señor taco’s travels

This is very minor in the grand scheme of the universe, but today is a day when I loath computers.

I played Bioshock up until the last level. At that point the Xbox 360 had to be sent back for repairs. After over a month of not playing it I decided I’d try to finish it up this afternoon since I got very close to finishing last night. When I started the game I was informed there was an update, that’s not unusual so I let it go through.¹

The update loaded and the game restarted. As it got to the opening screen where it normally says ‘continue’, ‘new game’, etc. the Xbox rebooted completely. I thought that was strange but I just went back into the game. Oh if only it were that simple. There was no ‘continue’ option this time. When I went to ‘load game’ I had no saved games. Well, that certainly blows.

I then went to check and see if it was just me, but whatever happened wiped out all Bioshock game saves on the console. Mine, my house mate’s and the guest account. I won’t be trying the game again, I’ll just go find the ending on YouTube.

Damn computers, maybe I should go back to forestry.

1. Technically I had to otherwise the game wouldn’t play.↩

This idea of cheap wind generators is pretty damn cool. I love the simplicity of the device and it’s relatively cheap components.

I just bought MarsEdit and I’m using it to draft and post my blog entries now. I love this thing. I can’t believe I waited this long to start using it. The coolest feature is posting from NetNewsWire when I find something cool I just want to link to, not go in-depth on.

So, the other night I’m working on my
sweet new Power Mac G5 (okay, not one of the new new sweet dual-core units,
but it’s no slouch, k?). I’ve got a friend, Patch, from the href="http://danimal.org/SenorTaco/Travel/New_Zealand">New Zealand trip
that is stationed in Iraq. He took a DV camera with him and shot a lot of
footage and he asked me to convert it to DVD for him so I’m doing that. I
pull all the stuff into iMovie
HD, add a title and chapters and then export it to href="http://www.apple.com/ilife/idvd/">iDVD. Rather than burning a DVD
right now (although that wouldn’t have made a difference at all) I burn it
to a disc image so I can burn more than one copy later. Everything worked
just fine and was hunky dorie.

Well, it was hunky dorie until Cort came over to do some work on her
project and needed to burn a
DVD with iDVD. It goes, previews just fine and burns without an error. We
put it in a DVD player to make sure it’s all kosher and we’re surprised that
the audio was not the one we just previewed, but instead it was the audio
from the DVD I made for Patch.

“Okay, somehow it’s reading from the other project, we’ll just move it to
an external disk and unmount it” I think. We do that and try again. Same, a
new coaster for my table. Stupidly I try something else and burn again. Same.

Now I’m really scratching my head. Of course had I just looked in the href="http://www.apple.com/support/">Apple Knowledge Base after the first
time I would have found out that the iDVD dev team href="http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301642">doesn’t know squat
about well behaved applications on multi-user systems. I take that back,
they might, but from this incredibly dumb bug they sure don’t
show it. The other thing that kills me is that this is something easily
verified in QA processes. The things of note here are:

• When writing temp files to a system shared by multiple users each temp
  file needs to have at least the username in it to make it not block or stomp
  other users use of the system.
• If you write temp files that are only around for one phase of processing
  then you remove them when that process is done (especially if the permissions
  are restrictive enough that another user can’t remove the file which is good in
  this case as you don’t want another user interrupting a phase of processing
  that does rely on said file).
• iDVD does it’s preview based on quicktimes (refrencing to iMovie I’m
  guessing) and then has to encode the audio for burning. It should
  give an error when it can’t open the file to store the newly encoded audio
  rather than failing silently!
• There is a point release (x.0.1) of iDVD from the version 5 release. How
  this bug is still around is a mystery. If it was introduced in 5.0.1 then
  I’m going to be shocked.

Now I have to figure out how to fix it in case I’m not around to be admin and
clean it out for another user.

title='DrunkenBlog'>DrunkenBlog has an href="http://www.drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog-archives/000581.html">interview
with href="http://www.wilshipley.com/blog/" title=" Call Me Fishmeal.">Wil
Shipley of Delicious
Monster. Delicious Monster makes Delicious Library, a media
library for OS X that has features and a user interface to die for.

There are a lot of good things in the interview, but the big one that
hit me is when Wil says:

Heuristics (the way I’m using them) are basically algorithms that are
not guaranteed to get the right answer all the time. Sometimes
you can have a heuristic that gets you something close to the answer,
and you (as the programmer) say, “This is close enough for
government work.”

He gets it and it’s obvious he enjoys his job. I’m still getting
there sometimes it seems. Occasionally I’ve been known to pull out
some fast and “good enough” work, but lately I don’t feel that way at
all. I’m getting work done, I just don’t feel super inspired I guess.

I’ve been href="http://www.advogato.org/person/grey/diary.html?start=17">hit
with a stick by grey. I had only seen it recently and happened to
notice grey got hit before he did. Grey is a good man and always
surprises me with his breadth of his knowledge.

I’ve been reading a lot lately and this seems to fit right in with a
post I was brewing up in my noggin. It seems that this year alone
I’ve read about one dozen books. I guess I should be keeping track,
but along the way it just got to be more fun to read than to catalog.

style="font-weight:900;font-size:xx-large;font-style:italic;">enter the
stick

You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which
book do you want to be?

Hands down the only choice for me would be href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/-/0679767800//ref=nosim/danimalorg-20"> class="book">The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. I
was introduced to this book by my good friend href="http://andremazzone.com/">Andre. Bester was at the time
unknown to me, and that’s a shame. I think he’s one of the best
writers I’ve ever read. He wasn’t extremely prolific and I think that
hurt his spread the most.

The Stars My Destination is definitely very
dirty and gritty, which helps to make it seem all the more real. Even
though it was published in 1956 it still feels contemporary. The
struggle and development of the main character left me wanting to know
more about his future. Being that book would be great in that scheme
of things.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Hmm, I’d have to say probably, but nothing is jumping to mind. It’s
not that I don’t think I ever did, I just preferred crushes on real
people since fictional characters were just that, fictional. If
anything I’m sure there was a twinge somewhere for some comic book
characters, what with visuals and all. Rouge, Mystique, Kitty Pryde,
stuff like that. Obviously nothing ever set in though so I can’t say
for sure.

The last book you bought is:

There was a giant book purchase not too long ago of about twenty or so
books, but the last one was for sure href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/-/0312864213/ref=nosim/danimalorg-20"> class="book">Reflex by Steven Gould. It’s the sequel to href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/-/0765342286/ref=nosim/danimalorg-20"> class="book">Jumper. Both tell the story of a boy, Davy, that
through a stressful situation discovers he can teleport himself. class="book">Reflex is set about ten years after class="book">Jumper and was a good and enjoyable read.
Strangely enough there are similarities to The
Stars My Destination and that book even gets a mention in class="book">Jumper.

The last book you read:

Just this morning I finished reading href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/-/0553348981/ref=nosim/danimalorg-20"> class="book">Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. I’ve liked
the Tom Robbins books I’ve read so far and class="book">Jitterbug Perfume was no exception. Robbins is
good at melding varying story lines into one coherent ending. This
book held my intrigue throughout. I’ll now need to pick up more works
by Mr. Robbins.

What are you currently reading?

Well, with my daily commute on BART I
tend to race through a lot of books pretty fast. Having just
finished a book on the ride in this morning (which I hate by the way,
because now I don’t have anything to read on the way home) I’ll be
moving on in my stack. I guess my next daily book will be href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/-/0316143464/ref=nosim/danimalorg-20"> class="book">Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David
Sedaris. At the same time I have a non-daily book that I leave at
home to read before bed and the like, href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/-/1571458662/ref=nosim/danimalorg-20"> class="book">Necessary Numbers by Mary Blocksma. It’s an
interesting look at everyday numbers. My favorite bit so far is
learning how barcodes work and how to calculate the check digit.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

A tough question, but here we go:

• href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/-/0679767800/ref=nosim/danimalorg-20"> class="book">The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester.
  You can see the first question for more on why this is my favorite
  book.
• A star atlas of some kind. I love looking at the stars and
  picking out celestial objects. Don’t ask me which specific book
  because I don’t know, but I would want a complete one for sure.
• href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/-/068483846X/ref=nosim/danimalorg-20"> class="book">CRUDDY: An Illustrated Novel by Lynda Barry. As
  far as fiction goes this book is another that I could read over and
  over. It’s interesting and has such gritty characters you can almost
  see yourself in the story. Good stuff.
• href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/-/0671640992/ref=nosim/danimalorg-20"> class="book">The Forest People by Colin Turnbull. An
  awesome romp into a fascinating culture.
• href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/-/0393324826/ref=nosim/danimalorg-20"> class="book">Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by
  Mary Roach. I can’t say enough good about this book. It’s a
  fascinating read, even after you’ve already read it. Ms. Roach
  de-mystifies the post-death happenings with the human body but does so
  in a kind, warm, and very real manner. You laugh, you tear up, and
  you understand.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3
persons)? And Why?

• rotomonkey - While Chris is a
  very visual person he’s also one of the smartest guys I know. I’ve
  been surprised in the past when Chris pulls out some bit of knowledge,
  but now nothing like that surprises me coming from him.
• KP - A master extraordinaire
  and a super nice guy. I only wish I had stuck around New York to work
  with him more.
• Chris Palmer - Chris is
  another one of those brainy folk that puts me to shame. He smart and
  quirky and I want to see a bit more of what’s in his brain without the
  need for a bone saw.

Current stick path as it got to me: Barrie unleashed the stick on
3/7/05 - Amanda - scooterdeb - Brian - Karma Police - Evelio - Ivy -
Suzanne - Jeff - Patricia Lockwood - Frank - Amy - Steve - Ginger
- href="http://scoplaw.blogs.com/scoplaw/2005/03/stinks_and_smir.html">Scopylaw
- href="http://mowabb.com/ai/archives/2005_05_01.html#004788">AI
- href="http://monkey.org/~jose/blog//viewpage.php?page=the_stick">jose
- href="http://www.advogato.org/person/grey/diary.html?start=17">grey
- me

The New York Times has a neat href="http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/politics/2004_ELECTIONGUIDE_GRAPHIC/"
title="Election Graphics">Election guide (flash) that shows not only the
way polls are going for each state but also past presidential results when you
mouse over the state or district.

Now, my friend Andre noticed yet another href="http://danimal.org/SenorTaco/2004/07/15#not-a-number" title="Silly
Interface Gaffe">NaN interface gaffe where the District of Columbia (D.C.)
has Kennedy winning by ‘NaN%’ in 1960. Not only should there not be any
listing for D.C. in 1960 (see, they only got electoral votes in 1961 with the
href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.amendmentxxiii.html"
title="Amendment XXIII">23rd Amendment) if it comes up as a NaN then it
should just not display at all. Oh well, things like this will continue. I’m
guessing it’s because people aren’t doing correct data input validation which
is the cause of many of our buffer over-runs and successful attacks against
software.

I saw that Planes
Mistaken For Stars has an title="ecard: stream the album">ecard available where you can stream the
entire new album before it’s release. So, when I get there I’m greeted with
not a time value for the track I’m not playing, but a value that a human
probably shouldn’t ever see, href="http://computing-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Not-a-Number"
title="NaN definition">NaN. It’s not a big deal, but those kinds of
interface gaffes are humorous to me.

alt="NaN screen grab" />

Well, I’m going to have to dig in some of the dusty recesses of my brain on
this one. Often times I will put my iPod in shuffle song mode, goto
Browse->Songs, pick a starter song and then let it pick from all
(currently) 5359 songs on the unit to play. Occasionally there will be songs
from the same artist and even album following each other. That’s fine I
guess, but I’d rather if it didn’t do that. However today there was an odd
occurrence. A song by the band Avail played and then the song that followed
it was the song that follows on the album. I though the shuffle had been
turned off for a second there.

I’m so rusty at statistics that I’ll need to look at some reference to
remember how to calculate the probability of that happening (and if you’re
going to comment with the answer please put something like SPOILER in the title
of your comment, thanks).

Firesomething “is
an extension for Mozilla Firefox/Firebird. It allows you to change the product
name in various parts of the browser. Random name generation ensures perpetual
humor and possible end-user confusion.”

As you can see I’ve been kind enough to put a comment in my User-Agent string
so sites can deduce the true browser. I also didn’t change it from Mozilla,
but that is possible.