Fugu Talk

I don’t know anything about this, but it looks cool.

A view-to-vote contest music video from a daughter of a friend (creativity runs in their family!)

I noticed a few weeks ago that the City of Huntington Beach made good on their promise (threat) to rename every north-south minor street to “Lane”, so now I live on Sims Lane nee Sims Street. One of my conspiracy theories was that this was a way to get stimulus money, but they just taped over the “St” portion of the signs with “Ln”, so if federal moolah  is involved, then they’re not working very hard for it.

I think the real mundane reason for this change is that someone thought it just sounded better. The city officials pushing for the change said it’s required to remove inconsistencies in various street databases that pose a public safety issue (aren’t you actually introducing inconsistencies?)  Well, it’s really to conform to an old city specification that north-south streets be named lane (what about all the curved and diagonal and L-shaped streets in my neighborhood?). And every other city has similar specifications (they all have the same convention?).  And if we need help from the Long Beach fire department, they’ll be confused if we don’t have this street naming convention (again, they all have the same convention? and isn’t it more confusing that we change street names running from outside into our city?) And these specifications are necessary for the computerized dispatch systems to work (you’re kidding, the computer actually cares if a street is named Lane or Street) And don’t worry about your mail, the post office computer system doesn’t care about street suffixes (well, the fire department should use their computer). The specification is really needed for public safety new hires who aren’t familiar with the city (so you were making up that stuff about the computer?) And you can change your financial information gradually over time (thanks!).

Watching the city council meeting where this was discussed and just about rubber stamped (no discussion of cost or how it would be executed), I thought, these guys really, really want this change. It reminded me of all of my workplaces where management made a fuss over coding style conventions and just said all kinds of stuff to justify it. It’s really important for code safety. It’s important for new hires or others visiting the code. Every company has a convention. It’s not bad, you’ll get used to it. So someone goes through and changes everyone’s code and introduces bugs, and I still end up looking at three-page long functions making improper use of the language and API’s. But it must be good code, because it’s following a coding convention. And it’s got design patterns (coding conventions masquerading as software architecture). And from that point on, I don’t believe anything more from the powers that be, since they made a fuss about this instead of focusing on important matters  (there’s a coding style guidebook behind every worthless startup stock certificate on my wall). Same with my civic leaders – next time I watch a city council meeting, I’ll be sure to disbelieve everything they say.

I’m always behind on making promotional videos for HyperBowl – haven’t even started on videos of the iPhone versions. I just realized I haven’t posted here the most recent web player video, of the HyperBowl Forest lane. I think I made this one in February. It also shows a glimpse of the new menu page which has navigation to the credits screen, the iPhone versions, and the various HyperBowl web sites and feeds.

Some friends of mine were joking about the inanity of the Census letter alerting us to the upcoming Census letter. I’ve seen dumber – just off the top of my head, I recall the MIT student loan office sending me a letter saying they didn’t have my mailing address (and yet I got it), a half-hearted apology (quarter-hearted would be more accurate) from Healthnet saying they “lost” my check into another account and terminated my insurance because I wrote my name “illegably”…and then they addressed me as “Ralph”. And recently, there was the series of letters from the City of Huntington Beach emphasizing the public safety importance of maintaining consistent street address names, so they were going to rename my street and expect all the utility, mapping, government, postal and financial institutions to adjust their databases.

Nonetheless, I filled out and returned the census form when it arrived, because all these people on TV, like the mayor of LA and Ed Begley, JR., say it’s important to make sure resources go where they need to go. But they don’t really explain how that works, and in particular they don’t explain why they ask the questions they ask, many of which are legally forbidden in job interviews.

I especially am tired of answering the which-race-are-you question (and the really weirdly specific are-you-hispanic-and-which-kind). It reminds of my interrogations over the years – “Where are you from? No, before that. No, before that. I mean, where are you really from?”, “How long have you been in this country?” (I used to answer with my age, but then they just respond, “wow, that’s a really long time”, which is starting to make me feel old), and in Oregon recently I got a couple of “Welcome to America!”s.

And I don’t see the point. It’s not as if the census asks what languages I speak (or don’t speak) and will apportion language services accordingly to my area (although what Huntington Beach really needs are better Chinese restaurants, at least something without “Panda” or “Wok” in the name). Maybe they’re just making assumptions based on the race selection. Like that woman at the bottom of the MIT steps who saw me and walked all the way up to hand me an English-as-a-Second-Language flyer. Or the Boston locals who asked me if I spoke English (what am I supposed to say – “No. I don’t speak English”. But at least they asked).

I looked at the IGDA diversity survey recently and thought, while well-intentioned, it looked like it had been done by a college intern (I think it actually was). Now, I think that work is right up there with the professionals’. So, what happened to this “post-racial society” I heard of?

Scene from today’s HUD/Flash Q&A session in Blue Mars.

Lately, I’ve been seeing this ad where a young woman says she had an epiphany in the back of a taxi that “Windows should be simpler.” So she told Microsoft and they took her suggestion! I’m jealous, partly because it never occurred to me that Windows should be simpler, and also because last time I called up Microsoft, to ask them to stop billing me for the Hotmail account that Best Buy signed me up for when I bought a PC there, they kept transferring me to successively less cooperative and articulate phone reps and then charged me for an additional month. I guess I should have opened with, “Hey, I have an idea for you – Windows should be simpler. And give me my $20 back!”

Putting together a hugely bad user interface is hard work – it requires painstaking assembly of numerous small bad interfaces. Recently, I received an email containing my World Market Rewards ID (are there any stores left where they you can just buy something without donating yourself to a database?) and a link to a confirmation page. In most online registrations, I can just click the link and I’m done. Here, you have to enter the code they emailed you, but you can’t even cut-and-paste it – the fields are separated so you have to type it in as if you’re entering a serial number for Microsoft Windows. I’m in no hurry to receive “more special offers”, so I’ve let it sit, while they send me reminders to finish my registration.

Every since the Mac went Intel, visions of doing both my Mac and PC work on the same machine have floated through my head. I first tried that with Windows XP running on Bootcamp on the first version of the MacBook Pro, back in 2006 on a contract that required supporting Mac, Windows and even Linux versions. And it worked quite well, although booting back and forth between Mac and Windows was inconvenient, so perhaps I should have used Parallels. In fact, I did use Parallels for the Linux version. My over-priced dog-slow DSL line had succumbed to something (maybe shame), so my routine involved taking my laptop to the public library, performing the daily Linux, Mac and Windows builds, then getting lunch. Ah, the consulting life.

Now, only four years later, Parallels is up to version 5, I’m on my second MacBook Pro which is smaller, cheaper and faster, and we’ve gone from Windows XP to Windows 7 (Vista got the New Coke treatment). Now I’m on a more graphics intensive project but Parallels now supports an “enhanced” graphics mode which is supposed to support some gaming, so I gave it a try. Installing Parallels 5 was a breeze, reinstalling that old version of XP that I’d used on Bootcamp was surpisingly easy, too, if lengthy. And I was relieved that the Windows “genuine” validation went through and didn’t complain that I’d already installed it on a dead machine four years ago, which saved me a Windows 7 purchase.

The new “Coherence” mode in Parallels is slick – instead of running the entire Windows environment in a single window, the individual Windows applications are on your Mac desktop and the system menus and tray icons are similarly merged in the Mac Finder. The downside is that the Activity Monitor shows Parallels takes 2GB of memory so my 2GB MacBook Pro just churns away when I click around on different windows. The 3D support does work, to an extent. I was able to bring up my Unity-based HyperBowl web player but some of the lighting is off, and the mouse controls appear messed up. To be fair, they don’t work that well in general on Internet Explorer, which is what I tested it on. Also, my much more lightweight Fugu Games web players might have fared better. I also gave the CryEngine-based Blue Mars client a shot, but that crashed Parallels. However, the Blue Mars FAQ does say that some people have successfully run it with Parallels, so maybe I just need some more horsepower (hardware power).

One reason I usually buy even non-Apple items from the Apple Store is the theory that anything sold there is less likely to exhibit Mac compatibility issues. I think it’s a good theory. I bought a LaCie Rugged drive at the Apple Store that worked immediately in the classic plug and play sense. Now, two years later, I saw a Western Digital MyBook at Staples for half the price and six times the storage – time for an upgrade. When I connected the MyBook to my MacBook Pro, the drive reassuringly mounted and displayed both Windows and Mac files, including a directory labelled “MyBook for Mac”. The Apple online store lists rave reviews for MyBook for Mac. This, however, apparently was MyBook Not For Mac. The Mac apps on the disk were runnable but unable to do anything except hang or show exclamation marks with blank error messages.

Googling showed that the first step upon purchasing a MyBook Not For Mac is to reformat it for the Mac. This is a surprisingly obtuse operation, particularly if you want to use the drive for Time Machine. You have to run the Drive Utility app in the Application->Utilities folder, go to Partition, select Mac Journalled, Case Sensitive, be sure to hit the Options button and select the middle radio button (the non-Windows option), then partition (of course, make sure you’re partitioning the right drive!)