No Pity for the Masses

Fail

How do you fail this badly? As I said in an email to a friend earlier:

How do you fail this badly? I would think that, when building a large apartment, you would use above and beyond what is required to create a stable foundation. Just to account for all the years of wear and tear the building is likely to see. Can you imagine what the folks nearby must think? If you look at a couple of photos these apartments actually tower over what look like older buildings. I don’t know about you but that’s a little too much looming threat for me.

They said the apt. was unoccupied but I’m curious about the other apts. If you notice, in the pictures, there are actually a couple of other apartments exactly like the one that fell. I’d imagine waking up one morning and opening your window to the sight of your sister building lying on it’s side would be a real splash of cold water. Hopefully any tenants that might live nearby now have a legal reason to back out of their lease.

I’ve been told I’m retreading old material (thanks Jason for the heads up on my redundant rants about spam.) I’d like to take this opportunity now to apologize to my friends and family who feel I tend to rehash old arguments/rants: I’m sorry, sorry that you think I’ll listen.

My folks turned me on to this podcast from the John Oliver(Daily Show) and Andy Saltzman(?). Very amusing. They have a running gag to find the hottest hottie from history. A must read for the history aficionado.

To close out the post I’d like to reference a recent FCC rule change that will make it a bit harder for telecommunications giants to block new comers. I refer, of course, to forebearances, a byproduct of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. In theory forcing the big players to offer wholesale bandwidth to emerging competition should keep the playing field even. Unfortunately there are a bunch of obnoxious clauses that allow telecommunications giants to argue for waivers if competition already exists. Waivers that keep the rest of us knee deep in beholden to the 1-2 options we may have. Like me, I’m stuck with Comcast.

And on that day he stood with his arms out stretched, as if stating to the web, “Bring us your tired, your poor, your cock enhancing masses.”

Why can’t spam serve a purpose…. I suppose then it wouldn’t be spam.  But when I get comments to “maake yur junk 3x tymes as biiggg!!” I expect results.  What if my life’s dream is to have 30 foot long junk, like a tree trunk?  And then here comes this comment with links that promise to deliver exactly that, only it’s bullshit and my hopes are dashed, again, as I’m redirected to a site for some goofy dong tea. Tea made from the finest in ground yak nards. No thanks, peep tea, I’m staying straight edge.

Spammers take note, if you want to make money try promoting something I want.  “Jeremy, you can haz the Ghostbusters video game here.”  Done and done.  Besides, my old “legit” videogame source (EBGames) was about as unscrupulous as an…. AIG executive?  To date I’ve not purchased another game from them.

For those that are fans of my old Havok posts you can finally expect a new one in the next week or so. I’ve finally had a chance to go back and look at my ragdoll code. It was a bit hacky trying to fit Havok capsules to the pre-built Ogre.Robot skeleton but I think I made it work. The method will work for any model but you need to know the joint/pivot rotations a priori.(You can infer some joint constraints just by knowing limb connectivity but it isn’t fool proof.) Amusingly the model you see in my image falls to pieces when the simulation starts, I disable joint constraints for the time being while I work on the Ogre/Havok mapping.

Just found this pretty cool little page of papers at the Applied Geometry Lab at Caltech. More specifically the papers titled “Interleaving Delaunay Refinement and Optimization for Practical Isotropic Tetrahedron Mesh Generation” and “Mesh Quilting For Geometric Texture Synthesis” sound extremely interesting. Good stuff. Gets me excited to finally get started on grad. school.

Speaking of physics, for any programmers out there looking to add yet another layer of abstraction to their programming there is a Physics Abstration Layer library out there that looks promising. If you’re like me you can never have enough layers. By god I’m going to obfuscate my code in shoddy design practices, layered libraries, and zero comments.

To round out this post of the obscene, the macabre, and the random I leave you with a post I read on Ars Technica (the photo is priceless). The gist: Go America, where a jury gets to decide what is considering deviant material. “I don’t agree with your desire to watch large eyed anime women get molested by tentacles but by god I’ll defend your right to do so.”

First amendment trampling aside this guy is a disgusting perv who should be locked up. Not for the regular pervy material that is but for the child porngraphy he possessed. The problem I have, much like the Ars author, is that this sets extremely ambiguous precedent for what is follow.

Recently I decided to give Ubuntu another shot.  I never had much luck with their earlier versions but not for the reasons you might think.  I am perfectly capable of working in linux.  Ubuntu however strives to be a friendly user experience.  This is a good thing but there are growing pains and the installer was one of them.  It hid enough to be annoying but didn’t work well enough to be truly helpful.  Many times I was left trying to figure out what library hadn’t been loaded properly.  Back in my Gentoo days this was less of an issue since I was basically building each component as I went.

Now that I’m old and lazy though I want something easy peasy.  Ubuntu 9.04 seemed to fit.

If you are like me you already have an OS running on your drives and all your free space is formatted.  Thus necessitated the need for gparted, a free live CD partitioner.  Resizing was a snap and things seemed off to a good start, unfortunately somewhere in the process gparted wrote something to my secondary harddrive that made it register as a Windows partition.  After much searching of the net I realized my BIOS was set to the load my larger drive first and not the one with Windows on it.  Easy to fix and we’re off again. 15 minutes later the whole things is ready to go.  But what the hell do I do with it?

What any good gamer does, I install a video game.  If you are not familiar with the wonderful world of linux I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that only a handful of games support any version of linux natively.  What you need something to run Windows apps, like WINE. As you can see from my screenshot I am in the process of downloading Left 4 Dead through steam. We’ll see if it works.

If anyone cares how to go about these tasks drop me a line, otherwise I’m keeping this post a bit less technical. I am too lazy to take numerous screengrabs.

“Your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash.”

You ever have one of those moments where you taste foot? Of course you have because no one is perfect, I don’t care that you tell the mirror differently each morning. I was remembering an amusing story the other day as it pertains to ego and tech. support. And I believe it’s a good anecdote for anyone who thinks they are above stupid mistakes.

To the point: The DVD-Rom on my laptop was broken and had to be replaced. The part was replaced but when I went to install the drivers from the disk that came with it the drive kept reporting a format error. The following is my conversion with tech. support (cut down for the sake of brevity):

Me: Look, I know you have to go through these steps but I’m a software engineer. I work with computers for a living. So I don’t want to do a “power cycle” or whatever else is on that list as it has already been done.

Tech: That’s fine sir. Is the driver disk you are using the Mac version or the PC version?

Me: ?…. (“Good god I’m stupid.”) Ummm,uhhh, it’s PC…. Oh I see the problem, the drive connector is loose. Good day.

That’s right folks, outwitted by a driver disk. Embarrassing as that situation might be it taught me a valuable lesson in humility and to double check even the simplest things.

That being said I had another of these conversations recently:

Me: The problem is the graphics card. When I run 3D intensive programs the system crashes.

Tech: I believe Jeremy (we’re on a first name basis I guess) that your card needs to upgraded. The programs you are trying to run are probably trying to use too much graphics memory.

Me: ??? You’re saying you think there is a program out there that uses more than 768megs of graphics memory? I’d like to see that.

Tech: Well sir the fact that Windows is running tells me the card is fine.

Me: ??? I don’t even know where to begin to tell you how wrong you are. As I said, the programs that crash the card now DID NOT CRASH IT LAST MONTH.

Tech: As I said sir perhaps it is using too much graphics memory.

Me: Look just tell me how to run your debugger so we can get this over with. I know the system is broken.

… 2 hours later

Me: (Sweet vindication in my voice) Your debugger crashed at the graphics tests. I would like the card replaced.

I still try to keep my ego. out of the problem but it doesn’t hurt to display some confidence.