The Quern

It's All Grist for the Personal Mill

Archive for July, 2009

Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Jul 31

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in C++/C#/SQL/Web Programming, Computer, Humor | No Comments

blog-tour-overload[1]I recently read a post on Coding Horror where Jeff Atwood was crowing about how well the blogging platform Moveable Type has worked for him over the last years.  I’ve been a WordPress user ever since I started blogging, and hadn’t realized that in a default installation, the dynamic page creation WordPress uses can really limit the number of pages that you can serve at a time.  And although I have yet to write that breakthrough post that gets on Digg, Reddit, and Slashdot all at the same time, I figured it might still be prudent to take steps to minimize the load on my relatively puny server.

After clicking through and reading some of the links describing different caching schemes for WordPress, I decided to grab one of the highly-rated plugins to handle caching this blog.  I chose WP-SuperCache.  Although it has a bewildering variety of options, it boils down to taking the dynamically-generated pages you publish, boiling them down to the raw HTML that ends up served to the client, and caching that on the server.

When this is done, the webserver only has to sling raw HTML to the browser, rather than make multiple round-trips through PHP to the MySQL database to construct the page.  This should be both faster and lower load on the server.

So feel free to load up this site as much as you want, and send links to all your friends.  Sure, even include another few hundred “Anubis Gates” spammers.  I can take it!

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The Egyptian God of Spam

Jul 30

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Humor | 2 Comments

anubis[1]I’m starting to get quite an inflow of spam on this site.  That’s not too surprising in and of itself, but what is surprising is that 95% of it is going to a single, very old post — my book review of The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.

I’m kind of at a loss to explain why, although I do have a few theories:

  1. There is an anti-spam company called “AnubisNetworks” that they might think I’m referring to, and this might be attracting spammer attention for reasons ranging from sheer stupidity to full-on DoS attempts.
  2. The spammers might be interpreting “Anubis” as a misspelling of “anus” and flagging it as a target post.
  3. Similarly, “Anubis” or “Anubis Gate” might have some bizarre and likely obscene meaning I’m not aware of, and thus draws spammers seeking a community of perverts to exploit.
  4. These spammers might be big Tim Powers fans, although this is probably giving them more credit for literary taste than they deserve.
  5. These spam messages might actually be attempted communications from immaterial, primordial entities, drawn through some Jungian affinity by the reference to possibly the most ancient known archetypal psychopomp.  Since these entities would have only the most vague and general knowledge of humanity, their missives refer solely to mankind’s most primal drives — sex, money and cheap foreign drugs — along with a healthy dose of apparent gibberish.  Although seemingly meaningless, they undoubtedly contain a stark, alien wisdom when properly interpreted through the lens of obscure and ancient lore.

I’m really holding out for #5, but I’d settle for that as the plot of the next Tim Powers or Charles Stross novel.

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Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Jul 29

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Movies, Reviews | No Comments

rDV7kyzWPor2jdoulS0RAEkKo1_500[1]Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Rating:  4/5

We did get out over the weekend to see the newest Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  Ultimately I found it to be a very good movie, well worth seeing, but one that was in the end merely evocative of the book rather than a true, faithful adaptation of the book.

The movie starts with Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, Harry’s guardian and mentor, arriving to take Harry with him on a trip to recruit a new professor, Horace Slughorn, after which he’s dumped off near the Weasley home prior to heading off to Hogwarts.

Harry Potter’s sixth year at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry starts painfully, as his attempts to figure out what the secretive Draco Malfoy is up to lead to him getting roughed up fairly badly, even before he gets off the Hogwarts Express.  From there, we’re whirled into the events of the book, with Harry discovering an old Potions textbook heavily annotated with spells and advice from someone enigmatically referring to him- or herself as “The Half-Blood Prince”.

The students plot and scheme with almost equal fervor to both unravel the plans of the Dark Lord Voldemort, and to pair up romantically.  Romances are shuffled and tested as Harry struggles to obtain a very vital memory from Professor Slughorn, a memory he is loathe to part with.

All the standard elements of the Harry Potter movies are here — a Quidditch match, classroom scenes, Professor Snape showing outrageous favoritism to his chosen Slytherin students, Hagrid waxing sentimental over some hideous magical creature only it’s mother (and Hagrid) could ever love, and some magical duelling.

I was disappointed both in scenes left out (anything having to do with Dumbledore’s Army, along with all but two of the Pensieve memories and the funeral at the end) and the new scenes tacked on (the assault on the Weasley home being the worst).  We didn’t see much of anyone but the main three characters, and many of the professors may as well not have been in the movie at all for the minimal screen time they got.

The acting was very good — Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson have matured into excellent actors, and although Rupert Grint’s performances are a bit too slapstick for me, he does have a gift for comedy and reliably gets me to laugh at the appropriate times.  Jim Broadbent as Horace Slughorn stole the show as far as I’m concerned, except when Helena Bonham Carter was chewing scenery as Bellatrix Lestrange.

In the end, though, although I think the movie has many, many strong points and is overall very faithful to the spirit of the novel, I don’t think it stands on its own as an adaptation, as some of the earlier movies did and as the Lord of the Rings movies did.  At best, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a great vehicle for reminiscence, each scene reminding you of the fuller, more complete events from the book, but forcing you to supply the extra details to knit everything together in your own head.

I’ve talked to a few people who have not read the book but have seen the movie, and their reaction has generally been confusion.  There’s just too much going on in Half-Blood Prince for it all to make it cleanly into a 2-1/2 hour movie.  Thank goodness Deathly Hallows is going to be split into two installments.

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IFComp Update #7

Jul 28

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Interactive Fiction, Writing and Philosophy | No Comments

baby_turtle[1]I did get some time to work on the game this weekend and finished up the first scene, including resolving a lingering verb issue that was irritating me and figuring a bit more out about the conversation modeling.

I also got started on the second scene, mostly just laying out the rooms.  I should be able to finish that scene up this week, which would go a long way toward giving me the confidence that I’m actually going to be able to get this game done in time to have it tested before the competition deadline.

I’ve put the development environment and my work in progress on a thumb drive, with the hopes of being able to snag some time over lunch on occasion to get some additional work done.  We’ll see how that works out; I’m usually either playing racquetball or trying to get stuff done around lunch, but one day a week to get some coding done seems doable.

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Cool Link: IFDB

Jul 27

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Interactive Fiction, Reviews, Websites | No Comments

old19infocom[1]If you are interested in interactive fiction, the IFDB is an invaluable resource to help you find good games.  With the wide variety in genres and quality available in interactive fiction, having a central clearinghouse to hold reviews and ratings of the various offerings is very valuable.  And although there are a couple of other sites that offer the same service, IFDB is apparently the most active and up-to-date.

If you are a fan of interactive fiction, you can probably find something you’re interested through the reviews at this site.

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Aftermath

Jul 26

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

rb[1]We got a heck of a lot of stuff done yesterday.  Lots of cleaning, and the new room is now wired for cable.  I took the kids to the pool while Robin worked on our room, and they had a great time.

The Rock Band party was awesome as usual; I left fairly early, which was probably a good thing, since I’m up fairly early this morning.

The major thing on the agenda today is that we are hoping to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which should be awesome from what I hear.  I’ll review it after we’ve seen it.

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Work Day

Jul 25

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

bricks-hammer[1]Not much to report today.  It’s the weekend; we have a lot to do around the house, we’re going to take the kids out biking later, and there’s a Rock Band party this evening that I’ll briefly attend.

Have a good weekend!

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More Tales of the Power-Hungry Beast

Jul 24

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Humor | 1 Comment

Super.Rhino_18_33_49_[1]Well, I now have a functional system, complete with monster video card.  I officially dub it Super Rhino, after one of Thomas’ all-time favorite movie characters.  So I’m done configuring the system, and that’s great.

How I got there was a bit crazy.

First off, I was wrong before.  I did not have any IDE-style (Molex) connectors free in the case.  I had only SATA and the one PCIe.  I went to MicroCenter to look for SATA to PCIe or SATA to Molex adapters, and had no luck.  Plenty of Molex to SATA, but not the other way around.

However, Newegg came to the rescue.  They had SATA to Molex adapters, but after I did a bit of reading I found out that the wattage specs for SATA are about 25 W lower than the PCIe specs.  Dangerous.  Luckily, Newegg also had a “Molex x2 to PCIe” converter, so I got two of the SATA to Molex adapters and chained them into the double Molex to PCIe adapter, and presto!  A case full of wires, but also a video card with two power connections, neither of which was loaded over spec.

So that worked great, and it booted up fine connected to my LCD monitor.  But what I really wanted to do was see how it performed on the HDTV with the HDMI adapter.  With that in mind, I carted it downstairs and plugged it in.

Nothing.

The screen stayed black, with a small “0033″ down in the lower-right corner.  This was an obvious problem.

So I carted the LCD downstairs and plugged it in, VGA-style.  It came up fine, so there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the card or the driver installation.  I tried HDMI again.  Nothing.  I tried both together.  Aha!  It came up fine, detecting the HDMI as well and cloning the display from the LCD onto the HDTV.  Progress!

I jimmied some of the settings around to try to get it to recognize the HDMI interface on boot, and restarted to test it.

Oops.  Nothing.  Tried both at once.  Nothing.  Tried the LCD alone.  Nothing for a long time, then the gray-screen Vista purgatory that told me that it couldn’t start up the computer.  Then 15 minutes in auto-repair before it threw up its digital hands and gave up.  So I rebooted in Safe Mode.

That worked; I was able to log in and look around.  I tried uninstalling the ATI driver package, but it gave me an error that referred to not being able to find the driver, so I figured Safe Mode probably didn’t load it.  So I tried to reboot in low-res graphics mode, figuring I might have set the driver to a bad resolution or something.

Back to Vista Purgatory.

OK, that wasn’t it.  Try “Last Known Good Configuration”.  Bingo!  Now that I was in, I could get in and modify the offending settings in the video drivers.  Reboot.  We’re back!  At least basic VGA and DVI was working.  Now to fix the HDMI…

I found an indication online that it might be a BIOS issue.  As the last few BIOS updates were to fix issues with the newest Intel chips, and I have the newest generation of chip, I didn’t feel comfortable flashing to an older version.  What I did find out was that people have had pretty good success letting their computer boot monitor-free until Vista loads, then connecting the HDMI.  If I was trying to use this as a media center PC that would suck, but as I will only occasionally be carting the mini-tower downstairs to try out some game on the big screen, I can live with that.

So the end result was that I had Portal running on the plasma downstairs at full 1920 x 1080 resolution and maximum settings, getting smooth performance and sound through the HDMI cable.

I was done.  And finally I was able to sleep.

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Nebraska Weekend

Jul 23

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

Baseball and Blair 015xWe got back from Nebraska on Sunday night, but we left the video camera behind so I didn’t have pictures to upload until now.  We had a really good time, with birthday parties for both of my brothers kids.

Brody, who is turning 5, had a John Deere-themed party at my parents’ farm.  Grandpa got out the Gator and took the kids for a “safari” ride around the lawn, cornfield and pasture.  Grandma set up a scavenger hunt, which the older cousins helped to captain.  It kind of ended up being more of a competition between them than anything meaningful for the five-year-olds, but it was fun.  A John Deere cupcake-cake and presents finished off the party, and then Nate and his family stayed there for dinner as well.  We also got some horse rides in, which Katherine was very pleased with.

Sunday it was Brooke’s turn.  She’s only two months younger than Thomas, turning 8 this year, and she had a party at her parents’ lake house in Elkhorn.  They played in the lake (which was pretty darn cold) and had boat rides and tubing.  Thomas stayed behind when we left with Katherine to come home, and had two sleepovers with Brooke and Brody later in the week, so it was a good catch-up time for him.

As promised, here are some of the best pictures!

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IFComp Update #6

Jul 22

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Interactive Fiction, Writing and Philosophy | No Comments

shame[1]Shame!  I did not work on the game this week.  I was out of town visiting my parents for the weekend, and on my one evening free this week I spent it screwing around with my new computer rather than working on the game.

If I don’t improve my focus, I’m going to come up short at the end, in the testing and polish phase that makes all the difference on whether a game is enjoyable to play or just a slog, so I need to get back on track.  I still have some configuration to do on the new machine (details in an upcoming post) but beyond that I am not going to play any more games on it until I’ve got at least a rough cut of the first three scenes done.  That should force me to spend the next couple of weeks making progress rather than playing Jade Empire and Portal.

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