I’ve updated the blog part of my Web site to use standard-size fonts now rather than small ones; you should too (if you’re not doing it already, of course). I’d been meaning to do this for a while, but someone emailed me and specifically requested it. The rest of the site will be updated soon.

Yeah. So the other day, I walk into my local AppleCentre to buy myself a nice new STM bag. Of course, since I’m there pretty much every third hour of the day…

• Me: “Can I have myself an André discount at all?”
• Manager: “Hmmm… well, normally I would, but I can’t do that today. How about I throw in a free copy of World of Warcraft? Yes, that sounds like an excellent idea…”

Nooooooooooooooooooooo! Tom, I officially hate you. Do you know how long I’ve been trying to avoid playing this frigtard game? Goodbye sunshine, it’s been nice knowing you. If I don’t reply to any emails from now on, I’m either dead, or I’m playing this bloody MMORPG that I’ve been avoiding so successfully up until now. Bye all!

My dad’s been on a Steven Seagal action movie rampage, recently. How many friggin’ movies has this guy made, you think? A half-dozen? A dozen? Nope, thirty-two. And they’re all exactly the damn same, although some of them have hilarious titles (such as Today You Die, Half Past Dead and Out for a Kill) with equally hilarious taglines (“Whoever set him up is definitely going down”).

Please add Steven Seagal to the list of heroes who I want to be when I grow up. Life just can’t be that bad when you keep starring in action movies with hot Asian chicks in half of them.

I know that the Wii is all the rage right now (rightly so, too!), but some of the more “traditional” games that are coming out next year still look nothing short of stunning.

Sample the HD trailers of:

• Mass Effect (developed by BioWare). The immersion resulting from the new dialog system just looks incredible. Having just finished Neverwinter Nights 2, I reinstalled Neverwinter Nights 1 again to see how it stacks up. It is amazing just how much more immersion the full-screen style cutscenes provides vs the NWN1-style textbox-in-upper-left-corner. (The fullscreen cutscenes being the same deal as those in Knights of the Old Republic I and II). Mass Effect raises the bar again with its immersive dialog system: it looks like it’s going to absolutely blow everything out of the water when it comes to character interaction in games.

  The tactical squad-based combat looks pretty cool, too: it looks like BioWare are taking some of the tactical aspects of D&D-style combats over to an FPS game. (No, really, D&D does have some tactical combat. Putting Mages In the Back and Fighters At The Front takes lots of brains, I tell you.)

• BioShock (developed by Irrational: the X06 and Developer Walkthrough HD trailers are both great, although be warned that both of them really are mature content). Man oh man, Irrational were spot-on when they claimed that BioShock will be the spiritual successor to System Shock 2. It’s clearly Shock 2-influenced to the nth degree: the splicers in BioShock highly resemble the deadly Cyborg Assassins in Shock 2, for example. However, BioShock looks even more disturbing than its predecessor, more moralistic, and scary as all hell. Having mere monkeys and protocol droids scaring the crap out of you in Shock 2 was bad enough, but with Big Daddies running around in BioShock, I wonder if I’ll actually be able to play this game at night at all. The water effects, 1950s influence and mature target audience make for an atmosphere that will leave even Shock 2 for dead.

With Jade Empire PC, Command & Conquer 3, and Unreal Tournament 2007 coming out next year, 2007 is looking like a pretty tasty gaming year indeed for those of us who are stubbornly staying off console games.

In the last month, I’ve had to dick around with (Linux) fdisk, gparted, lvm, mke2fs, tune2fs, the menagerie of RAID tools, and (Mac OS X) gpt, fdisk, pdisk, asr, diskutil and hdiutil.

I, for one, truly welcome our new ZFS overlords.

I’m not too sure that I can go much farther
I’m really not sure things are even getting better
I’m so tired of the me that has to disagree
I’m so tired of the me that’s in control
I woke up to see the…

Sun shining all around me
How could it shine down on me?
You think that it would notice that I can’t take any more
Had to ask myself,
… what’s it really for?

Everything I tried to do, it didn’t matter
Now I might be better off just rolling over
‘cos you know I try so hard but couldn’t change a thing
And it hurts so much I might as well let go
I can’t really take the…

Sun shining all around me
Why would it shine down on me?
You think that it would notice that I no longer believe
Can’t help telling myself
… it don’t mean a thing.

I woke up to see the…

Sun shining all around me
How could it shine down on me?
Sun shining all its beauty
Why would it shine down on me?
You think that it would notice that I can’t take any more
Just had to ask myself,
… what’s it really for?

—Yoko Kanno and Emily Curtis, What’s It For

Trust in love to save, baby. Bring on 2007!

Build 3036 of Parallels Desktop has been announced for all you Linux-on-Mac and Windows-on-Mac fans, and it comes with two very cool new features:

• You can use your Windows XP Boot Camp partition directly in Parallels. No more disk-space-killing installs of Windows XP as a Parallels disk image alongside Boot Camp! This will save me a good 8GB or so of disk space, which is badly needed on a laptop. A side-effect of this is that it should speed up Parallels’s I/O performance, since it now uses a raw block device for its virtual disk access rather than simply using a large file on a partition.

• Coherency: Shows Windows applications as if they were Mac ones. I’m guessing that Parallels can overtake Windows’s window manager and somehow displays the window as a native Aqua one. There are some pretty cool screenshots of this feature around.

There’s a ton of other cool new features as well. Delicious!

CNN do a quick 3-minute review of Microsoft’s Zune, and they didn’t like it at all. I love the bit where the female presenter says “May I show you my new Shuffle?” toward the end, and pulls one of the gorgeous new iPod shuffles. The design contrast between the two devices is night and day. I think that review will probably sell more Shuffles than Zunes.

You know, I really do wish the iPod had a kick-ass competitor. While there are plenty of geeks who’ll say “Well I have an iRiver and it’s much better than an iPod!”; I mean I’d like to see another device that has 30-40% of the MP3 music player market instead of Apple owning such a massive chunk of it. A single company holding such a large percentage of a market just isn’t good for consumers in the long run. Creative, Samsung, Microsoft, and every single other large electronics company have had how long now and how much resources to put out their so-called iPod killers? Get with the program!

Zing, can you tell I’ve been procrastinating lately? The last three blog entries are all about boring site news. Woah, like, totally meta dude.

• Comments have been turned back on, so now you can have your say on my views and boring-ass blog entries if you’re really keen!
• I’ve ripped out a couple of old blog entries and made a formal About Me section on this site, that talks about me in all my massive glory and stuff. There’s also a whole new shebang on stuff that I like. It’s always so weird writing about yourself.
• Lots of little tidy-ups and small things.

I’ve added a games section to the site. There’s some small cheat… uhh, tricks, that you may find handy, some information on crafting items, and also a small patch to remove the XP penalty for multiclassing if you think it’s stupid (which I do). Have fun!

Ooo, my main website just got a bit shinier. Yeah for awesome free RapidWeaver themes!

Whoops, those of you who had problems downloading Vimacs will find that the download links work properly now. (What the hell, people besides me actually use Vimacs?)

Those of you who like stalking me will be glad to know that the gallery is back online.

Well, it seems that Neverwinter Nights 2, Obsidian¹’s next kick-ass roll-playing game, is out in the USA. Unfortunately, it’s been delayed in Australia until November the 16th. Whaaaa? That’s… like… next year! Muaahaha, thankfully I’ve managed to wrangle some contacts and download the thing from Direct2Drive, so I’ve been gleefully playing it for the past few nights. Well, OK, make that the past few days, nights, and early mornings…

First impressions are good, although the game engine isn’t particularly medal-worthy: Obsidian could use some better game engines programmers, that’s for sure. It’s not in the same league as Oblivion, for instance. The user interface also isn’t quite up to NWN1 standards. However, the spell effects do look very pretty, and more importantly, the story looks quite promising, and possesses the same moral and ethical ambiguity that is the hallmark of Obsidian games. None of this bozo so-obvious black-and-white good-vs-evil crap. (Mind you, I’m playing a slightly evil character at the moment — slaughtering the Neverwinter City Watch might be somewhat evil… but it is so much fun. Besides, the Watch is weak and not doing its job, so I don’t see anything wrong with the Thieves’ Guild controlling the city streets since they actually have the resources to maintain peace and order better than the Watch. Just ensure the local shop keepers pay their taxes to the Guild and everyone’s happy… )

It also looks like an even more hackable game than the original NWN, although I’m unhappy with the toolset using the same dock-o-rama type of user interface that Visual Studio is famous for. Dockable windows are OK, but I still think it’s far inferior to using multiple windows and a decent window management tool such as Exposé. Still, it took me about 30 minutes to write some small chea… uhh, scripts, to help with some in-game things.

So far I’ve probably pumped about 20 to 30 hours into the game, and I think I’m about 3/4 of the way through Chapter One, with there being three chapters in total. If I don’t reply to any emails for the week or two, uhhh, I guess you know what I’ll be doing!

¹ Obsidian are makers of the best computer role-playing games in existence, end of story. (None of this World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy VII crap, thank you very much.) If you disagree with me on this, that’s OK, I’m not really into Pokemon anyway.

I found a pretty interesting paper the other day about Failure-Oblivious Computing. The idea is simple: when a program encounters an error, simply have your runtime return some garbage value instead of crashing, throwing an exception, or go into error-handling mode.

If you’re a programmer, this suggestion will likely cause you to recoil in horror because the very idea that your functions will be getting back undefined values seems contradictory to everything we’ve been taught. However, it’s hard argue with the results: the authors tested eight fairly well known programs, from mail user agents to Apache and Samba, and in every case the failure-oblivious version arguably did the right thing — and did a better job — than the ‘safe’ versions that would throw an exception or shutdown in a controlled manner when they hit unexpected territory. Read the paper if you’re doubtful about this.

This idea is somewhat in opposition to the Erlang philosophy of Let it crash. However, in both these scenarios, the underlying motivation is the same: large complex systems will inevitably have bugs, and both philosophies not only plan for it, but code to ensure that the system as a whole keeps running in the face of serious errors.

It’s quite easy to react emotionally to these ideas and say that it’s all just too dangerous and unpredictable — coders have always had it hammered into them to check for error values and exceptional conditions. However, there’s also something to be said about the brittleness of software vs more organic systems: the latter will often recover successfully in the face of unexpected conditions, whereas software will simply break. Failure-oblivious computing may not be the answer, but it’s a pretty good first research step. It would be an interesting follow-up experiment to modify the runtimes of the dynamic languages such as Python and Ruby and make them return sentry values instead of throwing exceptions. How many dynamic programs would continue to run successfully rather than die with some weird programmer-centric error?

If you have a VPN at your workplace, chances are good that it’s one of those Cisco 3000 VPN Concentrator things, which seem to be an industry standard for VPN equipment. Chances are also good that you’ve likely been forced to use the evil, evil proprietary Cisco VPN client, which has been known to be a source of angsta majora for Mac OS X and Linux users. (And if you think Windows users have it good, think again: the Cisco VPN client completely hosed a friend’s 64-bit Windows XP system to the point where it wouldn’t even boot.)

Enter vpnc, an open-source VPN client that works just fine on both Mac OS X and Linux. Linux people, I assume that you know what you’re doing — all you should need is a TUN/TAP kernel driver and you’re good to go. Mac OS X folks, you’ll need to be comfortable with the UNIX terminal to use it; unfortunately no GUI has been written for it yet. If you’re a Terminal geek, here’s a small guide for you:

• Download and install a tun/tap driver for Mac OS X.
• Download and install libgcrypt. If you have DarwinPorts (neé MacPorts) installed, simply do “port install libgcrypt”. Otherwise, grab it from the libgcrypt FTP site and install it manually.
• You’ll need to check out the latest version of the vpnc code from its Subversion repository: “svn checkout http://svn.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/vpnc/”. The latest official release (0.3.3, as of this writing) will not compile properly on Mac OS X, which is why you need the code from the Subversion trunk.
• After doing the standard “make && make install” mantra, run your Cisco VPN .pcf profile through the pcf2vpnc tool and save the resulting .vpnc file in /etc/vpnc.
• ./vpnc YourProfile.vpnc, and that should be it. While you’re debugging it, the --nodetach and --debug 1 options may be useful.

Muchas gracias to Mario Maceratini at Rising Sun Pictures for hunting down vpnc for me.

Welcome to the new-look Algorithm.com.au, redone from scratch. I’m now using RapidWeaver to do the web site rather than my 5-year-old installation of Movable Type; thank you MT, you served me well for that time! All my old blog entries have been imported across, although the URLs for the entries have all changed, sorry.

Apart from the obvious look’n’feel changes to the blog, I’ve finally put all my mixes online in the Music section, and added a small section on the code that I’ve released. (It’s not much code, so don’t be too disappointed when you visit there — but there’s lots more coming in the future!) So, have a look around if you’re bored, kill some time, and have the appropriate amount of fun.

Do you work with audio and video on the road? How does an astounding 640GB of storage on your laptop sound, with performance nearly meeting that of a desktop?

1. Buy a MacBook Pro, which can net you 160GB of internal hard disk storage.
2. Rip out the internal DVD drive and replace it with another 160GB internal hard drive, via an MCE OptiBay.
3. RAID-0 your internal 320GB of storage, for twice the read/write performance.
4. Buy a LaCie Little Big Disk, which will net you another 320GB of RAID-0 storage that’s totally bus-powered over FireWire 800.

Wallah, 640GB on the road. Of course, if you’re a serious performance freak, you’d probably opt for the 7200rpm 100GB drives instead of the 5400rpm 160GB ones. But that’ll only net you a meagre 400GB of storage instead of 640GB.

Your batteries might only last for about 30 minutes, but hey, it’s probably still longer than one of those Dell XPS Gaming laptops, and you can actually carry a MacBook Pro around without needing a truck.

You know that Which Operating System Are You quiz?

Well, they’re gonna have to expand it to include all six versions of Windows Vista, whenever that decides to be unleashed unto the world. Hello, six versions? With the starter edition only being able to use 256MB of RAM and run three applications at once? Even eWeek says that “you would be better off running Windows 98”. You know what, instead of choosing between Vista Starter, Vista Home Basic, Vista Home Premium, Vista Business, Vista Enterprise or Vista Ultimate, how about I just run Mac OS X or Linux instead, you stupid tossers?

Jesus, the excellent lads over at Microsoft Research (who produce some truly world-class work) must be just cringing when they hear their big brother company do totally insane stuff like this.

Do you like Mac OS X?

Do you like… Vim?

If so, your prayers may just have been answered: see the Vi Input Manager Plugin by Jason Corso. Vi-style key bindings in any Mac OS X text input area? Schyeah baby. As Jason says:

Right now, you should be thinking — “you mean the editor in XCode will behave like Vi?” Answer: Yes.

It’s open source too. Nice work Jason; let the hacking begin!