Wing Commander Privateer and Open Source

Given that last weekend was part of an extended holiday in the US, I found myself with some free time out of meat space (given that the gym I go to closed for the entire weekend) and I managed to pursue my traditional leisure activities. I initially spent some money on the second episode of the Penny Arcade Game, and thought that that was it for part of my weekend. It turned out that a friend of mine managed to find a "modern" remake of the Wing Commander Privateer.

I use quotation marks for modern because the graphics within the game my friend sent are entirely ASCII-based. Technically though, many of the characters used are not part of the 95 printable ASCII characters, but that would be just anal on my part. Moreover, certain elements in the graphics are not entirely based on a terminal layout, for example, the shots from the ships weapons do deviate in a way that would not be possible in a terminal window. In any case, those I believe, were necessary changes for usability, and ASCII Sector is a very promising game. You can see the difference in look between the same ship in ASCII (the first image in the post), and the 3D version of the same ship (the second image in the post).

Now, when writing this post, I tried to look for pictures of the original game, and found out that the idea of resuscitating this particular game is not unique to that guy, with at least two other games in the open source: Privateer Gemini Gold, and Wing Commander Universe, both of which are Source Forge projects (though the second project seems to be undergoing a major overhaul). These two graphics games seem to be more true to the game dynamics of the original game, but what really makes ASCII Sector stand out is that it allows one to interact with elements outside the ship flight simulator, allowing one to wander around space stations and talking to people, including person to person combat, which allows for all sorts of interesting extensions, like boarding a ship and capturing (or killing) its crew. So as far as depth goes, ASCII seems to win, but who knows that the source forge projects might evolve into.

Is twitter for twits?

Now I finally surrendered to this (not so) latest Internet fad, and created me a twitter account. I have always thought that twitter was the pinnacle of an ADHD internet behavior, since it only allows very short (140 characters long) messages. Effectively being like blogging for people who cannot put together a coherent sentence, much less a paragraph. I can see how some organizations might use it as a type of news feed, for example, a university department, however for regular people, it strikes me as odd that some people would use it on its own just to say that they have just pooped or something.

I can see why this kind of thing could be used in social networking sites, as it was used initially by Facebook and then Orkut. Indeed, it would make sense now to centralize (if one feels the need) the posting of this minor life updates, which Facebook allows, but Orkut does not seem to. In any case, we shall see if I become a twit by using twitter.

Taxation without representation

After starting my work in the US, and waiting for two full months to get a real salary with a discrimination of all the discounts I get from health insurance, other optional services and taxes. Now, my greatest disappointment here is that, since the American government provides almost no service to the population, or at least nothing even close to what the European welfare states provide, I expected to pay a lot less taxes here. It turns out that this is a naive expectation, since I ended up giving away about a quarter of my salary to the government, in return for pretty much nothing from the US government. The ethical implications of this are a bit jarring to me, since I am indirectly fueling two wars, one of which I completely disagree with.

TED Talks

It has been a while since I have started watching the TED Talks, but only now it occurred to me to share this experience with whoever cares to read my blog. This particular talk, which I find particularly illuminating, talks about the many misconceptions many people have about so-called developing countries. The main one being that in rich countries people have small families and live longer, and in developing countries people live shorter lives in larger families. According to the data collected by this researcher (from very public sources), this conception is very wrong. It is amazing the insights that this guy puts based on hard data.

Today I wanted to cry

Before you take me for a pussy, let me say in my defense that I have played every single Mechwarrior computer game to this date (including some of the crap SNES and Mega Drive ones), and the prospect of a new one is very exciting to me, even if my gaming days are pretty much over. This teaser video is especially exciting, and (and this is no spoiler for those who would care about it) follows the tradition of Mechwarrior introductions (save for Mechwarrior 3) whereby the narrator usually meets his demise at the end of the video.

Although I have heard rumours of a law suit from the owners of some of the early designs used in this franchise, I am quite hopeful that I will be able to play this game.

Land of the free (to pay)

Don't trust this guy.

This week my anxiety generating problem has to do with the way utility companies do business in this part of the world. I always heard that American businesses are all customer centered, and that they treat the customer as king and whatnot, however this sounds like bullshit to me now that I am here. It seems that no company trusts their customers at all, especially the crappy utility companies, since they all demand very significant "security" deposits to start service with you. Moreover, since Americans still use very archaic banking practices (like paper cheques), by the time it is my turn to receive my deposit back, I will not even be in the country to cash the cheques they send me with the money I wasted on their deposits.

Any more blindly patriotic American reading this might get a fit for my rant, but I miss England so much, because for all people here like to criticize them, the British are, as Bertrand Russel once said, the ones who invented common sense (actually John Locke) in the 17th century, only they have been using it ever since.

Keep fucking that chicken

Today I was catching up with The Daily Show after having traveled to Niagara Falls, Ontario, in what was my first tourism trip of the US season of Felipe's research tour, I was just pissing myself with laughter at a local broadcast from Fox (no less), in which an apparently famous news anchor banters to the weatherman to "Keep fucking that chicken", in the video you see above. As I mentioned earlier in the post, this was picked up by Jon Stewart in his daily show. This seems like the kind of thing that would slip out in the entire lifetime of an anchor, but this seems like just another day at the office for news anchor Ernie Anastos, which seems to have a small, and illustrious history in blooping on air.

At the end of the day, I always thought that it was me that was always thinking profanity while I carry out regular conversation, and hoping (though not most of the time), that my thoughts would not spill out at an important moment in my conversations. Luckily for me, my verbal misadventures have not been the subject of The New York Times.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Intro - Ernie Anastos' Catch Phrase
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

Open iTerm here

As you probably know from my previous entries, I have upgraded to Snow Leopard, which, despite initial hurdles, led me to read and demand more of the operating system. Among the custom things that I missed from my old windows installation was a context menu allowing me to open a terminal window through an Explorer context menu pointed to a folder of interest. Recently I found the solution in another software developer's blog, which allows one to open a window of Terminal.app. I however, prefer the alternative (and open source) iTerm, and so I tried to simply change the name of the invocation within the code of the workflow I downloaded for the previous site. It turns out that it was not that simple, so ended up having to dig into a Mac hints forum to find the code that finally did what I wanted. And the result of that is my very own version of that script, which I call, Open iTerm Here. I do not guarantee it will work, even though it has worked in my Snow Leopard installation. It includes installation instructions, which are basically the following: open the zip file, go into the open-here folder, and copy Open iTerm Here.workflow to ~/Library/Services.

Turing gets apology, now missing a knighthood

The father of the modern computer and all around scientific genius, Alan Turing, has finally received an apology from the British government over his treatment 55 years ago, which probably contributed to his untimely death, curtailing what could have been an even more brilliant scientific career.

The only thing missing now is his granting of a Knighthood by the very same monarch who could have done that when this man was still alive, and his contribution to the continued existence of the British royal family was even fresher.

Update on last post

As an update, I found out how to solve this problem from this thread at the Apple support forums. Well, thank you very much for nothing Apple, since I had to figure out this crap on my own.

It is one of the weirdest bugs I've ever seen, but apparently, if you have multiple keyboard layouts set for your Mac, as I did using the US International layout to be able to type in diacriticals for latin languages, the dialog asking for your admin password would never come up.

This affected everything from program installations to unlocking certain preference panes.

So the only way to solve this was to remove all keyboards but the US one (I don't know if it happens for other keyboard types, since I have a US layout keyboard), and then add the other layouts back again.