Nothing you do really matters

Posted on June 10, 2003 by Pace Arko

Ten to the tenth to the one-hundred and eighteenth power meters away, there is in exact duplicate of you doing exactly the same thing as you are now. Assuming that a level one multiverse exists outside our hubble volume, this is certain. Makes everything a little pointless doesn’t it?

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More thoughts about African Cyberpunk

Posted on June 4, 2003 by Pace Arko

As I mentioned earlier, Gibson and Stephenson got it wrong: The place where all the technology will be churning in the decades to come will not be Asia. China and India are already sort of established and old hat now. Indonesia, Southeast Asia and Malaysia (Or whatever succeeds them, if they break up.) may generate a flurry of interest for a number of years but essentially it’s a story that we’ve already heard for 20 years already.

So where is it really going to end up? Where is that gritty mix of chrome and squalor, future and past, repression and anarchy that makes up the idea of cyberpunk most obvious? Africa. The post-industrial world can’t send their old computers out there fast enough. Already African software companies are beginning to sprout. Obviously they face all kinds of problems, lack of electricity and clean drinking water to start with, but whoever said industrialization was a painless process?

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We are in the XXI century!

Posted on May 29, 2003 by Pace Arko

So I am writing code at 4 in the morning, listening to KEXP (which I’ve already mentioned and linked to elsewhere in my site. Go look for it Sam!), and I hear something that makes absolutely plain that the XXI century is upon me: I hear an MC mention nanotechnology in his rant. Nanotech in rap. Can you get any more futuristic than that? Anyway the artist is EL-P and the mention is in “Accidents Don’t Happen” on the album Fantastic Damage.

Anyway this is the reason why I prefer listening to KEXP early in the morning: they stop doing the heavy rotation of the whiny white guy music that passes for “independent music” these days, they play stuff with cuss words in it and play stuff that really is obscure. Sigh, even on small “hip” stations they still do boring rotation. I’m an old geezer who misses the speed and anger of punk. I am sick to death of Camper Van Beethoven clones!

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Probing the Geosphere in a Blob of Molten Iron

Posted on May 14, 2003 by Pace Arko

By way of Slash and the Beeb, someone over at CalTech has imagined to explore deeply into the Earth’s crust and mantel by embedding a robot probe in jacket of several million tonnes of molten iron. This iron would then be dropped into a fissure opened a nuclear weapon. Telemetry with the probe would be conducted by seismic waves. The researcher doesn’t really think the idea will work but wanted to spur others to think about novel ways to accomplish this. This is really neat!

Maybe, assuming the blob of iron idea doesn’t work, we could use a china syndrome effect. We could create this blob of radioactive materials at critical mass surrounding or leading a blob of molten iron. We’d have to figure out some way of continuously feeding radioactives into the critical mass to keep it from diffusing away from critical mass as it bleeds through the rock. We’d also have to keep feeding iron into the mixture to replace that which wears away. It’s a been a long time since, I’ve been a physics student but this idea really intrigues me.

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Computers and paper-based RPGs

Posted on May 10, 2003 by Pace Arko

As I’ve been playing NWN over these last few months (I’ve owned a copy since mid-summer of 2002.), I’ve been thinking of ways to tie it into paper RPGs. Simple examples of this would be a tool that exports a snapshot of a NWN character into an XHTML document for printing and use in your table-top game or exports maps along with notes on the critters stocking it to a paper format. Another hack that I would like to see in NWN is to make it turn-based.

Why do I think about such things? Because I originally had the misconception that the game was something of a tool to handle all the accountancy of characters, physics and combat in paper-based RPGs. I don’t know how I got the idea, but I had this vision of a tool that would render a map and all the critters and player characters on it and people would just input their numbers (Or better still, have the computer generate them.) and it would step through a combat turn by turn. The GM would have the power to fudge numbers, replay a turn differently with different conditions or totally change anything that she didn’t like. I haven’t yet played NWN on a server where there were live GMs adjusting things and making things more real and flexible so, maybe I am speaking out of turn, the fact that NWN has no turn based mode is a little annoying to me.

I wanted something that would handle the physics so I wouldn’t have to. I wanted something to keep me free to deal with the plot and the background creation as opposed to micromanaging hit points, knock back and encumbrance. I wanted something to just sit next to me in a meatspace game session and act as my admin.

I have been slowly trying to get all my game notes and such into digital format so I can manipulate them on a computer. For example, I’ve been taking old NPC’s and painstakingly typing them into a database–Oh! For the want of handwriting recognition! Recently there have been tools from Wizards of Coast that are supposed to help GMs computerize their records, but the problem is that they keep all the files in proprietary binary. I want text files, CSV and XML so I can port or grep them into whatever I like! I’ve been searching around on the web recently and have rediscovered old tools that have been around since the days of ADVENT and Nethack. I may start using those.

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Bad Mojo for Internet Explorer

Posted on May 3, 2003 by Pace Arko

I just read on Slash today how a piece of valid markup can crash Windows Internet Explorer 4 and later. This includes many applications that use Trident, a dynamic link library that is the markup rendering component of IE–this means Outlook, Outlook Express and perhaps other Office components. Bad, bad bug!

Here is the invalid markup that causes Trident to crash (without the spaces before and after the angle brackets of course.):

< code >< input type >< /code >

To make this legitimate markup we take advantage of something called conditional comments (A silly idea if I ever heard one.)and the result is (again without the spaces.):

< code > < ! --[if IE] >< input type >< ![endif]-- >< /code >

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The music of computer games

Posted on May 2, 2003 by Pace Arko

It occurred to me last night, as I was playing NWN with some friends, that the background music of computer games has improved a great deal over the last 15 years. No more tinny, grating MIDI files being played on very simple sound cards. I sometimes wonder if the music of Age of Empires might be as memorable as all the pop hits of previous decades are. Of course the pop hits of previous decades are hardly high brow (Assuming that’s something that anything really wants to be.) but it says something about how bad computer game music was to say that it’s reached this level now.

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The REAL reason support for print media CSS is so poor

Posted on April 30, 2003 by Pace Arko

Imagine if people didn’t have to use Acrobat or Word to print out legible, neatly organized documents? Well, they almost can. They almost could if there was good support of CSS rules and attributes related to print media. Mozilla does the best job in support of CSS in printed media and Opera isn’t too shabby either but they still fall short in key areas. I wonder how long this is going to remain so. As a matter of course I put all my documents in XHTML or text now, but I am sure veterans from the print media can spot all kinds of shortcomings in using HTML and CSS in serious production of magazines or books and such. It’s a pity because HTML is pretty darn cross-platorm, very simple, open and lightweight and could be more than adequate from most people’s needs. One only has to look at Word’s zillions of unused features to realize that.

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How the semantic Web influenced my writing style

Posted on April 24, 2003 by Pace Arko

Other folks have probably written essays on how hypertext has influenced writing style in other media. Here I’d like to briefly discuss how working with and correcting document markup to make it conform to the semantic intent of the W3C standards has influenced and is influence my writing style.

When I write in e-mail, I tend to use a lot more bullets (No, I make them by hand using the * character. I avoid using HTML-based mail for good reasons.) to summarize and focus my points. I think more about why I am bolding or italicizing something–is it a book title or am I quoting someone famous? On long documents I think about using headings and subheadings; this helps me to focus my thoughts and cut away the inessential or emphasise it and bring it into focus. Dealing with the meaning of markup has really made me think about how I organize own writing and thoughts. It’s weird.

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Accessible data table attributes

Posted on April 22, 2003 by Pace Arko

Even though many screen readers and Web browsers don’t support them yet, I put accessibility attributes in all the data tables I put on sites. (Don’t know how to build an accessible data table? Use the accessible table builder.) The thing that still confuses me about the W3C standard is that it defines two ways to organize table rows and columns behind the scenes. This organization is supposed to help screen readers recite tables in a nonconfusing manner. But if there are two ways to do this, isn’t it a little counterproductive? Isn’t it likely that different tool makers will support one method and fail on the other? Just in case, I mark with both sets of attributes. Anyway, I should pose this question to their accessibility mail list one of these days.

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