Otaku No Zoku

Just wanted to write a brief update to the “What are you reading?” post I made that so many people commented on.

Yes. All of those books got read & mini-reviewed. Those books are in addition to the weekly computer book review column that I write. And on top of my regular day job.

Several people enquired as to the status of the blogs that I follow.

So the low down is that I cut the following blogs:
Eric Sink. Read for 3 months, not very much in the way of anything useful. I wish he’d spend his time writing decent software instead of wasting his time talking about how decent software should be written.

Robert Cringley. I read through his entire archive and notice three really prominent things a) he’s frequently behind whatever technology curve everyone else is on b) he’s frequently wrong about any conclusions he comes too c) he somehow manages to get paid all the same.

“Hello World” is the ultimate “cat picture” blog. It’s a whole lot of nothing about… well… nothing. It’s really only one degree of separation away from the dullest blog in the world.

The past month or two I’ve received e-mails from law students working on various EFF patent busting cases. The first one was dealing with a computerised version of Solitaire granted in 1995, which is completely absurd as I shipped at least three solitaire games in the very early 1980’s for the Acorn Atom and ZX 81. I even have an old code listing from a magazine that is dated 1981. Thomas Warfield, author of Pretty Good Solitaire has more information and a better perspective on the details.

The latest patent is regarding the game of blackjack, specifically blackjack played online. This one was granted in 1997 but the EFF is seeking examples since before January 1995.

Tricky. I didn’t work on any online blackjack games until the end of 1995.

However, I do remember playing blackjack with a group of friends in real-time on various bulletin board systems spread all over the place. These blackjack games were homed on either single BBS servers with multiple telephone lines or multiple servers connected via regular old dial up modem in the pre-Internet days.

I’m sure that some of the students enquiring about online blackjack have performed many fruitless Google searches looking for details. But the information is all there, you just gotta know how to say it.

Just ask about “BBS Doors” and watch Google throw back thousands of hits on various blackjack BBS doors going as far back as the Tandy TRS-80 and Commodore 64.

If you want to stretch the definition of “online” all the way to the boundaries of its actual meaning you can even include “online” blackjack for the PDP-10 & PDP-11, the Perkin Elmer mini computer running UNIX and many other mini-computer & mainframe variants. I understand that the PDP-11 version dates from around 1973.

Absurd.

Just absurd.

Ugh! I hate intractable yak shaving problems. Today’s was just pitiful. Luckily I can dodge most of them, but there is always one that has my name on it…

So today I had the classic Yak Shaving problem. I encounter about one intractable Yak per week that just makes me blow my top and vent steam for about 10 minutes. My cats are beginning to recognise this behaviour pattern and hide under the couch until it passes.

My room-mate, Sharan, has a piece of homework she wants help with.

So Sharan starts up Visual Studio on her laptop and Visual Assist performs a scan of the local network and finds that the registration key it is installed with is already in use on my workstation in the other room and refuses to start. I have multiple Visual Assist keys so it must be that she inadvertently installed a key that was already in use.

So my room-mate asks me what the problem is and I tell her, and that she should use another key and it’s stored in the archive on the file server.

When she looks there is only one key listed there. I remember I put the newly purchased keys on the company wiki so I tell her to look there.

But she doesn’t have an account to the company intranet but she does have access to the company file server. So I have to add her details to the intranet server. This requires me to log in to the intranet.

But I’m logging in from my laptop which I just re-installed the OS on and I can’t remember my intranet password. I try all of my default passwords but none seem to work.

So I have to log in to the intranet server via windows terminal services to recover my intranet password before I can add my room-mate’s details to the intranet server.

But the intranet server is reporting that no terminal server client access licenses are available.

So I have to physically go to the intranet server and log in as the administrator to find out why the terminal server licence manager isn’t issuing licenses properly.

Which requires me to log on to MSDN on Microsoft’s website to read a help file, but that username & password are stored in the backup on the file server which I haven’t restored to my laptop yet.

But the information is also contained in the MSDN on CD.

But I don’t have the complete library installed.

So I have to install that.

But first I have to locate the proper disc in the MSDN box.

So I install the proper MSDN Library disc and I read the help file and log in to the file server at the console to flip the bit that switches on the Terminal License Server that lets me return to my workstation to log in via Remote Terminal to reset my intranet password to something I can remember to let me log in to the intranet to add Sharan’s details to the intranet to let her access the company wiki to retrieve another Visual Assist license key to enable her to do her homework.

I’m reminded of the nursery song “There was an old woman who swallowed a fly…”

I returned late on Friday evening from Game Developers Conference 2005 held in San Francisco, CA. I had fun, though I am beginning to have misgivings about the direction that it is heading in.

There were a number of problems with GDC this year. The food was lacklustre. Many panels were insipid. Conference rooms were poorly planned. The Expo floor was un-inspiring.

The expo part of GDC is becoming ever more like a mini-E3. Even though there were a number of innovative products shown, and I was very happy to see a lot of smaller companies showing off their exciting wares, GameStudio and GarageGames to name just two, there was the feeling of the big guys pushing out everyone else and wooing developers with razzle dazzle rather than substance.

Microsoft. Food. Pavillion. Dreamer’s Guild.

Steve Woita. Atari.

Tom Sloper. Activision.

Jim Charne. Activision. Roundtables.

Jeff Buchanan. Activision. Midway. Long hair.

John Harris. The John Harris.

IGF.

Simon Carless. GDM/Gamasutra.

Press Office. Bad food.

Crappy bandwidth.

Felt bigger than last year.

Benno. Santa Cruz Games.

— Justin Lloyd