Terminally Incoherent

Here is a fun little game we play around here. This is ideal for IT shops or generally places where you have bunch of geeks installing crappy software on windows boxen. It’s called the PK Master. The goal of the game is to type in the product key/CD key perfectly the first time around. A perfect game is worth certain number of point’s. We use 3 because of the old saying “3rd time’s a charm”. You can use 1 if you are all or nothing type of a person, or 5 if you want nice round numbers. Each time you mess up, you lose a point. This means that with our setup you are allowed 2 typos to score the minimal amount of points.

You can optionally subtract points for style. For example hitting tab in a system that automatically moves the cursor into the next box (in other words effectively skipping a box) can be penalized. Backspacing is another optional penalty. And of course if you are nasty you can take away points for squinting or picking up and re-reading the key.

At the end of the week/month you tally up the score and the person with the highest scoring average wins. It’s only fair to use averages because people do not always get equal number of attempts even if you all take turns. This someone only got to go once this week can still win, if he scored 3 points.

What does the winner get? It’s up to you - for example, the lowest scoring player may have to buy a lunch for the highest scoring one. This makes reinstalling windows on a box that is not imaged a little bit less of a chore because at least you get an opportunity to score 6-9 points and significantly improve your average.

Before you say this is easy, please think back to the last time you had to do enter a product key. If I give you a MS Office CD right now do you think you can score 3 points? Personally I can’t even remember the last time I got a perfect score. I always mess up and type 8 instead of B, G instead of 6 or O instead of 0. And if the product key is lower case I always fuck up 1 and l.

Then there is that tricky “are the dashes/spaces part of this key?” problem. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. Do they tell you this on the sticker? Of course not. Does the system complain when you type a dash when you don’t need it? Silly idea - that would just be to easy. This uncertainty adds element of chance to this game. When you are installing a new or unfamiliar piece of software it’s always a gamble. Do you risk plunging your average into oblivion, or do you let your co-worker type it? It’s a tough choice!

I really love how the software makers keep finding innovative ways to keep this game challenging. In most cases they print the keys in very small, non-distinct sans-serif font on some crazy colorful background. Most normal people would put a long alphanumeric key like that on contrasting background in a large font with big serifs and other features that clearly distinguish letters and numbers (such as crossed zeros). But not these guys - they literally go out of their way to make it fun for us!

Sometimes I wonder how normal people deal with this whole product key thing. I only see it in the game terms these days. I pick up a CD and go “oh boy, this one has too many B’s and 8’s… I better drop it on someone’s desk and hope they fall for it”. I actually find it hilarious to find a sequence like 8B8B6G6B within a key. It’s funny even if it causes you to score poorly because you can then show people the damn key and talk about Microsoft conspiring against you and your free lunch. But normal people… Hell, they must be mighty annoyed with these damn things. I would be if I didn’t see these stickers as free lunch opportunities.

Then again, if you think about it, the CD key is the least annoying and obtrusive form of copy protection. Much more convenient and harder to lose than a hardware dongle, and way better than some crazy DRM rootkit that makes your optical drive explode after detecting a blank CD.

Naturally they don’t work - even if you combine them with an online activation. All the copies circulating on torrent and warez sites are cracked and have the key/activation parts removed. Then again no DRM really works anyway. Digital copy protection is just a pipe dream of the software industry. But until the proprietary software moguls figure this out we might as well stick with the lesser evil.

Seriously, try this game people! Let me know if it catches up! I would love to see it spread into the wild.

Over the years I think I helped to influence few people here and there to actually start experimenting with linux. I count that as a personal success. I’m sure I was not the primary influence in most cases, but I’m glad I could help people to start tinker with the new OS. Note that I didn’t say switch. I do have an issue with this whole switch mentality. People say “I have switched to Linux” or “I have switched to Mac” and I can’t help but roll my eyes.

I just want to put out there this novel idea: you are not marrying you OS. Regardless of what Microsoft may want you to think, there is no rule anywhere that says you can use only one OS. Personally I think a well rounded human being should be able to use several operating systems. Hell, you can have several OS’s installed on the same computer, and simply boot into the one that you need when necessary.

When people ask me how to go about switching to Linux I tell them not to. I tell them, to try using it along side Windows (cause it’s usually Windows folks who ask it) for a while, play and explore. Whenever it gets scary or overwhelming you just go back to comfy windows zone. Whenever you need that crucial windows application that has no Linux equivalent it will be right there for you. Don’t switch - just start playing. Have fun with it and learn. Then if you one day realize that you haven’t touched the Windows box in months, you can say you have switched. However, most of us never reach the point where they can honestly say they use linux exclusively. I don’t see it as a honor badge or anything. Most of us are perfectly content having a windows box (for gaming) sitting in the corner, a MacBook laptop, and a linux workstation all working together.

But the question does have merit. Starting with linux is usually a little bit different than starting with windows, or Apple. Why? Because this is the only OS that most people have to install by themselves. When people start messing around with Linux and BSD they usually tend to install it on a system that originally came preloaded with Windows. And this is where many issues crop up. Here are the few tips I usually pass down to the newbies. I figured that I might as well record them here and just point people to this post from now on.

Consider buying a system that comes Linux installed

Best advice I can give to total newbs is to consider purchasing a system that already comes preloaded with Linux. This is naturally the most expensive option you can pick but it does solve two main problems a lot of people run into:

First, you side-step the whole installation process. Your machine will be equipped with hardware that works well with linux, and will ship with all the right drivers. Your drive will be partitioned for you and the OS will be right there. All you need to do is go through few easy initial steps such as creating a new user and you will be ready to go. The biggest linux adoption hurdle for many people is the issue with hardware that doesn’t play well with linux. If you buy a linux machine you circumvent this whole problem.

Second, you are getting a brand new computer. This means that if you for some weird reason hose the linux installation you still have your old Windows machine to fall back on. People are often scared to try linux because they don’t want to get stuck with a botched installation and a PC that can neither boot windows or linux. You will be working on a dedicated Linux machine so even if you hose it you are still fine. You can still go online and research your issues, and try to get help.

Where do you get a machine with linux on it though? You don’t have to go to some shady online company that promises to ship you linux powered PC. You can get one from Dell. Yup, dell sells machines preloaded with everyone’s favorite distro (Ubuntu). You can say what you want about dell, but at least they are trustworthy, and usually make good on their warranties.

If you feel more adventurous, or you hate dell/large corporate behemoths you can try something like System 76 which sells laptops, desktops and mini boxen all running Ubuntu out of the box.

Consider Using A Spare Computer

If you can’t afford a brand new PC at the moment. If you are like me, you probably don’t like to throw out old computers. I usually stash them in the attic planning to one day turn them into some low powered server or something like that. I also inherit hardware from relatives and sometime even co-workers who bring me their old PC to dispose of (”here, maybe you can do something with it or scrap it for parts… If not just throw it out”). Old machines are perfect candidates for Linux test boxen for all the reasons I listed in the previous section. If you mess around with your primary PC you will be nervous, and you will worry about hosing your windows partition. If you are working with a spare junker that you really don’t care about you will be in the care-free tinkerer mode.

If you mess up, just start over. Wipe the drive and start again. That is the mindset you want to get yourself into. You are messing around and experimenting on some random machine while your data and most importantly your internet connection is safe and secure on your windows box.

Of course when you are using old hardware you may run into problems. Some of it might not be compatible, some might actually be really broken, and naturally it will be really slow. Then again, older hardware may actually be a blessing - having been around for years, the correct drivers may have made their way directly into the currently used kernel.

Use a Live CD First

This is less of a concern now since most of major distros ship with a Live CD installer these days. It wasn’t like that when I was starting. Still, probably a good first step for anyone is to download and burn yourself a Knoppix CD and stick it into the machine you plan to use for Linux. If Knoppix has major problems identifying your hardware and getting to work, then you may need to reconsider your choice. Chances are that any distro will have simillar issues, if not worse. If Knoppix just works, it doesn’t necessarily mean your distro of choice will but it is a sign that your hardware can and will work with Linux.

A lot of distros ship a Live CD installer (I know Ubuntu does) which lets you try out the system before you install it. I highly recommend burning yourself several such Live CD’s of different distributions and messing around with them. See how they interact with your hardware, how they handle driver installation and etc. Pick one that gets everything right out of the box, or has the best, most intuitive system for loading the needed drivers and applications.

Most of them will be very simillar but different people tend to be comfortable with different types of interfaces or ways of doing things. Some distros are more n00b friendly than others. Some will require you to drop down to CLI while some other ones will have nice GUI menus to do these things. You just need to find one that you feel comfortable with.

Avoid Dual Booting if Possible

Having your machine set up with both Linux and Windows is great. Dual booting is an awesome feature and you should definitely try it at one point, but it is a lousy way to start your Linux experience. It’s not that it’s hard - it’s just that it’s not trivial. In most cases it will require you to resize your windows partition (which may hose your system), then format that partition (if you choose the wrong one you may hose your system) and then make sure that the bootloader works correctly. This process has many points of failure and you don’t really want to be dealing with all this stress and uncertainty.

Most distros come with a nice “wipe the drive and let me set up the file system my way” option and that’s the one you should be using your first time around. You can fuck around with custom partition on your third or fourth installation. The first time around though your mission is to get linux onto your box with as few steps, and in it’s most default form. It’s much easier to troubleshoot a system that was installed with the default configuration rather than with a meticulously tweaked one.

Know what you want

Before you start messing around with linux you should do some research and get to know the vocabulary we all use. At he very least you should be able to differentiate between different package management systems. You want to know whether you want a Deb based system or an RPM based one. You should also look into desktop managers - look at screenshots and reviews of KDE and Gnome and see which one you like better. Try live CD’s which ship with both of them. Your first linux experience will be largely depend on whether you like or hate the desktop manager. So it’s a good idea to try both Gnome and KDE beforehand. If you hate one of them, it will narrow down the list of distros you have to choose from.

Pick the right distro

Finally, do some research into different linux distributions. You want to pick one that is newbie friendly - so probably probably not Gentoo in which you compile everything from scratch. You probably don’t want slackware either which hails itself as the most unix-like linux out there. You want something like Ubuntu, or Fedora or SuSE. You want something with a graphical installer, shipping with either Gnome or KDE out of the box and providing a nice package management front end (ideally a GUI one).

You should also pick a distro that has a large community. This helps immensely - a large community means lots of backports, frequent patches and active forums and discussion groups where you can finds answers and solutions to many of your problems. At some point a distro reaches a critical mass where nearly every problem you run into is already well documented and resolved by the community.

How do you know if a distro is popular? You will likely know it by reputation - people on technology blogs will mention it and talk about it. If you are at a loss, you can try Distrowatch which tracks the trends on Linux distribution market. Just be careful with their data - you want to pick something that is consistently popular over a long period of time, not the flavor of the month.

If you follow these few suggestions, your first steps with linux will be a positive, rewarding experience even if you mess up. You will learn a lot, you will gain new perspective on things and most importantly you will have fun.

Folks at Wachovia recently decided that all the confidential information they exchange with contractors and field examiners via email and the internet must be encrypted using at least 128 bit AES. Good for them! I applaud this move but then I realized that human stupidity can turn even best security practices to a mere farce.

I think that Wachovia really evaluated this problem realistically and chose the the method that was easiest to implement without forcing their contractors to spend a lot of money on software and/or training. Both 128 bit and 256 bit AES implementation is built into WinZip. That of course means you need to buy WinZip at the $20 a pop, but surprisingly enough most businesses do. It always amazes me that the company forces us to install WinZip on new machines despite the fact XP has a built in zip file support. At least we now have a reason why to use it.

It’s a good policy, but there is a problem here:

Hey, here is the file you requested. I encrypted it with winzip like you asked. I set the password to be “password”. In case you can’t open this file, I’m also attaching the original word document.

This, ladies and gentlemen is why the suicide rate among IT professionals is so high. Also, this is why you should be terrified when someone asks you to give them your personal information. Think about it - that at some point your social security number, address and credit record will be handled by this guy above. There is no way around it. A person like that works at almost every company - even yours. Dangerous information handling practices are commonplace, and data leaks are imminent. It scares the living shit out of me, but there is not much I can do about this. Or rather I can only try to improve security practices at my company, and hope others will do the same (they wont).

There are two ways you can handle encryption. The easy way is via symmetric encryption like AES which requires little or no infrastructure or forethought. To send data between Bob and Alice they both simply need the encryption/decryption software and the key in a form of a pass phrase that can be exchanged over the phone for example. Of course exchanging pass phrases for each document is a pain in the ass, so Bob and Alice will likely use the same one for all their correspondence. Since Alice will need to share this data with her coworkers, they will probably all use the same password for all correspondence with just about everyone. So whether they are working with Bob, or Eve or someone else they will use the very same common password.

What is that password? You have 3 guesses!

The password naturally is Alice’s company name written as one word in lowercase. If Alice’s boss is especially security conscious it will be the company name followed by a single number. And no, I’m not making this up. I actually seen this happen. Given a choice, lusers will pick a password that is easiest to remember or figure out, and by that virtue the least secure. This is the huge problem with symmetric encryption. You can educate the users, you can beat them up, threaten them or reason with them. But when you are not looking they will invent new clever ways to circumvent company security policies - or at least make them ineffective. And it’s not like it is some kind of secretive “fool the sysadmin” club. That would actually be cool - that I would respect. But no, this is just like an impenetrable wall of stupidity that shields them from common sense and reason.

The alternative of course is asymmetric encryption which removes the password choice from the equation. But it has it’s own limitations - namely, it is a pain in the ass to implement, deploy and train your stuff. Optimistically speaking I think we can get somewhere within 50-60% of our staff trained to use the winzip AES properly within a few months if we get a go-ahead for rapid forceful insertion of knowledge into the cranial cavity using blunt tolls. It would be faster if I was training orangutans for example, because they are not inherently afraid of technology. Humans unfortunately are - they seem to consider it a mysterious mystical force that cannot be comprehended by anyone sans a super-intelligent and yet socially inept nerds. Learning technology is naturally out of the question. Not only is it not possible to understand this stuff without the born-in nerd gene, but forcing that knowledge upon you apparently can cause severe brain damage.

So you can clearly see why blunt tools are necessary. We need to convince them that the brain damage will take place either way. Learning simply hurts less.

But public key encryption is such a foreign and incomprehensible subject. It’s like a high level arcane magic. Hell, for that stuff you need to have like a PHD in Jedi Mastery to even begin to understand it. When you start talking about public and private keys, exchanging and signing them, key rings and key servers you can see your user’s expression change from “LOL, they be trying to teach me magic but it wunt work” to “OMG! My head is about to explode”. By the time you are finished you can see pure fear in their eyes. Most go into catatonic for hours afterwards. Some never recover.

And of course after you spend many many hours configuring everyone’s email, generating keys and training people to use them, without fail someone will send their private key company mailing list.

Generally speaking I believe that an asymmetric public key approach is intrinsically less prone to human error (like for example choosing a weak password) but it is also more costly to implement. Costly both in man hours, as well as licensing. If you choose to go with PGP you are looking at around $200 per license. You could go with GnuPG naturally but it does not have the brand name weight, and it is slightly rougher around the edges - which ends up being a huge deal when you hand it to users who are terrified of computers as it is.

Don’t you just love it how this is a fucking never ending struggle. We really need policies like that, but the policies are half the battle. The other half is the long and painful process of IT beating the users into submission to enforce them.

Last week I said that I will try Gutsy on Dell Inspiron 600m that is sitting here in the office. When I booted it with Kubuntu Dapper I was really impressed that almost everything worked out of the box. I was wondering if running Gutsy will be an improvement or a downgrade with respect to hardware support. Naturally I was hoping for the former.

I finally got few minutes to download and burn a Gutsy CD. Yes, I do not have any Gutsy CD’s! Me, the local Ubuntu guy doesn’t have the latest and greatest release on him at all times. The horror!

I will tell you a secret - I’m what they call a late adopter. You have your early adopters who can’t wait to get their hands on the new software, and they get perverse pleasure out of running beta or even alpha releases. I’m not one of them. While I enjoy solving linux related problems and learning how the guts of my OS work, I do not usually actively go looking for trouble. Why? Well, I have a life, a full time job, a part time teaching gig, bunch of games to play and a blog to write (ok, so the first item on this list is a lie, but I think you get my drift). Yes, from time to time I enjoy messing around with a new OS to see ways in which I can break it, but usually when I get a spare machine I tend to install ubuntu on it for a reason - it gets assigned a specific task, such as being my nethack server, or a network backup location or something else.

So this is officially the first time I’m actually using Gutsy. Again, Dapper and me are tight - we are like the best buddies. I do not have this relationship with Fiesty - we had our differences but we do respect each other. Gutsy is new to me.

I plopped it into the drive, booted up and noted that everything was working. In the previous thread Alphast mentioned that I may have issues with support for the internal sound card but I didn’t. KDE loaded with the bootup chime, and when I launched Amarok I was able to listen to the Welcome message without any problems. Lshw identified my audio device as:

82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC’97 Audio Controller

Alphast - is that what you had on your system? I also ran aptitude search for alsa packages and it told me that both alsa-base 1.0.14-1ubuntu2 and alsa-utils 1.0.14-1ubuntu4 are all installed. Perhaps they were added in since you checked it last time. Who knows… Either way, it all works fine and out of the box. I didn’t have to do anything to enable it.

I was especially happy that the jump from Dapper to Gutsy did not mess up the excellent out-of-the-box support for the Intel Pro/Wireless LAN 2100 Mini PCI Adapter I had in that system. Once again I had to manually bind my Wifi card to the access point by passing ssid and the WEP key as arguments to iwconfig, but once I did that I was connected. Very nice! I was about ready to snag it for myself, but the boss gave me a go-ahead to order a brand new one instead. So naturally I opted for the dual core Latitude clocking at twice the speed of 600m and allowing me to stick up to 4 GB of RAM in it. Downside is that I have to wait few days before I can start messing with it, and I do not know if everything will work out of the box this nicely. However I ordered it with the same Wifi card that Dell puts in their Ubuntu model (Inspiron 1420N) so it should work…. At least in theory. We’ll see how it goes. You will probably see a review for it here in couple of days.

Getting back on topic, everything worked out of the box. Including the damn winmodem. All I had to do to enable it was to go to K-menu, choose System Settings, then go to Advanced tab and click on restricted drivers tab. It was listed right there as a “software modem driver”. I simply had to enable it.

Apparently it fetched the driver, and configured it. Now I see the comforting green check-mark instead of a red x next to it. Did I test it? No, I didn’t. How am I gonna test it? Where am I supposed to dial up?

I didn’t install gutsy on the HD so it’s possible there are few little glitches here and there that I didn’t notice just using the live CD. But as far as I’m concerned the 600m and Gutsy are a perfect fit. If you have one of these, and considered trying Ubuntu definitely give 7.10 a whirl. You will be impressed how well it works with the hardware. I know I was.

How come so many Hollywood movies start out great and then fizz out in the final act ruining everything? I already complained about this odd phenomena when I reviewed I am Legend. No I stumbled onto another example of the same problem.

Lucky Number Slevin starts out great with a surreal, Kafkaesque setup. The titular character Slevin (Hartnet) arrives into New York and stays at a friends house. The friend is mysteriously missing but as if to compensate for his absence various people start barging into the apartment first thing in the morning. First it’s the oddly forward, nosy, yet cute girl next door (Lucy Liu) who comes to borrow some sugar and ends up launching her private investigation to discover whereabouts of Slevin’s friend. Next it’s a pair of gangsters trying to collect on a debt for the local mobster referred to only as “The Boss”. Then it’s a pair of Jewish mobsters working for another crime mastermind called “The Rabbi”. Why? Because he is one.

He also gets harassed by the police who wants to know why the two major crime syndicates in the town take so much interest in him. And there seems to be a contract killer lurking in the shadows who seems to be pulling the strings steering Slevin into these predicaments.

Slevin gets pulled across the town wearing only a towel around his waist. He is given and contradicting orders by the rivaling crime lords who both live in penthouses of twin skyscrapers across the street from each other. He gets hit, abused and exploited for absolutely no reason by people in power. But he takes it all in stride with good humor and overwhelming wide eyed innocence. The dialog is snappy and amusing if a little kitschy. But in this bizarre surreal setting it just works. The use of color filters, and attention to stenography only helps in building up this feeling of unreal, dream like world that must be navigated by the innocent Slevin. Just like Karl from Kafka’s America he gets pulled and pushed in many directions by powerful men with little control or inertia of his own - and his pleads of innocence fall on deaf ears.

Then the movie does a 180 degree turn rudely jerking you out of the dreamlike trance with a rather disappointing (considering the buildup) face to face confrontation between The Boss and the Rabi and a long and boring exposition that explains everything. Yes, there is a major twist at one point but have no fear. Everything is literally spelled out to you as one of the cops manages to piece together the whole picture and relays everything to his partner over the phone. As he does that we are treated to a rapid kaleidoscope of flashbacks, and scene changes.

The ending was probably supposed to be clever and trippy but it’s not. Its almost vulgar in it’s simplicity. It is the lowest common denominator of clever endings. It works, but it basically ruins the whole buildup and completely destroys the phenomenal surreal, dream like quality so meticulously layered up in the first 3 acts.

This movie could be so much more. In fact for a while there it almost seemed as if it would be kitschy, silly yet profound, thought provoking titles. Bit it is not - it is as shallow as your average Hollywood super production courtesy of the quick, easy and accessible ending that is forcefully spoon feed to the viewer completely stripping all ambiguity and doubt from the events in the movie. As you watch it you might be think that certain scenes have have deeper symbolic or metaphorical meanings but in the end you are basically told everything you read and see was supposed to be taken literally.

And the one character which really gets shafted here is Lucy Liu’s neighbor girl. I was entirely convinced she was either working for one of the mobsters, in cahoots with Mr. Goodcat or a mysterious 3rd party seeking to exert control over Slevin for her own mysterious purposes. She was just to useful - a regular treasure chest of information, and convenient skill repository. But in the end it turns out she was precisely that - Ms. Plot Device.

To bad. It is yet another of these movies which actually seem so much better if you just stop watching at some point and skip the last 15-20 minutes. This one had everything - a star studded cast, a very strong beginning and very good direction and scenography. It had so much potential, and it wasted it so foolishly. How come they always do that?

I never thought that I will need one of those, but I bought myself a clicker. To be frank, I have no clue what is the proper name for these things but I call it a clicker. What does it do? It’s a little wireless gadget you hold it in your hand and click a button to change slides. I never had one before, and I never even entertained notion that I may want one at some point. But since I’m teaching now I figured - why the hell not.

So I bought the Targus Wireless Presenter which looks like this:

I’m almost sure that the popper name for this device is not “Wireless Presenter”. To me a presenter, is the person who presents the slides. Targus probably made this name up because like me they had no clue what to call it. Either way, it’s a great little gizmo.

This particular model is not really top of the line anything. It’s a cheepo model, and it does feel like it. But at the same time it is fully functional, and perfect for my needs. All I really need when I’m teaching is to switch slides back and forward. This device does just that, and in addition it has a built in laser pointer which works out very well. It also has 2 other buttons: an Alt+Tab like functionality that lets you cycle between open windows and another one that blanks the screen for you. I don’t see much use for the later, but the former one is a nice thing to have.

It takes a single AA battery, and just works. So far every windows box I plugged it into detected and configured it immediately. Then again I only tested it on Win XP so I can’t vouch for it to work in Vista or 2k. It did come without a driver CD though so I’m guessing Targus is confident that it will work on every system. Then again my Sidewinder mouse didn’t ship with drivers either but that’s a whole different story.

My only complaint is that the On-Off switch is unmarked. The only way to know if the device is actually off is to hit the red laser pointer button. If the switch is in the OFF position it won’t work. It’s not a show stopper though. After all I paid $20 for this so it’s not like I’m expecting highest quality here.

The biggest benefit though is what this device does to your presentation style. I love it. It lets me move around much more, and takes me out from behind the lecturer’s desk. It kinda removes that artificial barrier and I kinda felt as if I was connecting with the students a little bit better.

It also works great with animated slides. In the past I used a lot of static slides so that I could get out from behind the computer and point to the things on the projector screen or write on the white board. With the clicker in hand I can have the bullet points fly in one at a time as I speak. The laser pointer is just a nice bonus that let’s me point to things without walking up to the screen or reaching high above my head.

If you teach, or regularly present stuff using ppt, I highly recommend getting a clicker. Not necessarily this one - the Targus is cheap, and it feels cheap. I’m actually paranoid now that it will break on me in a week or two and I will be stranded in the middle of a lecture without one. So far it has been working fine for me though. I’m actually considering buying a second one and keeping it in my bag as a backup.

I have a spare Dell Inspiron 600m laptop sitting in the office here. It is quite a decent machine with 1.4 GHz and 2GB of RAM. Not top of the line or anything, but actually much better than my shoddy work laptop which has recently decided it won’t work without an external monitor. I’m too apathetic to be fixing it though, since I almost always use it with an external keyboard/mouse/monitor combo and I hardly ever open it at home. I might just commandeer the 600m for my use - but before I did that I wanted to make sure I can run Kubuntu on it.

Don’t ask me why, but I only have Dapper CD’s in my bag. I could probably just download and burn Gutsy but I’m extremely lazy. Also, I’m a long time Dapper user and not only do I know this release well but I hardly ever see it develop any odd sort of behavior like I’ve seen on Edgy or Feisty. I never had major issues with Ubuntu but most releases have one or two weird quirks that surface given the right combination of hardware. Never had that with Dapper though - whatever I throw at it, it keeps chugging along without complaints. So I just popped in the original Dapper CD (ShipIt FTW!) into the drive to see how it behaved on this hardware.

It’s probably worth noting that I first installed a fresh copy of XP on that same laptop. Unfortunately XP could not figure out how to work with following devices:

1. Broadcom NeXtreme BCM7505M Gigabit Ethernet Controller
2. Intel Pro/Wireless LAN 2100 Mini PCI Adapter
3. Integrated Intel sound controller
4. ATI Radeon R250 Mobile Graphics Card
5. The voiceband win-modem

All of these showed as yellow question marks in the device manager. When Kubuntu loaded up from the CD, all of these were detected and configured automatically. That is, with exception of the modem, but I don’t even know what I would use it for anyway.

Here is the kicker - Dapper supports the Intel wifi card out of the box, while XP doesn’t! How funny is that? I was actually pleasantly surprised to see this to work out so well. I did have a slight issue getting associated with the local access point which is using WEP but I’m blaming the KDE networking tools. I think there is some bug there that prevents a 64 bit hexadecimal WEP key from being passed down to iwconfig. I pulled up the console, brought down eth1 (which is what got mapped to the Wifi card) then manually set essid and encryption key via iwconfig then ran dhclient and I got associated and connected. So the GUI is flaky. Most of the time I’m using ndiswrapper to get the wifi working so I thought maybe that’s why the default KDE tools for Wireless were not really working for me. But no - they just suck.

I might try Gutsy on this laptop next just for comparison, but so far I’m very pleased with the result.

Do people actually still play on the PC? Have you been to a store lately? The PC games don’t even have a isle at most gaming outlets these days. Games for current generation consoles line the walls, last gen console games sit in the isles while the PC merchandise is relegated to a bargain bin in the corner. And rightfully so - all the noteworthy titles these days are developed for consoles and then sometimes ported back to PC. Let’s face it - PC gaming is dead!

LOL

Inflammatory title and first paragraph FTW! In case you didn’t notice I’m fucking with you guys. Personally I think that this whole “PC gaming is dead” thing is total bullshit, but they say you should start a post with an attention getting sentence or two. I’m assuming that the blood pressure of most of my readers went through the roof while reading that - I know mine would - so I think attention has been gotten. While your rage is subsiding, I would like to talk about why PC gaming is not dead.

Btw, if you read that first paragraph nodding in approval… WTF dude?

For me it is obvious that PC gaming is doing well and that there is no indication that it is slowing down. However I keep hearing a spiel very similar to the one I regurgitated above increasingly more often. In fact, this topic has been tossed around in the comments here. So let’s discuss it. I invite the “PC Gaming is Dead” people to post counter arguments, or explain to us why they think console gaming will overtake PC market one day.

Here are some reasons why I think the PC gaming is still alive and well, and will continue this way for a long time:

Superior Hardware

Console hardware is static and frozen for the lifetime of the generation. PC hardware is dynamic, and consistently improving at the speed of Moore’s law. Not only is the console market lagging behind, it also grows in discrete jumps. Every few years companies put together set of top of the line hardware and call it the current generation. You are stuck with that hardware for several more years despite the fact that it is entirely obsolete after 6 months or so.

Don’t tell me that gaming companies like to develop for static hardware that doesn’t have the latest pixel shader or dynamic range whatever. Every new PC game these days strives to have graphics so realistic, and so sharp that it will make your eyes bleed. Why? Because of fucking Nathan’s first law - thats why. Software is a gas and it will expand until the hardware cannot support it anymore. If you give me a crazy, top of the line hardware spec, I will give you a game that runs incredibly slowly. Is it actually possible to run Crysis on highest detail setting already? Few weeks ago my co-worker actually went through every possible piece of hardware on the market and came to a conclusion that there was no hardware he could buy that was not short of what Crisis recommended for the highest graphical settings. This might have changed by now but you can see what I’m getting at here.

When you develop for a console, your limitations are dictated by what was possible months ago. When you develop for PC, your limitations are what will be possible at the time your game will be released - and you can calculate it based on mores law. If your are aiming to ship two years from today, you can safely assume that the average gaming PC will be at least twice as fast as it is now.

PC platform will always be a testbed for new technologies. If you want to work on a top of the line graphics, or physics simulation you need to go with PC. You can then scale back when you port the game to Xbox… Or you can wait a bit until the console world catches up with the rest of us and release the game on the new generation hardware.

Demographic

Do you know why console games line the shelves in gaming outlets? Let’s look at the demographics. I do not have any hard data here but from my personal observations and discussions with others I suspect that the age is a significant factor. I noticed that consoles tend to be more popular among teens and college students. Why? Because a console is relatively cheep compared to a genuine PC gaming rig. It’s easier to drop $300 on a piece of hardware that will last several years, than $2k on a PC that will be technically obsolete in 3-4 months. I know that it doesn’t work like that - hardware doesn’t age this quickly, but that’s how regular folks look at this.

PC gamers on the other hand seem to be more in the 20-30 and above category, having more disposable income to invest in expensive hardware. They are also more discerning buyers who have specific tastes, and discuss/research the games they purchase online prior to spending money.

Again, this is just a speculation but I’m thinking that console games are better impulse buy material than PC games. Personally, I can’t remember when was the last time I bought a game because I was walking down the isle and I liked the box. I mean, other than the $10 jewel case release of Morrowind that one time. When I buy PC games, I usually have a specific title in mind. Last few games I bought were from online retailers or via Steam. I’m guessing the same must be true for quite a few other PC gamers out there. I haven’t bought a game from a dedicated store (like game stop) in years. When I stopped by one last year the experience was comparable to that blurb in the first paragraph. It was all console games, and the only people shopping there at the time were parents with screaming brats running around messing with the displays, and high school teens who btw were the schoolmates of the teenage sales clerk.

The Best Buy in my town on the other hand had had 4 isles dedicated to PC games - go figure. So I guess different places pander to different customer base. If I thought that a Game Stop was the end-all-be-all of gaming retail I would probably think PC gaming was dying too. But I don’t shop there because they seem to focus on console sales. And it’s probably a good choice - since teens and parents are more likely to go to an establishment like that to get a game, while someone like me might just buy it online, or perhaps at Best Buy while shopping for electronic accessories.

No Content Control

Nintendo is notorious for censoring the titles that appear on their consoles. Sony and Microsoft are less anal about this but they still have full control over their platform and can refuse to license you the development kits. Look at the Manhunt 2 debacle. PC platform is much more open and accessible to titles that may not be family oriented enough for the big console makers.

If you make an NC-17 movie you do not need to ask anyone for permission to distribute or sell it. It will still play on any DVD player, or a movie projector in theater. If you make an AO rated game (equivalent to the NC-17) you will most likely get locked out of all the console platforms. So it’s obvious that there will always be market for these types of games on the PC.

Independent Developers

You may not realize this but indy developers are a huge driving force behind innovation in gaming. Valve’s Portal, which is considered one of the most interesting and innovative titles of 2007 was based on Nabacular Drop - a senior project by a group of students from Digipen.

This sort of innovative work is possible because PC is an open platform that anyone can develop for. There are groups of hobby developers working on Xbox and PS platforms but they constantly hit roadblocks. One such roadblock is that using the XDK without a Microsoft license is illegal. If you do want to license XDK you need to sign a restrictive NDA which among other things prevents you from disclosing any information about the kit and Xbox architecture. So it really prevents development of open source games on that platform.

There is the OpenXDK but it has it’s own problems and it is not supported by Microsoft, which can at any time subtly break it by minutiae firmware upgrades.

Then there is modding. Hosts of PC games are moddable gathering huge communities which produce crazy amount of free content to enrich your gaming experience. Mods range from simple bug fixes that were never addressed by the developer to total conversions such as Beyond the Red Line I wrote about recently. A great example of modding community is Planet Elder Scrolls which indexes thousands of user made additions to Morrowind and Oblivion games. You don’t get this type of community generated content on console titles - mostly because they are locked down in one way or another.

Genre Distribution among Platforms

How many RTS games have you played on a console? Let’s face it, consoles have some strengths and weaknesses. They are great for twitch based arcade games, sports games and racing sims. They are adequate for RPG games, and sometimes ok for FPS titles. I played FPS games on the game pad and it felt retarded but some people swear by it. But one genre that consoles completely fail at is RTS.

I know that there are RTS games for consoles - I even played Red Alert on PS1 back in the day. It was very… Strange experience. The RTS gameplay just doesn’t translate well into the whole gamepad + living room couch environment. This goes double for turn based strategy like civilization.

You can clearly see the division of roles between the console and PC market. Xbox and PS3 get all the sports action, racing and platformers/beat-em-ups as well as 3rd person perspective shooters and single player RPG - mostly in Final Fantasy like format. PC’s get strategy titles, tons of FPS and healthy dose of traditional RPG (ie. mostly Fantasy but not the “Final” one) and MMO.

RTS and MMO markets are huge, and they are inexplicably tied to the PC platform and it doesn’t seem like this is about to change. FPS is really the domain of PC too but Halo freaks will argue with me till they drop that this is not the case.

What may end up killing PC gaming in the end?

As of right now, I can only see 2 things that may be harmful to PC as a gaming platform in the future. And neither one of them is a console. First one is Windows Vista. Yes, I think Vista is harming the PC gaming scene mainly because of the insane hardware requirements that it takes to even run it. Back in December when I was doing Christmas shopping I looked at many “Minimum System Requirements” specs on many games. At the time they were actually splitting them and had one set of minimum specs for XP and one for Vista. The vista requirements were usually roughly double of whatever XP requirements where - or damn close to double. What does that tell you? That the overhead of actually running that OS in the background is huge.

Since we are getting dangerously close to the 4 GB RAM limit of 32 bit architecture there is nowhere to go from here. 32 bit Vista will always be a huge resource hog that will eat up most of your RAM. As the minimum requirement specs creep up this will become a huge issue, forcing the whole gaming industry into 64 bit universe. And from what I hear that running 64 bit Vista is like having a perpetual diarrhea that never ends. But then again, once we reach that point perhaps both hardware and software vendors will finally get their shit together and actually get the 64 bit support right.

In other words - consoles are no threat to PC gaming market. While they completely took over certain niche markets that were never very popular on the PC (sports and racing), PC will remain the dominant platform for FPS strategy and massive multi player titles.

Please feel free to disagree or add your own argument in the comments.

Since I’m teaching again this semester, so over the holiday break I set up a little website where I could post links, resources and various interactive things that don’t really work well with blackboard. I used my Novell Netdrive account since CORE deleted my unix account few weeks after I got my MS. I never really found out why, but it probably had something to do with a random php script that I wrote my sophomore year. It essentially appended user input to a text file and then displayed the text from that file on the page creating a primitive “blog comments” like effect on some of the pages. Needless to say, at some point it got spammed into oblivion, and being lazy I never really disabled it.

Or it could be the fact that I compiled and installed quite a few apps in my home directory, including a never version of VIM, nmap, netcat and few other security tools that probably freak out sysadmins. When I started teaching I asked if I can have my unix account back once or twice via email but I never got a response. When I arrive on campus these days, the CORE folks are long gone. In fact, everyone except for students and few professors who teach evening classes is gone. I never noticed that when I was a student because I would usually spend a whole day on campus doing research, GA stuff and etc.

Now that I work full time and I can’t get there before 5pm I never really see the administrative and support staff anymore. All communication with the secretarial staff regarding printing teaching materials or obtaining supplies must be done remotely. To be fair, I think there is like one day a week when the Registrar’s office and couple of other important administrative offices on campus are open till like 6pm - but most of the non-faculty inhabitants of MSU vacates their offices at like 4:30. Sigh…

Anyway, I used Netdrive because that’s all I have right now. I used some very simple PHP scripting mainly because I didn’t feel like copying and pasting the header and footer on every single page. Over the holidays I figured out that you can actually enable PHP parsing if you make your .php files executable. Naturally you don’t get shell access to your account, but Netdrive has a very clunky and counter-intuitive web interface. You can use it to make your stuff executable to the world, (but it requires some digging in the “Properties” panel) on a “per file” basis. That’s exactly what I did over the break and everything was working.

I decided to check back on the site today and I noticed that my PHP files were being displayed as text. WTF? I went back to the web interface, and sure enough - all the execute permissions were gone. I set them back, reloaded my page and…

Nothing. My page was still displaying text. At that point I gave up and figured they probably locked it down or something. It wouldn’t be surprising if they removed PHP access from the general netdrive accounts for security reasons.

Fast forward 20 minutes. I went back to the website to see if I can turn it into a static HTML, and lo and behold, it rendered normally importing headers, footers and all the dynamic content. WTF? Perhaps it took a while before the permission changes took effect or something. Or perhaps the text version of the PHP page just got stuck in my cache?

Did anyone else lose the execute permissions on your netdrive files? Is there some sort of a cron-job that resets these things every once in a while or something? Or am I just experiencing some system hiccups?

The other day I finally got around to installing LaTex on my Windows box after the last major reinstall. There are several different LaTex releases that will run on Windows. They all do pretty much the same thing, but now that I had to do this over again, I realize that the choice might be confusing to some.

If you want to start playing with LaTex on Windows I recommend you download ProText. Why? Because it ships along with everything you need to start working. The following products are included in the ProText package:

1. MikTex - one of the more popular LaTex packages for Windows
2. GhostScript - a windows release of the ultimate postscript interpreter
3. GsView - the windows postscript and dvi viewer which you will need to open some of the Tex generated files
4. TeXnicCenter - my favorite LaTex IDE.

It all comes bundled in a single neat package. The installer is a bit funky but don’t be discouraged. You get a self extractable rar archive that will dump bunch of files into a temporary folder of your choice. Inside you will find a setup file. If you run it it will open a PDF document which outlines the installation process step by step. It includes embedded links that launch installers for the products I listed above. It is a bit odd, and unconventional way of installing applications but it is very easy to follow.

Naturally you could get all these things separately, but ProText just makes it easy and convenient. I’m mainly putting this out here for people who might be new to LaTex. Also, I’m documenting this for myself because it took me a little while to remember which one was the nice PDF based bundle that I used last few times.