I've been spending a lot of time at work lately debugging Java. The details are not particularly important, other than to note that the popular description of JavaEE as "the new COBOL" is deadly accurate.

Most of you whipper-snappers probably use Eclipse to do your debugging these days. And that works quite well as long as you happened to compile the code you're debugging. But what happens when you didn't compile the code you're debugging? With Eclipse, you're pretty much screwed. Even if you create a fake project and link in the source, it still never really works quite right. Breakpoints often don't break. Eclipse often can't figure out which line you're actually executing. Etc.

So let's talk about going old-school - enter jdb. Never really intended to be more that a proof of concept for the JPDA, it actually turns out to be surprisingly useful when you need to debug something you don't have source code for and/or didn't compile yourself.

One nice thing about jdb is that if you have a JDK, then you have a copy of it. It's been a standard tool since Java 1.2. If you're on Windows, Unix, a Mac and have installed a JDK, then jdb(.exe) will be waiting in $JDK_HOME/bin/.

Another thing you may be surprised to hear about jdb is that it can do remote socket debug just like Eclipse can. This isn't well documented, so I'll give you the magic invocation here:

jdb -connect com.sun.jdi.SocketAttach:hostname=myserver.com,port=8787

(This is of course done after you start the remote program with java -agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,server=y,address=8000 myClass to allow it to be remote debugged, natch.)

Here's a quick cheat-sheet to get you started with the obvious stuff:

stop in com.mydomain.mypackage.myclass.mymethod         # Set breakpoint on method entry
clear   # List (no args) or clear (with args) breakpoints
use /home/mydir/sourcecodedir/     # Set source code path
list    # List source code lines
next    # steps OVER method calls
step    # steps INTO method calls
step up # run until current method returns
cont    # continue exection after breakpoint
print (somevar)   # Show current value of somevar

All pretty standard, I know. But it should be noted that all of the above work whether you have source code or not, which beats the hell out of Eclipse. Now, how about some stuff that's a little more fun?

classpath     # Print JVM's classpath
disablegc (expr)   # prevent garbage collection of an object
classes                   # list all currently loaded classes
class org.package.class   # show details of named class
methods com.this.class    # list a class's methods
fields com.that.class     # list a class's fields
eval (java expression)  # Run arbitrary java code, alter program state at will
redefine com.some.class newcode.class  # Load new .class file to redefine an existing class

Some interesting possibilities there, eh? eval is particularly fun. Need to delete an item out of a HashMap? Just eval myHashMap.remove("thiskey") and you're done. (And yes, Eclipse's debug perspective can do this too if you know how... but how many people do?)

The possibilities for redefine are especially amusing to contemplate...

This is arguably the best thing ever: http://labs.spritelink.net/living-with-windows-7

Further explanation of UserPreferencesMask: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc957204.aspx

Note: Bit 0x40 ("Active window tracking Z order") is basically equivalent to "autoraise" in X. Clear the bit to enable autoraise (default), set the bit to disable autoraise.

In my Windows 7 installation, "ActiveWndTrkTimeout" is set to 500 (ms) by default, which is actually a pretty good default, maybe even a tiny bit fast. See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc957203.aspx

Edit: After living with it for about a week, I think it could use some improvement. It needs a "if the cursor sits still for X time, auto-raise. Otherwise don't." type of deal. It's annoying to be moving across windows to the other monitor and have them all auto-raise because they're wide and you stay inside them for .5 sec as you move the cursor across.

http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3p77cy/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3337056/convenient-way-to-parse-incoming-multipart-form-data-parameters-in-a-servlet

Why would we want our convenience methods that work for every other kind of HTTP transaction to work the same way for multi-part POST transactions? That's crazy talk. You must be some kinda person who believes that libraries and frameworks are supposed to make life easier for the application programmer, or something. Nutjob!

I constantly see people on Reddit /r/ece, /r/electronics, etc asking for advice on how to drive LEDs. It happens at least once a week. The classic approach is to take the input voltage, subtract the LED's forward voltage, and then use V = IR to compute the appropriate resistor. And that does work.

( But there's another way. In my opinion, a better way. )

Here it is:


Click on the image to open circuit simulation in a new window/tab. (NOTE: Requires Java capable browser.)

Simple, no? The only thing you need to know is how to calculate the resistor. Here's the formula:

Rbase = 100 * ((Vconstant - 0.65) / Iconstant)

( Read more... )

( Code... )

I created this algorithm as a result of reading a post on Reddit that showed some shockingly poor performance for intrinsic software "%" operator in some C compilers for microcontrollers which don't have hardware divide.

How does the algorithm work? Well, the mathematical definition of modulo is:

y % x = y - (x * int(y/x))

The trick this algorithm employs is to do a kind of weirdo binary search to find (x * int(y/x)), without ever directly computing int(y/x), or using division.

( Read more... )

Is it possible to do this faster? I strongly suspect so. As the Wikipedia link given below notes, it is possible to reduce (y % x) to (y & (x-1)) when x is a power of 2. Seems to me that trick should be exploitable to bring the time to compute modulo down even farther. But in any event, the above unsophisticated and unoptimized algorithm should still be a very large improvement over modulo implemented via a software divide routine... as some people's compilers are probably doing now.


See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulo_operation#Performance_issues

http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html#ModulusDivisionEasy

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2566010/fastest-way-to-calculate-a-128-bit-integer-modulo-a-64-bit-integer

I haven't had much chance to play RAGE. Job hunt it taking almost all my time. However, I think I have found some things worth sharing...

( Trivial. )

( Update 2012/02/22 )

http://cds.linear.com/docs/Application%20Note/an81f.pdf

From the excellent Reading Jim Williams blog.

After seeing this, I can't believe we're still using magnetic core transformers. I realize they're good for high-current, low-frequency applications. But this is so much better for LCD backlights, I can't believe it hasn't come to utterly dominate the marketplace.

This is probably how the people that invented fuel injection way back in the 1920's felt. "Why isn't everyone using this??" :P

But my friend decided to buy some other blu-ray discs. Or at least he tried to, until we were “assisted” by a young, poorly groomed sales clerk from the TV department, who wandered over to interrogate us. What kind of TV do you have? Do you have a cable service, or a satellite service? Do you have a triple play service plan?

He was clearly—and clumsily–trying to sell some alternative. (My guess is CinemaNow, Best Buy’s private label on-demand content service.) My friend politely but firmly told him he was not interested in switching his service from Comcast. I tried to change the subject by asking if there was a separate bin for 3D blu rays; he didn’t know.

The used car style questions continued. “I have just one last question for you,” he finally said to my friend. “How much do you pay Comcast every month?” My friend is too polite. “How is that any of your business?” I asked him. “All right then,” he said, the fake smile unaffected, “You folks have a nice day.” He slinked back to his pit.

As a sometime business school professor, I could just imagine the conversation with the TV department manager the day before. “Corporate says we have to work on what’s called up-selling and cross-selling,” the clerk was informed in lieu of actual training on either the products or effective sales. “Whenever you aren’t with a customer, you need to be roaming the floor pushing our deal with CinemaNow. At the end of the day, I want to know how many people you’ve approached.”

But this is hardly customer service. It’s actually getting in the way of a customer who’s trying to self-service because there’s no one around who can answer a basic question about the store’s confusing layout. It’s anti-service.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2012/01/02/why-best-buy-is-going-out-of-business-gradually/

Beast Buy is founded on the idea of anti-service. It's their bread and butter. And they're far, far too stupid to know that they're cutting their own throats. Personally, having worked there, I don't think it could happen to a nicer company. I will throw a party when Best Buy finally dies.

So amishx64 @ Reddit said they wanted a medium voltage, high amp regulator. Specifically, something to regulate 76 volts down to 70, and do so at a current of 8 amps(!).

( To buy or to build... )

That decided, now it was mainly just a question of using the classic negative-feedback regulator architecture and adapting it to P-channel MOSFETs. I'm pretty pleased with the resulting circuit:



Falstad Circuit Sim code: http://www.gully.org/~mackys/circuits/linreg-opamp.txt

( Read more... )

Notice that Perl requires over sixty seconds to match a 29-character string. The other approach, labeled Thompson NFA for reasons that will be explained later, requires twenty microseconds to match the string. That's not a typo. The Perl graph plots time in seconds, while the Thompson NFA graph plots time in microseconds: the Thompson NFA implementation is a million times faster than Perl when running on a miniscule 29-character string. The trends shown in the graph continue: the Thompson NFA handles a 100-character string in under 200 microseconds, while Perl would require over 1015 years. (Perl is only the most conspicuous example of a large number of popular programs that use the same algorithm; the above graph could have been Python, or PHP, or Ruby, or many other languages. A more detailed graph later in this article presents data for other implementations.)

It may be hard to believe the graphs: perhaps you've used Perl, and it never seemed like regular expression matching was particularly slow. Most of the time, in fact, regular expression matching in Perl is fast enough. As the graph shows, though, it is possible to write so-called "pathological" regular expressions that Perl matches very very slowly. In contrast, there are no regular expressions that are pathological for the Thompson NFA implementation. Seeing the two graphs side by side prompts the question, "why doesn't Perl use the Thompson NFA approach?" It can, it should, and that's what the rest of this article is about.

http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html

These aren't used much because the implementation is a little more difficult, and you have to give up some things, like backtracking. Still, if your program is limited by regex matching speed (most aren't, but just in case) you should consider using an NFA regex package, instead of the default DFA regexes that come with most languages/libraries.

If you enjoy TEH DEVIL MUSIC, this may be relevant to your interests:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.272692642768878.63482.100000844344684&type=1&l=560f04be86

Ever wondered if you can synchronize your Windows (2000 or later) computer's clock with an NTP server? Yes, you can download NTP synchronizer program if you want. But I am lazy and hate waiting for downloads, so I wanted to do this with just stuff that ships with Win7.

Turns out you can synchronize with time.windows.com, which is accurate to approximately 1.5 seconds. If that's good enough for you, here's a way to do it without downloading anything:

First, click on the Start menu at lower-left. Type in "cmd". Windows will show you a "cmd.exe" program. Right-click on it and then click "Run as administrator". Now a special "administrator" command prompt will come up. Type in:

net start w32time

w32tm /config /update /manualpeerlist:time.windows.com

w32tm /resync

net stop w32time

The "net start" command starts a windows service that synchronizes clocks, the "w32tm /config" commands tells it you want to synchronize with time.microsoft.com, the "w32tm /resync" command says "okay, actually do a sync now", and finally the "net stop" command shuts down the sync service, since the clock has successfully been sync'd.

It's a lot more convoluted and annoying than Linux's "ntpdate", but I guess that's Windows for you. :P If you anticipate doing this frequently, by all means cut and paste the above into a batch file named "synctime.bat" or whatever. Just remember that you need to run it as administrator, or it won't work.


Google-bait: NTP server manual time synchronization windows

http://www.androidzoom.com/android_applications/productivity/droid48_wex.html

Aww yee, muffins...

No doubt I've been working too much. This weekend was the most fun I've had in two months at least. Let's name and praise!

Saturday Chuck invited me to come see an Impulse Theater show. This is the improv group that performs in the basement of the Wynkoop Brewery. Afterward we dropped by Watercourse Foods (near 17 & Emerson) for some of the best vegan food I've ever had.

Sunday during the day I got to help Simon move. ("Friends help you move - real friends help you move bodies.") There's no shortage of interesting people around Simon, and it was cool to meet everyone. I was actually disappointed how many people showed up - I didn't even get to do any heavy lifting. After how hard I worked Simon during my move, I was ready to move mountains for him.

Sunday evening I hooked up with j_b, Morgan and Shawn. Bailey and I got dinner at a little Chinese place down at Alameda and Logan in Wash Park. It is evidently under new management and the food has taken a major turn for the better. I was literally licking my plate (for real, ask Bailey) after I was done with my shrimp & vegetables. The food is excellent, and it isn't expensive either. You may have noticed I haven't named the place - that's because I'm not sure I remember the name right, and I don't want to give you the old name, as the food didn't used to be as good. (I'll try and find out what the name of the place was, and toss an edit in here.)


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1270262/

After dinner we went and saw The Devil's Double at The Mayan. This is a movie about the life of Uday Hussein, Saddam Hussein's son. This is an amazing movie, and it's a damnable shame that it will never be shown in mainstream theaters. The reason is simple: it's completely unflinching and it pulls no punches. Torture, rape and endless drug use were Uday's weekly routine, and the movie shows all of it in graphic detail. Dominic Cooper turns in an incredible performance as both Uday AND his body double Latif Yahia. Top it off with a budget of $24 million and direction by Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day, Along Came A Spider), and you have what really should be the movie of the summer - if anyone even knew it existed. GO SEE THIS. You're missing out on what may be the best movie of the year if you don't.

Video games are art, and they deserve the exact same First Amendment protections as books, comics, plays and all the rest, the U.S. Supreme Court said Monday in a ruling about the sale of violent video games in California.

California had tried to argue that video games are inherently different from these other mediums because they are "interactive." So if a kid has to pick up a controller and hit the B button - over and over again until he starts to get thumb arthritis - to kill a person in a video game, that's different from reading about a similar murder, the state said.

The high court didn't buy that argument, however.

[...]

"Like the protected books, plays, and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas - and even social messages - through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player's interaction with the virtual world). That suffices to confer First Amendment protection."

http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming.gadgets/06/27/supreme.court.video.game.art/

And so another miserable old scold loses any claim to be able to tell those kids that they can't play on their own lawns. Excellent.

P.S. IN UR FACE, Roger Ebert! ;]

Just wanted to give a quick shout out here: I can't login to my LinkedIn profile. Consequently can't accept any invitations to link. Sorry to those who have sent them, you know who you are. I'll keep trying. (They won't even send me an email with my reset password... I swear Linkedin gets dumber every hour.)

I'm quitting PlentyOfFish.com out of sheer boredom. The last two months with an account there have completely validated my prejudice that there are no single women over 25 in Boulder. (Actually, there was one, but she evidently deleted/hid her account, so...) I suppose my timing could have been better. I created my account just before 4th of July weekend, so the two replies I did get were: "let's talk again after the 4th holidays are over." And then no messages after that. Guess I'm not very memorable. ;]

In other news of the nerdy, the wifi I'm leeching off is one whose encryption is disabled and has no password... but also has its SSID broadcast turned off. Someone thought security through obscurity actually worked! So I ask you, my fellow techies... how many gigs of sheep porn¹ per hour should I download through this person's unsecured wifi? ;]

-----
¹ Hot, hot, SEXY sheep pr0n...

By contrast, EVE takes a much smaller player base - perhaps 450,000 - but jams all these monkeys into one barrel, a barrel from which there is no escape - no 'other server' to flee to and begin anew. The learning curve in EVE might as well be vertical, despite all the efforts to make the game more newbie-friendly over the years; any sort of mistake usually results in you dying horribly and losing substantial assets, which are very limited when first playing the game. Additionally, more than any other MMO, EVE relies heavily on mathematics and spreadsheets in the player-run logistics and production aspects of the game. Given the violence, loss, and (horror of horrors) math, it is only a certain sort of of monkey who not only ascends the nightmarish and Darwinian learning curve, but finds the process entertaining enough to stick around and play for more than a week. So this is EVE, a galaxy filled with socially inept spreadsheet nerds on the one hand and obsessive, ambitious griefers on the other. Resources are limited and must be fought over, and the only way out is to quit entirely.


http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/65475

I like to say, "Life is not a zero-sum game."

EVE Online... is!

Who's white, has two thumbs, and wishes he was as smart as Neil deGrasse Tyson?

(points thumbs at self) THIS GUY! ;D

I don't think C gets enough credit. Sure, C doesn't love you. C isn't about love - C is about thrills. C hangs around in the bad part of town. C knows all the gang signs. C has a motorcycle, and wears the leathers everywhere, and never wears a helmet, because that would mess up C's punked-out hair. C likes to give cops the finger and grin and speed away. Mention that you'd like something, and C will pretend to ignore you; the next day, C will bring you one, no questions asked, and toss it to you with a you-know-you-want-me smirk that makes your heart race. Where did C get it? "It fell off a truck," C says, putting away the bolt-cutters. You start to feel like C doesn't know the meaning of "private" or "protected": what C wants, C takes. This excites you. C knows how to get you anything but safety. C will give you anything but commitment

In the end, you'll leave C, not because you want something better, but because you can't handle the intensity. C says "I'm gonna live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse," but you know that C can never die, not so long as C is still the fastest thing on the road.

http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1312655446/4

Yes, from a 4chan board. Really.

Why do I personally like C? Partly it's Baby Duck Syndrome - C was my first real language (Apple Basic doesn't count). Partly it's that I've always been a low-level guy, who likes assembler and enjoys knowing how things work behind the curtain. Being essentially a portable assembler with a veneer of high-level language applied, C appeals to me in the same way sportbikes do. You're close to the metal, but not so close you're getting burned. You're just close enough to the machine to enjoy it, but the rough edges have been mostly rounded to where it's mostly comfortable. High power, but reasonable comfort.

My mom talked me into voting for Obama the first time. Not again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

If Ron Paul runs, I'll vote for him knowing full well he won't win. If he doesn't, I may not bother to vote at all, or I might write in Anton LeVay. (It's time to stop voting for the lesser evil. :P)

What he found is that the batteries are shipped from the factory in a state called "sealed mode" and that there's a four-byte password that's required to change that. By analyzing a couple of updates that Apple had sent to fix problems in the batteries in the past, Miller found that password and was able to put the battery into "unsealed mode."

From there, he could make a few small changes to the firmware, but not what he really wanted. So he poked around a bit more and found that a second password was required to move the battery into full access mode, which gave him the ability to make any changes he wished. That password is a default set at the factory and it's not changed on laptops before they're shipped. Once he had that, Miller found he could do a lot of interesting things with the battery.

"That lets you access it at the same level as the factory can," he said. "You can read all the firmware, make changes to the code, do whatever you want. And those code changes will survive a reinstall of the OS, so you could imagine writing malware that could hide on the chip on the battery. You'd need a vulnerability in the OS or something that the battery could then attack, though."

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/07/hacking_apple_l.html

Making your batteries a different size and/or shape than others? Probably had a good reason for it.

Making a customized connector for your batteries? That's starting to get a little silly, but maybe it was to lower cost, or enable the flow of more watts between battery and computer.

Adding extra expense and extra complexity to both the battery and the driver software by putting not one but two layers of password lockout... on a damn battery??

That's not evil, monopolistic or specifically designed to avoid interoperability and guarantee your ability to price-gouge your customers, Apple. Nope. Not at all. Stay classy, you guys. And by all means, continue this kind of behavior. You're doing a stellar job of niche-marketing yourself right into oblivion.

The fact that such added complexity provides a potential opening for BIOS viruses that can't be detected by normal means and will survive an OS reinstall? That's just the icing on the cake. Memo to geniuses: Haven't you guys ever heard of a fuse? If you don't want customers (or viruses) casually messing with your battery's firmware, then you should have put a twenty cent chip fuse on your $100 battery, and blow it as the last step of the factory QC process. Then nobody can change your device's factory settings without at least having to take it apart.

(Yeah, I know: "So sorry - we can't hear you over the sound of our thousand-foot high piles of cash!" -Apple. Yeah, well, you guys be sure to let me know when you find your thousand-foot high pile of brains! What's that? You say you don't have one of those? Well then...)

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-wrath-of-the-killdozer/

Some thin-skinned person might say: "How you can laugh at such a horrible tragedy??" I ask: "What tragedy?" Heemeyer didn't manage to kill or even seriously injure anyone. Not a single person. He did property damage only, and then he paid with his life. That's why this is worthy fodder for humor - because nobody else was hurt. The fact that Heemeyer was clearly bonkers, and that he built an unstoppable redneck tank, only make it all the more bizarre and thus more amusing.

My net connection is going away temporarily due to my apartment move. I may be rather scarce online for the next couple weeks.

Phone number is in the user info as always, should you need to contact me urgently.

Chances are you’ve never heard of TruePosition. If you’re an AT&T or T-Mobile customer, though, TruePosition may have heard of you. When you’re in danger, the company can tell the cops where you are, all without you knowing. And now, it’s starting to let governments around the world in on the search.

The Pennsylvania company, a holding of the Liberty Media giant that owns Sirius XM and the Atlanta Braves, provides location technology to those soon-to-be-merged carriers, so police, firefighters and medics can know where you’re at in an emergency. In the U.S., it locates over 60 million 911 calls annually. But very quietly, over the last four years, TruePosition has moved into the homeland security business - worldwide.

Around the world, TruePosition markets something it calls "location intelligence," or LOCINT, to intelligence and law enforcement agencies. As a homeland security tool, it’s enticing. Imagine an "invisible barrier around sensitive sites like critical infrastructure," such as oil refineries or power plants, TruePosition’s director of marketing, Brian Varano, tells Danger Room. The barrier contains a list of known phones belonging to people who work there, allowing them to pass freely through the covered radius. "If any phone enters that is not on the authorized list, [authorities] are immediately notified."

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/global-phone-tracking/all/1

Old news. Very old. I've been telling people about this since the late 90's, when I helped write some of the code to make one of the first E-911 systems work. (For a now-defunct company, not for TruePostion.)

I am going to need one or two people to help me move, this Saturday 7/23 @ 11am up here in Boulder.

I don't have much stuff; I pride myself on that. And most of my stuff I can move myself; ditto.

However, you may remember that I acquired a couch last year. It's not heavy, but it's physically larger than my arm-span, and thus I can't move it myself because I can't pick it up. My bookshelf has similar problems - not heavy, but too large for me to get my arms around. Ditto with the dresser. So these are the things I need one other person's help for. It doesn't need to be a strong person, either, because these things aren't heavy, just awkward. I just need another set of hands.

It's also easier to move my bed frame with another person than alone. I can take it apart into one-person sized pieces, but it's faster to leave it assembled. Frankly the hardest part of moving the bed is moving the futon, which is heavy and awkward and right at the limits of my arm-span. The frame itself is really quite light and easy, it's just bigger than my arm-span when assembled, so...

If you feel like helping me schlep boxes after the two-person stuff is moved, hey great. But there's no obligation. I can move all the boxed stuff myself with ease.

I'll have my step-dad's F150, so no worries on vehicular arrangements.

As usual, I'll take anyone who helps me move out to lunch when we're done. For whatever you guys collectively want. My usual offer is BeauJo's for pizza. But if there's something better, just name it.

Please RSVP via a comment here, an email, or call me 303-817-5817 so I can know if someone is coming. If not, I'll need to ask a relative to come help.

Edit: You guys kicked ass and took names, in spite of the heat! Thanks a ton for the help! "Friends help you move; real friends help you move bodies."

Truth hurts, eh?

Stop me if you've heard this before: "I'm a business guy, not so good on the technical side, and I've got a great idea that I need a programmer to develop for me. I don't have any funding yet, but I've got a really nebulous connection to the venture capital world. That being said, I'll start paying you once we get funding or we start making a lot of money from the project! All you need to do is write a Facebook clone in 2 weeks."

This kind of shit lands on Craigslist so often that it makes you wonder what they actually teach at business schools. It's time for we programmers to take revenge! So, a couple of months ago, I did a reverse-programmer troll on Craigslist. It went something like this:

http://teddziuba.com/2011/07/the-craigslist-reverse-programmer-troll.html

The troll itself is hilarious, but the responses are even more hilarious. You've heard the phrase, "hook, line and sinker"? Bahahahaha!


And speaking of internet-based businesses...

Intellectual property law that provides an economic foundation for anti-Star Trek: the ability to tell others how to use copies of an idea that you "own." In order to get access to a replicator, you have to buy one from a company that licenses you the right to use a replicator. (Someone can’t give you a replicator or make one with their replicator, because that would violate their license). What’s more, every time you make something with the replicator, you also need to pay a licensing fee to whoever owns the rights to that particular thing. So if the Captain Jean-Luc Picard of anti-Star Trek wanted “tea, Earl Grey, hot”, he would have to pay the company that has copyrighted the replicator pattern for hot Earl Grey tea. (Presumably some other company owns the rights to cold tea.)

http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/

My anti-IP rants are tiresome enough to me already, I'm sure you're sick of them. Suffice it to say you can get the tl;dr version of my feelings here.

The Colorado Technology Association has announced Power Tagging as the "Technology Product of the Year" award winner from over 100 applicants. The prestigious award recognizes technically innovative solutions that solve real world problems in a manner that provides benefits to its customers. Power Tagging, a leading provider of solutions that enable Utilities to deliver energy efficiencies through intelligent grid management, has now garnered its second major award in the past 30 days.

"Power Tagging is taking a leading edge approach to managing the smart grid. They have been dedicated to improving the overall efficiency between energy providers and their end users," explained Su Hawk, President, Colorado Technology Association. "They believe the Smart Grid can be achieved by delivering a strong rate of return for Utilities, energy savings for consumers, and flexibility for the future. Their technology is amazing and truly deserving of this Award," she continued.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/07/14/prweb8641882.DTL

When I first came to PowerTagging, conservation applications were the thing I was least excited about. But as time has gone on, the ability to conserve energy by real-time monitoring of the voltage on the power grid has become more and more interesting to me. Today, I think it's the best thing about PowerTagging's technology.

Most of our power plants still run on coal, and I don't see that changing swiftly - certainly not in the next ten years. Automated conservation measures will mean that we burn less coal, without any kind of disruption to customers' electrical power. This is a no-lose scenario: we burn less coal AND the grid becomes more stable. Try and accomplish that with your old dumb-grid!

And PowerTagging has an actual, on-grid demonstration system that provides the capability to do this today. I'm not kidding - I'm sitting about 25 feet from our in-house demo system that actually measures voltages on the lines here in the office, and then sends that info back to the electrical substation about 1.5 miles away, in real-time, via the power lines. And it's been doing this consistently, month after month, for at least...

...uh, whoops! I don't think I'm allowed to tell you that. ;] Suffice it to say, it works. And has for quite a while. This ain't sci-fi. It's here today.

http://twitpic.com/5p5736

Christ, Grant, don't you get enough chicks already? Save some for the rest of us!

In other news of the bleedingly obvious, Grant's photo-stream continues to be pretty much the only thing worth looking at on Twitter.

P.S. Special bonus Scari-Kari! ;]

Xbox 360 controls: Clicking left stick turns light on and off, so you can run and turn light on/off at the same time. "Speak" is moved to cross pad, since you're usually standing still when you speak anyway.

Gun & blade: Can carry one pistol/magnum AND one melee weapon simultaneously. Can only use one at a time, however. Standard weapon switch key rotates through long gun, pistol, melee.

Trample mod: Zombies that are in the animations frames where they have their backs on the ground can be stepped on and run over, at the cost of reducing your movement speed. In other words, a zombie that's been knocked down and has its back on the ground can be trampled, at the cost of slowing you down somewhat. Also a zombie that you're standing on can't get up and can't hit you. It just flails and sputters at you.

Transferable Laser Sight: When you drop a laser sight weapon, the laser falls off separately, and can be picked up by you or anyone else and attached to the weapon you/they are now holding.

"Distracter" flare launcher: Launches a parachute-equipped flare into the air. As it descends it distracts the zombies, who stare at it and won't attack you unless you provoke them - i.e. shooting them, touching them, etc. VERY limited ammo: 3-5 flares. Also doesn't work nearly as well indoors due to low ceilings. (An homage to Land Of The Dead, where fireworks fascinate zombies into passivity.)

Silenced pistol: Allows you to headshot a zombie without alerting the other zombies that you're there. Limited number of uses - runs out of special subsonic ammo after a magazine worth of shots.

Master Key weapon: M16 with underslung shotgun. Shotgun could be pump or semi-auto. Must drop primary weapon AND pistol/melee to pick this up. Weapon switch button switches between shotgun and rifle mode. Undecided on how many rounds it should have (half of normal amount for both rifle and shotgun?), or if it should be reloadable from ammo piles. Can't attach laser sight due to underslung shotgun being in the way.

FN P-90 weapon: Its bullets are specially made to be armor piercing, and therefore do some damage even to armored zombies (50% of normal damage). High ROF, medium accuracy, low recoil - roughly equivalent to silenced Uzi but with per-bullet damage more like SCAR. 50 round magazine, but longer reload time due to magazine being a top-feed configuration.

Select-fire for the M16: Button to switch between semi- and full-auto. Semi for headshots & conserving ammo, full-auto for hordes & special infected. Small time penalty/animation to switch modes, say 750ms or so. Character unshoulders gun, thumb of pistol grip hand moves to selector lever, clicks it into new position, then gun is re-shouldered. Could also make this as a new select-fire weapon - suggest the TAR-21 for futuristic looks.

Hitler's buzz-saw: An MG-42 heavy machine gun. Same game mechanics as M-60, just much higher rate of fire. 250 ammo. This is an anti-Tank weapon.

Better bot control: Can command bot to use its medkit/pills, throw its item at a certain place (like Portal 2 ping tool), "come here", "stay there (unless I get incapped)", "pick up this item/gun".

"Drop item" button: I can drop my medkit, throwable, primary gun, pistol, etc, etc whenever I want.

Ability to move/stack world objects to get over barriers: But it's slow to drag such objects around, and they make a grinding noise while being dragged that attracts nearby zombies. E.g. move a shopping cart to jump over 5' fence.

Jockeys are way too durable: Reduce Jockey health by 20-30%. No way I should have to dump a whole M-16 magazine into a jockey to shoot it off my friend.

Spitter goo hurts zombies also: Maybe not as much as it hurts players, though.

Ride the coaster: If I pop adrenaline I should be able to catch up to and jump onto the roller-coaster cars on the Screaming Oak, and ride all the way to the station unless smoked/jockeyed/hunted off.

Quad ATVs: Fast but noisy. Limited gas. Can't go over obstacles taller than 18". Pretty much useless inside.

FLAMETHROWER. Limited fuel, but SO MUCH FUN while it lasts. Destroys hordes utterly. Massive friendly fire damage. User is reduced to walk speed while firing it due to recoil.

I have a lot of friends and family who smoke pot, and the majority of them are pretty vocal about wanting it legalized. Let me make perfectly clear right off the bat that I'm not coming at this as an "anti-pot" guy because I personally don't give a shit if they legalize it, and it doesn't bother me that people smoke. I've done my share of illegal substances.

But goddamn are pot advocates some of the most annoying fucking people on the planet. I'm not talking about the average Joe who just wishes it were legal. Hell, those people are inching into the majority and comprise a significant portion of our own audience. I'm talking about the people who push it so hard that they're just short of going door to door, like Mormons. And they get so aggressive and misguided in their arguments that I'm pretty sure that they are their own worst enemy at this point.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-pro-marijuana-arguments-that-arent-helping/

Some good wisdom here, I think.

My personal belief why marijuana should be legal comes from a couple of reasons that were only partly covered by the article.

First is that, as best I can tell from both my own personal experience and from the scientific studies done, pot is no worse than alcohol. So if you believe that legal adults should have the right to drink Jagermeister (which I do, even though personally the stuff makes me gag) then you should also believe that legal adults should have the right to smoke weed. All the same reasons apply to both.

The article argues that the marijuana/alcohol danger comparison "doesn't matter" because weed is still dangerous enough, regardless of where that danger level comes in relative to alcohol. But personally I'm libertarian enough to believe that you are the owner of your body, and the FDA isn't. This isn't to say that the FDA shouldn't have the right to test and label every drug under the sun - I believe they should. I'm just saying that if you want to take risks with your own body that don't endanger other people (like say motorcycling, skydiving, rock climbing without a top-rope, or ingesting nicotine), then you should have that right. Also, the article seems to base part of its "marijuana is still dangerous" argument on the fact that most people use smoking as their delivery mechanism for THC. As a person whose marijuana experience involved (highly potent) pot brownies, let me assure you that THC works plenty fine when eaten, and smoking it is not necessary in any way.

Second is an economic issue. The article does a good job debunking the whole "marijuana will save the economy!!!1!!" myth, and I fully agree with it on that score. But the economic issue I'm thinking of is the one about how Mexican drug cartels make their money. I just recently read that the official line from DC is that Mexican drug cartels make 60% of their income from smuggling pot. Some other studies suggest that number is way overblown, and the real number could be as small as 15%. Still, wouldn't it be nice to kick those motherfuckers in the balls by legalizing pot? I certainly can't think of a more deserving group of murderous thugs to give a swift kick in the teeth. And it would be a victory for US citizen's civil rights at the same time. Now I realize that regardless of what the number really is, legalizing pot won't put the Mexican drug cartels out of business. But I still say that this is a no-brainer.

Lastly, if the nationwide experience with marijuana legalization unfolds in a similar fashion to how things have gone in Colorado so far, legalizing and regulating marijuana will cause about as much damage and disruption to society as a strong spring rainstorm...

So I went looking for new t-shirts worth buying recently...

I found this: http://www.sighco.com/Seraphim-p-130.html Which I actually like quite a bit, as it's a subtle tribute to one of my favorite local Denver bands.

However, the real find of the day was this: http://www.sighco.com/Head-Nurse-p-115.html Which I'm still chuckling to myself about...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W67Gmd97hR8

"This is a gameplay prototype that I was working on for several weeks about one year ago. The player is given the ability to warp space by placing two warp anchors anywhere in the world, warping the space in-between those anchors. Space warping also affects physics, which may be used to make objects roll off curved surfaces, bridge gaps etc. Note that the focus has certainly not been on graphics.

Like previous demos, this prototype was built on top of my engine/framework/sandbox called breeze, using DirectX for rendering and PhysX for physics simulation. Visit http://alphanew.net for more info."


bitwize
"Today you'll be testing the new Space Warping technology. The lab boys tell me that this little gadget actually warps space and time between its two anchor points. So if you should find yourself squashed into the size of a breadbox, or bent or twisted in any unnatural way, just remember: it's not you, it's space that's being bent or squashed. You should be fine, although this statement implies no legal obligation to guarantee your safety on the part of Aperture Science."

karmadogma
Cave Johnson. We're done here.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ie75e/amazing_space_warping_gameplay_prototype_that_i/c230syh


SixSided
Here's a link to the prototype on dropbox, put up by the maker.

Note: As it says in the readme, to run it you're going to need the latest PhysX runtime, DirectX runtime and VC++ 2005 CRT. Links to where to get each of those are included in the readme.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ie75e/amazing_space_warping_gameplay_prototype_that_i/c230rpt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzEaj0c1YSo#t=0m54s

He is, of course, wrong. But it's going to take a Supreme Court case to settle it.

And nobody, I mean nobody in Congress has the balls to file the lawsuit. Nor to defund the war, for that matter.

There are no good guys in DC. Never have been.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/573352

There are two good cheat maps: one, two.

Neither of these are helping me find the last of the shells, though... :P

http://aei.org/article/103754

Oh what a riot! This is the same guy who authored Dubya's memos on why the kindapping, imprisonment without charge, and death by torture of innocent Iraqis (including children) was perfectly A-OK.

But now that there's a Democrat in the white house, suddenly he's anti-war.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

It's nice to know that Democrats aren't the only ultra-slimy, hypocritical, principle-less shitstains in DC, who change their positions on issues depending entirely on which corrupt, power-hungry party happens to be sitting in the White House this week.

Jeremy Clarke Kilowog: Hal Jordan, now that you've arrived on Oa, let's train for two minutes.

(they train for two minutes; Sinestro arrives)

Sinestro: Hal Jordan, Abin Sur was the greatest Green Lantern ever. You embarrass him by wearing his ring. And even though I look like a bad guy with my pencil-thin mustache, the fact that I've been fighting for good in this movie so far but also because you've been a huge douchebag, I am obviously right about this. I'm also more likeable than you, too - even though I look like an intergalactic pedophile.

Hal Jordan: This Green Lantern shit is hard. I quit.

Sinestro: What?

Hal Jordan: Yeah, I'm going home. See if I can bang Blake Lively or something.

Sinestro: Seriously? You're chosen to guard part of the universe, and not only are you quitting after two minutes, leaving countless lives in jeopardy, you're not even going to try? How the hell are you the hero of this film?

Hal Jordan: Not sure. Sniff you jerks later! (flies off)

Jeremy Clarke Kilowog: Christ, what an asshole.

http://www.toplessrobot.com/2011/06/topless_robot_presents_the_best_scenes_from_the_gr.php

The only way this could be more accurate is if they replaced "Blake Lively's Dad" with "Indistinguishable Suit Who You Neither Recognize, Nor Give A Damn About".

Thanks mr_chip!

I can't prove that there isn't going to be a hard take-off singularity in which a human-equivalent AI rapidly bootstraps itself to de-facto god-hood. Nor can I prove that mind uploading won't work, or that we are or aren't living in a simulation. Any of these things would require me to prove the impossibility of a highly complex activity which nobody has really attempted so far.

However, I can make some guesses about their likelihood, and the prospects aren't good.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality-check-1.html

This should cause some major butt-hurt among the mindless singularity fanboys who worship the ground that Kurzweil walks on.

Fortunately, nobody likes them anyway, so their tiny fist pounding will just be entertainment for those of us who have a clue about the actual current trend in hardware cost/MIP.