Monthly Archives: May 2009

Kongregate games: Splitter

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Maybe I’m just overly stressed tonight, but playing Splitter for the past 17 levels has given me the biggest headache I’ve had in days. I’m not sure why I carried on playing for so long whilst leaving that stupid music turned on! I know it’s flash game and that they need to stay small, and to do that they use looped music. But developers, please, make sure the loop isn’t obvious and god dammed annoying. It’s totally possible, Bloody Fun Day did it, so did Areas. Tonnes have. It is possible.

It’s not even noticeably annoying, until you’ve heard it for fifteen minutes and then BAM! average sized headache.

I'd much rather take my knife to him, thanks.

I'd much rather take my knife to him, thanks.

That stupid grin on the ball guy’s face? Grr! What’s he got to be so happy about? He could blink or something once in a while. I have no urge to help him in the slightest.

Physics engine games are always fairly fun for a while, until you get to the impossible levels that you can only hope to complete by chance after downing half a litre of Felix Felicis. Challenge is always good, but when you know you’re doing the right thing, just not at the exact right millisecond it gets really quite annoying. I spent six or so tries on the stupid level pictured above before angrily giving up and deciding to bitch about it on my blog.

I don’t like this game. I’m sure you’re all dying for one though, so here’s a walk through. At least this video has the common decency to mute the sound and overlay his own music.

This doesn’t look good…

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The dwarf swings his pick-axe.  The dwarf hits!

                             ---
                            --
                            |
                           --
                                --
                              ---

                                                        ...-
                                                       ....--
                                                 G G  ..G.h..
                                                     h.dG@.%.
                                                      - --*..  -
                                                         -#.   |
                                                         #
                                                         |  |

Shamess the Bandit         St:18/01 Dx:18 Co:17 In:7 Wi:7 Ch:6  Chaotic S:2728
Dlvl:6  $:22 HP:5(58) Pw:0(0) AC:8  Xp:6/609 T:2456

–FeedDemon

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I actually really don’t like FeedDemon. They’ve clearly tried to act like Google Reader in a lot of ways (or maybe Reader decided to be like them when they started) but Google does everything much better. Which annoys me.

I was really look forwards to venturing out beyond Google’s services and trying others but Google’s monopoly on awesome is held really tightly for some reason.

I didn’t like FeedDemon because:

  • It doesn’t mark items as read after I’ve been looked at the item. After the item has been selected it should immediately become read, keeping an item as unread isn’t the default action that I’d want.
  • Control + D to go to the next unread item. I’m sure you can change that, but by default that’s a dumb idea. What’s wrong with J (which works in some cases, but not others)? I typical action such as going to the next item shouldn’t require a combination key press. I know this sounds lazy, but I have to move my hand to press control, and that annoys me.
  • It seems to be using Internet Explorer in the reading pane. Not so much of a big deal, but wha’?

I really do like the syncing with Google though. I know I wanted to get away from Google to start with, but it’s more about working in the cloud than fanboyism. I like all my stuff being synced. My laptop should really just be  a throw away device.

I also liked the monospaced, large reading area though. But for now I’ll just give Reader a quick CSS hack to do that.

Start and home pages

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For the past few years I’ve been using Google Reader as my homepage, since I go there every few hours really frequently. Today though, I’ve decided that I want to change the way I use RSS feeds. Instead of just lumping together all the things I want to read in Google Reader, and then being overwhelmed when there’s a few hundred things  a day, I just want to keep Reader for infrequently updated feeds. More a feed reader (web comics, forum threads I want to keep track of, WordPress trac posts I want to keep track of) than a content reader (TechCrunch, Valleywag, Mashable). For content, I can go to their websites.

I’ve also decided to try out FeedDemon.

That leaves my homepage empty now, and I’ve been thinking of sites to replace Reader. I figured start.io might be a good idea before realising that my bookmarks do that job in a much more organised and quicker way. I actually really don’t like iGoogle, and I’m not sure why. I have a perfectly good search bar with more functionality right up top of my browser.

BBC News is pretty depressing most of the time. I like to be caught up on the news, but death, war, and economic failure isn’t really the pick me up I want to see first thing in the morning. Maybe I’ll go with /r/funny. That’d be new content each time I go there, and it’d make me happy. I’ll go with that for a while.

Orson Scott Card isn’t so bad

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I wanted to carry on a discussion about Card that was being held over at the LGBT reddit. I want to have it here because there my view points seemed to have been just pushed aside because I was sticking up for him and most people just decided to label him a homophobe and move along. It’s really all you can expect for a somewhat biased subset of people.

Card’s claim to fame is the Ender Saga, which I really hope you’ve all read. If not, let me know. I’ll freaking buy you a copy of Ender’s Game myself.

He has always been vocal about queers. In fact, his article he wrote about people calling themselves both gay and Mormon has been in my “Interesting prose” bookmark folder for a few years now, and I think it pretty much sums what he feels. He’s not homophobic in the sense that he’d go out and kill off some butt munchers, and I doubt he’d ever even nudge someone in that direction to do that. He just doesn’t like gay people interfering with his religion, and that’s totally acceptable. Most religions have conservative “rules” you have to stick to, beliefs you must hold, and that applies especially the Latter-Day Saints. If you’re gay you’re just not invited.

In the same way that if I’m asked to an invite-only party, and you’re not, you can’t go. It’s not that the hosts hate you, it’s just that they don’t really want you there. And why should they? It’s their event. Their religion.

Same goes for marriage really. It’s a Christian thing. What right do the government have to start meddling in it? The church and state should be separate; that’s usually said to stop religion messing with laws, but it’s also true to stop law messing with religion.

I’m not sure on Card’s views on civil partnerships – different but equal. Assuming neither partner in a civil partnership wanted children (for the sake of this paragraph) I think he’d be okay with it. After all, then it’d just be a legal thing and Judges wouldn’t be fucking up his religion in ways it never wanted to be, in ways that specifically are outlawed in their rules.

Up until this point I agree with all of the above; religion should sit in one corner, and politics should sit in another, and their paths should never meet. However, I disagree with Card – not angrily, because I understand why he disagrees with me – as soon as children step into the picture.

I don’t see why gay people can’t have children. I’m pretty sure that having two same sex parents doesn’t mess up a child in any way. The heterosexual desires are inbuilt in heterosexual children, and the same for gay children. It really isn’t a choice, I’m not arguing that here, and I’d love to as I find the article Card mentions he’s going to write “soon” (back last year, so I guess it’s around somewhere). It not being a choice is what I’m basing my opinion on concerning gay people having children. If it turns out that it affects the child in anyway I’ll seriously reconsider my stance on this. I wish I could go out and look at data for how gay parented kids turn out, but I’m guessing that they’re all written by extremists, on both sides so I won’t look. But this isn’t the place for that argument (and I will delete any comment bringing that argument up, email me if you really want to).

I also disagree with him that it’s wrong to allow children to see that there can be happy homosexual relationships, and that they can be just as successful (and as catastrophically dismal) as heterosexual couplings. As a (playing-around-with-the-ideas-of) Objectivist, I’d say that every human has equal rights, and the law should promote those individuals however it can to aid their safety. Morality on the other hand should be controlled by organisations, in this argument religions, and not the government.

PS. Although I’ve only read Ender’s Game so far (just waiting till I can afford Speaker) I’m pretty sure that Card doesn’t put much about gays in his books. There’s no reason not to buy his books. Whilst boycotting is typically a good way to get a business to change their ways, refusing to buy his books isn’t going to stop him believing in what he believes in, and so you’re just missing out on some of the best writing ever. I have amazing small attention span, and can happily sit through reading his massively long articles despite him saying stuff I don’t believe in.

Firefox 3.5b4: Storing data for offline use fuxxored.

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Good idea, that doesn't work.

Good idea, that doesn't work.

For me at least anyway, and I’ve only tried it on two WordPress installations running bleeding edge 2.8. I get this message, click allow, and then all pages work once. Caching on the first load.

Then, if I refresh the page, or go back to it later, everything loads without the style sheet and JavaScript – the cached stuff. To fix it, I had to go into Options > Advance > Network and then remove my websites from the list.

I guess they’re for some reason competing with Google Gears, which makes little sense. Why compete? Why not just advertise Gears? They do exactly the same thing from what I can see.

Update: A lot of people are getting here to find out how to use Gears in the Firefox beta. You can use all your extensions (even if Firefox says they’re not compatible) by editing a single option. Of course, if you do that you could end up crashing Firefox or something, but you can just start in safe mode and disable it again.

  • Type about:config into Firefox’s address bar and click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
  • Right-click anywhere. Choose New>Boolean. Make the name of your new config value extensions.checkCompatibility and set it to false.
  • Make another new boolean pair called extensions.checkUpdateSecurity and set the value to false.
  • Restart Firefox.

Time to end capitalism, methinks.

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Almost a hundred percent of the time our society works on the premise of being rewarded for doing something. To put that in little less vague terms; we make something, and then we sell it. People like having money to treat themselves to things, ergo people keep creating more things, to make more money. That’s capitalism.

I’ve known for sometime that’s not my thought pattern, not how I feel the world should be. People should be making money to make stuff, not making stuff to make money. That just leads to patterns and habits, which are always bad for development. Ender was brilliant because he noticed this – noticed that flying in formations is stupid, people get used to formations, but never change them, no innovation comes out of it. So lets not do formations.

To make that analogy make more sense, look at cars. People like cars, they get the job done. Consumers don’t have any problems with them, and will keep buying them. So the manufacture companies keep making them. Sure, this engine goes a little bit faster, but it’s the same technology. No innovation.

I want someone to develop a new engine, which doesn’t require petrol or diesel. Maybe we can up the game even more and say lets not have any type of fuel. But Shane! You need fuel to make the wheels move! I disagree. I’m no engineer (so maybe this was a bad example), but it looks like magnets can cause a pretty powerful motor. Oh. That’s cool. Why don’t I have this in my car? Because no one wants to risk losing money investing, and researching it, and potentially realising that in fact, magnets make a sucky engine. Why look into an engine that won’t make us money?

The liberal part of me really doesn’t want the government to interfere by forcing private companies to invest in innovation. The socialist in me (which seems to be growing more and more each day) really thinks that if they’re not helping humanity willingly, maybe they should be forced.

I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.

–Ayn Rand