Get Lost

Click here and then wave your mouse over the image.

On fast modern machines it looks pretty cool.

The original Java applet came from Durius.com; it's now a JavaScript port of that applet.

The image is from a game I was working on at home back in the mid-90's.

At one point the story for the game was almost picked up as a screenplay for a $3M movie. But then, many screenplays are almost picked up.

Oldest known post

Here's a link to the oldest known post by me: Did you know the internet was usable in 1989?

Lego upgrade and MIT sample server (hack fix) - comp.windows.x | Google Groups

-- Stephen

Software Piracy

Here's my idea for a T-Shirt to combat software piracy:

"Help prevent software piracy: become a software ninja!"

Sadly, it might have the wrong effect - a person might refine their pathetic pirate skills into leet ninja skills and steal more software.

© 2007 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

NBC's Stupid Move

Digg - Welcome to Zuckerland: NBC's Stupid Move

This is awesome. I rarely read the comments at Digg but even the comments are interesting.

And I never heard of Hulu either.

This is my favorite comment:

From Hulu.com:

"Why Hulu? Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we're building. Our hope is that Hulu will embody our (admittedly ambitious) never-ending mission, which is to help you find and enjoy the world's premier content when, where and how you want it."

Translation: Doomed.

Update 2007/09/24 - Hulu.com is probably dead on arrival, but at least Zucker had a backup plan with Amazon.com to host downloadable TV content. You can download the pilot episodes from four new shows. Amazingly, these downloads don't have any tag lines like "Watch the show Monday's at 8:00 p.m. PDT/EDT!" The shows are just the shows without any commercial breaks, no tag line, ... basically no promotional oomph at all.

Bionic Woman was interesting but I don't plan to continue watching; Chuck was funny and we'll give it a chance; Journeyman was interesting but I don't plan to continue; and the fourth one never downloaded.

Update 2007/11/24 - I have an invite to the Hulu private beta so I'm going to check it out. According to Zucker, NBC barely makes any money off iTunes. I read an interesting article recently that explained Apple's iTunes store pricing: priced just low enough for everyone to break even ... and therefore promote the sale of iPod hardware! That made a lot of sense to me.

I like getting non-DRM tunes from Amazon. I just visited California and I thought, "I should own California Dreamin'". Cost at Amazon: $.89. You can't beat that with a stick.

HD DVD in Upset Victory Over Blu-ray

GameDaily BIZ: Forrester: HD DVD in Upset Victory Over Blu-ray?:

'Weakened by these developments, Blu-ray needs to offer a viable hardware model at the $250 price point by Christmas 2007,' said Gownder. 'The Blu-ray camp must also stave off further studio defections, and employ more aggressive promotional tactics to counter HD DVD's recent momentum.' 'Failure to alter strategy would open up Blu-ray to a possible upset defeat at the hands of HD DVD,' he added.

It's only going to take one more tudio to switch for the death knell for Blu-Ray to begin tolling.

And HD-DVD players will be less than $250.00 this Christmas.

(Update 2007 11 24: Blu-ray is $450 at Costco and HD-DVD is $250. My friends with Blu-ray say, "So what if HD-DVD wins? So what if it is a stalemate and we have both? HD-DVD is going to be so cheap I'll just buy it later for $100.")

Dog thinks 'WTF?'

© 2007 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

A Pirate's (After) Life For Me

A Pirate's (After) Life For Me

(That link is dead, but here is a link that refers to that link, which is not dead:  https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=3876673&page=1 )


Un-frickin'-believable.

The best fix, of course, is to let it be known that it's all cleaned up and put down the toilet by the end of the night.

Another idea would be to let people fill out a form and have the ... stuff shot up in a firework. They could charge big $$ for that.

[2024-07-11 - Hey Elon - could be big business!  Just launch some remains along with Starlink satellites!]

Mario Galaxy

I seem to have a copy of Mario Galaxy a little before it goes on sale tomorrow.

I've played it a bit. One of my children has finished it. It takes a little getting used to - the nun-chuck is used for moving and the standard Wii remote is used to grabbing and shaking and spinning.

I love that it runs at 60 fps. Very few games pull it off. 60 fps looks so much more "real" than 30 fps (and lots of games drop to 20 fps). It's simple arithmetic - you can draw 3x the stuff at 20 fps as you can at 60 fps, so to get a 60 fps game going you need to make some simplifications. (Those football games that run at 60 fps are amazing bits of engineering.)

I don't have a lot of time to play games, sadly. When I do have time, I usually play the game that's made where I work. I have about 280+ hours into that. (One of my kids has 2400 hours into it. She knows everything about it. She's a very helpful resource.)

When I was working on console games, I played console games. When I was working on PC games, I played PC games. Now that I'm working on a massive MMO, I have no time for other games. I don't think this is an unusual experience in the MMO world. The good ones consume all your game playing time.

Oh wait, this is about Mario Galaxy. Yeah, looks pretty good.

© 2007 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

TiVo and Rhapsody

I like Rhapsody - I use the free version which lets me listen to 25 songs a month. It's great for checking out what's happening. For instance, Britney's new album, which was almost entire written and performed by her producer and her highly processed voice is treated like an extra synth instrument, sounded interesting to me, and worth using up some of my 25 free plays on.

I like TiVo. Of course.

TiVo + Rhapsody (at least on a Series 2 box) is not good.

The UI locks up a lot. When it's not locking up, it's slow to respond - so slow you get confused about what you've done.

Too bad. It could have been cool.

© 2007 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Radiohead

E! News - Fans Shortchanging Radiohead's Rainbows?:

A new study says nearly two-thirds of respondents indicated they didn't pay anything for the download.

The problem with any statistics about the Radiohead experiment are that a lot of people are going to go try it out even if they don't know Radiohead as a band. The upside for Radiohead is huge - lots of people get exposed to the band that might not otherwise have listened.

I haven't tried it out - I don't really care about Radiohead. But if I did, I would probably give them a couple of bucks. 1) Hey, it's more than they ever would have gotten from me in this life; and 2) if I like it a lot I can buy it again; and 3) I might not like the music at all, so a couple of bucks is a small risk to take on the music.

(I've been downloading lots of Amazon Unbox to my TiVo for $0.99 - in fact, two weeks ago I downloaded four movies and I've only had time to watch two. For $0.99 I'll try lots of movies I would never otherwise touch.)

Pretty Dang Funny

This is a pretty dang funny article about the writer's strike.

Multi-Threaded Program Visualization

(Click for bigger picture.)

This strange looking picture is a trace of a multi-threaded program. This is just a screenshot - in the real display program you could mouse over the interesting bits and see a call stack at that point in time for a particular thread.

I have all the code to do multi-threaded traces. I wrote it over two years ago. I didn't like the way the visualization part was going and I gave up on it. I think it needs to be done in 3D to have the most utility.

I placed the code that writes out the trace into the public domain but then I never posted it. I guess I should do that. I would love it if someone was inspired to work on the visualization part. The trace files can be quite huge as every single function entry and exit is traced. The idea is to turn it on for a frame or two while your game runs and then look for hotspots. I was visiting a local game company before I took my current job and I integrated it into their code. They had a demo coming up the next day and there was an unexplained hiccup in it. After looking at a simple HTML dump of the function timings one of the engineers sort-of slapped himself on the head and said, "Duh!", and ran off and fixed the demo so there was no more hiccup.

I really should get around to packing up a zip file and posting it on my web site ...

© 2007 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Routine layoffs at EA

GameDaily BIZ: EA 'Restructuring' Confirmed:

'This was a small and somewhat routine event for this time of year when many of our titles are finished and being shipped,' said a statement by EA. 'The action included small numbers of people across studio, publishing and corporate divisions.'

This has to be one of the dumbest press statements I have ever seen.

It's good to know that EA has routine layoffs every year around Christmas time.

I'm sure that's a great recruiting tool.

Warming Oops

FOXNews.com - Junk Science: Hey Al Gore, We Want a Refund! - Opinion:

A British judge ruled on the eve of Al Gore co-winning the Nobel Peace Prize that students forced to watch 'An Inconvenient Truth' must be warned of the film’s factual errors. But would there be any science at all left in Gore’s 'truth' if these errors and their progeny were excised?

Read the entire article for a breakdown of all the scenes (a lot of them!) that the judge says must be excised before the film can be used in schools.

(Well, they didn't give him the Nobel Scientific Accuracy Prize, eh?)

Rod Miller Banana Mix (mp3)

I spent around thirty years going to Disneyland to listen to Rod Miller play the piano.

When I was 16 years old, I took my tape recorder to Disneyland and recorded on cheap cassette tapes. A few years ago I recorded three days of his playing onto MiniDisc (it sounds a lot better).

I've always wondered if there was a pitch shift caused by my old cassette recorder. I was never sure that it recorded and played back at the same speed!

I finally answered that question last night when I compared two versions of "Yes, We Have no Bananas" played 28 years apart.

The 1976 version is on the left and the 2004 version is on the right. They weren't played at the same speed so you'll hear them drift together and then apart with an echoing kind of sound. The clip is only 15 seconds long.

And the answer is ... my old cassettes are in tune! Or at least close enough.

Woot!

© 2007 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Epcot 25

Epcot opened 25 years ago (October 1st). I was 23. A friend of mine was an Imagineer on the project. Shortly after Epcot opened I flew out and stayed with him for a week. He had a trailer at Fort Wilderness Campgrounds. He worked a lot so I had tons of time to myself. I got into everything free, thanks to him.

One day he drove me into Epcot through the back gate. Since he is an Imagineer and he has a good "show sense", he took a certain route he had worked out where we went up over a rise (there aren't any hills around) and he had carefully timed the music on his cassette tape recorder to match. So my first experience of Epcot was coming over this rise with Disney music playing and World Showcase laid out before me.

25 years ago is a long time ago, and I can't remember some details. I know I had some kind of backstage tour of Journey Through Imagination. I think it was partially open. I've been saddened at how the ride has been torn apart and reconstructed and made cheaper over the years. I suspect the original version cost too much to run - it was pretty clever.

I love Epcot even though it is overall pretty boring. It's hard to justify the cost of spending much time there. If I lived in the area and had an annual park hopper I would go to Epcot a lot. As it is, when I travel from Washington State, I spend just a day there - and maybe some extra time in the evening for the fireworks.

Of course, I loved Progress City and the vision for a whole new city with all new cool tech. It might have been built if Walt Disney's charisma had carried the day, but he passed away. I have to hand it to the Imagineers that turned it into a Disney park. That had to be really hard to do. But the original vision was bigger than the remaining Disney Corporation could handle without Walt.

Someday I want to rent a condo in Celebration for a month and pretend I'm living in Epcot.

Irvine, CA, has a lot in common with the original vision of Epcot. The president of the Irvine company was a board member at Disney. Irvine is a planned community. UC Irvine, in a sense, is at the center, with a beautiful park, and then the various parts of the University extending out, hub-style. I lived in Irvine a long time and I went to UCI for 10 years. That was sort of like living in Epcot.

Now I live in Washington State where they can't plan their way out of a paper bag. But at least the water we need falls out of the sky. That's a good thing.

© 2007 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Overpass

I love this bridge/overpass/architecture in Seattle and I've taken lots of pictures of it:



I've always wanted to go up there but I didn't know how!

At PAX the exposition was in the North Hall. I walked over to the North Hall, back to the main area, over to the North Hall, back to the main area, and the fifth time across the bridge I realized I was actually walking across the very place I had wanted to visit! Yes, I am slow on the uptake. Well, to tell the truth Will Wheaten was there, and I was distracted by that. (Heh, not really.)

Here's a shot from the South Hall:



and from inside:





© 2007 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Downtown Disney (California) Monorail Station

Downtown Disney Monorail Station - Night. (Click for larger pix.)









© 2007 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Downtown Disney (California) Fountains - Night

Downtown Disney Fountains - Night. (Click for larger pix - I use these as Windows desktop wallpapers a lot.)






© 2007 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.

Netflix Instant Viewing

I've tried this on five computers and it works on two of them. It's awesome when it works - I have the cheapo $5.95 Netflix plan which means I get almost six hours of free instant viewing time in a month. That's almost enough to watch an entire season of a half-hour comedy show - because each 1/2 hour show is really about 22 minutes. That's almost eighteen episodes a month. I've been working my way through "The Office".

At this very moment I am on the phone with tech support at Netflix. Well, actually I've been listening to pleasant elevator music for the past 1/2 hour. The phone support doesn't give you any queue information at all - how late 90's is that? I'll be hanging up soon.

Of course, I've tried all the online remedies that I could find. Plus, since I designed and programmed the DirectSong site, I know all about how Windows Media works. I've deleted the usual folders and what-not and it still doesn't work.

Maybe I'll try it on some more computers.

This reminds me of my second most favorite Microsoft joke.

Three guys go on a camping trip. On the way down the mountain their Jeep (yes, it was a Jeep brand vehicle) skids around a corner and almost falls down a ravine!

The hardware guy opens the hood and starts to examine the engine to figure out what went wrong.

The marketing guy starts working out talking points about how exciting the accident was.

The software guy says, "Say, why don't we take the Jeep back up to the top of the mountain, drive down, and see if it happens again?"


© 2007 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.