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Archive for September, 2009

IFComp 2009 Final Pre-Submission Update

Sep 30

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

The “last” bugs have been squashed.  The walkthrough is written.  BB1162-002The beta testers have been credited.  The file is uploaded.

Grounded in Space is finished.

You won’t hear much from me on the subject until November 15th, when the judging is complete.  As per Rule 5 of the Interactive Fiction Competition, I cannot comment on my game or respond to reviews at any time during the judging period.  I do hope to have an extensive postmortem after that point, where I go into detail about what I learned and what I’ll do differently next time.

I will say that I’m already planning at least one new project; this one was so fun, challenging, and rewarding that I’m sure I’ll be motivated to try again at least one more time.

I’ve put a lot of time and effort into this, but it’s absolutely been time and effort well spent, no matter how I do in the competition.  It’s helped me to learn a new programming language and practice my writing, exposed me to some excellent interactive fiction in a community that I had no idea even existed before, and motivated me to follow through and finish a fairly large project purely on my own, with my own willpower and resources, giving me confidence that I can handle a project of this scale outside of the confines of work.

This last week was a doozy.  At the very last minute, one of my testers found a couple of issues that exposed a whole class of bugs that neither me nor my testers had found previously.  I spent Saturday evening frantically rooting them out, prior to bringing my wife home from the hospital with our new son on Sunday.  I’m pretty confident the bugs are cleaned up.  Of course, I’m also fairly confident there are others, and that there are weak spots in my writing that another pass might have addressed.

In the end, though, you have to call it a day sometime, and I choose now.  Play it and enjoy it; it’s yours now.

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Huge Spam Wave

Sep 29

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

spam[1]After the weekend’s festivities, we returned home on Sunday.  On Monday, after having settled in a bit and gotten the kids off to school, I sat down to post the pictures in yesterday’s entry.

We’ve gotten a lot of spam in the past, but it was ridiculous yesterday.  85 new messages had come in since I posted Friday.  Most were the usual “Anubis Gates” pharmaceutical shill, but there was another type of gibberish spew that had apparently walked through my blog, targeting a pretty decent subset of all the posts I have.

With Akismet, of course, it’s the work of a moment to delete them all, but this was by far the biggest wave I’ve been hit by.  Akismet has registered something less than 600 spams total, making the weekend’s attack 15% of all the spam I’ve ever gotten on this blog.

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And Then There Were Five…

Sep 28

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | 3 Comments

Jonathan and Soccer 033rHere’s the newest addition to our family:  Jonathan Rowe Wigdahl.  He was 7 lb. 5 oz. at birth, was 19″ long, and was born at 1:48 pm on Friday, September 25th.  Here are a bunch of pictures!  Note that you can click on them for a larger version.

Just a warning:  blog updates may be sporadic for the next week or two as we get our new schedule and responsibilities sorted out.

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Economic Astrology (aka Book Review: The Great Depression Ahead)

Sep 25

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Books, Reviews | No Comments

2950849303_b39feef51e[1]The Great Depression Ahead — Harry S. Dent, Jr.

Rating: 1.5/5

I can’t really claim this is a full and complete review of The Great Depression Ahead, because I didn’t finish it. I borrowed it from a friend at work, and although I made an attempt to read it and got through the first three or four chapters, there was way too much pseudoscience in here to motivate me to complete it.

Dent’s central thesis is that the economy operates according to cycles, and that these cycles are relatively regular both in amplitude and frequency. He posits the existence of multiple overlapping cycles, ranging from an every-decade stock market cycle and cycles based on our presidential election years, all the way up to a 500-year “mega innovation cycle” (his term) and even a 5000-year “civilizational advancement cycle”.

I don’t have a problem, really, with most of the short-term cyclic approach, particularly that based on demographic analysis.  I can easily see that demographic spending trends will change as large generational cohorts enter and leave the workforce, and as their aggregate family conditions change.  So far, so good.  And I’m willing to go with the empirical evidence of some of his odder cycles — given enough points that plot with regularity, you can infer the presence of at least a temporary cycle with reasonable confidence.

But these longer cycles that he anchors with one or two conveniently-chosen points are just bunk.  For example, he chooses the invention of the printing press and the rise of computers as anchor points for his 500-year innovation cycle.  But what about the steam engine?  The assembly line?  The railroad?  The telegraph?  The cotton-pickin’ cotton gin?  You could make a reasonable case for each of these as being society-transforming innovations, but since they don’t fit his 500-year model, they’re conveniently left out.

But when prediction fails, hindsight comes to the rescue!  The 60-year Kondratiev Wave cycle theory went off the rails in the 1990s, trashing some of his earlier predictions.  So, to cover himself, he posits a new, 80-year cycle.  But a one-time change in cycle length doesn’t fit his “everything can be explained by cycles” model — if cycles can arbitrarily change in length, then they weren’t really truly cyclic to begin with, and the whole premise of his analysis goes straight into the wastebasket.  So he concocts the explanation that the 60-year cycle shifts back and forth to an 80-year cycle on a schedule governed by a 250-year Revolutionary Cycle.  Fiction masquerading as truth is truly stranger than honest fiction!

So what is the predictive value of his theory?  He claims successful prediction of the Japanese slump in the 1990s.  Fine.  Let’s take that at face value.  He’s also the guy that wrote Dow 30,000.  Oops.  His most successful “predictions” appear to be immediate reads of the existing situation, more akin to psychic cold reading than any long-term prediction of market trends.  He touts the recommendations he made that paid off, and conveniently fails to mention the ones that didn’t — a classic use of confirmation bias.  The terrorist attacks of 2001 and their effects on the market took him by surprise, so now he has incorporated a nine-year “terrorism cycle” into the mix — retroactively, of course.  By this model, we’ll be “due” for a major terrorist attack in 2010, and apparently can breathe easy until then.

Folks, you can’t make this stuff up.  Economics is supposed to be a science, but for Harry Dent it’s more like astrology.  Or, if you want to be generous, it’s more along the lines of astronomy: Ptolemaic astronomy, with scads of epicycles to attempt to shoehorn ever-more-complex observed behavior into the straightjacket of a single, incorrect unifying assumption.

The irony in astronomy was that the truth, given the illumination of proper mathematics, is much simpler and more elegant than the Ptolemaic model could ever have been, and I suspect (with no proof, I admit) that the same is probably true of macroeconomics.  Possibly the greatest irony in this book, though, is on the back cover of the hardback, where (at least in my edition) he proudly features a glowing testimonial from none other than recently disgraced South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.  It’s tempting to thus just refer to Dent’s cyclic theories as the “Argentinian School” of economics, and to put it quietly back on the shelf where it belongs.

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Clockwords

Sep 24

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

clockwordsEmily Short, a prominent interactive fiction author, has contributed to the development of a new browser-based game, Clockwords, which combines the best aspects of the tower defense genre and Bookworm.  Set in a “gaslamp fantasy” setting with crazy mechanical inventions, you type words to arm your contraption and shoot down clockwork attackers before they can get to your machine.

I’ve played quite a bit, and the concept of the game is pretty intriguing, not to mention horribly addictive.  You get letters that boost your damage if you use them, and they come in different varieties and potencies, but you can type any word you want.  Using all your bonus letters in the same shot unlocks another letter chamber, so your vocabulary along with your typing speed is ultimately what determines how much firepower you have.  It looks like it should be a lot of fun for kids as well; I’m sure Thomas will love it, as he likes tower defense a la Plants vs. Zombies, as well as Bookworm.

The only irritating thing about it is that Clockwords is microtransaction-enabled through MochiGames, which means a steady stream of annoying ads and shilling for in-game powerups.  Set your brain filters on “ignore” and you should be fine.

Emily said that the version that’s online currently is just the Prelude, and that in the future there will be more content and gameplay variations.  I look forward to seeing what they come up with!

IFComp Update #15

Sep 23

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

3039522605_72b86b1e2e[1]Depending on how things go, this might be my final pre-submission update.  I’m up to Beta Release 7 at this point — my testers have been finding bugs at a truly staggering rate, which is testament both to their persistence and my questionable implementation decisions.

Beyond bugs, the testers also identified a lot of areas where the flow of the game was bad, or where I was dumping an unreasonably large amount of text onto the user at once.  Also, several of the testers are completely new to IF, so reading their transcripts is really helping me to identify alternate command formulations that I should support, as well as extraneous wacky actions, synonyms, and the like.  One tester in particular has been excellent at triggering almost every conceivable state machine misfire, and thanks to his work the game is much more solid and stable now.

The testers seem to enjoy the plot and writing so far, although not all have made it past The Big Puzzle yet, so we’ll see when they get to the end.  I’m definitely paying the price for some of my ignorance of the proper way of doing things in the early days.  I made some mistakes early on that are not feasible to fix at this point, and that cause some really wacky behavior.  Next time around I will definitely have a much better idea of what things are fairly straightforward to implement and which are error-prone.

I’m also disappointed (as I suspect almost everyone is at one time or another) with how conversation works in my game.  I use the standard “ASK X ABOUT Y” syntax, which is fine as far as it goes, but feels limiting even as it fails to provide any sort of ongoing conversational flow.  The next time I need to implement NPC conversation, I’m definitely reading Emily Short and Mike Roberts before starting.

The competition starts in just over one week, so I will likely be uploading my submission before Wednesday of next week.  What that means is that the next update will probably be a quick post-submission report before the comp kicks in, after which I will have to maintain radio silence as per Rule 5 until the judging period is over, which will be November 15th.  To fill the time, I should have a new son in the next week or so, so I don’t think it will be a tremendous hardship to wait.

Wish me luck!

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Book Review: Last Call

Sep 22

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Books, Reviews | No Comments

pc[1]Last Call — Tim Powers

Rating:  5/5

I’m probably taking my blog’s life in my hands posting a review of another Tim Powers novel.  The earlier one, about The Anubis Gates, continues to attract an inordinate amount of spam — probably five times as much as all other posts on the blog combined.  If it’s the Tim Powers name that’s attracting them, I guess it’s time to roll out the red carpet again…

Last Call is a great book, and ranks right up with The Anubis Gates as my favorite Tim Powers works.  Like The Anubis Gates, it features a protagonist who is fundamentally a good, well-meaning guy, who gets thrust into a situation a bit over his head.  All right, way over his head — he’s used as a pawn in an ongoing battle about which he at first understands nothing.  Eventually, over the course of the novel, he learns about what’s going on and the role he can play in the action, and finally is able to stand on his own and fight for himself.

The novel starts with a quick and brutal scene as a financier / Poker player / sorcerer named Georges Leon attempts to destroy the soul of his five-year-old son, Scott, by means of a game played with Tarot cards.  Scott escapes with his mother.  She dies shortly thereafter, but not before she manages to get Scott to safety.  We then quickly flash forward about thirty-five years or so as that son, now called Scott Crane, is about to be kicked out of his house for failure to pay his mortgage.

Scott’s wife is recently dead, although he can’t quite bear to let her go, and he’s starting to see ghosts and visions that somehow seem to be related to a game of Poker he played with a deck of Tarot cards on a houseboat in Lake Mead twenty-one years ago.  Scott’s first job is to get some quick cash, and then try to figure out what the heck is going on, which will involve finding Ozzie, the adoptive father he hasn’t seen in twenty years, and then convincing him not to kill himself.

From there, things get really odd.  Several factions of hired guns are after Scott, who is learning that he has strengths as well as weaknesses in the high-stakes game that’s being played.  By enlisting the help of his adoptive sister Diana and some other reluctant participants, he’s able to work toward claiming his role as a Jack — an aspirant to the throne of the King.  But to win it, he’ll have to not only defeat the other Jacks, but unseat the reigning King — his body-swapping biological father — before his father can finish what he started so long ago:  disposing of Scott’s soul and claiming Scott’s body for his own.

The novel is a great ride, with the usual Powers-style secret history in full effect.  Ever wonder what is the cosmic significance of the exact dates Bugsy Seigel chose for opening, closing, and reopening the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas?  You’ll find out in full detail.  The characters are well-defined, the plot is tight, and the worldbuilding, as always in a Tim Powers novel, is first-rate.

I’ve now read this book through three different times, and I continue to get more out of it each time.  There’s such a density of detail that it’s very hard to pick it all up at once.  The symbology of the cards — both Tarot and traditional playing cards — is central to the novel, so the more knowledge you have about the subject the easier it is to figure out what he’s talking about.

As usual, the bad guys have a good dollop of the grotesque about them, from the over-friendly hit man to the omniphagous “Mandelbrot Man”.  If the novel wavers at all it’s in these extreme characterizations.  Powers does a good job of pulling them off, but I found my suspension of disbelief wavering at some of the outrageous behavior some of these guys displayed, in ways that even the starkly supernatural aspects of the novel didn’t trigger.

Last Call won the World Fantasy Award, and it’s easy to see why.  It’s a great novel for fans of the secret history or urban fantasy genres, and probably has appeal outside those categories as well.  I highly recommend it.

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The Saga of the New Keyboard

Sep 21

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in C++/C#/SQL/Web Programming, Computer, Humor | 5 Comments

keyboards-709573[1]I program.  A lot.  I type in a lot of code at work and at home as well, and I’ve had numerous flirtations with carpal tunnel syndrome in the past.  What finally cured the problem for me — and it was a dramatic cure — was moving to the Microsoft Natural Keyboard around 13 years ago.

Programmers get attached to their keyboards, and it’s no wonder; we type tens, possibly hundreds of millions of keystrokes on the things.  Switching keyboards is a big, big deal — nothing to approach lightly.  As an example of how particular we can get, note that the keyboards pictured to the right are recognizable instantly as examples of the Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite model, which are inferior to the original models in key feel, function key size, and the layout of the insert/delete and cursor arrow key blocks.

Don’t mess with our keyboards.

The original Microsoft Natural Keyboard is, in my opinion, the pinnacle of keyboard design.  Nothing before or since matches its ergonomics, key feel, or spare layout and design.  I bought one for work and one for home way back in the day, and have used them for well over a decade now — they’ve outlasted at least 3 computers with never a problem.  I’m typing this post on one right now.  I have an Elite as a spare, but I try not to have to use it.

There’s only one problem; the original Microsoft Natural Keyboard is a PS/2-only device.  That’s not been a fatal problem even in the age of USB, as there are PS/2-to-USB converters.  However, either the converter or the new Dell I got recently (or both) are not fully compatible with the keyboard, as I get dropped keys when typing at speed, and it can’t handle interleaving multiple simultaneous keypresses very well, which affects ALT- or CTRL-key combinations and games.

So it was time to look for a new keyboard.

Of course, the first place I went was to Microsoft’s offerings.  After over a decade of complete satisfaction, I knew they understood what a programmer needs in a keyboard.  I also knew they had a suite of new keyboards, all of which natively supported USB.  After reading some reviews I went with the Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000, which seemed to be the intended successor to the original Microsoft Natural Keyboards.  I ordered it from Newegg, got it, and plugged it in.

With one exception, it’s really quite a good keyboard overall.  The key feel is OK, the layout is good (read:  familiar) — everything about it was acceptable, except for the spacebar.

The spacebar.  How could they screw up the spacebar?  When you type on an ergonomic keyboard, especially  a split one like the Natural series, the spacebar has to be wide to bridge the gap between the two sides of the keyboard.  For comfortable hand positioning, you have to have your thumbs on the very ends of the spacebar — it’s required by the very concept of a split keyboard.  So why would Microsoft make a keyboard with a single contact for the spacebar, and a cheap swaybar to try to balance the forces?  It presses OK in the exact center, but when you press on the ends, it sticks.  Badly.  On either side.

It’s a dealbreaker.  It may be news to Microsoft, but the spacebar is a commonly used key.  I’ve used it several hundred times in this blog post already, which is more than I can say for the ‘x’ or ‘q’.  So back the Natural 4000 went to Newegg, and I looked for another answer.

What I came up with in the end was a used Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro.  This model supports USB natively, has the same key layout as the original Natural, a good spacebar, and a bunch of extraneous buttons at the top that I just ignore.  Key action is OK; not as good as the Natural, but acceptable.  The function keys are the small Elite size, but I can live with that; I don’t use the function keys nearly as much as the spacebar.  And since older Natural keyboards are almost indestructible, it still works great.

I wish I’d found this one originally, as it was cheaper than the 4000 and I wouldn’t have lost the $18 on return postage and restocking fee when returning the 4000 to Newegg.  But even so I consider it a cheap lesson to learn.  The important thing is that I have an acceptable keyboard to use now; one that works well enough that it seems to blend into the background, and becomes something I can just ignore while I work.

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Mini T-Rex

Sep 18

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Humor | No Comments

art.raptorex.eight.courtesy[1]Apparently researchers have turned up fossil evidence of a miniature Tyrannosaurus Rex in China.  “Miniature”, in this case, means around human height, so it could still take a pretty good chunk out of  you.

No news on whether the mini T-Rex ever took on Triceratops Maximus, but if it ever did, it would have to have brought along quite a few friends to bring the Max down.

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Natural Childbirth Class

Sep 17

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

Two weeks (approximately) left!  natural_childbirth_heart[1]Last night we had a childbirth class on “Natural Strategies” — since we’re trying to minimize the risk of autism with our next child, and we have no idea what the environmental trigger factors are (if any), we’re trying to be prudent and minimize interventions as much as possible.

The course was pretty good; the high point was a demonstration where we held a bunch of ice in our hands until it was unbearable to simulate contraction pain, then did the same thing while using “natural pain management” techniques (really, distractions).  Robin reported the difference was pretty amazing in the amount of discomfort perceived and the amount of time she could stand to hold the ice.

The problem was that the class was 3 1/2 hours long and there was about 1 1/2 hours of valid, new material in it — at best.  The rest of the class was either rehash of the mainstream childbirth class (which was a prerequisite for this one) or anecdotes about other natural deliveries.  I don’t think the extra material had much value, and certainly wasn’t worth blowing the entire evening on.

I do think the instructor was really good, and the new information we got was definitely useful.  I’d just work on trimming the fat from the course and let us out an hour earlier.

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