkable: He was typing in a program from a magazine. Someone else’s program?!? Why aren’t you learning how to write your own? This was like finding Merlin’s Spellbook and using it to prop up a crooked table leg. The secrets of the universe are in there, man! How can you be content typing in all these words and symbols without knowing what they mean? They demand understanding! Does their mystery not taunt you? At the time, I thought I was the only person who thought of computers this way. It would be many years before I met anyone else like myself.

(I had an uncle that was wired this way as well, but he was born about 30 years too soon. He spent his teens and twenties messing around with model trains and ham radio, which is what computer geeks did before computers were available. He went on to work on the Apollo program, which is nice enough, but doesn’t seem to make up for not having computers available for half his life.)

Eventually I stopped being such a crybaby and got a paper route. I saved my money for a few months until I had enough scratch to buy a Tandy MC-10:

Most people have a fondness for their first computer. You can still find fans of the TI-99/4A, the Commodore 64, the Amiga, and the Atari 800. It was not so for the MC10 and I. While I did grow attached to a few of the above systems, I never really liked the Tandy computers. This dislike grew into a resentment that I extend onto all of Radio Shack today.

As long as they were in the computer business (which lasted until sometime in the early 90’s) Tandy computers were dull and akward. As a programming platform they were difficult. Their hardware was bulky, ugly, and gave off the stench of obsolescence right out of the box. Imagine the proprietary nature of Apple combined with the asthetics-assulting early IBM clone hardware, and imbued with the clumsyness of Windows 3.1. Now regress that unholy union back to the days of sub-megahert CPU speeds and computers with 4k of memory. It wasn’t pretty. I wish there was a familiar object in the above photo to provide a sense of scale. The chiclet keyboard was horrible. Even for my 13-year-old hands, it felt a little crowded. I can’t imagine a grown man making use of it.

In the late 80’s / early 90’s, Tandy had their own line of quasi-IBM clones. They seemed to use similar architecture, but the machines were just a little different. Aside from costing more, they also required certain Tandy-specific parts. At the time I told people they had “compatiblity problems”, as if the Tandy engineers had trouble duplicating the mysterious IBM clone architecture. Looking back I can see the system for what it was: A very cynical attempt to take the large IBM clone market and make their own proprietary offshoot. Again, it was Apple-esque proprietary hardware and IBM / Microsoft uglyness, all for a higher price! Being known as “the computer guy” among my friends meant that I was the one people called when their computer went sideways. I always dreaded when a Tandy user called for help, because there wasn’t much I could do but shrug and blame Tandy. This was akward because it was also indirectly pointing the finger of blame back at the person asking for help, for buying such a machine in the first place.

During my high school years it became clear to the adults around me that this computer thing wasn’t just a phase I was going through, and that it was just the sort of thing that might make me useful in my adult life. I enjoyed quite a bit of support from parents and a couple of teachers during my high school years. For graduation, the uncle I mentioned earlier sold me his old machine, which was my first IBM clone. It was a 4mhz machine, but with the math co-processor he’d added it ran at at a supersonic 7mhz! It had 256k of memory, or 1/4000^th of the memory of the machine I’m using now. However, it had a C compiler, which is what allowed me to escape COBOL and BASIC and learn a real programming language. From there, I was off and running.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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RGB Color Cube

By Shamus Posted Thursday Mar 23, 2006

Filed under: Pictures 3 comments

 Not for the timidPrevious Post

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RGB Color Cube

My own Rubik’s cube. Somewhat worn but still loveable.

While we’re here, let’s dispell some myths…

The solution isn’t just a single sequence of moves that leads to the pieces falling into place by magic. It isn’t some secret combination of turns that you repeat over and over.
You cannot have just one piece out of place. You also cannot solve five sides. (Think about it)
There are eight corner pieces and twelve edge pieces, for a total of twenty pieces that move. The center pieces do not move relative to one another: They simply spin in place.
You don’t need to spend five minutes turning the thing to make sure it’s REALLY messed up. Once it’s scrambled, it’s scrambled, and any more random moves are superfluous.
The solution is not to solve for sides. People will sometimes get two (usually adjacent) sides, and then think they should naturally progress to three, four, and so on. Sometimes I have two adjacent sides completed, and I’m obliged to scramble one of them as I work on the rest of the cube. Sometimes the audience will laugh at me, “Ha ha! You had that one and messed it up!”

There is a tradeoff in solution methodology. Generally, you can have short (ish) sequences of moves that can be used over and over again to swap a couple of pieces. For example, if you have two corner pieces that need to trade places without disturbing the other six corner pieces, you might hold the cube so that the two corners in question are right in front of you, and then make a particular seven-move sequence. You could use this method over and over again to nudge all of the corners into place. However, you could also have a longer sequence that swaps four corners. You’ll need to memorize a few different variants of it, depending on how you want to re-arrange those four corners. But when you’re done, you’ll have four corners sorted instead of two. So, the simple method would require you memorize one seven-move sequence, and the faster method has you memorize several ten-move sequences. It continues to scale up like this, with longer and more complex chains getting more accomplished. I’m sure the masters have immense lists of moves for every situation. Pehaps they can arrange all eight corners in one set of moves, they just need to choose the right sequence of moves from the huge library they have memorized, and then perform it flawlessly.

Another danger of using long chains: If you mess up and make a wrong turn somewhere, it is far harder to recover. Generally if you make a mistake during a long chain you won’t know it until you’re nearly through with it, and by that time you’re in trouble. The last few errant moves have just been scrambling the cube. When this happens to me I have to start all over.

There are many solution methods that people use. Some are very tricky and optimized for speed. Mine is much simpler and quite slow. The best in the world can solve a cube in less than fifteen seconds. I’ve seen it done^* , and it is very strange. Unlike the method I use, where I work on a layer at a time (top to bottom), these people seem to work on the entire cube at once. The cube looks scrambled right up until the last few moves when everything begins to fall into place. Conjecture: This method arranges the corners relative to one another, and then the edge pieces. I imagine they have huge lists of lengthy sequences for swapping groups of pieces as needed. I’d love to know how they develop such sequences.

* Who out there remembers the show “That’s Incredible!”? You do? Then you are clearly an aging codger like me. One episode featured various champions racing to solve the cube, and I remember quite a few people did so in under twenty seconds.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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HP Pavillion Sucks

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Mar 22, 2006

Filed under: Rants 61 comments

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The following is a long diatribe on my former computer. There is no need for you to read it. It’s boring. Just don’t buy an HP and none of this will apply to you.

I warned you.

Back in 2004:

I get myself an HP Pavillion. My company buys me the machine for use out of my home office. The goal is to have a reliable and affordable machine. I don’t need to play games on it or do anything fancy, I just need it to work.

I bring it home and plug ‘er in. Here is how HP greets me:

Click for biggie view

A challenge: How would you go about closing that goofy window right in the middle of the screen? You can’t move it. There is no close button. Right-clicking does nothing. The answer? Click in the white area to launch the wizard, then tell it you don’t want any.

Then hope the window doesn’t re-appear next time you boot up.

I should add that when this sales pitch for internet providers popped up, my cable modem was already connected and working properly.

Anyway, what a mess of icons. Before I go installing any of my software, I need to clean this stuff off.

Before I can do that, yet another popup appears letting me know I need to create my restore discs. It turns out that HP did not provide the restore disks. I have to go out and buy blank disks and burn them all myself. All ten of them. I really should make the restore discs before I go on my un-installing binge, in case I remove something important, or one of these nagware programs makes a mess of the system during un-install.

So I run the restore disc creation program. The process is tedious and tiresome, with an long-winded wizard that chews through a lot of time before getting around to asking for the first blank disc. I put it in. The program reports that the disc is bad. It aborts the process. I throw the disc away and try another. Run through the wizard again. This disc is also bad. Abort. Two bad blank discs in a row? What are the odds?

Hmmmm….

So I insert a regular music CD into the burner. Nothing. I mess around with it for a while, always assuming that I was doing something wrong. I have to reboot several times. Every time I reboot, the system pummels me with various “offers” and other useless windows. Windows open up, unbidden. My “favorite”:

Click for biggie view

This is HP organize. The thing is just a huge confusing container for a bunch of sales icons. Note that these are different from the sales icons that litter the desktop. In that center window a little movie begins to play, welcoming me to HP and telling me abut HP Organize, a ridiculous contraption made to replace the familiar windows interface with something more gimmicky and convoluted. It does this every single time I reboot, until I give up and hunt around in the options and find the one to shuts it off for good.

Remember, I’m just trying to install my software. Before I can do that, I have to clean all this junk off the machine. Before I can do that, I have to create restore discs. Before I can do that, I have to figure out what’s wrong with the CD burner. Before I can do that, I have to figure out how to disable this HP Organize monster before it drives me mad.

But it doesn’t end there.

Windows with nonstandard layouts (read: the close button isn’t where you expect) appear regularly. They fade in, slide up, and otherwise animate in a distracting manner. HP organize. Updates from HP. Some picture viewer thingee. Configure your new ISP. Join the HP club. Each one is totally different. They eat up system resources, greatly slowing the machine. Boot-up takes ages.

These programs seem to wait until I try to accomplish something and then leap into view. It’s madness. If I were to go to the mirror universe, Steve Jobs would have an evil goatee and all of his computers would act just like this.

I finally get that stuff shut off and out of my face so I can get back to finding out why I can’t burn or play CD’s. Eventually I realize: This CD burner doesn’t work. It’s busted, right out of the box.

I get on the phone with them. It is, as you’d expect, a long process of assuring them that yes my computer is plugged in and no, I don’t have it submerged in water and I have not set it on fire. I’m in a hurry. I don’t care about the CD burner. I don’t need it. This machine is for work, and I don’t need to burn CD’s. I just need the restore discs. They agree to send some in the mail. Fine. Bye.

I’m happy I don’t have to spend an hour swapping discs to burn these things, and they’re glad I’m not demanding they do anything expensive like make sure their computer actually works.

I spend some time un-installing all the crap. It’s a long and thankless task. I’m not even installing my own stuff yet: I’m just trying to clean off the machine so it will leave me alone. There is a lot of useless stuff tucked into the various corners of the OS. I clean out the system tray. I clean off the desktop. I clean out program files….

(Let’s skip ahead here,. This took a while and you get the idea.)

…finally done.

I put in a music CD. Because the CD drive is rubbish, I put it in the DVD drive. It doesn’t play. Instead, a new popup appears, prompting me to register (pay for) MusicMatch, some sort of music provider. But I don’t need to buy music. I have some, and I just put it in the drive. All you have to do is play it! I can make this thing go away, but I can’t get windows to make with the music-playing. Musicmatch comes up whenever an audio CD is inserted.

One of the windows that was jumping in my face a while ago was a link to the HP Help Center. I imagine my current problem is a common one. Rather than fight with it myself, I sign on and see what the help center has to say. I fire it up. Instead of just some FAQ or webpages, the help center is yet another fancy-pants application. It’s sluggish. It prompts me to create my account. Create an account? Are you kidding? I just want help with my HP computer! Are you afraid non-HP users are going to leech help from you or something? I go through the motions and the help center locks up. I can’t believe this. I try a few more times, but that’s all the help center can do.

I give up on help center and deal with this Musicmatch program myself. It’s tricky because the program itself doesn’t offer any way to deal with it. I uninstall it, but then windows doesn’t know what to do with audio CD’s. I have to go into file associations and re-assign audio CD’s to Media Player. I know that a very small percentage of the people out there know how to do this. As far as I can tell, this is the only way to get my computer to play audio CD’s without paying for MusicMatch.

I’m enraged on behalf of all the people out there (the proverbial moms and grandpas) who buy one of these as a first computer. Just imagine if this was your first experience with a personal computer. This experience almost turned me into a luddite.

Eventually I get the thing fixed up and working right. The annoyware is gone. My software is installed. I’m getting work done. Then I decide to watch a movie. The DVD player is an annoyware demo. Figures.

In any case: The DVD player doesn’t work right. Movies stutter and pause at regular intervals. It sucks.

Again, DVD playing wasn’t on the list of stuff we needed the computer to do, so from a business perspective there was just no point in making a big deal out of this. It would just eat up a bunch of time and in the end I doubt they would get it right anyway.

Two years later:

Amazing. My standards for this computer were quite low, and yet it ended up disappointing me anyway. Even if the hardware worked like it was supposed to, this was a miserable machine. It was crippled by horrible software that was so unhelpful that its actions bordered on sabotage. I weep for the poor people who bought this machine. I had the knowledge required to clean off the machine and make it perform as it should, but I’m far from the average user. I’ll bet there are still hundreds or perhaps thousands of people out there right now who have simply accepted that part of the boot-up process is closing HP Organize, and the picture viewer. They are used to seeing a half-dozen blinking icons in their system tray. Icons about which they know nothing, which they have never used, and which have been needlessly clogging up the works since day one.

I don’t have any sort of denouement for this tale. I don’t have anything witty to add at this point. After two years with the machine my opinion of it has not improved. I admit my tale isn’t as bitter or frustrating as Jeff Jarvis in his adventures in Dell Hell. I’m only putting it here so that maybe someone in the market for a computer will read this and think twice before buying HP.

I’m also putting this here as a way of shaking my fist at the loathsome people at HP who put this thing on the market. You guys are scum. You could see how the machine performed and what it did, but you put it into boxes and sent them to stores anyway. Every dollar you made from this model was stolen, as far as I’m concerned. You cannot concieve of the misery you spread and the endless hours of your customer’s time you wasted with this terrible, irritating, useless, nagging, slow, and piggish software.

Deep breath.

Okay, I’m done. I don’t know what posessed you to read this, but thanks for your indulgence.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Not for the timid

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Mar 22, 2006

Filed under: Pictures 4 comments

 A Very Random PicturePrevious Post

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Wuerfel2

Originally uploaded by m.helmreich.

This one is not mine. I just found this picture on Flickr. I want one.

Back in 9^th grade, I owned a 4×4 cube. It was tricky to use, because if the sections didn’t line up just right it wouldn’t turn. This would lead to twisting harder to overcome the resistance, which would lead to one of the center pieces snapping off. I went through a few 4×4 cubes this way, and no longer own one.

For a solution of the 4×4, I would ignore the outer rows and focus on the center area. This was, in effect, a 2×2 puzzle, and almost anyone can solve one of those. Just keep at it and they will fall into place sooner or later. From there I would pair up the edge pieces. This was more tricky, but still not too hard. Once that was done, the thing was, in effect, a normal 3×3 Rubik’s cube and could be solved thus.

This 5×5 is quite a step up in difficulty. I think it would be possible to ignore the outer layers and focus on the 3×3 in the middle, which would be like working with a normal cube. Once that was complete I’d have a solved area in the center of each face, although I’m not sure where I’d go from there, or if that is even a good approach.

Honestly, I’m sure this puzzle is beyond me, but I’d still love to take a crack at it.

UPDATE: I’ve been thinking about it and I realized that my idea for treating the center rows of the 5×5 like a 3×3 cube wouldn’t work. It just.. they wouldn’t… geeze I can hardly picture it, but I can see I was talking nonsense. Maybe you could ignore the center and work on the corners (thus turning it into a 2×2) and then work your way in. I don’t know. I think I need to surf around and see if I can buy one of these. On the other hand, I’m concerned that it would be very frustrating to work with. I imagine it has all the turning issues of the 4×4, only more so.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Ping Time

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Mar 21, 2006

Filed under: Game Design 4 comments

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EDIT (9/28/2008): For some reason, the images that go with this article are gone. Gone from the server, gone from my local machine. I have no idea how that happened. It will make this kind of hard to follow. Sorry.

Someone in the comments of this post asked about ping time. I sort of took a halfhearted attempt at answering it, but I thought it might be useful if I could explain why latency is such a problem for online gaming. This explanation is going to be very simplified, but should give the non-action gamer an understanding of why people are always ranting and whining about ping times. Please don’t nitpick.

Let’s assume that you and I are playing some Quake-type game. We both have a ping of 1000, which means 1000 milliseconds, or simply one second. So, it takes a half-second for stuff to go from me to the server, and another half-second to come back. Let’s say I’m in the room (green) and you (red) come in, running right-to-left

To keep this simple, let’s assume I try to blast you with some instant-hit beam weapon so we don’t have to worry about projectile speed. I just need to aim directly at you, and I should hit:

EXCEPT… That isn’t where you are. I’m lagging by a half-second, so I’m really seeing where you were a half-second ago. Here is what “really” happened:

But it gets worse. When I hit the fire button, the message takes another half-second to get to the server and tell the server I fired. By that time you are yet another half-second along.

This is a nasty problem. And it gets worse: The message that I fired takes yet another half-second to reach you. By that time, you are another half-second away.

I saw: Direct hit.

You saw: I missed by a second and a half.

The server saw : I missed by 1 second.

The problem gets worse still if we are fighting with (say) rockets that travel at a visible speed, and you realize that from my standpoint the rockets themselves are lagging by a half-second. If I’m running down the hallway firing rockets, I don’t get the message that the rocket has been fired until a second after I pull the trigger. I know it might be hard to picture, but what I end up seeing is my own rockets passing through me after being launched from where I was a second go. Doors which are supposed to open when you get near don’t seem to open right away, and you see yourself slam face-first into a closed door. A half second later (when you get the message from the server) you appear on the other side of the door, which now appears open. It’s a mess. The world doesn’t work right if you try to interact with it like this.

What really matters is what the server sees. The server is in charge, and decides if you explode or not. So the person with the lower ping sees the world more as it “really” is, according to the server.

This isn’t as much of a problem today as it was back in 1996 or so when on-line deathmatch was just catching on. Connections are, on average, much more reliable and provide for lower ping times. In addition, most games have various tricks for making the world appear more normal even when coping with a certain degree of lag.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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The Good Guys Win

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Mar 21, 2006

Filed under: Game Reviews 2 comments

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This makes me very happy. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of developers.

LATER: (March 31 2007) The article is gone. The gist was that GalCiv 2 was one of the top-selling games that week. There were other details, but they elude me now.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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More on Porco Rosso

By Shamus Posted Monday Mar 20, 2006

Filed under: Anime 4 comments

 Porco RossoPrevious Post

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I just re-read my post on Porco Rosso from a few days ago and realized that I made the movie sound like a serious drama with no action whatsoever. This is not the case. My point was that there isn’t more action than there needs to be, and that the movie isn’t afraid of taking its time when it needs to. Indeed, there are some fun and exciting moments in it:

A low-altitude aerial dogfight.

Porco flies the red plane. (Porco Rosso means “crimson pig”)

There is even a car chase (truck chase, really) through the streets of Italy.

In the original post I mentioned that I didn’t think my kids would like it. I stand corrected. They love it. I’m sure their favorite moments (the comedy and airfights) are different from mine (Porco’s quiet moments of reflection on his past) but there is plenty in there for all of us to like.

A side note about this goofy PowerDVD software I’m using: It’s odd. It has a million obscure options for fiddling with the color and aspect ratio, adjusting the de-interlacing (whatever) and altering the behvior of any number of inscrutable acronyms, but the obvious stuff doesn’t seem to work right. To wit:

The “capture” button doesn’t always work. It seems I have to re-select “capture to clipboard” each time, even though it’s already checked.

I have “keep original video size” checked under screen capture, and I can see it is clearly reducing the images and re-sizing them.

The black border on the images above? The first time I played the movie they weren’t there. Now they are, and I can’t find an option to make them go away.

Every time I take a screen capture it advances a couple of frames. Annoying.

It’s not like this is new technology. I’m using version 5 of PowerDVD. You’d think interface annoyances and bugs like these would have been fixed by now.

Annoying.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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