Mass Effect

So there I was, reading the wikipedia article on Mass Effect -- because I'm sad and lonely -- when I notice the PC release date is May 28th, 2008. I then notice that today is May 29th, 2008. After several moments of pondering, I conclude that Mass Effect has been released for the PC. And yet I do not have it. Because I am poor.



....somebody buy me Mass Effect please.

Portal on Wine

I figured I'd post about a problem I had running Portal under WINE, since I couldn't find it posted anywhere. I dare you to try and solve this just from the symptoms:

• Quicksave works fine, but quickload goes to a black screen and sits there


• When a new level loads, you start outside the level and immediately begin falling to your death


• Video settings are saved when the game is restarted, but key bindings are lost

Give up? I had no idea what the problem was, since by all accounts Portal works great under WINE, including on a friend's machine. I was fully prepared to blame Steam, which thoroughly hates me, but then I discovered the problem by accident when I had the developer's console open: there were a series of error messages about quicksave failing everytime I tried it. It turns out permissions had changed when I remounted a partition: I was running Portal without permission to write to its folder. This means quicksave can't work, and for some unknown reason quicksave fails silently (excluding the developer console output; the screen itself reports "Saved" whether it worked or not). You get the same black screen if you try to quickload without having any quicksave; apparently it doesn't check to make sure you have a save before trying to load it. The permission problem also means keybindings can't be saved in the configuration file; video settings are stored to the WINE registry, so they were fine. I have no explanation for the problem with starting outside the level, but changing the ownership on the portal directory fixed all the problems listed above, including this one. I suspect you would have the same problems under Windows if you ran as a limited user, but I'm not sure.

Random Fail

I just found a fairly amusing/depressing (depending on what OS you're using) article about how Windows sucks at generating random numbers. First, we might as well all take a moment to laugh at Debian, as has become the custom every time random number generation is mentioned:



Now that that's out of the way. It appears Windows too fails at randomness, and the test of it is actually really simple. The author of the source article wrote a short PHP script that sets each pixel of a generated image based on the results from the rand() function. Since PHP uses the system libraries for this, it's equivalent to testing the OS. I ran his script on two of my machines, one running LAMP and one WAMP. Guess which is which:





The worst part, and I'm not really clear if this is a PHP problem or Windows, is the image doesn't change under Windows. PHP is supposed to auto-seed the RNG (somehow), but on Windows the image doesn't change unless I add an explicit call to srand(). This doesn't fix the problem, but at least then I get different non-random images. I considered writing "Random Fail" over the one image, but I like the glaring wrongness by itself.

And this is one of the big differences between Windows and Linux. When the OpenSSH vulnerability came out -- and it really depresses me that it took 2 years for somebody to notice, especially with sites like GitHub noticing multiple users with the same SSH key. But anyway, when the OpenSSH vulnerability came out, I got about 6 updates over the next 24 hours, presumably 1 to fix the problem and 5 more to convince me they were sorry. I'm fairly sure this problem will never be fixed (I ran the WAMP test on Vista).

EDIT: There's a nice in-depth exploration of this on Codifies that looked through PHP's source code and determined this is actually PHP's fault, not Windows'. Nonetheless, I maintain that the above paragraph would be true if this were Windows' fault.

Jack Thompson makes me smile

I love Jack Thompson. Well, no, I detest Jack Thompson, but he does amuse me in ways few people can. A few weeks ago he apparently sent a letter to Strauss Zelnick's mother. Zelnick is the chairman of Take-Two, who make games like GTA that taught me killing cops and hookers is cool. In the letter he quotes miscellaneous biblical passages (of course), saying that Zelnick's mother didn't raise him well and should've beat him more. He encourages her to have a gamer play through GTA for her, assuming she can find one not on death row (I wish there was a way to find out how many lawyers are on death row; I'm sure there's a website for this somewhere). The next time some teenager kills someone they need to say "Well, I used to take out my frustrations on video games, but then Jack Thompson took them all away, so I was forced to kill real people instead".

I really don't understand why Thompson bothers anymore; everytime he opens his mouth (so, every second of every day) I'm reminded of the quote, "Say anything you want about me as long as you spell my name right". Jack Thompson does more for GTA marketing-wise than Take-Two could ever hope to do. I haven't played any of the new GTAs. The last one I played was GTA2, when you actually stole cars, instead of the craziness it's morphed into today; I think Take-Two has actually forgotten what the acronym stands for. Despite how stupid I think the new games are, I'm actually tempted to try them solely because of all of Thompson's bitching. I want to see what all the fuss is about; I want to find out if I do feel the desperate urge to murder people after playing this game. And if I do play, I am absolutely going to e-mail him and let him know he's the only reason I bought the game. And he'll probably reply that I'm harassing him and threaten to throw me in jail, which will be pretty entertaining.

Are you my mummy?

The new Doctor Who had an amazing reference to a previous episode. If you haven't seen it, The Empty Child is an earlier episode from the Ninth Doctor, and in it the empty child wears a gas mask (I suppose "wears" isn't exact the right word, but oh well) and constantly repeats the phrase "Are you my mummy?"




This is the clip from the most recent Doctor Who episode, Poison Sky:




On an unrelated note, I upgraded to Hardy a little over a week ago, so at some point I'll post about the epic pain that was.