Oct 21, 2004 · psu · 1 minute read
Culture
The Red Sox are in the World Series. That’s pretty cool.
Oct 20, 2004 · peterb · 3 minute read
Computers
I really, really, really don’t like Tcl. Here are some of the reasons why.
1. The syntax for basic language elements is broken and inconsistent. Look, go ahead and put dollar signs in front of variables. Or don’t put dollar signs in front of variables. I don’t really care. But make up your mind; don’t make me have to figure out which syntax I need to use from context.
2. No syntax checking until the program actually executes a given line of code.
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Oct 19, 2004 · peterb · 4 minute read
Games
What are all the cool kids playing on their consoles today? Katamari Damacy! It’s the sort of game that only comes along once every few years, where the controls, theme, and tone all coalesce perfectly to create a kind of Platonic gaming mood. Katamari Damacy is a Namco release for the Sony Playstation 2.
Katamari Damacy
The plot is a tissue thin excuse to justify the madness. Your father, the Lord of All Creation, got drunk and accidentally destroyed all of the stars in the sky.
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Oct 18, 2004 · peterb · 2 minute read
Games
My mom is convinced that John Kerry is going to win the election.
I think she couldn’t be more wrong. I’d like for John Kerry to win. I’d like for George Bush to lose. But I don’t see it happening. I do have to say that her logic is pretty compelling: she says that I’m a guaranteed jinx when it comes to politics, and since I’m so certain that Bush is going to win, he won’t.
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Oct 16, 2004 · peterb · 1 minute read
Culture
If, like me, you’re not in the habit of watching CNN, you probably missed the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart lay a righteous smackdown on Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala. I did. Sure, you can read the transcript, but that doesn’t really do it justice.
For the full-on effect, if you have a fast internet connection, you’ll want to watch the video
Jon Stewart, I salute you. On the one hand, it’s depressing that it takes a comedy show host to raise this issue and not, say, a journalist.
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Oct 15, 2004 · peterb · 1 minute read
Computers
…that’s how I feel tonight, because my fabulous employers gave me, as a gift, a 19" flatscreen monitor. It’s a ViewSonic VX910.
It’s pretty. Oh yes, it is pretty.
The big problem, though, is that now I am having the feeling that I need to upgrade my computer so that I have a game playing box worthy of the monitor.
The other problem is that I’m running Win2k, so I don’t get any ClearType antialiasing love.
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Oct 14, 2004 · psu · 3 minute read
Food and Drink
Who would have thought that a pizza with fresh mozzarella and roasted potatoes would be a great thing?
Anyway. To go back to the beginning. There is an organization in Pittsburgh called Slow Food Pittsburgh which is a local chapter of an international group of the same name. They are dedicated to the proposition that we need to defend traditionally prepared regional foods against the onslaught of large scale generic mechanized “fast food”.
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Oct 13, 2004 · psu · 2 minute read
Food and Drink
I have an almost irrational fondness for sausage that extends even more irrationally to hot dogs. A good hot dog can be a thing of beauty and a stupendous culinary experience besides. A bad hot dog is at best sad and at worst something that will make you vomit in a dark alley somewhere far away from home.
After some years of obtaining hot dogs in various locales on this planet, here are some guidelines for their proper construction.
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Oct 12, 2004 · peterb · 5 minute read
Culture
The bad part about buying books in Canada is that they are often from Great Britain.
This sounds wrong, intuitively. For me, at least, mentioning “books” and “England” in the same sentence conjures up an image of a sober, thoughtful old gent, reading a thick, leatherbound volume with a sewn-in silk bookmark while comfortably – but not indulgently – ensconced in a leather chair. The smell of pipe smoke is in the air.
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Oct 11, 2004 · peterb · 6 minute read
Culture
Since I spent so much time raving about the Carnegie Library recently, it’s only fair that I indicate what I’ve actually been reading. What follows is a laundry list with some brief comments on each item. The hyperlinks in each item will take you to Amazon, in case your local library isn’t as good as mine.
Books I, Fatty by Jerry Stahl. Stahl’s fictionalized autobiography of the celebrated and then later villified Fatty Arbuckle is gripping.
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Oct 8, 2004 · peterb · 3 minute read
Games
Comic books are for kids
I was at the Carnegie Library last night, trying to track down volume 2 of Alan Moore’s Promethea. A very nice librarian was helping me, and we got to talking, and she said “So, are you really into…” There was a long pause. “…graphic novels?”
Now, I’m sure she was just making conversation, but there was a very large part of me that was sure that the real question being asked was “Why are you reading comic books?
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Oct 7, 2004 · psu · 5 minute read
Photo
I have a book by the late great Galen Rowell called Mountain Light. The book is filled with breathtaking landscape photographs from all over the world and the stories of how the photographs were created. Rowell worked with a series of 35mm color slide films during his career: Kodachrome, Velvia, and so on. At the end of the forward, he talks about how a friend of his had periodically told him that in the next few years, a digital camera would come out that would put his film to shame and be easier to use besides, and that he had been hearing this story for the last decade or two.
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Oct 5, 2004 · peterb · 1 minute read
Games
Reminder: the 10th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition has begun. Anyone and everyone is welcome to play and judge the games.
We used to call them “text adventures” instead of “interactive fiction,” but you know these crazy kids with their loud rock and roll music and their hamburger sandwiches and their french fried potatoes.
Oct 4, 2004 · peterb · 3 minute read
Culture
On Sunday, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh – one of the greatest libraries I know of, outside of the New York Public Library – opened for the first time after completing their extensive renovations. It was a magnificent celebration. There were tours, there were children listening to stories and singing songs, there was free pizza. There were books, and music, videos, and people everywhere. The place was completely packed. In a strange way, that was the best part of the opening.
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Oct 3, 2004 · peterb · 6 minute read
Games
A typical Star Trek game
Last night I dragged one of my Apple IIs up from the basement and set it up, and searched through every disk I own, searching for a game that only I remember. It was a version of the old text-based Star Trek games that randomly printed out page-long quotes from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations.
I didn’t find it.
Unfortunately, I only have about half of the disks I had from that era – I don’t know what happened to my “main” box of disks.
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Sep 30, 2004 · peterb · 1 minute read
Culture
I admit it: I didn’t watch the candidate’s debate tonight. I had two reasons:
(1) My mind is already made up.
(2) Contemplating the sick feeling I will get in the pit of my stomach when I wake up the day after Election Day and read about who won makes me break out in hives. I get enough existential dread when I think about being forced to program in Tcl without adding politics to the mix.
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Sep 29, 2004 · peterb · 6 minute read
Computers
The number of people that know how to effectively debug and triage problems in a complex software product is upsettingly small.
I don’t know why this is. Debugging has always seemed to me a very simple, straightforward task. Start at the top: figure out if the problem is reliably reproducible. If it is, start eliminating codepaths. It’s basically the Holmes Principle applied – when you’ve eliminated every other explanation as impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, is the explanation.
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Sep 27, 2004 · peterb · 3 minute read
Culture
What time is it?
Coffee Time is a Toronto coffee and donuts chain, roughly equivalent to what Dunkin' Donuts used to be in the US, before they made the conscious corporate decision to make all their donuts suck. They also have the best brewed coffee of any chain in Toronto (which, as I’ve alluded to before, isn’t really saying much), and better donuts than Tim Horton’s. They seem to be a thoroughly urban phenomenon – as soon as you get on the highway, they disappear, and you are left and bereft, Coffeetimeless.
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Sep 24, 2004 · peterb · 1 minute read
Food and Drink
I’ve heard about Retsina for years, but it was not until recently, at a Greek restaurant on Danforth in Toronto, that I actually got to taste it.
It tastes like rosemary wine.
That’s not a bad thing. Rosemary, of course, is a member of the pine family, and Retsina is treated with pine tree resin; hence the taste.
It’s a light white wine, similar in body to a Frascati or a Pino Grigio.
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Sep 23, 2004 · peterb · 3 minute read
Food and Drink
Bonjour Brioche is a breakfast place in Toronto. It’s inconveniently situated on Queen Street East about midway between downtown and the Beaches, at the corner of Queen and Broadview. It’s small, cluttered, and there’s usually a wait to get in. The hours are annoying and too short. And it has some of the best bread you’ll ever have.
The croissant is superb. The baguette transcends belief. The coffee is good. Amusingly, the brioche they are named for is only just sort of OK – if you’re in the mood for a pastry, skip it and get the croissant instead.
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Sep 22, 2004 · psu · 3 minute read
Food and Drink
Don’t be fooled. This is easy. You just have to follow a few simple rules and you too can make a beef stir fry that will show up the dishes at P.F. Chang’s as the chewey carboard crap that they are. First, the typical chinese stir fry starts with flank steak. I don’t know why, but it’s what my mom did, and she’s generally right.
Second, cut the meat as thin as you can across the grain.
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Sep 21, 2004 · peterb · 5 minute read
Games
Everett Kaser had one great idea for a game.
He’s taken that one idea, and leveraged it into many, many games. Which of them you play is a matter of taste. But if you don’t own at least one Kaser game, you’re missing out on the most addictive puzzlers since Sokoban.
Rewind to 1990: my friend Nerak hands me a floppy with a DOS shareware version of Kaser’s great idea: the game Sherlock.
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Sep 20, 2004 · peterb · 1 minute read
Web
Back from Toronto, with new tales to tell. This week, expect to see some or all of the following items:
The best baguette on Queen Street
Why is coffee in Toronto so uniformly bad?
A proposal for Canadian banking reform.
Retsina: the other white wine
…and, when they’re done, book reviews of Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, In the Shadow of No Towers, and the most recent of Jasper Fforde’s “Thursday Next” books, Something Rotten.
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Sep 18, 2004 · psu · 5 minute read
Photo
In an earlier article, I outlined my general thoughts on digital cameras. In that article, I noted that digital cameras fall into two basic categories: point and shoot cameras, and digital SLRs. At the time, my main camera had been a Nikon D100. So I thought now I’d write a more specific piece about that body and its more recent cousin, the D70. The D100
The Nikon D100 handles and shoots basically like a high quality mid-end Nikon film body, except that it captures digital files instead of slides or negatives.
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Sep 17, 2004 · peterb · 1 minute read
Places
I’m still in my office, rather than on my way to Toronto, because Pittsburgh – inland though it is – has had its own close, personal, and somewhat intimate encounter with Hurricane Ivan. To call what has happened here “flooding” is somewhat of an understatement.
17 September 2004, is officially the rainiest day in Pittsburgh’s recorded history, with 5.08 inches falling in a single day. Small Japanese sedans are floating through the streets.
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Sep 15, 2004 · peterb · 1 minute read
Games
For those of you who might want to play Sims 2, you could do worse than to read Tilt’s mini-review of his first exposure to it.
Sep 14, 2004 · peterb · 7 minute read
Games
I’ve never liked The Sims, despite trying to play it at least three times a year for the past few years.
I think a big part of this is the mise en scene. I can read books, cook, take out the garbage, go to work and shower all by myself; the idea of playing a game where I shepherd a little avatar through these activities feels just a little too meta.
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Sep 13, 2004 · peterb · 1 minute read
Games
The article on The Sims, and why we love (or, in my case, hate) it goes live tomorrow. If you want to get your $0.02 in, it’s now or never. Send your submissions to sims-article@tleaves.com.
So far, most of the submissions are from Sims addictsaficionados. Surely, I can’t be the only person out there who just Doesn’t Get It? Send me your take on it.
Sep 11, 2004 · psu · 4 minute read
Games
In addition to an orgy of Madden Football, I’ve been playing a lot of RPG titles lately. I’m still in the early stages of both Knights of the Old Republic and Mario and Luigi, the latter of which I’ve already written about.
These two games seem completely different. Mario is a sort of platformer/RPG hybrid, while KOTOR is described as an epic story with complex character development. These characterizations may be true, but I think if you look past surface elements like presentation, graphics and combat engines, you find that they are really the same game.
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Sep 10, 2004 · peterb · 2 minute read
Culture
Genesis Space Probe
In a press conference today, NASA Director Sean O’Keefe announced the preliminary findings of the Genesis space probe. Genesis, which succesfully engaged on a 3-year mission to explore the solar winds before crashing to Earth when a parachute failed to open, was salvaged from the Utah desert and moved to the clean room facilities of the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California.
“Thanks to the hard work of the recovery team,” said O’Keefe, “we have completed the processing and analysis of approximately 98% of the samples, and can now announce our preliminary results: the ‘solar wind’ that is blowing from our Sun is composed primarily of dirt.
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Sep 8, 2004 · peterb · 5 minute read
Computers
In my article Software Development Considered Harmful, I talked about a number of mistakes that are often made by developers who should know better. I’d like to expand on one of them here.
Never send a human to do a robot’s job.
A lot of the code we have to write to make programs run on modern platforms is code that can be more effectively generated by programs than by a human.
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Sep 7, 2004 · peterb · 1 minute read
Games
I want to like The Sims.
A large number of people whose opinions I respect adore the game. The graphic sensibility in it is bouncy and fun. The sound design and music are top-notch. The game has a sense of whimsy and humor. The ideas are clever, and the amount of customization you can do to your characters and their surroundings is practically unlimited.
And it bores me. It bores me to tears.
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Sep 6, 2004 · peterb · 1 minute read
Places
[](http://www.tleaves.com/weblog/images/articles/applestore- done.jpg)
applestore-done.jpg">Inside the Apple Store
The Pittsburgh Apple store is open. Welcome to the neighborhood.
The kids section is fun, everything is hands on, and the staff is (as should be expected) friendly and knowledgable. Three cheers for genius (and CMU grad) Meredyth for giving me the tour. Plenty of Birkenstocks were in evidence, as was lots of brand new, shiny merchandise. I don’t even need a new Mac and I found myself glad that I left my wallet in the car.
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Sep 3, 2004 · peterb · 3 minute read
Racing
“The power output of an engine [equals] the size of the bangs, times the number of bangs per minute that you can manage to get.”
Keith Duckworth – Cosworth Engineering
The Chariot Makers
Former Benetton mechanic Steve Matchett has written a new book, The Chariot Makers: Assembling the Perfect Formula 1 Car. True to his usual style, it is a breezy, informal, and very readable book.
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Sep 1, 2004 · peterb · 3 minute read
Food and Drink
Cafe Anatolia
I spent Monday in downtown Pittsburgh, taking a class. I only had about a half-hour for lunch, which left me with not quite enough time to head to Buon Giorno Cafe, my usual haunt. From the corner of my eye as I walked up Fifth Avenue I saw a marquee on the Warner Centre with the intriguing name “Cafe Anatolia.” Having always liked Turkish food, I decided to check it out.
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Aug 31, 2004 · peterb · 7 minute read
Games
One of the advantages to owning a nearly-obsolete PC is that you know off the bat that the latest and greatest games won’t run on it. So rather than spend $49.99 on the latest releases, which, let’s be frank, are usually not that good, you can hit the bargain shelf and find games for $10 or less. You’ve heard me talk about this before, as the “kielbasa sandwich in Chiodo’s” effect: it may not be a great sandwich, but it was only $2, so who cares?
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Aug 30, 2004 · peterb · 4 minute read
Games
Every so often, I forget that many PC games are bug-riddled sacks of garbage. When this happens, I go out and buy a couple, until I remember why I was driven to transfer most of my gaming to dedicated consoles. This is sad, since PC games do have a rich and storied history, and address a market that is not adequately served by consoles (that market being “people willing to spend way too much money on games.
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Aug 27, 2004 · peterb · 1 minute read
Places
[](http://www.tleaves.com/weblog/images/a rticles/apple_store_interior_close.jpg)
[Signs](http://www.tleaves.com/weblog/images/articles/apple_store_interior_clo se.jpg)
As promised, here are some photos of the soon-to-open Pittsburgh (Shadyside) Apple Store. I concur with the opinion that it doesn’t look anywhere near close to done, but then my experience in constructing anything other than computer programs is severely limited. Perhaps Steve will visit. We could have coffee at the relaxing and sociable cafe, Jitterz, across the street, and down one block. Here’s the exterior (click to enlarge) which still has quite a ways to go:
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Aug 26, 2004 · peterb · 1 minute read
Computers
According to Apple’s web site the Pittsburgh (Shadyside) store should go live the weekend of September 4th.
Quoth people who have walked by and looked in the window: “Hmm. the store didn’t look like it was 2 weeks away from completion when I went by yesterday. Must look more carefully.”
I’ll try to post some photos tomorrow evening; check this space then.
Update: The photos are here.
Aug 25, 2004 · peterb · 9 minute read
Games
Andrew Tepper
Continuing our focus on A Tale in the Desert, here is an interview with the Pharaoh of this particular Egypt, Andrew (“Teppy”) Tepper, the game’s designer and President of eGenesis, its publisher.
Typically, interviews like this focus on the gameplay design or community development. I’m less interested in that (in part because I think you can often explore those aspects by simply playing the game). Instead, my aim for this interview was to focus specifically on the actual technical development challenges in creating a complex online game with a small team, something that few of us have done.
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Aug 24, 2004 · psu · 5 minute read
Games
I don’t buy too many games the day they come out, so by the time I’m done with one it’s been around a while. Here are some thoughts on a couple of games that have been around for a while.
DEUS EX: Invisible War
This game has been derided for being a shallow, cheap, and generally lame followup to DEUS EX. Having not played the first game, I can only give impressions of the second on its own terms.
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Aug 23, 2004 · peterb · 8 minute read
Games
The gamer’s complaint of “we want innovative games!” is one that the industry has learned, through experience, to ignore. Some gamers want innovative games. Most gamers say they want innovative games, but really the marketplace proves that – as a group – they want derivative games that carry the illusion of being innovative. This is doubly true in the tired and pretty much creatively dead genre of multiplayer online role-playing games, which combine the kludgy game mechanics of any mediocre game that is five years out of date with the social culture of IRC and the lousy user interface of a MUD.
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Aug 19, 2004 · peterb · 1 minute read
Games
I have cancelled my City of Heroes account. It was fun while it lasted, but eventually I realized that my main motivation was to see cool super powers and beat up computer controlled bad guys. City of Heroes did that very effectively, but so does Diablo II, and that doesn’t charge me $15 a month for the privilege.
However, I have once again gotten entangled in the intriguing game A Tale in the Desert, this time as part of the beta test for the next version.
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Aug 18, 2004 · peterb · 2 minute read
Final Cut Pro
I have a problem that I can replicate reliably. If I capture in OfflineRT mode in Final Cut Pro I can generally only capture about 30 seconds of video before I drop a frame.
This has led to me spending hours debugging my camera, film, and every element in my chain other than my computer before reaching the sad conclusion: there’s nothing wrong with my equipment per se. The 867 Mhz Powerbook G4 with 640 Mb of memory is just too slow to capture more than about 30 seconds of OfflineRT video (30 seconds, incidentally, sounding suspiciously like “the amount of time it takes some internal buffer to fill up before it has to page to disk.
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Aug 17, 2004 · peterb · 1 minute read
Culture
Tooku (far away, Japanese)
Chiacchiarare (to chit-chat, to gossip, Italian)
Batcheat (chit-chat, Hindi)
Decimate (kill every tenth soldier,_ Latin_)
Hamartia (sin, human frailty, Greek)
Quay (wharf, Canadian)
Zdorovie (health, Russian) Decimation, in Latin, does not actually refer to senseless violence, but to a very specific – and rare – military punishment that could be imposed on a legion (or a subunit thereof, such as a cohort) for extreme cowardice.
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Aug 16, 2004 · peterb · 2 minute read
Culture
[](h ttp://www.tleaves.com/weblog/images/articles/boxers.jpg)
Minoan Boxers
If you’re in the USA, and want to see how Olympics coverage should be done, consider grabbing this video of the BBC’s coverage of the opening ceremonies [ in](http://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/2414/Olympic%20Opening%20Ceremony%20 -%20Athens%202004%20(BBC)%20Part%201of3.DigiTVRip.XviD-avi.torrent) [three]( http://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/2414/Olympic%20Opening%20Ceremony%20-%20 Athens%202004%20(BBC)%20Part%202of3.DigiTVRip.XviD-avi.torrent) [parts](http ://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/2416/Olympic%20Opening%20Ceremony%20-%20Athe ns%202004%20(BBC)%20Part%203of3.DigiTVRip.XviD-avi.torrent). You’ll need a Bittorrent client like Azureus to download these, and probably also the DivX video codec. The movie files are quite large – about 700 Mb per part – but worth it.
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Aug 14, 2004 · psu · 2 minute read
Food and Drink
Where I grew up in Amherst, MA, there is a farm market called Atkins Fruit Bowl that has been around forever. They started out as just an apple orchard, but quickly grew into almost a whole supermarket. In particular, at some point they started baking pies and donuts and other things in the store. And oh, what pies they are. They have a perfect crust, which is incredible in a semi- mass produced product.
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Aug 13, 2004 · peterb · 2 minute read
Culture
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Bjork is singing, but I can’t hear the song if you are **talking during it, ** you idiots. Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up. I hate you.
Is there anyone, anywhere, who has thought that NBC’s Olympics coverage for the past 20 years has been anything less than uniformly terrible? Who are these people? Why haven’t they been fired yet? What can I do to hasten the process?
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Aug 12, 2004 · peterb · 3 minute read
Games
Bonaguil 0.2 (click to play)
Bonaguil 0.2 is out, with support for pluggable AI modules. Give it a try.
The UI still sucks, because, well – I’m not very good at user interfaces. “Know thyself,” said the Oracle, and I know that I’ve never been one of the graphics people. Fortunately, in addition to making the AI easily customizable, I tried to keep all the GUI callouts separated in their own little ghetto.
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Aug 11, 2004 · peterb · 1 minute read
Food and Drink
mmmmmmm
[Nevat](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/06/24/WIGGN7AF341.DTL&type=wine), a Spanish goats' milk cheese that has the body of a brie but the lightness of a chevre. [Cabrales](http://www.vivirasturias.com/asturias/turismo- rural/40568/40891/0/queso-de-cabrales-en-el-concejo-de-cabrales/index.html), the best blue cheese in the world after true Roquefort. No bread, no crackers. Just a fork.
A glass of white port.
And, last but not least, two ripe, fresh green figs.
Sometimes, life is good.