Microsoft has just confirmed that it has cancelled development of Train Simulator 2 (some time ago, apparently.) On the positive side, I guess now I don’t have to worry about whether or not to buy a new PC.

I was watching Access Hollywood on NBC last night, and they had some sort of special on about the last episode of Friends this week. It was mildly interesting to see, but of course they were extremely close-lipped about both the series finale and the spin-off show. Laura’s sister, on the other hand, has an absolutely brilliant idea for the latter.

I left home this morning with an umbrella. I arrived home this evening with no umbrella. Hopefully two things are true:

• The umbrella is at work, and not on the train.
• It does not rain tomorrow morning.

If either of these turn out not to be true, I will be unhappy (and possibly wet).

As I suspected, Beyond Dark Castle was not nearly as difficult to beat (on the Beginner level) as Dark Castle was. And while I don’t get the “secret animation” until I defeat the Black Knight on Advanced, at least this time I got a nice dialog acknowledging my accomplishment before I got tossed back into the castle. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.

I recently complained about my PC being too slow to play the Windows-only games I want to play, but don’t want to spend a few hundred bucks on a more modern computer just for gaming. I note that Dave Hyatt appears to have had the same problem, even though his “old” PC is easily two or three times as fast as mine. His solution appears to involve more than a few thousand dollars worth of new hardware. I suspect the games Dave is playing are far newer and fancier than mine, though. If he needs that Athlon 64 FX-53 or dual 2GHz G5 to play Dark Castle, he’s doing something very wrong.

(Now that the power’s back on, I can post this. Actually, the power’s been back on for a few hours, but the computers here in Laura’s father’s house all came back asking for passwords. Finally I gave up and borrowed the Ethernet connection from one of them for my PowerBook.)

I think I was wrong about Dark Castle not being a skill game. I’ve only been playing Beyond Dark Castle for a few hours now, but I’ve already made it all the way to the Black Knight. I haven’t beaten him yet, but getting to this point in Dark Castle took me weeks of effort, and BDC is a larger game. So maybe I did pick up some general Dark Castle-playing skills beyond the patterns of each individual level. Admittedly, there are a few other possibilities. BDC might simply be easier than Dark Castle (at least on the respective Beginner settings). Or maybe BDC’s feature that lets you save games makes a huge enough difference in how much time it takes to get familiar with a level, since you don’t have to replay as much. Still, I was able to beat most of the BDC levels the first time through, and that was almost never the case with Dark Castle.

Regarding my previous problem with Dark Castle’s ending—or lack thereof—I find it interesting that the BDC instructions specifically mention that beating the game on the Beginner and Intermediate levels takes you back to the dungeon to play again at a higher level. They do promise a “secret animation” if you beat the game on Advanced, though. Maybe it’s true of the original as well?

Playing BDC right after DC, it’s extremely obvious how much of a derivative BDC is. When I played them years ago, there was time in between, and BDC felt much more advanced (contrast to my experience with Deimos Rising vs. Mars Rising). The games are very clearly built on the same game engine, with most of the same sprites and animations. BDC has a few more characters, much larger levels, and some new game mechanics, but it’s definitely the same game.

For months now, Eric has been bugging me to attend ADHOC, aka MacHack. I’ve been thinking of going for a few years now; probably would have last year if I hadn’t been unemployed and/or moving at the time. So when he suggested that I’d better register soon, since the registration fees were increasing in a few days, I figured I should head over to the Web page and figure it all out.

They could hardly have designed a Web site better-suited to making me not want to attend. I started my browsing session planning to give them $450, and ended up deciding to at least postpone my decision for a few days. Honestly, the experience has me leaning towards not going at all.

First, the site is badly organized. The site calls itself the “AdHoc Blog”, and it has an accordingly unprofessional feel. Half the information is obscure or out of date (since it’s an “older entry”), and a lot of the links don’t work; they take you to the wrong pages, or don’t take you anywhere at all. There are links to online registration forms that don’t list prices, or list only student rates ($50 is a lot cheaper, but I’m sure I’m not eligible!) Hardly the best way to collect my money…

Eric was still trying to convince me to attend, so I figured I’d at least figure out what airfare and a hotel room would cost. Which is when I discovered that the Web site does not tell you when the conference is. Oh, sure, it says “July 21-24, 2004.” But for an event that purports to have a “24 hour nature,” that’s less than helpful. Am I supposed to arrive the night of the 20th and leave on the 25th? Or do I show up on the 21st and leave on the 24th? I’ve been to events that work both ways, and so I was expecting to find an hour-by-hour schedule that would tell me when I was expected to show up and leave. Instead, I found less than the bare minimum of information. Certainly not enough for a hotel or flight reservation.

It’s obvious to me that ADHOC has no interest in helping newcomers like myself (and I’ve known about MacHack for years!) attend, so I therefore have no interest in attending. I’ve been eyeing the Treo 600; maybe I’ll spend my $450 on that instead.

P.S. Eric has also written about this. His weblog gets more traffic than mine, and since he’s attended and spoken in the past, maybe he has more influence with the ADHOC folks. If they clean up their site and make it clear that they are actually running a professional conference–I should point out, by the way, that I’ve been to plenty of $50-$100 events that appear better organized than this $450 conference–then maybe I’ll think about going. I still regret never having attended a MacHack…

For the past few weeks, I’ve been playing the old classic Mac game Dark Castle on a Mac Plus emulator. It’s a game I remember fondly from when I was a kid, and playing it again has been a lot of fun. I’m on vacation in St. Louis this week–which would explain why I wasn’t posting much, except that I never post much–and I was hoping to beat the game before I got back. I think I just did. I’m not sure, though. I toppled the Black Knight’s throne. I wasn’t expecting an intricate victory sequence, but I seem to simply have been tossed into the dungeon, with my special powers reset and the difficulty level of the game turned up a notch (there are three). Do I have to beat the game on Advanced to see a real ending, or even then do I win only the opportunity to play it again?

It’s frustrating, since there isn’t much information about the game from 1986 online. I did find one walkthrough of the PC version of the game–the Mac version is slightly different but close enough to be helpful–but the author never finished the game.

Maybe I’ll see if I can’t beat it again and see if I missed something. One interesting aspect of Dark Castle is that it’s very much a practice-makes-perfect sort of game. Each level has a pattern, and once you’ve learned the pattern, the level becomes fairly easy to beat each time. Most levels, from the first to the last, started out being very daunting, but once I successfully got through them once, they became routine. So hopefully it won’t be too hard to beat the Black Knight again, and see if the same thing happens.

Or maybe I’ll just move on to Beyond Dark Castle.

TiVo just showed me an episode of Family Ties that contained this gem of dialogue:

Elyse: Let’s sit down and have a rap session.
Mallory: What do you want to wrap?
Audience: Laughs
Elyse: No, not wrap with a W, this is rap with an R. It’s a term we used in the 60’s, it means talk. But “talk session” didn’t sound right, so we used to say…
Mallory and Jennifer: Stare blankly
Audience: Laughs

Funny at the time, I guess, but it’s the wrong joke for 2004, where Mallory should be wondering why her mother wants to sing hip-hop music. Ironically, according to the dictionary, that definition is directly descended from Elyse’s 1960s hippie conversations. The word had been used for the music genre for over a decade by the time this episode aired in 1987, but I guess it hadn’t yet hit the popular culture scene.

Personally, I’m not one to know anything about what was popular when. I didn’t start listing to ’80s music until at least 1998. The first rap song I remember being aware of is U Can’t Touch This, circa 1990 or so (a friend of my parents was fascinated with M.C. Hammer as a cultural phenomenon, and bought me a cassette). I certainly would have found the Family Ties gag appropriate when first aired. But it’s definitely a joke that went stale in only a few years.

Just watched this week’s The West Wing. I’m never a big fan of “gimmick” episodes, but I thought this one was extremely well done. It took the form of a television documentary, which has been done a lot, but I thought this was one of the better ones I’ve seen. One thing that particularly impressed me was that they not only had documentary-style camerawork, but that the cast’s hair and makeup was radically different than normal; everyone looked more “real.”

It was also a little jarring to see Wilson Cruz on TV again. Who knew Rickie would grow up to work in the White House?

Does anyone have a recommendation for a good hobby shop anywhere in the Mountain View, California area, particularly for model railroading? I live two blocks from the San Antonio Hobby Shop, but I like it less each time I visit. First, what kind of hobby shop is closed on Sunday? Second, they have impressive square footage, but never seem to have what I’m looking for. Third, the attitude of the stuff leaves a lot to be desired. They always make me feel like I should go away and stop thinking about visiting their store (which is easy, because they’re usually closed when I think about it).

My pants pocket has developed a small hole, and throughout the day coins have been falling out of my pant leg as I walk. On my way home, I discovered a penny at the bottom of my sock. That’s just strange.

Curtis recently wrote:

As the world moves to HDTV and 16:9 widescreen displays, people will still want to watch older programs– reruns of Star Trek, for example, which were created for 4:3 displays. Why not use the blank space on the sides of the screen to display ads?

Interesting idea, but it reminded me of something I’ve wondered about every since I first read the HDTV draft standard published by ATSC five years ago: Why are the high-definition resolutions (e.g., 720p and 1080i) not available in the 4:3 formats, and what will that mean for archival content?

I understand that widescreen is the Television of the Future, and I suspect that the reason that HDTV is widescreen-only was to encourage the switch to widescreen by both set manufacturers and content providers (i.e., networks and studios). The 4:3 “square” aspect ratio has long been considered inferior, and Hollywood has been trying to get us to use widescreen TVs for years. It doesn’t appear to have worked; I notice that consumer electronics stores are happily selling 4:3 HDTVs, although I admit I don’t know what they do when presented with actual HDTV (hence 16:9) content; I imagine they letterbox it, although they might have a zoom mode that chops off the sides.

But besides new content, there’s plenty of old 4:3 television episodes and movies that are ripe for high-definition conversion. Curtis’s example, Star Trek, was filmed and edited on 35mm film, and might benefit from an HD version (actually, it might not; it was shot for television, and adding extra detail might reveal that the costumes, props, sets and makeup was never intended to be seen that close up). But there’s no good way to broadcast it on HDTV without windowboxing—adding black bars to the sides—or cutting off the top and bottom. Which is, I guess, fine if you have a widescreen TV, but if you have a 4:3 HDTV (as mentioned above), what you end up with is a black box around an image that only takes up two-thirds of your TV. Even if you zoom in, you’ve lost a third of the resolution HDTV promises. It just doesn’t seem right.

I recently read through this thread from the IETF HTTP working group, circa 1995, on Netscape’s then-current proposal to add byte-range support to HTTP. What I found fascinating about the thread is that at the time, there was great resistance to the idea. Netscape wanted support mainly so they could retrieve individual pages of embedded PDF documents, but many people objected that general byte range support was too expensive and complex to support this one use, and that byte ranges were the wrong mechanism for this anyway (which is true).

What’s amazing is that while the resumption of interrupted documents—which is probably what 99% of byte range requests are used for today—was mentioned as a potential use (and Netscape Navigator 2.0 did implement it), no one seemed to consider it a worthy goal. Many people pointed out that a lot of documents (server-translated HTML, CGI scripts, etc) could not be reliably byte-served, or would be prohibitively expensive to do so. Static binary files were mentioned, but mostly in the context of, e.g., a 100k image, where it would be a handy convenience rather than a huge time-saver.

It is remarkable today to remember that in the mid-’90s, HTTP simply wasn’t considered a viable way to transfer files. If you wanted to download a large file, you switched to FTP. Nine years later, of course, I find myself routinely using HTTP to transfer multi-gigabyte files, for which the possibility of resuming a failed transfer without starting over is much appreciated.

I also noted with satisfaction that it was my idea to encode the range request in a request header, which is the design that ended up in HTTP 1.1.

What’s the point of an ATM if not to dispense cash? More seriously, given that 99% of ATM transactions are cash withdrawals, why wait until the customer has inserted their card, entered their PIN, selected their transaction type, and entered an amount before mentioning that there’s no money to be had? A clever ATM design would flash “NO CASH TODAY” in big red letters before you even insert your card.

My Web site is now at my shiny, brand-new domain name. My weblog’s new address is http://akosut.com/log/. Thanks for visiting.