April 2009 Archive Page

The St. Cloud Times gives retrogaming its due, with this profile of Matt Barton.

The most common misconception about video gamers is that they are young teenagers who absorb everything negative that the most violent games offer. Matt Barton has another take. The 30-something English professor at St. Cloud State University considers himself to be a more accurate reflection of today's typical gamer. And he's out to educate the rest of us by making a feature-length documentary about the history of video games.

Best. Comment. Ever.

        while([fh offsetInFile]+12<=imageoffs)
        {
                uint32 sign=[fh readUInt32BE];
                uint32 marker=[fh readUInt32BE];
                uint32 chunklen=[fh readUInt32BE];
                off_t nextchunk=[fh offsetInFile]+((chunklen+3)&~3);
                // At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format.
                // PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an
                // insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having
                // worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire
                // that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.
                // If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different
                // places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those
                // too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide
                // that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement
                // should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned,
                // or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included.
                // Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD,
                // of course, uses all three, and more.
                // Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of
                // your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th
                // birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but
                // at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people
                // responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.
                // Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this,
                // I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending
                // me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or
                // other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so
                // difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I
                // was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done
                // so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire.
                // Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch
                // them on a spaceship directly into the sun.
                //
                // PSD is not my favourite file format.

                if(sign!='8BIM') break; // sanity check

Thanks, Josh, for the link.

I am not a fan of Adobe Acrobat Reader, though I do read a lot of PDFs.

With all the Internet attacks that exploit Adobe Acrobat Reader people should switch to using an alternative PDF reader, a security expert said at the RSA security conference on Tuesday. Of the targeted attacks so far this year, more than 47 percent of them exploit holes in Acrobat Reader while six vulnerabilities have been discovered that target the program, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of security firm F-Secure, said in a briefing with journalists.--CNet

Fascinating story of a forger who tricked both the Nazis and the Allies. Sounds like a great subject for a non-fiction novel.

Brought in for questioning, van Meegeren refused to give up the name of the painting's rightful owners and was sent to prison on charges of treason, a crime punishable by death. Six weeks on death row and van Meegeren cracked, announcing somewhat histrionically that he'd painting the thing himself. Awkwardly, nobody believed him.-- BoingBoing

I never actually had to teach my son to read. He went smoothly from being read to, to reading along, to reading on his own.  The transition for my daughter has been a little rougher, so in the last year or so, whenever Carolyn showed an interest in reading, I've praised her for her accomplishment.

Last weekend we were driving to Denny's for a family treat when she read some random sign, and we habitually praised her.

She got a skeptical look on her face. "Everybody's treating me like a queen. All I did was read a word. I'm seven."

My former student Mike Rubino sent me this link to a wonderfully awful new media course description. String me up by my USB dongles if I ever teach a course like this.

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers.

Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new "Lost Generation" of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t! Throughout the course, a further paring down of the Hemingway/Stein school of minimalism will be emphasized, limiting the superfluous use of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, gerunds, and other literary pitfalls.-- McSweeney's

In the past few hours, I've gotten Friend requests from Jay Gatsby and Nick Carroway, as well as a a shady "Narrator Man" who calls himself invisible, and is a member of The Brotherhood.

My students in an American Lit class have been working on a creative interpretation of a work of literature, and several have chosen to use Facebook. 

Most small publishers only received letters from Google last week asking them to contact their out-of-print authors and let them know that soon their rights will revert to Google unless they "opt out" immediately. This gives small publishers two weeks to track down their writers, many of whom spend at least half the year in an alcoholic coma.

They will not succeed at this. Many writers will not know what is happening until it is too late.

I want to know what deal the Internet Archive will offer to rightsholders in order to compete with Google. Kahle wants everything to be free, does this mean that he will strip away even Google's meager profit-sharing deal to authors if he can? -- the fiction circus

My class topic today was an introduction to oral presentations for a freshman writing course. The students had already given informal four-minute practice presentations earlier in the term, but they're gearing up for a more formal presentation. So this article comes at a good time for me.

The ability to give an engaging lecture doesn't come shrink-wrapped with your graduate diploma. Nor does it necessarily come with experience; some of the smartest and most seasoned professors I've ever encountered are horrible lecturers. That said, lecturing is so integral to successful college teaching that it's a form of masochism and sadism to not become good at it. -- Rob Weir, Inside Higher Ed

Another thought-provoking link from BoingBoing. Maybe the language is a bit alarmist, but that's what gets the linkers linking.

The Authors Guild -- which represents a measly 8000 writers -- brought a class action against Google on behalf of all literary copyright holders, even the authors of the millions of "orphan works" whose rightsholders can't be located. Once that class was certified, whatever deal Google struck with the class became binding on every work of literature ever produced. The odds are that this feat won't ever be repeated, which means that Google is the only company in the world that will have a clean, legal way of offering all these books in search results. --Cory Doctorow

We Didn't Start the Flame War. (Don't listen to this one with urchins underfoot.)

College Humor does not pull its punches when it satirizes (and celebrates) the depths to which human nature can stoop when participating in discussion threads.

(My favorite bit is the Rick Astley impersonator, a reference to an internet meme of the recent past.)

An interesting introduction to literary Darwinism, from LiveScience.com:

Carroll hypothesized that modern readers would gravitate toward protagonists who displayed pro-social tendencies or promoted group cooperation -- similar to how ancestral human hunter-gatherers valued such behavior.

He joined forces with another Literary Darwinist, Jonathan Gottschall, as well as two evolutionary psychologists on the study. Their online survey asked respondents to identify characters from classic 19th century British novels as protagonists, antagonists, or minor characters, and to rate character traits and emotional responses based on a psychological model of personality.

As predicted, people rated protagonists as displaying cooperative behavior that produced feel-good, positive responses from readers. They rated antagonists as being motivated by desire for social dominance, which drew negative emotional responses.

The study also found strong agreement among respondents rating character traits, even if just two people responded regarding a certain character. "Pride and Prejudice" had no lack of responses -- 81 people showed a familiarity with heroine Elizabeth Bennett that might have made the Austen protagonist blush.

I try to read to my kids for an hour every night -- sometimes two hours, if we time everything right. 

Whenever I need about 20 minutes to do a load of laundry or make a phone call, I tell the kids "It's time for the book game," which involves each child picking a book for Peter to read to Carolyn. (Berenstein Bears and Magic School Bus titles are still favorites for both kids, though Peter will cheerfully read a My Little Pony or Strawberry Shortcake book if that's what Carolyn chooses.)

We try to keep a chapter book going that both my son (age 11) and daughter (recently turned 7) are interested in, I read a series of shorter books for my daughter (I do a damn fine reading of Bartholomew and the Oobleck, if I do say so myself) and after she goes to bed, I read a different chapter book with my son. 

Tonight I just finished finished reading the final chapter of The Story of Rolf and the Viking Bow, which starts out as a kind of sequel to Icelandic legends, featuring prophecies, storms and shipwrecks, generational feuds, banishments and vengeance, Vikings, some wonderful secret-passage cloak-and-dagger intrigue that reminds me of the classic Mission: Impossible (not the recent Tom Cruise movies), and ends up with a climactic bromance showdown that brought tears to my eyes.

My 11-year-old son needed a hug at the end of it, it was so emotional for both of us.

The always-interesting Language Log offers this detailed and thoughtful analysis of gender and sports terminology. Here's just a snippet:

I've never seen man used to refer to a female athlete in an expression like "guard her man" or "I had my man beat". Nor, for that matter, have I ever seen woman used in such expressions. Instead, female athletes and their coaches seem normally to use girl.-- Mark Liberman

There's nothing terribly stunning or new in this interview with Steve Meretzky, but I'm happy to read his memories about the good old days of text adventuring.

SM: It's kind of hard to imagine, looking back on these text games now, but at the time, they were really the cutting edge--not just of games, but of any computer application. They pushed the limits of computing power. To be able to type in sentences in natural English and have the computer understand them seemed really cool to players. Infocom also did some incredible things in terms of text compression, frequent-word algorithms, and the like that allowed us to get what at the time seemed like an extraordinary amount of material into a game.

TR: Infocom created a "Z-machine," which was a piece of software that could serve as a container for any Infocom game. When a new type of computer came out, you could adapt the Z-machine to that computer, and Infocom's entire library would immediately be available for it. How did that help the company?

SM: It was certainly a huge component of Infocom's competitive advantage. It was just hugely important in the early '80s, when there was a new, completely incompatible PC coming out once a month or so. Digital would come out with one, and HP would come out with one, and Tandy would come out with another, and NEC would come out with another, and there were just so many. I think at one point we had 20 different personal computers that we were supporting. The great thing was that it was almost free to move our game to some new computer even if it would only sell a hundred copies. And the other huge advantage was the speed with which we could respond to a new computer. The biggest success was when the Mac came out in 1984. We wrote a Mac interpreter, and got about 15 games running on the Mac, at a point when there were only maybe 15 other games in the entire universe that you could find for your Mac. So half of all the game titles that you could find for the Mac were ours.

No comment. Just watch it. Two minutes well-spent. Via Kairosnews.

Spill-chuck rares it's ulgy heed.

The caption described a photograph illustrating the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' General Conference, and it referred to the group's "Quorum of Twelve Apostates" rather than "Apostles." -- Chronicle of Higher Education

And to think Charkes Kinbote had to make do with John Shade's index cards...

The influence of authors' environments on their writing has always interested scholars. Marcel Proust, for example, is known to have been heavily influenced by the paintings he surrounded himself with when he penned the novel Remembrance of Things Past, between 1909 and 1922. Imagine if Proust had been writing 100 years later, on a laptop: What else we might be able to learn about his creative process.

The implications for scholarship are tremendous, Mr. Kirschenbaum says. Take a great digital-era author: "You could potentially look at a browser history, see that he visited a particular Web site on a particular day and time," he says. "And then if you were to go into the draft of one of his manuscripts, you could see that draft was edited at a particular day and hour, and you could establish a connection between something he was looking at on the Web with something that he then wrote." -- Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education

The Huffington Post said Sunday that it will bankroll a group of investigative journalists, directing them at first to look at stories about the nation's economy.... Work that the journalists produce will be available for any publication or Web site to use at the same time it is posted on The Huffington Post, she said.

The Huffington Post Web site is a collection of opinionated blog entries and breaking news. It has seven staff reporters.

Huffington said she and the donors were concerned that layoffs at newspapers were hurting investigative journalism at a time the nation's institutions need to be watched closely. She hopes to draw from the ranks of laid-off journalists for the venture. -- The Huffington Post

This is good news for journalism, and probably good news for citizenry. It may be bad news for rank-and-file bloggers, since it will be a lot harder for guys in their pajamas living in their parents' basements to compete with professionals with a high-profile bankroll.

My wife can't stand computers, but she's more than an honorary geek because she knows her classic sci-fi. She pegged this scene instantly.

In this re-creation from "The Cage," green-skinned Orion slave girl Vena dances for Captain Pike. Why does Elchesen put in the hours necessary to create such images? "The time involved depends on if I feel like working on my latest creation or not," Elchesen said. "As for the effort, when someone sees it, I want that person to see something that is one of a kind -- never done before."  -- Wired

Ted Stevens was right.... The Internet is a Series of Tubes (techno remix).

But the Parisian telegram system in the early 1900s and the American postal system in the mid 20th century had their own tubes, as Molly Wright Steenson demonstrates (in this example of Pecha Kucha, a genre of speech delivered with exactly 20 slides, each one displayed for exactly 15 seconds).

My son watches, as a baby becomes totally engrossed with a pair of sunglasses, puzzling over how to get them on his face. The baby keeps manipulating the glasses, turning and twisting them in attempt to get them to stay on.

"Look," says my son.  "It's like his 'Zork'."

People. This is serious. Is nothing sacred?

Matt will play the character of Mondain Minax, a cyber-space explorer and weirding weapons expert who lives more in VR than RL. Minax is a member of the crew of the alien Sontarans space vessel Zero Wing (veQDuj'oH Dujllj'e') which acts as a foil to the Stargate Universe crew during episodes 3, 7, & 11.-- Kairos News

Researchers quizzed 571 people aged 17 to 25 about their lives and found those who grew up with sisters were more likely to be happy and balanced.--BBC News

Well, at least "Sisters appear to encourage more open communication and cohesion in families." The words "make people happy" only appear in the headline.

From another point of view, the researchers learned that brothers make people sad. Or rather, "Boys tend to internalise problems and in families where there are lots of sons, I can see that can cause problems," which doesn't fit nicely in a news headline.

A number in the news is no longer a cold fact, it is a killer fact, with all the murderous zeal that word implies. Journalists everywhere know the meaning of the phrase, the dagger of detail that runs the opposition through: the 23% up! The £16m wasted! The 140,000 children!

For an example, try 271. I have it on reliable authority that this is the percentage increase in the money supply in the US in five months. There, he's gone cold on me again, you're thinking. But stay a moment. This is the killer fact in a piece by a smart, famous former senior advisor to President Clinton.

The point is obvious. The economy is in weirdness overdrive, things are out of control, cash is flooding through nook and cranny, but barely a cent is spent.

Feel the peril. 271%! -- BBC News