Hope This Doesn't Keep You Up at Nights–

Posted on July 11, 2001 by Pace Arko

The US spends over a billion dollars each year to assure that decommissioned Russian nuclear weapons don’t fall into the wrong hands. Recently, Russian scientists discovered several flaws in the database software that the US lends to Russia to track it’s weapons and nuclear materials. The US has been using this accounting software to track it’s own nuclear weapons and materials for a few years now.

Surprisingly, a Slashdot author debunks the inference, made in the Washington Post, that it’s Microsoft’s SQL Server or NT that’s to blame.

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Why European Trains are Better than Ours

Posted on July 11, 2001 by Pace Arko

I ride Amtrak a lot and, from time to time, I’ve run into fellow passengers that were or are citizens of European countries.

Normally I’m not a very talkative person with strangers but, sometimes the subject of the differences between European and US passenger rail has come up between me and these aforementioned seatmates. As a geek, this is subject matter that I can actually get interested in.

Anyway once I ran into this guy from the UK who disagreed with my perceptions of the superiority of European rail technology. He said that service on British Rail sometimes really sucked. I argued that that was beside the point. The key thing is that UK passenger trains go much faster than US passenger trains and this is the only thing preventing the revitalization of US passenger rail as a medium haul commuting option. One only needs to think of the TGV in France to understand this gap.

He didn’t get it. He didn’t seem to understand our mania for speed in this country. This is surprising since it is likely that he’s taken a few rides on US airlines. The service sucks and the cabin is cramped but we don’t care as long as the planes get us someplace fast.

And Europe, and for that matter Japan, get a key side benefit: Because trains are fast and very common in Europe and Japan, that means fewer patrons of airports which vastly reduces traffic congestion (which essentially destroys much of the time savings for medium haul airflights.) and pollution (because more people are moved for less fuel.).

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The Screen Actors Guild better start worrying

Posted on July 10, 2001 by Pace Arko

Most of you out there probably saw this coming for a long time but, it is now getting almost impossible to tell computer generated images of humans apart from real humans. For example, Final Fantasy’s Dr. Sid is not real, he’s just a bunch of binary numbers on a disk. Of course his voice still requires a real person and his movements require body mapping from real people but this is still much cheaper than hiring real actors and even stunt doubles. Imagine what Hitchcock, who was a massive control freak and referred to actors as cattle, would have done with computer graphics.

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Ex-physics majors are dangerous

Posted on July 10, 2001 by Pace Arko

There’s this guy who invented a safety device to prevent injuries from rotory saws. It all relies on the electrical field generated by human skin, which is different from that of wood, to stop the saw blade within one hundredth of a second. He tested the device with hot dogs, which have electrical properties similar to human skin, but finally he had to make the ultimate test with his own finger. Obviously the device worked. Speaking as a fellow ex-physics major, I can vouch for this kind eccentricity.

Actually ex-mathematicians are more dangerous but we’ll leave it at that.

Posted in Science and Engineering | 2 Comments

Made a few minor changes to the journal pages

Posted on July 9, 2001 by Pace Arko

I moved the entry index and search form to the right-hand column on all journal pages to make them easier to get to. Thinking of finally implementing my Chumbe Bandia ideas as an EM-RPG. Thinking this dot-com downturn is finally beginning to suck and that I should start looking for steady work. Just general musings.

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A kid in search of a software patch

Posted on July 6, 2001 by Pace Arko

Went to see A.I. yesterday.

Anyway this isn’t exactly a review of the movie. It’s more an exploration of the ideas behind the movie. No spoilers.

All I can really say is that film shows that Spielberg, although he really tried, unsuccessfully fused Kubrick’s ideas and plot together and, as such, consistency and continuity suffered.

You get the impression that it should have been two or more movies. It sort of was–considering that Kubrick wanted to meld Aldiss’ “Super Toys Last All Summer Long,”, “Pinocchio” and Moravec’s Mind Children altogether into one movie. It may have tied together a lot better if the final scenes had been written differently. If you see the flick, you’ll know what I mean. Let’s just say that Steve should have made himself more familiar with Moravec’s (or Clarke’s) braintaping idea.

Kubrick apparently was and Moravec gives the impression that Mind Children was part of the inspiration for the movie, AI in the first place.

If some of these ideas were articulated better at the end of the movie, it would have provided an explanation for the end and the movie as a whole and resolved some remaining conflicts.

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Interesting rants about RPGs

Posted on July 5, 2001 by Pace Arko

Found an interesting page about RPGs today by some cat named Mu.

Me, I’m real old school, I’ve been playing RPGs since I was sophmore in high school in ’78. My friend wrote his own versions of ADVENT and Rogue (AKA, Nethack) for his university’s vaxen back in the early Eighties. Things have changed a lot since then.

Still, it’s interesting to see games like EverQuest and Asheron’s Call run into some of the same issues that I deal with in GM’ing my own, paper-based, sessions.

Some of you squares out there may not understand the addictive appeal of these games. But I could never understand the visceral appeal of football or golf myself.

Posted in Games, Udra | 2 Comments

Been a while since I've said anything.

Posted on July 4, 2001 by Pace Arko

On this Independence Day, as Ivar’s representatives attempt to turn our urban skies into an air raid zone, I can’t think of anything profound to say. Over the years I’ve had complex feelings about this country. But when I think about it, Emma is the one who comes closest to my way of thinking about the States. Drop science Emma!

Actually, now that I think about it, Woody comes pretty close too.

Posted in Personal | 2 Comments

Microsoft drops the Smart Tags feature in IE 6

Posted on June 27, 2001 by Pace Arko

Actually I wrote this entry about Chris Kaminski’s article last night before I saw the news that MS was dropping the feature.

A lot of ink has been spilled over the problems with this feature over the last three weeks so, I’ll just Mr. Kaminski’s list of reasonable demands:

  • Smart tags must be always invisible by default on any page retrieved from a web server (or pulled from the user’s cache). If Microsoft wants to offer a meta tag, they can offer one to make smart tags visible by default.
  • Smart tags should become visible only when the user issues a ‘show smart tags’ command, either by clicking a button, selecting a menu item or invoking a keyboard shortcut. Smart tags could also become visible when a user clicks or highlights a word for which they have a recognizer.
  • Smart tag actions should be labeled with the source company’s name or logo to show who is offering the user the functionality or information.
  • With default settings in place, smart tags should notify the user every time they contact an external server.
  • P3P support should be added to the technology to allow users to disallow any smart tags that attempt to track them.

If Microsoft plans to ever implement the feature again they must meet those requirements before I’ll find Smart Tags acceptable.

Microsoft does provide a tag for page authors to control smart tag behavior but unfortunately the default is to turn them off, not to turn them on. The tag is: < meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE" >

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Just made major revisions to Greymatter

Posted on June 23, 2001 by Pace Arko

Things seem to be working normally now except one of the client-side editing tools has broken. Considering all that I’ve done, this is surprisingly good news.

Things I’ve changed:

  • Fixed the URL strings of the Karma function so that they parse as kosher markup in W3C validators
  • Removed most of the presentational markup in the Greymatter forms. A needlessly nitpicking change for sure, but it makes the script easier for me to read. I knocked off more than 60 KB this way. It makes the script easier to upload and probably makes it run faster too.
  • Increased the functionality of the JavaScript used in the editing function
  • Made certain that all markup that is generated is lowercase.

Things planned in future:

  • More encapsulation and modularization. For example, putting all the JavaScript in separate files referenced from Greymatter.
  • Tightening security.
  • Correcting other minor markup errors generated. For example the use of ” instead of ".
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