Archive for 2007

I think the tradition of making predictions of the future near the turn of the New Year is vacuous and stupid. That’s why I’m planning on making predictions for the first time here on my blog- “vacuous and stupid” is my middle name

Without further ado, here are my predictions for the next twelve to eighteen months. Just like this website, most of the content is technically-oriented, but other weird stuff creeps in as well

• Apple will release a new iPhone supporting G3 (faster mobile networking). Unfortunately, it will still be the world’s most expensive disposable phone as Apple will persist in making the battery impossible for the consumer to replace. Another 15 million iPhones will be sold during 2008 despite this and the fact that there are innumerable other, more capable phones out there,
• Apple will announce a new ultra-mobile PC: it will essentially be a giant iPhone, with a more complete OS X user interface. It will have no keyboard (although it will have the option to add one), will use a touch sensitive screen about 8″ x 5″ in size, and will weigh somewhere between 1.5 and 2 pounds. It will cost about $1,500 at launch, and may actually have a user battery that can be replaced by the owner. There will be inevitable comparisons to the Newton
• the tiger that killed the one boy and injured two others will turn out to have been provoked by the victims themselves. The “victims” will be shown to have either entered the enclosure and/or have released the tiger as part of a pre-Christmas prank. The boys parents will still sue the San Francisco Zoo because in America personal responsibility is a dead concept and litigation is a national sport
• Microsoft will release Vista Service Pack 1, and it will make using Vista significantly more pleasurable. The next version of Windows will be announced with a target ship date of mid-2009. There is almost zero chance of it actually shipping by that date
• Starcraft 2 will be delayed until 2009
• Duke Nukem Forever will not be released
• The format war between HD DVD and Blu Ray will be resolved. Unfortunately, almost no one will care
• SSD (flash memory “drives”) with a capacity of 32 GB will drop in price to approximately $600
• there won’t be a single new successful (I.E.: > 500,000 paid month-to-month subscribers) massively multi-player role playing game released during 2008. Only one or two of the new games released during the year will survive for more than twelve months
• Stock market analysts will begin to recognize that Google has a massively over-inflated value. There will be a downward price adjustment in Google stock of over 20%, making it only over-valued by a factor of about 50:1

I expect that my track record for “correct” predictions will be at least as good as that demonstrated by most tabloid telepaths..

I remember spending a couple of summers on my Uncle George and Aunt Yvonne’s farm when I was about eight or ten years old. Two of my Uncles, George and Charlie Gillies, and my Grandma lived near Big Beaver, Saskatchewan. The family farm, split between the two brothers, had grown to several thousand acres from Grandpa’s original homestead. It sat on the American boarder…as I recall, the big “excitement” was going across the border to Scobey, Montana, to use their swimming pool or shop in the American stores.

For me, though, the best part of spending those weeks on the farm was seeing a different way of life from what I was used to in the city. I was too young to appreciate it properly, I suppose, but the time spent with my cousins Mark, Greg, and Karen formed all sorts of good memories. I recall breakfasts in the big kitchen, riding in George’s new four wheel drive tractor, and following Mark and Greg around as they did chores and generally did things young boys do like play with the old farm equipment or shoot gophers.

One memory sticks in my mind of a “round up”, where the local farmers were moving some cattle from their own pastures to the community or shared pasture. Greg and Mark had an old grey horse, and I recall they put me up on it and we did a bit of “cowboying”. I’m sure they thought I was a bit of a pain in the neck, sort of useless baggage that they got stuck with entertaining. But for me the memories have that hazy “wonderful summer” feel to them, like something from a movie.

The last time I recall seeing Mark and Greg was probably when my Grandfather passed away: I guess I would have been around 13 or 14 then. I barely recognized them at the time, and in all the years since I haven’t really thought much about them. I heard the news from Mom now and then: Mark and Greg leaving the farm, becoming welders or various things, Greg getting into body-building and then professional wrestling. But it was more or less all somewhat fantastical: I had a cousin who was a pro wrestler, with a stage name (Doby Gillis, or “Mr. Gillis” later) and everything- kind of neat, but hard to imagine being “real”.

I found out earlier this week, on December 23rd, that my cousin Greg had died of a sudden heart attack earlier that morning. He had been at home in Coquitlam from his work as a heavy welder, which often took him to places like Fort McMurray, Alberta. His girlfriend was holding him as he died. He was born three years before me, in 1961, and died only a few miles away, without me even knowing he was there.

Thank you, Greg, for being a temporary brother to me all those summers ago.

Update: The wrestling community is responding to Greg’s sudden death- this article by Dan Denton seems to be the most complete.

The element of surprise…it is critical for special forces military operatives. So a gun that can shoot around corners makes perfect sense. But a gun barrel poking around the corner still looks like a gun barrel…unless you camouflage it.

Meet Kitty Corner Shot…

Future Weapons Kitty Cornershot
Uploaded by nofrag

Remind me not to let our cats see this And if you want more information on the actual weapon in the cat suit, you can take a look at this website about the Corner Shot itself.

Irene and I opened our gifts a couple of hours ago. We both received lots of wonderful things, but most of all we got the best gift of all: each other.

Each year at Christmas time I like to take a moment to reflect upon everyone who is not so fortunate, or who as I often do lacks the will to see their good fortune for what it is. I’m so very lucky. I’m basically healthy, as is everyone in my immediate circle of friends and family. We have enough for essentials plus a great deal of non-essentials.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

I bought Halo 3 on my XBox 360 shortly after it came out. I didn’t expect much from it- and that’s what I got. The Halo franchise is good, but has never really “wow”ed me.

At its root, I’d say the problem is partly a matter of the story as presented in the game coming across as “weak”, and partly the visual perspective the game plays from. I understand the back story behind the games is very detailed and rich…but the game doesn’t convey that well to me. As for the perspective: they seem to consistently do something with Halo that combines to irritate me (”an endless stream of passages, all alike…”) and give me motion sickness. First person plus acres of similar looking views equals nausea for me. Add these considerations to the fact that I made a mistake and played 9/10ths of the game on “easy” before discovering that you have to play on “normal” to get any achievements…the thought of playing the game through again made me put the DVD away.

Along comes Crysis. This game is as “different” as Far Cry was a few years ago, and that’s not too surprising I guess as both games were developed by Crytek. Note that Far Cry 2 was *not* developed by Crytek, so who knows what that will be like.

Moving back to the topic…Crysis has the bog-standard first person shooter plot. A super-soldier is part of a squad tasked with investigating some strange happenings on an island near China. The cause turns out to be some sort of alien invasion- much gunfire ensues. What makes Crysis “better” than the standard fare has more to do with how the story is presented, how the player is allowed to interact with the world, and how natural the whole process feels.

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If there is one thing that can make me giddy when I’m working on a computer upgrade project, it is a well-designed case or chassis. Well-designed means:

• the pieces slot together with minimal effort
• I can open the box without special tools or fiddly screws
• the edges and corners are nicely turned with no sharp edges
• the paint/finish is clean, smooth, and elegant
• there is more than adequate room for all the necessary cables
• all marks/writing/labels are clear and easily read during assembly and future disassembly
• the chassis as a whole feels massively solid and robust: no wobbles, no crappy plastic-y bits
• lots of spare parts and cables included
• good cooling/heat management design, with space for additional/optional fans where appropriate

My favorite case manufacturer to date has been Antec. Their cases generally meet or exceed all the items on my list of requirements. My most recent full computer chassis from them was the P180: it’s a fantastic case, and I’m very happy with it.

Choosing a hard drive enclosure early this year seemed like a no brainer since I like Antec cases so much. I bought Antec’s MX-1 “actively cooled” enclosure. It looked like typical Antec: well made, easy to open, all screws easily accessible and nicely sized, with excellent cooling. Unfortunately, after just a bit over six months of use it died…rather completely. And finding a replacement wasn’t a picnic…

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I was starting to think that the tide might be turning away from ATI + AMD: my favoured platform for the last four years or so. Both Intel and NVidia have been ahead of ATI/AMD now for about a year in terms of top-end video card and CPU performance.

But ATI, at least, seems poised to introduce some interesting technology during 2008. It appears that my long-held hope that “two GPUs on one card” would finally become a reality is about to be fulfilled. ATI has already been talking about four video cards in one machine- which really doesn’t interest me that much. But the 3870 X2 has two processors on one card…which is much more appealing.

My disinterest in having two video cards boils down to three main things: heat, power, and space. If you’ve ever looked at a single high-end video card of moderately recent vintage (such as my existing ATI X1950XTX), you know they are large beasts with big fans and a requirement for their own power lines. They throw off a ton of heat, and are noisy. Two of them in my machine would mean my huge tower would actually be *crowded*, and my 650 watt power supply would likely be strained keeping up with the power demands. It has always struck me as an ugly way to increase video performance.

Now I have an option: perhaps a four core AMD Athlon with a dual GPU ATI 3870 X2? That might be an upgrade worth waiting for. I get the impression NVidia has something similar in the works…I guess I’ll have some work to do to make a decision

The Conservatives appear to have delayed introducing the new DMCA-like copyright bill I mentioned in a previous post. Some people are saying that this delay is a result of the vocal reactions from various quarters, particularly on the Internet.

I suppose that the delay could be related to the outcry: in fact, it seems likely. But the delay doesn’t in any way suggest to me that we’ve heard the last of this. The usual government strategy when some desired legislation receives a negative response is to back off, then bury the legislation in some other, far more complex and confusing bill that gets introduced later under a completely different title. “Desired” in this case means that any legislation where millions of dollars in lobbyist ‘donations’ are at stake. And to be clear, this same strategy is used regardless of party affiliation, and on both sides of the border.

Until I see a clear statement from the government saying “Whoa, that was a stupid bill, we’ll scrap that and make darn sure we respect the fair use rights of our citizens before we even think of changing the law again”, I’ll assume that the ball is still in play. The bill will be back with different words but the same intent: to strip Canadians of the right to watch or listen to the videos and music we pay for on our devices of choice…without purchasing the same damn thing over and over again.

If you want to learn more about the bill, Canadian Copyright, or what you can do to make yourself heard, check out Michael Geist’s blog.

I have a deep, dark secret to admit: I often send email using HTML/rich text features. I know, it is shocking: but I fear the seductive features of things like fonts, bold facing, and colour have turned me from the true path of pure text.

When I started using the Macintosh, I set my email options to use rich text format for composing messages:

You’d think that, with this setting, any email message I compose would be formatted using rich text, right? Well, apparently Apple wants to think on my behalf. In their infinitely wise thinking, the setting above is actually more of a request than a command. Apparently, they think I mean “use rich text, if you think that’s wise”. Because what really happens with the above setting is that rich text/HTML format will be used *if* I put something in my email message that demands rich text. Like a font change, or a different colour. Otherwise, the message will still be sent as plain text.

I discovered this behavior after my friend Chris noticed that emails I was sending him were arriving devoid of any formatting, with lovely courier-style fonts. I don’t see a quick way to fix this other than to maybe select some kind of odd font or always make at least one character in every email I send boldfaced or some such. I’ll probably just ignore the problem for now

Running a public website of any kind means having to deal with various unwanted guests. This blog, for example, receives around 300 spam comment posts a day, and any number of attempts to break in.

With a little bit of research, a site administrator can reduce the effort of managing all of these intrusive visitors to a minimum. The trick is to choose the right tools to keep the site accessible for legitimate users without making it too easy for bad guys to get in or generating a lot of daily work to keep things going.

For this blog, Kelly’s World, I use two tools that work well with WordPress:

• Akismet, which comes with WordPress, and analyzes submitted comments for characteristics that suggest the comment is spam. This is basically the same idea as an email spam filter, and it works pretty well
• Bad Behavior, which is an optional plugin that can be used with WordPress and other blogs/site content management tools. Bad Behavior looks at characteristics of the site *visitor*: their browser, their IP address, characteristics of their HTTP traffic. If something looks fishy, Bad Behavior can prevent the visitor from getting at the site at all. Bad Behavior works pretty darn well too. Or it did…

Bad Behavior has been working great for a couple of years. On Thursday I attempted to access my blog from work, and got the “you’ve been blocked” message from Bad Behavior. I didn’t think much of it: although where I work is pretty clean from a security perspective, there are several hundred thousand users sharing a few thousand outbound IP addresses, so I could see a false blacklist entry getting added somewhere. But today my friend Chris emailed me saying he had been blocked as well, so I went into full investigation mode…

I don’t know whether I have the problem fixed. Apparently, however, there was a problem with Bad Behavior’s back end configuration, and a patch had to be released to correct it. I was using Bad Behavior 2.0.9: the patch is 2.0.11.

If you are trying to comment on my site (and aren’t some sort of Russian pornography spam bot), please email me at kadams at kgadams dot net. Replace the at with an “@” and the dot with a … dot. You know the drill. Let me know when you encountered the problem, and I’ll look into it.