Old clunky hardware

Posted on May 24, 2005 by Pace Arko

You know the hardware is old and broken when you can’t even get it install Linux. Yes, I have kernal boot floppies around but these old laptops either don’t have a floppy, the BIOS won’t support boot from CD or their floppy is broken. All I could do was swap the drives to my working laptop, DBAN them and install DOS. Now these old clunky laptops are off to RE-PC to be broken up for spare parts.

And my work laptop is getting long in the tooth too. It has plenty of RAM (512KiB) and a fast enough CPU (697MHz)to run XP but it’s DVD broken and its USB socket is loose. My current working laptop is assembled from two Dell Inspiron 3800s, one of which I dropped, the other I bought used. I guess I could get a docking station and a used DVD drive for it off eBay but is that just pouring good many after to bad?

And my two gaming machines are noisier than hell.

So why all this talk about hardware? Well, my small business has manage to show a profit for more than three months. Time to think about upgrades. I bought a new, network-ready, all-in-one device at the beginning of the month.

Posted in Computer Support | 3 Comments

Advertising in Software Games

Posted on May 21, 2005 by Pace Arko

I saw Episode III of Star Wars last Thursday. It was so-so, or at least the best of a bad lot but, here is the interesting thing that occurred to me: there was no way to have “prominent product placement” in the film. It takes place long ago in a galaxy far away. It’s therefore unreachable by Sony, GM, BASF or WalMart. The same thing applies to the Lord of the Rings, Middle-earth is unsullied by Coke ads. No ads in the Matrix trilogy that I can recall. Neo is not even using a Apple PowerBook or G*. (Contrary to what the marketing weasels at Apple would have you believe, not all the heros or hip guys use Apple.) Plenty of ads before the movies, plenty of ads in the theater lobby but, no ads in the films themselves.

There were ads in 2001 and in Bladerunner. This added some realism to the science fiction but it also dated the movies rather quickly. Pan Am doesn’t exist anymore. The Bell System doesn’t exist anymore. Atari ceased to exist and then was revived as a brand name by a totally different company. When you see the scenes I’m talking about, with the ads in them, you’ll wince.

This is really old news but now the marketroids are lathering up about putting ads in software games. Many of the sports games (auto racing, tennis, football, etc.) render stadiums, fields, arenas and tracks in photorealistic splendor–sweat, dust, ads and all. I’m sure the marketing departments at the big game companies are patting themselves on the back about that but, for me, that’s another reason not to buy sports games. The Sims is rife with advertising opportunities. Why get your sim just any ol’ vacuum cleaner, when they can get a Hoover (with a hidden neatness bonus to encourage players to by it.)? But I think if I stick with the fantasy and science fiction genres, I’ll be pretty safe from ads in the wire frames. I’ve busted the ads out of so many areas of my life; this is just one more.

Posted in Games, The Future | Comments Off on Advertising in Software Games

Time wasted on vitalism

Posted on May 19, 2005 by Pace Arko

Living things are complex machines. The mind is a process that occurs with the machine of the brain. There is no magical life substance or mind substance. There is no division between life and death, mind and mindlessness. It’s all a continuum and many things lie in the gray area. Life and mind can be created artificially or emerge from natural, blind processes.

Saying this scares some people because it implies that gods and souls aren’t necessary; they’re irrelevant. The religious and the mystical are left only with faith, faith in purpose and meaning. Science doesn’t really say anything about purpose and meaning.

Posted in Personal, Science and Engineering | Comments Off on Time wasted on vitalism

It's weird to see things revive

Posted on May 1, 2005 by Pace Arko

Now I’m truly old. I’ve lived to see punk and thrash return to the station formerly known as KCMU. I guess the kids think it’s hip to be angry again. I’m glad! I was getting completely, aardvarkly sick of the whiney, neo-paisley, post-cobain stuff that passes for college radio these days. It stopped being fun after Hammerbox broke up. Good to see the hyperactivity return.

Still it’s kind of weird to think there isn’t any new sounds out there to replace the tired stuff now. Punk is fun but revivials do not creativity make.

Posted in Music | Comments Off on It's weird to see things revive

Should I shut this thing down?

Posted on April 15, 2005 by Pace Arko

The trouble with writing things here is that I want to use it for at least three different purposes:

  1. As a lab notebook for web design, XML and such.
  2. Vague thoughts of the future of technology and society. I suppose if I was a real programmer/inventor I could combine this with purpose one.
  3. Reviews of books, television, films, music, games that I’ve experienced.

I seem to do better at commenting on what others have written than in initializing my own thoughts. This happens all the time when I comment on threads I’ve read on Orkut. I’ve wasted some great rants there! Rants that I should have here. But I can’t have here simply because the general public reads this and I have to defend my privacy. To write well, you really have to care about something.

The trouble with blogs is that you’ve got to keep adding new material. You’ve got to have a large mine of material to unearth.

If I were hacking on some daily project to work on, I could give you all updates on my progress or lack thereof on that. If I were like the technoprogressive pundits and journos over at WorldChanging I’d probably have a lot of news stories to post here that emphasize that viewpoint. If I weren’t utterly exhausted with refuting the undying mountain of pseudoscience, I’d probably talk more about my atheism and skepticism. If I approached and documented my creative work as a role-playing gamemaster more seriously, I could write about that.

At least I’ll be amassing more music to talk about in the near future, thanks to digital technology.

This site is a lot like my life. I’m too afraid to commit to anything in serious way. I seem content to run around in a million directions at once. As such I get much early exposre to a lot of hip stuff but I never engage in it long enough to really establish a name for myself. I’m lazy. To establish yourself as an expert in a field of endeavor requires a lot of hard work and a lot of focus. I seem unwilling to do either. I was in on the ground floor of accessible web design but, I never became a household name for it.

Sometimes this blog seems to ask me, “What are you waiting for?”

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on Should I shut this thing down?

I have decided I don't like MT

Posted on March 22, 2005 by Pace Arko

On March 13th around 5:55 in the morning, I had just finished installing MovableType.

It’s actually a well written piece of software, at least by my naive technician’s eyes, but, I simply don’t like the way the URLs are implemented. Some of directories MT creates don’t terminate in an index page. To me that’s a no-no in URL design. GM has ugly URLs too but at least their more friendly than MT’s. After languishing for a week or so, I restored a backup of my site.

Sigh. It looks like I’m just going to have to keep hacking GM beyond all recognition.

Posted in Webmastering | Comments Off on I have decided I don't like MT

Well, so long GreyMatter

Posted on February 8, 2005 by Pace Arko

It’s been fun. It’s been nearly 4 years since I installed Greymatter and then extensively changed it to meet my needs. But now that I see that the Fish was able to install version 3.1 of MovableType and we share the same server, it’s time for me to explore this.

I’ve read that it has a restrictive license so, there really isn’t a community of people contributing code to it. But we’ll see how neat it is. If I don’t like it, I can always put my GM installation back.

Posted in Webmastering | Comments Off on Well, so long GreyMatter

The Bakafish Joins the 21st Century

Posted on February 4, 2005 by Pace Arko

With a small amount of help from me, Baka has been working on a layout-table-free, semantic and pure CSS facelift for his site. He had just sent his penultimate draft to me last night. I looked it over and it looks nearly perfect! It renders just fine in Firefox and even IE6 on Windows. Opera 7.54 still looks a little dodgy but I think that can be compensated for with the right hiding tricks. He still has to optimize things a bit for Safari but he’s very close to finished.

I’m really happy to hear this! I’ve been doing things this way for the last six or so years. It’s just nice to see more and more people find the enlightenment of a better way of web design.

Baka has done it! He’s gone purely semantic and valid! Plus he’s added a blog! Hooray!

Posted in Webmastering | Comments Off on The Bakafish Joins the 21st Century

MSN takes the plunge into standards

Posted on February 3, 2005 by Pace Arko

As I’ve mentioned repeatedly, back in the late Nineties I was the webmaster for Microsoft’s accessibility pages. Back in those days IE for Windows was really the only game in town for CSS support but, I’d read about the WaSP, saw where the future was headed and became a true believer. But rather than repeat that story, I want to note that MSN’s latest facelift is apparently attempting to validate as XHTML 1 strict.

Hm. If my former employers are finally apprehending why web standards matter in terms of ease of maintenance, ease of development, reduction in server bandwidth and improvements in usability and accessibility, then perhaps it is time for me to come in from the cold. If I ever really was out in the cold.

I never really started to toot my horn about my time at Microsoft until recently. This was mostly because I was afraid I didn’t know enough. My time as a freelancer during the bust years taught me a lot but I still haven’t design web applications entirely from scratch. I think I have to start doing that.

Ah. I am just second guessing myself again. The decision I made back in the summer of 2000 was the correct one. It may have been an emotional hunch but sometimes that’s all you’ve got. I felt I was stagnating. I knew this would be bad for the team. I knew or at least felt that the only way to force myself to learn things is to throw myself into freefall. That’s what I did. I made the right choice.

Posted in Webmastering | Comments Off on MSN takes the plunge into standards

For Future Web Design Reference

Posted on January 31, 2005 by Pace Arko

My news feeds are getting out of hand. I now have more wonderful stuff to read than I have I have time. So in a effort to follow these things up later, when the Web hits a dry patch, I plan to save the links here with brief descriptions. This is mostly for my benefit as a web technician.

Posted in Webmastering | Comments Off on For Future Web Design Reference