Windows 7 - A Rant

Windows 7 has really been getting on my nerves. There are things going on with it that shouldn't be going on with it, especially since you have to pay so much for it. And disclaimer, I do have a degree in computer science, so I know a good bit of what I'm talking about.

My current computing setup is triple. I have a relatively modern desktop running Windows 7, a six year old laptop running Debian stable, and a five year old iMac G5 running Mac OS 10.5.

Allow me to post the basic specs of my desktop and laptop to make the sins of Windows 7 more apparent.

Desktop, "Randgriz"
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 x2 3000+
RAM: 1.5GB generic
Secondary Storage: 420 GB across two SATA 3.0 Gb/s drives
OS: Windows 7 Professional, cost, free (courtesy of the university)

Laptop, "Finney"
CPU: Intel Celeron M 1.6 GHz
RAM: 1.5GB generic
Secondary Storage: 80 GB IDE drive
OS: Debian GNU/Linux Stable, cost, free (courtesy of the open source movement)
Window Manager/Desktop Environment: Windowmaker/GNUStep

Note that the laptop is clearly inferior in every way, shape, and form. I'm going to skip the petty little differences in user interface, bash vs. PowerShell, et cetera, and get to the real meat and potatoes of what's inexcusable.

Technical Issues
Occasionally I make the mistake of trying to use Windows 7 the way I use GNU/Linux. With Finney, I find myself able to run dozens of programs, both GUI and command line, simultaneously without any noticeable performance hit. Sure, my little system resources monitor will go a bit crazy, but the system is still perfectly usable. Typically, I'm running Firefox (Iceweasel, actually) with several tabs open, mpd (music player daemon) with MPDCon, a system resources dockapp, emacs, gnus, and maybe nethack or Dwarf Fortress under wine.

In Windows 7, god help me if I try to run more than two applications simultaneously. I wish I were joking. It takes upwards of 30 seconds to launch an application in the first place, and if I have more than about three windows open, I'm screwed. The system approaches complete unresponsivity. And if I want to install a program, well, I might as well go make a sandwich, because I won't be using the computer for half an hour.

Granted, Windows has always had admittedly bad resource management. Windows can't schedule IO worth a crap. Any and all significant hard drive access will slow most Windows systems noticeably, but this is absolutely ridiculous. This leads me to the conclusion that Windows 7 somehow manages to have even unbelievably crappier resource management than any operating system I have ever used ever. And I've used more operating systems than most people can name.

Second major technical issue, crappy drivers. So, sitting inside Randgriz is an almost brand new Linksys 802.11 b/g wireless card that is completely useless. Because Windows refuses to acknowledge that it even exists. It worked just fine when I booted Linux on Randgriz. Randgriz outputs video through HDMI to my HDTV. I have never had a problem with video. But the sound craps out frequently. It would seem that about once an hour, Windows 7 forgets that the video card is also a sound card. So I have to reach behind the TV, unplug the HDMI cable, replug the HDMI cable, and suddenly sound works again! What. The. Fbadword. That should never happen in any conceivable universe.

General Evility
Microsoft is a pretty evil company. Seriously. The entry for "Unethical Business Practices" in the encyclopedia should read, "See Microsoft." As if that wasn't bad enough, they're a huge supporter of software patents, the single biggest stifler of innovation in the modern era. But I digress.

I have Windows 7 Professional. Professional. And I like to play around with languages. It's a hobby of mine. But I can't change the system language on Randgriz unless I upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate. And even then only a measly 35 languages, unlike the dozens and dozens available on any standard Linux distribution.

Artificial feature restriction is nothing short of unethical, especially when it forces people to upgrade to the most expensive version of a tiered program for something that should be a standard feature across the board.

And that's not even going into DRM, security issues, et cetera.

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I'm typing this on Finney. My duck is telling me that I'm using about a third of my RAM and hovering around 70% CPU usage with spikes up to 100%. I haven't even noticed. I'm contemplating switching the entire system to Esperanto just because I can.

I hate Windows 7 so hard right now. Thanks for reading.

Dragon*Con 2009 Retrospective

Another wonderful Dragon*Con come and gone! It was quite pleasant this year. It wasn't as crowded as last year (the trekkies were moved to another hotel,) and it was unseasonably cool. Still quite warm, but I'll take 80s over 100s (Fahrenheit) any day. Time for me to share my favorite moments.

Funniest Moment:
The following exchange took place in the Wheel of Time Sword Forms panel. The moderator had just explained that he had two black belts and nine years of stage fighting experience. One you man in the audience raised his hand and said, "Can I be your apprentice?"
"..sure, hang on." And then the moderator drained his water glass. "Here, refill this!" So, the young man did. Quoth the moderator, "Ok, what's your name?"
"Ish."
"Ish?"
"Ish."
"But...but...that's like the END part of a word!"
And then later, as the moderator was looking up something in his notes, he said, "Hang on a second, guys. Apprentice! Entertain the audience!"
Ish proceeded to do a little dance, and then someone from the audience piped up, "Well, that was only entertaining-Ish."

Most Surprising Moment:
So, I was one of three people to get pretty wet during the live Astronomy Cast podcast when a waterlogged ceiling panel decided to land on the audience. Poor guy next to me got conked in the head and soaked through. My left leg just got soaked. Something or other about condensation from the air conditioning duct collecting where it wasn't supposed to. It's towards the end of episode 151, whenever that gets posted.

Most Informative Panel:
That's a tough one. Either the aforementioned Astronomy Cast panel, in which I learned all sorts of nifty stuff about SETI, or a panel on quantum cryptography that I attended.

Funniest Overall Panel:
The webcomics panel, of course! Those guys always crack me up. Hilarity ensued.

My Thanks:
To whoever it was that recommended the Tales from Earthsea vocal album. It's lovely!

People who know me know that for the past couple of years, I've always tried to do something different every Dragon*Con. Last year I checked out the gaming. The year before I came in costume (as a hitchhiker, complete with "Disaster Area" and "Milliways" t-shirts.) This year, my goal was to try and actually make some friends! Sure enough, I had plenty of pleasant chats, got to know a couple people, and secured three e-mail addresses. I've e-mailed all of them. Now to see which ones e-mail me back! If this was successful, I might just try it every year.

So, anyway, another fantastic Dragon*Con. Looking forward to next year's!

Romancing SaGa

Romancing SaGa is one of those games that I picked up years ago, forgot about, and only recently started playing. So, here are my first impressions, after about two hours. I started playing with Claudia, a girl who was raised in the Mazewood. An enchanted forest so entangling that all visitors get lost and find themselves back at the entrance no matter which way they turn. Claudia was raised by an old woman, considered to be a witch, who might be the one who maintains the spell on the forest. Her story opens with a man, Gian, being attacked by monsters at the entrance. Claudia saves him, and he thanks her by inviting her to the palace for which he's a guard. The old witch tells her she might as well go, because a young adult should go see the world or some such.

But before we go any further, there's a disclaimer attached! I've always been something of a fan of the SaGa series, so I may be a bit biased. Let me go ahead and give you guys an overview of the series.

Oh, and Romancing SaGa is a remake of a SNES RPG that never left Japan. So I'm treating it as a completely new game, because, well, it's new to me.

The SaGa games are considered by most JRPG fans to be challenging, bizarre(in terms of gameplay), and greatly underrated. Or bafflingly overrated, depending on who you ask. I, personally, more or less grew up on the SaGa games. Final Fantasy Legend (actually the first SaGa, rebranded in the USA) was one of my first RPGs. I grew to love its quirks and unique setting and story. The series is known for having equipment with set durability, turn-based battles, branching, interweaving storylines, non-standard leveling, and really cool combo attacks. In all but a few games, the player actually controls a cast of about seven or so main characters, each with their own goals and stories. The characters often meet each other, and it's always nifty playing through one character's story only to see other characters join and then leave your party from a completely different perspective. Which was done years before Suikoden III's "innovative" Trinity Sight system, by the way. And as for leveling, rather than gaining experience and levels, characters simply gain points in stats as they use them. A guy who takes damage might gain more max HP. A character swinging a sword will see an increase in strength, while a bow-user is going to get boosted agility.

From what I understand, the series is by the same man responsible for the weirdness of Final Fantasy II (skill-based attacks, individually levelling stats, and a rotating cast of guests). Square recognized his genius, but didn't want him to mess too much with their flagship RPGs, and so gave him his own series to play around with.

Being much more well-played, I see the series as the Japanese take on Western-style RPGs. To most JRPG fans, the series is disturbingly nonlinear, and the distinct lack of a single main character is jarring, and not at all carried out in the same manner as the beloved Final Fantasy VI. Western RPG fans, however, would find much to love. The nonlinear gameplay focuses on exploring and finding fun things to do. The games, however, have JRPG turn-based battles as well as distinctively Japanese graphics and music.

Now that I've given something of an overview of the series, the best I can really say is that Romancing SaGa is a classic SaGa game. It follows the same overall format, with the branching, interweaving stories and all. Combat seems to have been taken straight outta SaGa Frontier. The game system is a nifty skill-based class system. Once characters have certain levels in certain skills (by training them using "jewels") they can change to different classes with unique abilities. Rangers sometimes use no BP (battle points), for example.

The graphics are absolutely gorgeous, although a bit weird. The characters are all SD (super deformed, or chibi) except without the corresponding cutesy features. The effect is like walking to a room of four-feet tall adults with heads twice their normal size. The soundtrack, from Kenji Ito, is beautiful. So much so that I've been listening to it on my iPod for a while.

Long story short, if you like SaGa games, you'll like this. I know I'll be playing it for a while. And if you're just curious about the series, this may arguably be the best place to start, with relatively accessible gameplay and a lot of eye and ear candy (unlike the truly bizarre Unlimited SaGa.)

Elven Legacy - First Impressions

Wow, this new version of Battle for Wesnoth sure is impressive! Wait, hang on a moment, this is Elven Legacy!

For those of you unfamiliar with the open source classic, Battle for Wesnoth is a fantasy turn-based strategy game on a hexagonal grid. EL is also a fantasy turn-based strategy game on a hexagonal grid. In fact, the core gameplay of the two is darn near identical. Recruit units that can move about and attack enemies. Capture towns and villages to get gold. Only one (land) unit can occupy a hex. Units can level up to gain new abilities and stats. Gameplay proceeds one battle at a time, and there is next to no game outside of battle. Click your next battle on the map, and you're off!

There are some slight differences between the games. In Wesnoth, units cost an initial amount of gold to recruit, as well as gold per turn. The number of units on the map are limited only by whether you can afford to pay them. In EL, units cost only an initial sum or gold, and there is a hard limit as to how many units can be on a map, although they can be swapped with reserves (I believe, I haven't actually yet had the opportunity to do so.) The method of obtaining gold is slightly different. In Wesnoth, villages give a certain amount of gold per turn. In EL, you get a lump sum of gold when you capture a village and nothing more.

Healing also differs between the two games. In Wesnoth, you can heal by resting, standing next to a healing unit, or standing in a village, as well as unit-specific stuff like trolls regenerating and the like. It should be noted that in EL, every unit is a collection of individual soldiers. So, you can wounded soldiers by resting, and you can restock your dead comrades with recruits if you're close enough to a village. Restocking does cost gold, however, and the unit's experience drops on account of the green soldiers coming in.

Obviously, then, Wesnoth puts much more emphasis on capturing and maintaining villages. Villages in Wesnoth are not just valuable defensive points, they are the backbone of your army. In EL, however, villages serve no purpose other than their defensive value, and one may discard them after their capture so long as there isn't an extreme risk of enemy troops getting behind your front lines.

Wesnoth has another unique feature that makes it more of a "prepare and then strike" game. Time. Time passes in Wesnoth, and certain units are weak at night and strong at day, and vice versa. The emphasis in Wesnoth is waiting and defending and bolstering your army whilst you're weak, and attacking when you're strong again. Without this time feature, EL seems faster-paced and more combat oriented.

EL of course offers some strategic possibilities not available in Wesnoth, most notably a second plane of battle. EL features air units that can fly around and occupy the same hex as land units, which means they can fly past one's front lines and attack your rear. EL archers are also able to attack from a distance, and if they are positioned next to an allied unit that is being attacked, they will let loose to give their allies some covering fire (a feature which, to my knowledge, debuted in Squaresoft's classic SaGa Frontier II.)

EL is of course prettier, and voice acted fairly competently, although in the tutorial at least the on-screen dialogue doesn't always match the spoken dialogue. The soundtrack has an entirely different flavor from Wesnoth. Wesnoth's music is mainly battle marches, whereas the music in EL is more ethereal, and, most appropriately, sounds more elven.

EL is certainly a solid strategy title. It isn't, however, anywhere near as complicated as the reviews I've found online make it out to be. It manages to surpass Wesnoth in complexity, as well as, say, Nintendo's Fire Emblem series, but it is nowhere near as complicated as, oh, any of Nippon Ichi's fantastic strategy RPGs (Disgaea, Phantom Brave, La Pucelle...) or even the more mainstream Final Fantasy Tactics. On the other hand, it isn't an RPG and doesn't try to be.

If you'd like a solid strategy game that doesn't try to be anything else, and you also want pretty graphics, this is the game for you. As for myself, I'm a bit miffed paying so much money for a game that barely surpasses free offerings, and one that's way simpler than advertised as well. I shan't stop playing it because of that, though.

Oh, and I think that aside from Tetris, this is the only Russia-developed game I've ever played.

I've only played a couple of missions, and haven't yet dived into multiplayer. Perhaps my impressions of the game will change as I explore more of it!

LaTeX

The problem is that LaTeX has a learning curve. Historically, any software with a learning curve at all has been pushed aside as soon as alternatives are available. It's why GUIs took off in the late 80s (and earlier for Mac and Amiga users.) People didn't have to learn anything to use a computer. Most computer functions were immediately obvious or took very little figuring out, as opposed struggling to memorize and learn the conventions of CLI.

I think the problem is that most people would rather do a lot of work to avoid learning a little, than learn a little to save a lot of work later. Why else would someone rather spend hours doing menial typesetting (one of those tasks computers are darn good at) than learn a little bit of markup language?

What inspired this post? I spent an hour today trying not to sleep in that gorram required technical writing class as the professor laboriously demonstrated how to craft a table of contents by hand in Microsoft Word.

\tableofcontents It's that easy, people.

A couple o' perl scripts

I'm in a course this semester in which we exclusively use Java. And whilst working on a project, I got quite tired of creating accessors and mutators (getters and setters) for every single member variable I had. So I wrote a couple perl scripts to do it for me.

Now, a friend of mine who uses an IDEs to write his software has informed me that many of them do this for you. I don't use an IDE. I don't have any need for it. The code I write simply isn't that big or that complex. I use vim and javac. And if I must use a GUI, I generally go with KWrite on Linux or TextMate on Mac (or Notepad++ on Windows if I've booted into it for some reason.)

So, these scripts are for you java coders out there, who, like me, just don't use an IDE. You can find them here.

If I ever get around to making a version 2, I might include support for C++. But as for now, java coders, have fun.

Oh, yes, by the way, these are the first perl scripts I've ever written. I know there are probably a thousand ways to improve them. By all means, download them and improve them if you want. Just remember to credit me and share alike.

Food waste

Today I ate at Subway. The woman in line ahead of me requested that they redo her sandwich as they accidentally put pepper on it. Now this was a full sandwich. Meat, cheese, vegetables, condiments, the works! And when she requested a pepper-free sandwich, the Subway employee tossed that whole sandwich, the whole thing, into the trash.

That was a footlong. It could have been a meal for two or more people.

Now lets do a little math. There are some 30,000 Subway locations, according to Subway.com. Suppose that each location threw away one sandwich a day. That is enough wasted food for 30,000 or more people! Let's look at what would happen if, I think more realistically, each location threw away just one sandwich a week. That's still about 4,300 meals a day. Food that could save, or at least ease, the lives of over 4,000 people daily. And why? Because Subway employees, in general, don't care.

I propose that there should be something of a recycling center for edibles. A place where restaurants could take their unwanted or uneaten food that would in turn distribute it to homeless shelters and soup kitchens for those in need. I further propose that these places, like regular recycling centers, offer a tangible reward for distributing this food. Or maybe governmental incentives.

I dunno. All I know is I don't have the money or the power to help. But someone out there does. If you can, please, do something. This is stupid. If people don't want it anyway, at least give it to someone who needs it!

But until that happens, if you're ever homeless in Jacksonville, Alabama, the dumpster behind Subway is a great place to score some grub.