JDHarper.com

Ubuntu 11 Impressions » 0

This weekend I decided to reinstall Ubuntu onto my laptop. So far, I’m very impressed:

It asked me for details like what I wanted my username to be while it was copying files rather than before or after, which is a nice time saver
It automatically recognized most of my computer’s hardware, unlike the Google Chrome OS which I tried to install earlier in the day. That system didn’t recognize my wifi and didn’t include ndiswrapper, the utility which lets you install Windows wifi drivers onto Linux, which is frankly unforgivable at this point
It’s very fast, at least compared to the Windows Vista installation I was using. Firefox opens almost immediately rather than several seconds later.
This is more of a Firefox feature than an Ubuntu feature, but they made syncing very, very easy, so all my bookmarks and passwords carried over from my other PC with no trouble.
I like the new Unity interface a lot. For example, they borrowed the menu system from OS X, so now the menu looks like this:And when the screen is maximized, the menu bar is covered by the title bar of the window, so the menu is hidden unless you hover over the title. Pretty clever. And the new “start menu” is very nice as well:
Oh, and the Ubuntu Software Center is a very nice interface for downloading new software, sort of like the App Store on iOS. You can still use Synaptic Package Manager or sudo apt-get [package] from the command line, but this is a really clean and easy interface.

For what I use my laptop for (mostly web browsing) this ought to do very nicely indeed.

The Wii U is going to be amazing. » 0

Nintendo announced the their new Wii U console. It’s got a graphics upgrade from the Wii, of course, but what’s really interesting is the new controller:

I think this is really exciting. One of the big limitations on console games is that everyone has all the same information. This is huge; think of how many card games and board games rely on players having limited information, from Poker to Scrabble to Settlers of Catan.

This touch-screen controller opens whole new genres of games to the Wii. One of their demo games, for example, is essentially a hide and seek game where one of the players has to run away from all the other players who are using Wii controls and looking for her on the TV.

Spitballing some ideas:

How about a game where one player controls hordes of bad guys RTS style and the other players have to fight them in first person shooter mode.
Sports games where you draw different plays on the controller.
Whatever that collectible-card-game anime show is where you play cards to make monsters fight for you.
A robot fighting game where your ammo counts and health information is hidden from the other player.
A single player RPG where all of your inventory and whatnot are on the controller so the image on the TV has a completely immersive feel to it.
A multiplayer game where one player is secretly an assassin and the other players have to figure out who it is before he kills the king.

Motion controls were a gimmick; having separate screens for different players is going to be revolutionary.

The Word of the Lord to His Exiles » 2

It is written that when Judah was about to conquered, the Lord sent his prophet Jeremiah to give this message to his people, who would soon be scattered from their homeland into the Babylonian empire:

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let the prophets and the diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, says the Lord.

I find that these words resonate after this Saturday.

Many Christians believe that Jesus is coming and that he will take them away to heaven and slaughter the sinners left behind. The primary difference between this more mainstream view and Camping’s cult is that Camping put an exact date on the event.

It is not a good belief. It is a badly reasoned doctrine, derived from a hodgepodge of verses from throughout the Bible, ripped out of their original contexts. Take a chapter from Daniel here and a few verses from I Thessalonians there, mix in several chapters from Revelations, and paste them onto framework of charts and outlines invented in the late 18th century, and you’ll get modern evangelical eschatology. I won’t go into it here, as whole books have been written debating the issue, but suffice it to say that if you read the Bible itself without some pretty complex charts you probably wouldn’t find the Rapture or the Great Tribulation on your own.

But more importantly, it’s a bad doctrine in terms of its practical conclusion: If we’re going to be raptured soon anyways, then we don’t have to take care of the world we live in. After all, God’s going to burn the world, the plants and animals that he called “very good” back in the beginning, and everyone who believes differently from us. Why not get started early?

That’s not what God told his exiles to do. He said to build houses and families and communities, to occupy until he comes. The hymn is wrong: This world is our home. In its welfare we will find our welfare. Pray for it and make it better.

Thanks to Fred Clark for highlighting these verses recently.

Quote of the Day » 0

I still don’t understand why a terrorist bringing a bomb on an airplane and killing 200 people in an airplane is so much worse than a terrorist bringing a bomb into a shopping mall and killing 3000 people such that everyone attempting to get within 500 yards of an airplane has to be treated as a potential threat but no one anywhere else does. Are airplanes just really expensive? Why don’t we say that?

TSA SECURITY SCREENING
SAVING AIRLINES FROM HAVING TO BUY MORE AIRPLANES

THANK YOU

- shakespeherian

Metatropolis » 0

I just finished listening to Metatropolis and its sequel Metatropolis: Cascadia. They are collections of fantastic science fiction novellas, by several authors sharing one fictional world, read by stars of Battlestar Galactica (in the original) and Star Trek (in Cascadia).

The stories explore a near-future world after ecological and economic disasters fragment the world into semi-independent city-states. Lots of interesting concepts throughout the book, all of which are plausible, even likely, and some of which have their roots in the real world.

Vertical farms, for example, have been proposed as a way to feed the world as we run out of potential farmland. We build hydroponic farms into glass skyscrapers and put them in the center of our cities. Saves on shipping–prohibitively expensive once the oil runs out–and takes up less space, meaning we can let the we can let some of what’s currently farmland revert back to wilderness.

I also liked the idea of turking, which seems to be an extrapolation of the Amazon Mechanical Turk project. Basically it’s like a short-term (potentially anonymous) job board. You need something done, you can pay a stranger to do it–anything from delivering a package to farm work to bailing out a man from jail anonymously.

And there’s the idea of Winos, a time-limited currency backed by wine. It’s a local currency for the Pacific Northwest, protected from the inflation shocks of fiat currency. And since Winos have an expiration date, you have to either spend it or you lose it–you can’t hoard the money.

These fascinating ideas (and plenty more besides) are the backdrop to good, human stories. And they’re narrated well; Michael Hogan, René Auberjonois, Kate Mulgrew, and Levar Burton in particular did a fantastic job telling their stories.

I liked it. Definitely worth a listen.

Quick Log Files » 0

“Ubiquitous Capture” is a productivity buzz-phrase meaning “write stuff down.” You should always be able to get thoughts out of your head and into a more permanent form. Generally that means carrying around some paper or a smart phone wherever you go, keeping a pad of paper by your desk, having notepad open on your computer, whatever way you can record your ideas before they vanish.

Ideally you also want to be able to be able to do this quickly, capturing your ideas so you can focus on what you were doing before. So I wrote a little script for AutoHotkey to help with that. Here’s a quick video showing what it does:

Capslock: Pops up a text input box. Appends that text to a text file named after today’s date.
Ctrl-Capslock: Opens today’s text file
Alt-Capslock: Same as Capslock, but first pops up a box asking what file I want to append to–this way I could conceivably keep a bunch of text files, like a wishlist, todo list, shopping list, whatever. Does not record a timestamp
Windows Key-Capslock: Opens a list of the text files in my txt folder so I can select one and open it
Ctrl-Alt-Capslock: Opens the txt folder in Windows Explorer
Shift-Capslock: The regular Capslock function

I’m keeping the txt folder in my dropbox so I can edit the files using PlainText on my iPhone. I think it’s going to be really useful.

The Many Plot RPG » 0

One of my favorite videogames of all time is Oblivion. You start off as a prisoner, but are quickly released by King Patrick Stewart and charged with delivering the Amulet of Kings to a priest who can use it to prevent monsters from another dimension from invading the countryside.

What’s more interesting to me is the fact that Oblivion has a huge open world with lots of people to meet and things to do. You can become an assassin or a thief or gladiator champion or a wizard. You can rescue a kidnapped lizard-girl and buy a haunted house.

There’s just one problem: all of these things are side-quests. To do them you have to basically ignore the main plot; the monsters will politely wait for you to deliver the amulet before opening their dimensional portals all over the land. There’s no real sense of danger; it could take you in-game months before you decide to show up with the MacGuffin of Power and move the main plot forward.

I’d like to see a game like Oblivion (or Fallout 3, or any of these open-world games) with no main plot at all—it’s all side quests. They would be elaborate and interesting side quests, but there’s not a main plot that every single character has to go through.

In fact, you *shouldn’t* be able to go through every single plot in a single game. You could limit it in different ways: if you aren’t good enough at magic, you can’t join the magical university (skills). If you’re a necromancer you can’t join the priesthood (factions). If you’re a lizard person you can’t infiltrate a party of humans (race). If you’re a gladiator champion, you won’t be asked to be a delivery boy (reputation).

And you should only be able to take on one quest at a time—while you’re on a quest, the NPC’s should not even offer you new quests. The game should focus on one plot at a time. Otherwise you get a to-do list of really important, supposedly time-sensitive things—rescue the daughter, deliver the medicine, steal the jewels—that you can ignore in favor of wandering around picking flowers.

Maybe take a page out of Just Cause 2’s book—you have a huge open world to explore, but once you start a mission the game becomes tightly scripted until the mission is over.

What I want is an open-world RPG that has lots of different tightly-focused interesting plots which make sense for the character I’m playing. I think it can be done—Oblivion is really close; maybe the upcoming sequel, Skyrim, will do even better.

The Future of Stories » 2

Stories should be free. I don’t mean that in the sense of the ethereal “Information wants to be free” hacker motto. I mean that in market terms. There are more stories in the world than any human being could ever read in a lifetime. According to one site more than 291,000 new books were released in 2006. Of those books, 42,076 were adult fiction titles–or 115 new novels every day.

There is a vast oversupply of stories. And stories have a shelf life in the hundreds of years. Authors must compete with Mark Twain and William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens as much as they compete with J. K. Rowling or Steven King or Dan Brown.

This leaves aside all the alternate forms of story telling, from TV and movies to dance and stage performance.

Stories have no market value. But it’s not quite that simple, is it?

Good stories do have value. They are ideas in viral form. They change our lives, entertain us, and give us common ground with each other.

I cannot wait for the next Terry Pratchett novel. I have almost given up hope that George R. R. Martin will ever finish A Dance With Dragons. And I want to read more from Nathan Lowell and J. Daniel Sawyer and John Scalzi and Neal Stephenson. Books from our favorite authors are in all too short supply.

Here’s what I see as the future: I see authors giving away their stories–at least at first–and passing a hat. (In other words, the future will be as the past was, before industrialized printing.)

It’s so easy to get a story out into the world now. Publishers aren’t needed any more, or won’t be once e-ink becomes cheap enough. The Apple iBooks store allows people to self publish and split the profits; I expect more such markets to pop up.

How does a new author get readers? Unless he is already famous for something else, he has to give his work away if he wants to compete with the other 114 books that came out that day (and all the millions of books that came out before). He has to build a base of fans who will love his stories enough to A) tell their friends and B) buy his future works/donate.

I know this model works. I’ve seen the success of Escape Pod, a science fiction short story podcast that pays its authors a reasonable rate, funded entirely on donations. I’ve watched Scott Sigler go from a guy recording in his closet to a New York Times best-selling author, by giving away his novels in audio form. I’ve personally bought ebooks from other podcast authors simply by virtue of their names (And Then She Was Gone by J. Daniel Sawyer and Marco and the Red Granny by Mur Lafferty) and even just donated money to other authors (most recently, after the release of Owner’s Share by Nathan Lowell). I would gladly pay for the next story in the How to Succeed in Evil series by Patrick E. McLean.

The barriers to entry for new authors are as low as they can be: If you can write a book, you can distribute it to millions of people for nearly free, grow a fan base, and maybe even make a little money at it. And as a reader, the future is bright with the possibility promise of thousands of new stories, free and priceless.

Busy Day » 0

Today, I was productive. Let all the internet know that today I:

Got an oil change
Picked up the boxes that UPS wouldn’t just leave at my door (just a USB hub and a notebook)
Bought new shoes
Bought and installed a new headlight to replace the one that died last week
Washed two loads of laundry
Cleaned out my car
Burned a CD of old files to give to my mom over Thanksgiving break
Made some dinner (see below)

Now it is time for video games.

Twice Baked Potatoes » 1

So, basically, you bake some potatoes. Cut them in half and let them cool for a few minutes. Then you scoop most of the potato out of the skins and put it into a bowl. Add salt and pepper, and mash the potatoes with a fork. Mix in some stuff; in this case, it was some left over ground beef that I had browned for a different recipe and some cheddar cheese, and a little Parmesan cheese too. Put the potato and stuff mixture back into the potato skins, and bake the skins for ten or fifteen minutes.

If I had to do it over again, I’d sprinkle a little more cheese over the top of the potato halves after putting the mixture back into the skins.

Apparently, you can also refrigerate the skins before baking them a second time. I’ll let you know how that works out tomorrow.

Based on how good this tastes, it is probably very unhealthy.

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