Tron is an important waystation in cyberpunk, borrowing heavily from Metropolis in its milieu and design (particularly the character makeup!) and The Wizard of Oz for the fantasy story. In turn it has inspired films such as the animation in Johnny Mnemonic and the navigational scenes in The Second Renaissance (The Animatrix). The cast is surprisingly good, too: David Warner, Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, even Barnard Hughes is fun as that guy.

The new Tron 2.0 PC game is a pleasure. There was talk of a Tron movie sequel but now the rumour is there is no film. Probabaly just as well.

I believe computer games are some of the most interesting commercial art being produced today. Shame to see the commercialism screw it up.

The Internet should not be a battleground.

I'm good at patching my system and the place the virus phones home is offline, so I'm presumably safe. But how would I know for sure? And why did the active virus protection allow this file to be written at all?

Java is useless for embedding in web pages anyway. I probably should turn it off.

The question is how many games the market will sustain. So far there have been a few smash hits: Everquest and Ultima Online of course, but also Dark Age of Caemlot and maybe Star Wars Galaxies. This graph of subscriber stats suggests a bunch of new games are taking off without really cannibalizing existing populations.

The historical record is astonishing as well. The Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, may record the story. Pytheas of Massalia was in the area 350-325BC and wrote of "the grave where the sun fell dead". The Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes (3rd C. BC) may describe the lake:

Google has 153 pages about this spam.

• Fission reactor: 46 years, .12c
• Fusion reactor: 46 years, .12c
• Antimatter reactor: 41 years, .66c
• Laser sail: 12.5 years, 1.0c
• Fusion ramjet: 25 years, 1.0c

But there's rumours. She really was eaten by that cougar. Even better, next season is rumoured to feature Kim as a lesbian. It's every straight guy's fantasy!

It may be a hoax. I tried to find more info, but a search for Elisha Cuthbert Lesbian finds rather different material.

Why do user interface designers think it is ever appropriate to prevent a user from taking an action?

I imagine Atari is trying to head-off pirates stealing the game on KaZaA. Or maybe they've found a clever way to get their demo out. Or maybe they're brave and are actually trying a new distribution model? Greg Costikyan has written some good stuff on online distribution. The movie industry better be paying attention; they only have three years to figure this out themselves.

There's no way I'm installing the evil scumware that comes with Kazaa and Kazaa Lite is failing me. Bittorrent would be a perfect alternative. I fear it will be about six days before a crack for the time limit is released. There's a reason demos don't have all the game assets.

Like all cool software that seems vaguely illicit, Kaillera has some association with Nullsoft. The download is hosted there and the Kaillera author credits Justin Frankel for the net code.

I took me 86 quarters and a couple of hours to get to wave 101. The game doesn't really change much after wave 60. If only I had two analog dial controllers, it's a really fun two player game.

This is much easier than the contortions I went through trying to record a RealAudio stream via Total Recorder. Great for recording game soundtracks. And it's a simple solution for bypassing whatever consumer-hostile DRM crap the rest of your computer tries to foist on you.

This is my first time fooling with Ogg Vorbis. I'm impressed, particularly it's handling of very low bitrates. I was able to make an Ogg half the size of the smallest listenable MP3. Useful for bandwidth-starved blogs.

The code is quite a hack, using Perl Inline to let me write the actual text processing in Python like Rael's demo. There is one neat trick: Inline->bind() lets me defer the import of Python until it's actually needed, meaning there's no efficiency cost if the Python code isn't invoked.

The Romanek links may break until the crowd dies down.

Why? Base64 encoding breaks up the pattern so the compressor doesn't work as well. Base16 preserves byte boundaries. It's even more efficient to gzip, then base64 encode, then gzip. Summary:

data                      909k
gzip(data)                248k

gzip(base16(data))        296k   base16 is smaller
gzip(base64(data))        385k

gzip(base16(gzip(data)))  280k
gzip(base64(gzip(data)))  250k   base64 is smaller

Unfortunately, GET-based WSDL doesn't seem to work well. I can't make Mark's WSDL work with either Java's Apache Axis 1.1 or Perl's SOAP::Lite 0.55. Neither seem to find any methods to invoke. There's also an issue of getting .NET to do authentication; that may be solvable.

I'm seeing the same problem with Paul's Google wrapper. WSDL is one of those squishy specs where stuff may be 'correct' but it doesn't work with any of the tools. I suspect the issue here is since no one is using the GET binding, it just doesn't work in many places. Frustrating situation.

There's a good overview article from Rob (along with some Slashdot kibbitzing). Also a 1997 patent filing. I couldn't find Rob's PhD thesis online, you'll have to look it up in the MIT library. His master's has been taken offline but archive.org's Wayback Machine still has it.

Torcolato is made in the recioto style - the grapes are allowed to dry on the vine, usually picking up some botrytis rot. The result is a sweet wine not unlike a Trockenbeerenauslese. My glass had a lovely balance between sweet and acid, without the heavy cloying botryized taste that Sauternes can have. Very nice.

I know a fair amount about wine; it's nice to be surprised with something new.

Pineau des Charentes is not wine. The grapes aren't fermented, instead year-old cognac is added to fresh grape juice before the juice has a chance to ferment. The result is a sweet drink, very pleasant, and honesty if I hadn't been told I'd have assumed it was a dessert wine. It's usually had before dinner, but it's heavy enough I prefer it after. It's not terribly expensive.

I thought I knew a fair bit about wine, and we gave the nice lady in Sooke a hard time about wine selections. I think she had fun fooling me with something new.

Turns out that while most user browsers support gzip encoding, most spiders don't. GoogleGuy says this may be because servers don't reliably serve gzip. I could believe that given the contortions I had to go through.

RSS aggregators are mostly good about supporting gzip. They are good about handling 304 Not Modified, too. Good thing; RSS polling is such a huge source of traffic.

I just tried it out with Scott and was impressed. Installs with no trouble and no scumware. Looks like an instant messenger app. The voice connection to Scott just worked. The sound quality was great even with our crummy desktop microphones. It was only half duplex, but that may just have been one of our sound card setups.

The network details are good too. Despite us both being behind NAT routers we got a direct P2P link going at the click of a button, no configuration required. Traffic was a steady 11 kbytes/sec (just perfect for my 16kbps link). The packet trace of connection setup is a bit odd - it talks to a bunch of different IP addresses. But hey, it works!

Bryan also has a draft RFC for NAT P2P. It's a great document and includes a technique I'd love to see developed further: opening TCP connections through NATs with a "simultaneous open":

The only alternate I know of is UPnP Nat. There's hardware router support and a free Linux implementation.

Not many uses on the net; the earliest I could find is a reference in a June 1997 post on alt.fan.frank-zappa.

Cables to Go also sells a 3-in-1 PC extension cable - keyboard, mouse, and VGA all bundled in one. Great for moving your noisy PC into a closet.

Not easy, but I found a couple of leads on sound libraries. Audiere is nice, but its Python binding doesn't do much more than "play sample". There's a good Python binding for fmod which uses swig to generate the code. It has a lot of functions, but it's organized like a C API and some of the type mappings (such as float *) aren't complete.

All this stuff is very low level.

I don't kid myself that Al Jazeera is perfect, but it's important to have alternatives to American "fair and balanced" crap that masquerades as objective.

BTW, the best steakhouse in San Francisco is Alfred's.