Drinkable Chicken

This Nintendo DS game is the third in the Phoenix Wright series. As such, it’s much the same as its two predecessors, and doesn’t introduce much (or anything at all) in the way of new gameplay. In spite of that, I found it to be quite enjoyable.

The ongoing story of Phoenix & co moves ahead, sometimes in unexpected ways. Most of the well-known supporting characters are here again. We get to learn more about their past, and sometimes you even get to play them for a while (rather than Phoenix). Also: Phoenix has a love interest! :-) Or maybe two. In addition to that, there’s the usual number of cases that seem impossible to solve at first glance, but turn out to make sense (well, sort of) as the game goes on.

Like the other two games, there are some minor nits that make gameplay somewhat less enjoyable than it could have been. Where some text adventures suffer from the “guess the verb” syndrome, PW sometimes suffers from “guess the correct piece of evidence”… or rather, presenting a piece of evidence at the exact point the makers of the game had in mind, even if there are other points where it would make sense to do so. Saving often helps, but is still annoying.

But overall, this game’s highly recommended. It’s too bad the Phoenix storyline seems to be over now. Fortunately it’s not the end of the series; the next game will be Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. ^_^ (Apparently it’s already out; I haven’t seen it anywhere yet.)

Four years ago, I did the Clean Sweep Assessment. Back then I scored a “meager 51″ (out of 100). Today, my score is 41. Hmm, I don’t think it’s supposed to work like that. :-(

Even though I make more money these days, everything else has been crumbling down. Although there are signs that positive changes are coming up soon. Getting rid of some abusive household members should be a great improvement.

This post is making the rounds: Are .NET developers the American tourists of the software industry? Some random remarks…

I have met my share of ignorant Americans, but then again I’ve also met quite a few ignorant Dutch. :-/ And it’s not like most Dutch tourists take a keen interest in learning about the country they’re visiting. Let’s face it, the majority couldn’t care less as long their destination has bars and nightclubs. :-(

I don’t understand the first comment by “joe”: “Most people in the world may not like us, but whether they want to admit it or not they are better off because of us. Each time they turn on the TV or a personal computer, surf the net, talk on a telephone, drive a car, fly in an airplane it is a tacit endorsement of American culture.” What is this supposed to mean? Does the poster think that all of these are American inventions? If so, he very ironically demonstrates American ignorance.

As for .NET developers… the only ones I know switched to .NET after I left their company, and I would not look down on them. Maybe I would think their choice of platform a little odd, much like they probably still think Python is odd… but some of them run circles around me when it comes to designing, implementing and delivering database-driven apps that are actually useful to customers. ^_^’

Arkanoid DS. With a paddle controller!

Unfortunately, judging from the preview, the game itself is disappointing (and isn’t the same as the original Arkanoid we all knew and cursed back in the 80s).

Bangai-O Spirits preview:

“Once you’re done your creation, you can save it to cartridge and send it to other Bangai-O Spirits owners in a very unique way: through the power of sound. Using old-school modem-like technology, you’ll convert your levels into a sound that other Bangai-O Spirits carts will recognize. Place a set of headphone earpieces to a DS microphone, plug in the 1/8th inch jack to the host, and send that file off through high-pitch whines. It’s similar to the way that we Commodore 64 and TRS-80 programmers used to save and load our created programs, and here it makes a return in a contemporary game design.”

My esteemed coworker Justin pointed me to this device: the Asus Eee. “They even have it in your favorite color”, he claimed; which isn’t true, since it’s not yellow. :-) Not that it matters so much if you’re colorblind…

But anyway. The stupid idea is:

• install C64 emulator on it (it runs Linux, so it should be possible to run e.g. Vice)
• install oodles of C64 games on it (can be found online at various places)
• um, that’s it. You now have a portable C64. ^_^

Supposedly this can be done with the PSP as well, and it even has an analog stick that could be used to emulate a joystick, but I never managed to get it to work. :-(

(I mention this because my “Commodore Project” is stalled at the moment. Over time, I collected a C64, a Plus/4, a 1541-II, two Quickshot joysticks, 5 1/4″ floppy disks, and a XE1541 cable to transfer files from PC to C64. That last part never worked. Then my Windows box died. ¹) So I’m disgruntled and looking for a better way to play all those old games. (Other than using an emulator on OS X, an area in which the Mac isn’t a very strong player, by the way.))

Someday I should really blog about things that actually do work. :-/

¹) Hopefully the two events were unrelated.

Ebay search results are often unrefined. I know, there’s a whole slew of settings that you can use… most of which are uneffective.

Let’s say I am looking for a PowerMac G4 Cube. The actual machine, *not* memory for it, or a power supply, or peripherals, or software for it. The search “powermac g4 cube” does not work well here, because it does include all the above. Queries like “mac g4 cube”, “powermac g4 cube machine”, etc, yield similar results. Narrowing things down by selecting the category “Apple, Macintosh computers” hardly has any effect either. ¹)

This problem is not easily solved. Selecting “Search title and description” returns even more bogus results. As we already saw, categories are useless (most likely because people lump their items in whatever old section to increase exposure). Yet, I don’t like to have to wade through hundreds of items just to find a few that actually match the criteria I had in mind.

Sooo… I was wondering… maybe some sort of Bayesian filter would help here? You get a bunch of items and group them… this would match my criteria, this does not. It probably wouldn’t be so useful if you are looking for a certain item but don’t intend to search for it again once found and acquired. It might work better if you’re, say, a collector, and are regularly looking for certain items (e.g. zoids, although those results tend to be more accurate).

What I would need is

• a query
• a script that crawls the eBay site periodically, using that query
• simple user interface that lets the user filter the results (and, after the initial training, makes educated guesses)

Of course, eBay doesn’t like spiders crawling their site. Alternatively, one could set up an RSS feed and use that as input.

Thoughts welcome… :-)

¹) If there is some secret eBay-search-fu that I am not aware of, and that does give the correct results, narrowed down, then I’d like to hear more about it. :-)

Update 2008-03-03: It appears that eBay’s developer program has been free since November. I recall it being virtually unusable before, but I will take another look at it, and see what I can do with it.

Update 2008-03-04: I’m currently doing some research in order to write some Chicken code that uses the API. (Talking to HTTP, and generating HTML and XML, seems easy enough. I am now trying to figure out which XML parser is the best.)

Update 2008-03-18: I have since written some proof-of-concept code, which produces SXML, but I’m kind of at a loss what to do next. Leaving the (simple) code as it is, is pretty lame, as a seasoned Schemer can easily write this themselves. On the other hand, second-guessing what the user would want to do with the XML doesn’t sound like a good idea either. (The hard part was actually, signing up for the eBay developer program in all the right places, and getting all the right keys and IDs.)

Damn difficult test at OKCupid. Might to be interesting to math and/or programmer types, or Virgos. Here it is: The-Numbering-Systems-Test.

(Registration may or may not be necessary, I don’t know.)

Not just in the “sucking up to people hoping to reap the rewards later” sense of the word, but especially the computer-related sense. I tried to make the G3 clamshell talk to my MacBook, or vice versa. Should be a piece of cake, with File Sharing and all that. It isn’t. Reason unknown. They see each other in the “Network” tab alright, but when trying to access I get “The server may not exist or it is not operational at this time. Check the server name or IP address and try again.” Makes no sense. All settings seem OK. I used to be able to connect without problems from Windows, but that machine is borked. Oh well. I’m going to call it a day now, I already wasted a few days last week trying to set up communication between Windows PC and the 1541-II.

This wouldn’t be really worthy of a post, if I had not had this problem for as long as I can remember. Networking & I don’t mix.

[Update 2008-03-02] OK, maybe I don’t suck *that* much after all. I knocked the Wii from my network, and suddenly things started working. Apparently there have been cases where the Wii interfered, although the reports are scattered and vague.