Category: Random Ramblings

Anything that catches my fancy as a topic I want to cover. Truly random crap.

Just another reason government agencies should require all software to be open source

Sometimes, the best techie reading is the quick read things about what goes wrong with hardware and software. In this case, I’m thinking about things like the Daily Shark or Ed Foster’s Gripeline. So while perusing recent gripes at Infoworld, I found this case of vendor lock-in, and my first thought was that this could have been avoided if government agencies were to require vendors to use open source software or open interfaces for all future projects. Because this requirement wasn’t in place, we taxpayers had to fork out an additional $20 million to pay for the Air Force to keep maintenance available for $80 million worth of uninterruptible power sources.

In 2003 the U.S. Air Force held an open bidding for a post-warranty service contract on about $80 million worth of Powerware uninterruptible power supply (UPS) equipment it had purchased in 2001. At that meeting, Air Force officials and the other bidders were surprised when Powerware informed them that proprietary service software is required to fully maintain the UPS equipment and that Powerware would not provide that software to any of the third-party bidders or to the Air Force itself. As a result, the Air Force had no choice but to award the contract to Powerware, costing U.S. taxpayers more than $20 million over what some of the other firms said they were prepared to bid.

. . .

What makes some customers even madder than Powerware’s refusal to provide the software is the total lack of information about it when they purchased the equipment. “Even now you don’t see a word about it in their sales literature or on their website,” says one reader who encountered the Powerware lockout surprise while working for a financial institution. “How can it be legal for them to hide the fact that they will not let you have this tool that is needed to properly use and maintain the equipment you’re buying?”

Require all software interfaces to be either fully open via open source software included with the equipment or require all software interfaces to be freely accessible via fully documented open interface specifications or APIs. This isn’t an easily solved problem, but this is something our government needs to start doing now so we don’t find ourselves as taxpayers paying this exhorbitant support bills for years and years after the original contracts expire. It would take time to get contracts properly created and written to cover this, but it is something that we need to see happen. This is especially important if vendors go out of business and proprietary interface information is lost to the ether.

[tags]Infoworld Gripeline (with Ed Foster), Our governmental agencies need to write open software interfaces into all hardware and software contracts[/tags]

Failed suicide attempt earns two Atlanta men “Stupid” award

Business failing? HIV infected? Looking at the rest of a miserable life and thinking “How can this be changed?” Naturally, mutual suicde is the way to go, right? Just try to come up with a smarter, more likely to succeed method than these two unsuccessful losers.

Two Atlanta men survived an attempt to kill themselves Friday by cutting off their arms with a circular saw, according to Atlanta Police Major Lane Hagin.

The men managed to sever three of their arms about six inches above the wrist, he said.

The two men – ages 40 and 41 – left a suicide note with the manager of their Atlanta apartment building saying they were committing suicide because their business had failed and they were recently diagnosed with HIV, Hagin said.

After reading the note, the manager called police who found the two men in their apartment with “a lot of blood,” the major said.

Their names were not released. Police spokesman Steve Coleman said both were in stable condition at Grady Memorial Hospital late Friday and will undergo psychiatric evaluation.

My theory is the men made it to the 75% mark on their attempt before realizing the error of their selection. But that’s just a theory.

[tags]Bad suicide attempt, The wrong way to end it all[/tags]

Zelda DS first Zelda game to feature online play

Not much meat to this story. Here’s the full article about the coming Zelda for the DS, Phantom Hourglass:

San Francisco (CA) – Zelda will join the ranks of many other classic Nintendo franchises that have made their way online, with the release of Phantom Hourglass later this year.

In an interview with Game Informer magazine, Zelda co-creater Eiji Aonuma was asked if The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass will have online multiplayer battles. Without elaborating, he just said, “Yes.”

As with many other gamers with a long history of Nintendo gaming, I’m a sucker for the Zelda games. I hear the CD-Interactive Zelda games were horrid. But I’ve never played a bad Zelda game (and I totally skipped the CD-i generation because that whole technology looked stupid to me, even back then). I’m looking forward to Zelda on the DS. (via Joystiq)

[tags]Zelda DS to feature online play, First online Zelda game – Phantom Hourglass[/tags]

Going to try WoW (World of Warcraft) – recommended reading?

Many months ago, I bought World of Warcraft (WoW) in a moment (well, a 6 week long period) of disappointment and frustration with the state of City of Heroes (CoH – look for me as global @RagManX1 or @RagManX2). I have yet to install WoW, as I did eventually get back into playing CoH, but I am considering trying out WoW just for an occasional change of pace. Given that, are there any recommended sites I should hit to learn the game better? Any particular guides I should read to help me decide my starting character?

I can tell you that in City of Heroes, I typically build min/max characters, or at least fairly power-efficiency focused ones. I also solo most of my play time, as play sessions can be 10 minutes, 6 hours, or anything in between for me, and many, many times I don’t often know in advance just how much time I’ll get to focus on the game. So I really want something that can solo well, but that is useful enough for a team if built well that I’ll be able to find a team. I don’t know that I’ll care enough about WoW to stick with it to the really high levels, so I don’t know that I’ll care much about being built for raiding. In CoH, I mostly play controllers, with scrappers being my main fallback class. In CoV, I mostly play brutes, with corrupters being my main fallback class.

Where do I go to get a good pre-install guide to help me know where to start, and what sites do I need to keep up with if I play a lot?

[tags]Help me start playing WoW, I’m considering joining the 8 million+ collective – guide me[/tags]

Documentary on documentor Moore? You had me at “question his ethics”

Way back in time, when I first started caring about politics, policitians, and all the things the government does to screw us, I decided I should watch some documentaries from this Michael Moore guy. Some of the liberal folks I worked with said they were good. The conservatives I spoke to had nothing valid to say about them, because they hadn’t watched them (criticism after watching them would carry weight with me, but such commentary based on “I heard XYZ said…” did not). After Moore said he wanted people to download his movie Fahrenheit 9/11 if they wanted to see it, I decided that is where I’d start.

About 5 or 10 minutes into the movie, I was already fed up with the movie, as I heard a number of things I just didn’t believe, so I put the movie away. I tried several times to come back, but I found the movie more and more annoying each attempt to watch, even just selecting random areas of the movie to watch. Now I understood why the conservatives didn’t bother watching the movie. I can’t recall now the problems I had with the movie, but I could probably try again to watch this fictitious historical account of the days following the 9/11 attacks if someone disagreed with my belief that a lot of the movie is just made – sensationalism done at history.

I’ve tried watching a couple other Moore “documentaries” since then, but just can’t stomach them now. So given my personal background with Moore’s displays of his reality, I found this mention of others’ attempts to make a documentary on Moore turning into a tale of displeasure.

Canadian filmmakers Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine unveiled their newest documentary entitled Manufacturing Dissent about legendary filmmaker Michael Moore at Austin’s South by Southwest Film Festival on March 10 2007.

According to a report from the Associated Press, the filmmakers are huge fans of Michael Moore who initially set out to make a biography of their hero. However as they learned more facts about Moore they began to question his ethics and his tactics and began to make a more hard-hitting film while chronicling the filmmaker on his 2004 Fahrenheit 9/11 and Slacker Uprising tours.

. . .

His career was launched by the documentary Roger and Me, released in 1989 and detailing his unsuccessful efforts to talk with Roger Smith, then chairman of General Motors. The only problem was, as Manufacturing Dissent points out, Moore did successfully meet with Smith. He decided to leave out the footage for the final cut in an editorial decision.

Now it remains to be seen when we can see this and get a better look at how Moore works, from former fans.

[tags]Documentary on Michael Moore, Manufacturing Dissent – former fans of Michael Moore look at how he works[/tags]

Proof that we are a nation of idiots

I heard this listing of last week’s top 6 television shows as I was driving in to work today. I really didn’t believe it until I looked it up and verified that as an American, I am in a population best classified as eff’ing idiotic brain-damaged monkey (FIBDM). And since that information is like to change or go linkdead, here’s the facts:

Continue reading “Proof that we are a nation of idiots”

The Restaurant Game – using artificial intelligence to develop human-like game responses

A neat gaming project is going on thanks to the folks at the MIT Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab. The plan is to get people to play a game based on a restaurant interaction, then by processing the collected gameplay data and processing it through some magic-like algorithm, come up with game behavior that will better mimic human response.

Contribute to the first collaboratively authored computer game and earn Game Designer credit! customer_waitress_small.jpg

. . .

The Restaurant Game takes about 10 minutes to play. It is a two-player game that will automatically find partners for players once you join a server. You are welcome encouraged to play multiple times. In order for this project to be at all successful, we will need to collect a lot of data — data from over 1,000 10,000 gameplay sessions. Play early, play often, and please spread the word!

This project attempts to address two frustrations I experienced as a professional game developer. 1) Convincing human social behavior is difficult to model with existing hand crafted AI systems. 2) Play testing by people outside of the development team typically comes too late to have a major impact on the final product. This experiment aims to generate AI behaviors that conform to the way players actually choose to interact with other characters and the environment; behaviors that are convincingly human because they capture the nuances of real human behavior and language.


I’ll be downloading and installing this little gem tonight after work. There’s even a desktop widget available so you can get notification of when there is an available restaurant gamer waiting for a partner. (via DubiousQuality)

[tags]Artificial Intelligence used for improving human-like game interactions, Gaming with the MIT AI lab[/tags]

The greatest mobile phone review?

Catching up on so much recent miscellany brought me to this British journalist reviewing his new mobile (we call them cell phones, by the way). He titles his write-up My new mobile is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots, so you know just by the name that I have to read and share it.

The trouble started the afternoon someone from Orange rang me up to say, “Hey, valued customer – do you want a free phone?” At first I wasn’t interested, but he went on and on about how popular and great the Samsung E900 was, then promised me free texts at weekends for life if I said yes. So I gave in.

Continue reading “The greatest mobile phone review?”