Things God forgot to mention

y take on the creationist nonsense is this: Completely independant of any theological argument, just as a practical matter, where should you look for practical advice about the world we live in. The self described omniscient God, or to modern Science. Consider that God forgot to mention a few pretty important things.

• Geography: The existence of 4 entire continents, with people on 3 of them.
• Cosmology: The existence of a billion billion additional stars in the universe, in addition to the few thousand you can see.
• Medicine: the existence of living things too small to see, but which can kill you.
• Natural History: Dinosaurs, and almost everything else.
• Engineering: Anything beyond muscle power.

You get the idea.

Digital Frames

Digital frames started out a few years ago as expensive novelties, but the prices have plummeted and I’ve joined the movement. I place mine on my desktop, within arm’s reach but not in the direct line of sight. I like mine so much I’ve bought more and given them away as gifts.

So far I’ve bought four different frames from different manufacturers. They’re not quite idiot proof yet, but anyone advanced enough to photoshop his own digital photographs will have no problem getting them loaded and running. The hardware is pretty solid and standardized - basically a small LCD, USB interface, some amount of internal memory, slots that accept most of the common camera memory cards, and of course, a power brick. Some have WI-Fi. Some have remote controls. It all works.

The on-board software is pretty awful now, but is bound to improve. Part of the problem is the no computer required requirement, which currently also means your computer is irrelevant. Everything about what the frame actually does is controlled by pushing combinations of buttons to scroll through multiple levels of menus. Yuck. Other things are just inexplicably dumb:

• The “random” slide show always starts with the same picture. Sure, it seems to diverge eventually, but some photos are seen much more often than they should be.
• There is a low, unpublished, absolute limit on the number of different photos that will cycle through the slide show. Each model seems to have it’s own limit, and none advertises what their’s is; but don’t bother cramming all 20,000 of your digital pictures onto one card. For now.
• Frames accept and store huge images in their internal memory, although they can only display limited scaled down versions.

The software can only get better.

I predict that the days of the traditional photo-of-wife-and-kids on the desktop are numbered. The photo-on-the-wall may follow soon. It’s a mystery to me why my expensive flat panel TV can’t double as a digital frame already.

The problem with getting rid of hypocrital politicians

.. is essentially the same as the problem with getting rid of drug dealers.

No matter how many you shoot or imprison, there’s always another one just as bad ready to take his place.

Spam as an economic indicator?

I’ve noticed a distinct shift in my spam box, from

get a great loan in 5 minutes

to

part time job you can do at home.

I’m sure some future PHD will be based on using spam as a metric to study social and policial trends.

What if…

The chairman of General Motors was chosen by having a bunch of executives from other companies spend a year touring the country, promising faster new cars with great gas mileage for lower prices. Attending monster truck rallies and Nascar races one day, solar scooter competitions the next. The current lower level GM executives would be touring too, but they would be campaigning on a platform of continuing to build the same great cars for another four years.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with the skills needed to run GM. Oh well.

… and my next Game is Fanorona

I’ll start the legitimate games second of this blog at the current endpoint of the story; with my latest on-line game: Fanorona. Fanorona is a traditional capturing game, played mainly on the island of Madagascar, where it is reputed to be the national game. It is pretty much unknown everywhere else. I discovered Fanorona while random-walking through the game space.

Some games require an effort to understand and appreciate; not Fanorona. The opening phase of the game is a flat-out massacre of most of the pieces. No subtle training is needed to appreciate what’s going on! After the massacre, cleaning up the remaining wreckage is a surprisingly subtle positional game.

Fanorona was an ideal candidate to add to my game site, Boardspace.net. It’s unencumbered by intellectual property issues, it’s a short game with immediate appeal, and it’s not widely known or available elsewhere. So it has been added.

Now a few words about Boardspace. I’ve been in the computer programming “game” for a long time, and at every stage of the industry’s development, I’ve been writing games for whatever computer equipment was current. For the last three years, I’ve been sole proprietor of Boardspace, a site devoted to abstract strategy games which you probably have never heard of. It’s strictly a hobby; not a business. There is no revenue, only expenses; but it not a very expensive hobby. Web sites are cheap.

I’ve seen a lot of smart people trying to combine fun and profit, but I haven’t seen any really succeed at it. The desire for profit always seems to drive out the fun. My solution to this conundrum is to separate them strictly. I do programming for a living, and I don’t complain too much if it’s not always fun. I also do a lot of programming strictly for fun.

A Brief History of Animal Club Gaming

It all started with bingo. Local Elks clubs and Moose lodges have been running bingo games since revolutionary times. It all seemed innocent enough, and no one seemed to mind if an occasional church group poached on the franchise.

Then the Elks started getting greedy, and for reasons that remain somewhat obscure, the supreme court ruled that as a sovereign species, the Elks were entitled to play any game that Humans anywhere on the planet were also permitted to play. Soon, Elks and Moose were upgrading dusty lodges to fully fledged casinos, and started raking in huge sums. “All for good works” they maintained, and massive campaign contributions assured that the sums actually contributed to public works were considered to be enough.

Meanwhile, Elks and Moose were paying out huge sums to their members as “charity consultants” and “public needs researchers”. “We’ve never had the resources to properly pursue our objectives. Funding the club properly is a good thing”. Rotarians sought, and failed to receive, a wavier to join the animal club club; no one could find a species called a Rotary. A scandal erupted when some Elks lodges ousted most of their members as “inactive, or not Elkish enough” despite testimony by doctors and DNA experts that the ousted members are alive and 100% Elk. This vastly increased the payments to the remaining members. Club leadership claimed this would make their good work even more effective.

Rotarians aside, other animal groups are destined to break into the franchise. It’s rumored that politicians will assert their right as Horses Asses (both species in good standing) to be allowed to fund their campaigns directly by opening casinos; And voters, as Sheep, should open their own cooperative gaming venues so they can fleece themselves. It remains to be seen how these initiatives will be resolved.

Why is email unsigned?

Given the ubiquitous spam and fraud being perpetrated by email, why is it that legitimate email from established sources is not digitally signed? It’s incredibly lame that my bank is reduced to warning me about spam, but begging me to believe that this particular email is legitimate.

Carbonite

Carbonite is an offsite backup product with a general philosophy of install it and forget it. The short form review is that it probably works well enough for general consumer use. It seems well written, it’s extremely simple to use, and the customer support crew is very reactive and keyed into the difficulties that joe-average user might have.

On the other hand, it doesn’t seem to be engineered for large file systems. The first sign of this was when Carbonite announced it was “done, you’re all backed up!” after only a few hours and a few gigabytes of data. It turned out to have only backed up the “documents and settings” folder. I pointed it at my real data (images, mp3s, cvs repository, source code) and it seemed to be chugging along, so far so good.

After a while I noticed Carbonite doing complete file system scans, which severely degraded my system’s performance, and due to its “no options” philosophy there is no way to slow down or schedule them. Also viewing the backed-up file database (presented as a pseudo disk drive) is extremely slow. I think the algorithms being employed just didn’t envision file systems with 200,000 files in the backup area. This is probably fixable, but until It’s fixed I can’t have Carbonite around.

Note the date of this review and your current calendar. Carbonite is a promising product, just not ready for my kind of user yet.