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Yes, this movie exists. And yes, it's godawful beyond belief.

Here's a review I wrote about the movie when it came out. But, really, every detail is awful-- not just the computer scenes, but every scene is brimming from top to bottom with WTF. It also doesn't help that they couldn't get any characters from the original, except WOPR (if you count that.)

Try JamesPad, it's a quick and dirty app I wrote that saves the notepad when you close the window, like old-school Mac Classic's notepad program:

http://blakeyrat.com/jamespad/

Requires Windows and .net 2.0 (I believe... some .net version.)

http://blakeyrat.com/2008/12/steam-more-like-scam/

Steam had a pricing error on their website. There's no place to report pricing errors. Submitting a ticket about the pricing error? No response at all from Valve-- completely ignored! Never once did they offer to give me the discounted price, or did they even fix the error on their website. This is the second time I've attempted to correct a pricing error on Steam, both attempts completely ignored.

I stand by what I said. You were just lucky, and the rare exception to the rule.

And Wargames 2 only slides past on a technicality-- it was direct-to-video.

http://blakeyrat.com/2008/09/wargames-the-dead-code/

Just noticed the YouTube movie cut out about a minute and a half of the song. Not a huge deal, really, but I put the full version in MP3 format on my website: http://blakeyrat.com/commodore-64-sound-rips/

Just FYI for next time, there is a way to remove Vundo without a boot disk:

http://blakeyrat.com/2008/10/how-to-really-get-rid-of-the-vundo-aka-virtumonde-virtumondo-ms-juan/

Once you've identified the offending DLLs, you can set their file permissions to "Everybody - Deny". When you next boot, they won't be allowed to execute and you can simply delete them. (You do, however, have to power-off your computer without shutting it down, which carries a tiny risk.)

Has a terrible UI, too. I had a debate with one of the game programmers last time this got posted to Slashdot. (Why!???! Is it really that slow of a news day?)

Shoved it in a blog post if anybody cares: http://blakeyrat.com/2009/02/stupid-slashdot-exchange/

The part that really throws me about VS is how it reconfigures itself, seemingly at random, when you load different projects/files/etc.

For example, we use Team Foundation Server as source control. In a typical day, I have TFS's source browser open while I'm working on other things-- Word docs, or email, or whatever. Fine. But then I need to do some work on a C# program, so I click the C# project in Explorer and it opens in the same VS window... well, ok.

But now it gets weird. Since TFS's source browser has no "solution", the Solution Explorer isn't there. I have an open project, but it's not showing me the project items, which is really dis-concerting... and even worse, if the project happened to be saved with no open tabs, the VS UI does *nothing at all* when you open a project. (Well, it does some stuff to the menus, but the window looks identical to before.) So I always have to manually show the Solution Explorer and Properties Explorer, and usually the Toolbox also.

What I'd MUCH rather have is TFS source control browser being treated as a completely different instance of VS, instead of just a tab in VS. Then when I opened a C# project, I'd get a whole new VS instance with the correct UI elements shown.

Oh, but it gets even weirder with Javascript. I'm running a JS project in a browser, and I hit "Debug" and choose VS as the debugger. Now, the JS file I'm running is RIGHT THERE in VS, but it seems completely unable to detect that the file I'm debugging is the same thing as the file I'm looking at... so I get a new VS tab, which is crazily showing the exact same file as the one I was editing a minute ago, except it's non-editable. Which means I always, and I mean *always*, try to edit it and get that idiotic error "you can't edit this file, dummy, it's being debugged" or whatever it says. Irritating as hell.

IE8 fixes that latest problem, except I'm still running IE7 for QA purposes.

I think the problem I really have is that VS is designed around the assumption that you sit down, open VS once, and open a single solution which is the *only* thing you work on each day. My work isn't like that... I'm editing HTML here, JS there, oh quick change to the C# site, another quick change to the DB schema, etc. I'm constantly opening and closing new projects, and VS seems to have a new and exciting UI configuration every single time I do so.

I'm not trying to suggest the widgets are broken (although they are weird in many ways), but the holistic experience for me just isn't there... I feel that every time I open up something that uses VS, I have absolutely no clue how it's going to look. "Is the Solution Explorer going to be there this time?" "Is the Properties Explorer?" "Is the Propeties Explorer going to be below or beside the Solution Explorer?"

That said, it's not true that there's "little to no" usability testing and UI design review, for VS at least.

The testing I need is, "hey, spend a few hours looking over my (a typical customer) shoulder, and see how weird this all is." Some groups do that, I know Office and Windows does. Maybe VS is doing that, but they don't watch people who work like I do.

VS has a lot of features I really love, although I have to admit I've been slowing moving over to Expression Web for all my HTML/Javascript needs. The only thing I really use VS for HTML-wise anymore is the "Format Document" function and the Javascript debugger.

Oh, and BTW, did you know the "Check for Updates" item in the VS Help menu does not, and has not ever, worked? Oh, it LOOKS like it works, but after you the install process, you actually end up with the same version of VS as before? It's devious. http://blakeyrat.com/2008/10/ms-sql-server-2008-installer-woes/

Last version of Psi that I've regularly used was 2 major releases before the current one; I don't recall seeing that button there back then (or at least it didn't look as wrong as on the screenshot).

You can also set Deny permissions of the files the virus is trying to start at boot, once you figure out what those are. NTFS permissions are adhered to *extremely* early in the boot process, so this technique is really, really effective-- the hardest part becomes figuring out which specific files contain the virus.

I wrote a blog post on how to use this technique to get rid of Vundo on an XP machine: http://blakeyrat.com/2008/10/how-to-really-get-rid-of-the-vundo-aka-virtumonde-virtumondo-ms-juan/ No reason this wouldn't work on tons of other viruses/malware out there as well.

Avatar - Dances with Wolves with Headless Robots: http://blakeyrat.com/index.php/2009/08/avatar-dances-with-wolves-with-headless-robots/ (my own blog)

It reminds me of this article a while back, which was trying to scare people off air travel by mentioning that some wires in airplanes were being measured with a piece of paper:

http://blakeyrat.com/index.php/2008/03/a-critical-reading-of-the-news-faa-criticized-in-report-on-airline-parts/

During a visit to one parts supplier, the inspector general's office observed an employee who "used a piece of paper, scotch-taped to the work surface, as a measuring device for a length of wire on an oil and fuel pressure transmitter."

Sure it sounds scary, until you actually engage your brain and realize that paper can actually be cut to a specific length, just like wire! Amazing.

Read the comments, one of the authors/supporters of the study responded to my blog posting, but never bothered to explain why exactly measuring a piece of wire with a piece of paper was scary.

I hate fear-mongoring.

I wrote a blog entry just yesterday about Slashdot's completely ignorance of the term "staging server": http://blakeyrat.com/index.php/2009/06/slashfail/

I can recommend Sedo.com as a reliable and honest domain escrow service. If you're looking for recommendations. I also have a few domain names for sale, you can take one for your business: http://blakeyrat.com/index.php/domain-names-for-sale/

For example, "webpageofshit" might be appropriate. ;)

XP. Sometimes it works, but it did not seem to automatically hotplug. And this was, of course, once drivers were installed -- drivers that Ubuntu and OS X provide out of the box.

FYI, Vista has good drivers out-of-the-box. XP does too, if you have a XP SP2 disk, but the original XP disk doesn't include them.

For example, the keystrokes I mentioned in KWin simply do not exist, configurable or not, on Windows or OS X. If they did exist, they were not discoverable. Usability is more than discoverability, but discoverability helps.

They aren't built-in to the GUI, that doesn't mean they don't exist. It means they exist as plug-ins/applications you have to install separately. All the hotkeys in OS X are configurable, but they don't have hot keys for the behaviors you're looking for.

A quick Google would've shown you that, by the way.

I could have, but if you're trying to convince me, you'd do better defining terms that aren't commonly-known.

Speaking of which, it's been awhile since I've even tried to do this elsewhere, but I can right-click the title bar of a window, choose Advanced -> Keep Above Others. Windows certainly allows always-on-top windows, but I haven't seen the window manager itself support this.

Windows has a distinct disadvantage in that a large proportion of its developers are asshats. For example, think about what would happen if RealNetworks circa 2001 had the ability to set their windows to always-on-top. The Windows API is specifically designed (since about Windows 2000) to preclude developers abusing the system, or otherwise being asshats. So, in general, any feature with the potential for abuse doesn't exist, or at least doesn't exist in a manner that's accessible by the user.

There's also the technical issue of what happens when two always-on-top windows overlap each other-- how does that work in KDE?

In Linux ever developed a 3rd-party software ecosystem, they would have to begin installing the same limitations.

So, IE passes Acid2 now?

Who gives a fuck?

IE can render my standards-compliant pages now?

"Standards-compliant" isn't a feature. It's a fucking waste of time. Let's spend 80% of our developer time changing parts of the program that end-users NEVER SEE, only web developers do.

Oh, and despite that, web developers will have to test in each browser *anyway*. So you're barely saving even that tiny percentage of users any time anyway.

Oh, and despite that, web development is still a shit process because the web standards are shit anyway. DOM is a goddamned joke! CSS can't even do math! Seriously, WTF. The only web standard I have any respect for is Javascript, but since it's tied to DOM, it instantly becomes as retarded as DOM is.

For example, something I discovered just yesterday: http://blakeyrat.com/index.php/2009/04/gigantic-javascript-wtf-disphtmlelementcollection/

Nobody in the real world ever picked their web browser due to standards support. If they did, Opera would be the most widely-used browser for the last 5 years. It's a complete non-feature. It's the kind of thing you should work on when you have free time after all user-facing features are completed, not the kind of thing you should base most of your work on.

And I've yet to have a single person convince me that the XHTML standard is worthwhile. What's the point of a webpage validating as XML? What does it gain me that I can't already do? Nothing. It's just a giant waste of W3C time that *should* have gone into HTML5. (A standard I can actually get behind.) No high-traffic sites validate, why is that? Because they don't care! Why should I?

"Standards-compliance" is just a gigantic geek-wank started by some pissy web developers who think their already-extremely-easy job is just too hard.

And I suppose IE has Adblock, Noscript, Greasemonkey, and Firebug now?

Fortunately, the article summary contains the phrase "Details about the Nexuiz project are available at SourceForge," which is code for "it sucks, don't even bother."

So, unlike the last open source Quake-clone game I wasted tons of time on, this one I don't even have to bother.

BTW, why is the open source community so obsessed with Quake (generally, and deathmatch specifically) when the wider gaming community has almost universally moved on to more complicated games? Deathmatch simply isn't fun for the majority of the people on the server, I'd much rather play something like a Battlefield game where even if you suck, you're clearly contributing.

I got pissed off with Steam when they had a fraudulent advertisement, and not only refused to sell me the game at the advertised price, but didn't even respond to my trouble ticket at all. Of course, unlike pretty much every other retailer out there, they don't even *have* a way to report pricing errors in a ticket, so you have to file it under something else. (Possibly explaining why it wasn't answered, but there's no excuse in not at least pointing me in the right direction or forwarding it to the right people.)

Oh, my post on the Dark Messiah of Might and Magic-suck is actually mostly Steam-suck as well. Strangely enough, it also had a tiny bit of Steam is awesome, when after completely failing to install from CD it actually was able to successfully install from a download.

Anyway, I'm done with Steam, too. It's a POS. I don't care about game boxes on a bookshelf, but I'd love a game download service that *works*.

I got pissed off with Steam when they had a fraudulent advertisement, and not only refused to sell me the game at the advertised price, but didn't even respond to my trouble ticket at all. Of course, unlike pretty much every other retailer out there, they don't even *have* a way to report pricing errors in a ticket, so you have to file it under something else. (Possibly explaining why it wasn't answered, but there's no excuse in not at least pointing me in the right direction or forwarding it to the right people.)

Oh, my post on the Dark Messiah of Might and Magic-suck is actually mostly Steam-suck as well. Strangely enough, it also had a tiny bit of Steam is awesome, when after completely failing to install from CD it actually was able to successfully install from a download.

Anyway, I'm done with Steam, too. It's a POS. I don't care about game boxes on a bookshelf, but I'd love a game download service that *works*.

It's impossible to get any kind of support from Steam relating to pricing.

They recently ran a New Year's Sale, but coded the prices in their store incorrectly. I sent several tickets, no response. Here's the blog article and screenshots if anybody cares: http://blakeyrat.com/2008/12/27/steam-more-like-scam/

Reputable sellers have, you know, support for issues like this. Steam is such an amateur production, I still don't see fit to give them my credit card. (I was close, if they would have given me the advertised deal on Colonization, I would have gone for it.) Oh well, fuck them.

I actually want to stab the voice actor who played the Prince and whoever wrote his dialog. Maybe I'm crazy, but when I see something like a "Prince of Persia", I don't want them to talk like a skateboarder circa 1988.

Here's my review, if anybody cares to read it:
http://blakeyrat.com/2009/01/14/prince-of-persia-review/

I can't tell you how many game forums I've seen where games, and especially games with mods, don't work in Vista because UAC breaks folder privileges.

Wrong; UAC *enforces* the rules that have always been in place. It's not Microsoft's fault that game developers are piss-poor at programming, and their products usually end up as buggy pieces of shit.

In XP, I can run the game as a non-admin, and just elevate rights for specific files or specific folders.

YOU can, because you know how to. The average man-on-the-street would never be able to manage this, and for them Vista's method (which is automatic and not manual) is much better.

In Vista, the Program Files folder is sacrosanct territory and must be treated differently.

As it is in XP, and 2000, and NT4. Again, applications are *never* supposed to write files to the Program Files folder in *any* version of NT. The only difference between Vista and XP here is that Vista actually enforces these rules programmatically, instead of relying on software developers to do the right thing.

Installing the game outside of that folder all buy bypasses UAC, rendering the so-called security useless.

No it doesn't; it still prevents (for example) a virus downloaded from an online game infecting user accounts other than your own. Given, it definitely weakens the protection (and boo on companies who have done this as a "workaround" for their buggy-ass applications: I'm talking to you Blizzard*!) but you're still better off than running the same game as Admin on XP.

I've developed XP sandboxes for my users when I make desktop images, or when I research and install individual apps. I find precisely what authority they need, and grant that. I find proper sandboxing to be easier in XP.

Maybe, but Vista does it *automatically* (for IE at least) without any user interaction. Say it with me: "I am not the typical user." The typical user doesn't know how to fiddle with permissions, so he just runs as Admin. Vista allows them to run as a more secure user account without knowing how to fiddle with permissions; this is a GOOD THING.

*) See my blog post on the subject: http://blakeyrat.com/2008/11/02/world-of-warcraft-updates-and-the-definition-of-half-assed/

I wrote a blog entry to illustrate a method of getting rid of files like this in a slightly more "safe" manner, using NTFS permissions:

http://blakeyrat.com/2008/10/02/how-to-really-get-rid-of-the-vundo-aka-virtumonde-virtumondo-ms-juan/

The short version, set "Deny" permissions on the files you want to remove, when you reboot the NTFS permissions will prevent anything from opening up/running the files, and you can then remove the Deny permissions and delete them.

Anything that uses the system registry. Microsoft 'helpfully' redirect it. Ditto Program Files.

Not if they're coded correctly.

Applications that *wrongly* try to write into nodes of the registry they shouldn't have access to will have their registry entries redirected. Applications that attempt to write into the Program Files folder (also *wrongly*) will get a "spoofed" Program Files made for them elsewhere.

These applications were broken in Windows XP; they were broken in Windows 2000 Pro; they were broken in Windows NT4. They've been broken for decades, the only difference is that Microsoft is now having the OS enforce its own multiuser rules.

What's really sad is the developers who go WAAAY out of their way to do stupid shit to make their product work, when they could just change a couple folder entries in the first place. Blizzard is guilty of this; instead of just moving their WTF and UI folders to the correct location, they actually move *the entire application install* into the /Users folder. It's hard to even fathom how anybody who considers themselves a "Windows developer" can be that dense. http://blakeyrat.com/2008/11/02/world-of-warcraft-updates-and-the-definition-of-half-assed/

Because consoles have DRM built-in?

Who gives a shit? At least consoles WORK. Take a look at how long it took me to get a copy of Dark Messiah working on my computer: http://blakeyrat.com/2008/08/02/why-pc-games-suck/

If I had bought the Xbox 360 version of the same game, I would have been done in less than a minute. You put in the disk, it works. Period.

I've yet to have Google Gears work properly once.

I think it may be because my Internet connection isn't just plain "not available", but instead it's a wifi with a weak signal which comes in and out. Nevertheless, every time I tried to access documents while offline, I saw nothing but:

http://blakeyrat.com/2008/05/27/google-docs-offline-is-a-great-idea-too-bad-it-never-f-ing-works/

I posted a whole bunch of display bugs to Slashdot's tracker: http://blakeyrat.com/bugs/ Nobody's done jack about any of them.

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I posted a whole bunch of display bugs to Slashdot's tracker:

http://blakeyrat.com/bugs/

Nobody's done jack about any of them. In addition, the one bug that *was* resolved was only confirmed and resolved for the "D2" discussion system, even though I filed it for the original discussion system. (I have no idea if the fix worked for both; the example thread I have in the bug report seems not to work.)

Anyway, like open source projects, Slashdot isn't actually interested in reading or fixing bugs. Don't bother.

Open source developers don't fix bugs submitted by the general public:

http://blakeyrat.com/bugs/

In fact, I'm pretty sure the majority of those haven't even been READ.

Oh no, I completely agree with you. I also don't agree with this statement:

Browser-specific issues are handled by the AJAX layer, and Google's is pretty solid. In effect, that's a single platform that all their applications are coded against.

As a former Safari user, it's clear that Google's layer is not coded for, nor tested against, Safari. Maybe it's better now, but a year or two ago, it took ages for Google to release *working* Gmail features to Safari browsers, compared with IE and Firefox.

Not because they can't afford it or because they don't care about quality. It's because their corporate culture has no room for the people who see that boring stuff like QA gets done.

I would argue that if the boring stuff like QA isn't getting done, they actually do not care about quality. They operate like open source developers, who never do the boring stuff like QA, or even actually readding or answering bug reports for the most part.

(See http://blakeyrat.com/bugs/ and pay attention to the section on Inkscape and Notepad++. Slashdot, while commercial, also has the open source development philosophy and also doesn't give half-a-shit about bug reports.)

How many bug reports have you even bothered to file with X.org? That's what makes a user part of the community. Not just using the software for free, which just makes you a user.

This article is exactly about the large number of filed bugs that aren't being fixed. What good would filing more bugs do if they can't fix the bugs they have already?

Besides, I've learned from long experience that filing bugs against open source projects is a waste of time. They never get fixed, most of the time they never even get read: http://blakeyrat.com/bugs/ That's just a partial list of the bugs (maybe a third) I've filed over the last 2+ years, none of which have been fixed. And most of which haven't been read. (And most of which are extremely obvious bugs, like lists that aren't alphabetized, or menu bars that don't work right.)

(Oh, ignore the Slashdot.org bugs, it's not really an open source project, since the bugs are against Slashdot.org specifically and not Slashcode in general.)

I just posted a review on my blog: http://blakeyrat.com/2008/01/19/cloverfield/

I'll paste the text here, but I'm still thinking of going back and revising it.

---

The one sentence review: Cloverfield is unfortunately kind of disappointing, and bring your Dramamine if you're sitting close to the screen.

Look, I like kaiju movies. I like serious Godzilla, the Godzilla of the 50s and 90s. I like crazy Godzilla, the Godzilla of every other decade. Yes, even Godzilla's Revenge. (What? It's funny... don't look at me like that.) I like crazy Gamera, and I believe honestly that Gamera truly is friend to all children. I like the serious Gamera of the 90s, which are still pretty crazy when you think about them, just with more gruesome effects. I even like Garuda, even though it's not really in the same genre.

I'm also the first person to proudly say that despite its name, kaiju movies are an American invention, damnit. Even if you don't think King Kong counts, there's still this awesome little flicked named The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms which not only fits the genre's conventions perfectly, but was released a year and change before the original Godzilla and had special effects by Ray Harryhausen and was written by Ray Bradbury and you really can't beat that.

So what I'm getting at here is you'd think I'd enjoy Cloverfield simply by default, and I didn't really. It had some moments that were truly worthwhile, but the film as a whole just didn't gel for me for whatever reason. And it didn't help that...

Spoilers Ahead ... the monster sucked! All I can say about the monster is that it's a good thing the cast and crew kept it such a tight-lipped secret, because if they'd released photos of it I think it would have hurt their chances at the box office. Yes, gentle viewers, New York was being destroyed by a monster that not only had killer lice, but literally could not stand upright. Being one hundred feet tall? Scary. Waddling around on flippers? Not scary. The two even out to give the general reaction, "eh." When the reaction to the main character of your film is "eh" (and let's face it, people go to kaiju films to see the monster), then you got problems.

The second problem is that Cloverfield doesn't explain anything. Where does the monster come from? I dunno. Why is it in Manhatten? No clue. How come when the little killer lice bite you your head explodes? Shrug. I'm ignoring the questions that apply to all monster/horror movies, such as: "how come weapons that can penetrate 20 thick reinforced concrete are useless against fleshy creature?" and "why the hell are they just standing there gaping when they're in mortal danger?" Even Spielberg's War of the Worlds gave a BS explanation for the alien's presence. (They buried the spaceships a million years ago, then teleported into them under cover of a thunderstorm... God that movie sucked.)

Cloverfield also makes use of the new popular technique to make movies and TV shows look "more real" by not using a steadicam at all. Actually, the entire movie is a first-person viewpoint from a camcorder held by one of the characters, which flashbacks provided by the un-erased parts of the tape he was recording on, so that when the camera jogs or skips you see a few minutes of what it recorded a couple weeks before the events of the movie. I thought that was pretty clever. I'm not a huge hater of the hand-held camera look like a lot of people are, but I do want to warn you if you're going to see the movie that this camera movies. There are several-minute long scenes of it pointing randomly downwards while the characters are running. There's one shot where the camera falls 40 to the ground. (I want to know what model that is, damn it's durable.) Unlike, say, I Am Legend or Battlestar Galactica which are filmed with hand-held cameras that are held pretty steady, the camera in Cloverfield really, really moves. I sat too close to the screen, don't make the mistake I did.

So, in short, despite some exciting moments, I think the negatives of Cloverfield outweight the positives and I left the theater pretty disappointed.

I wrote a blog entry on that a few weeks ago, after encountering both Pipe Dream and Simon recycled as mini-games in two big-budget titles:

http://blakeyrat.com/2007/09/04/is-the-world-out-of-games/

Obligatory post of my Crackdown review: http://blakeyrat.com/2007/03/27/crackdown-review/

Lost Planet, which I'm about halfway through right now, has the most cliched plot and dialog ever. I mean, it's cliched almost to spoof-of-video-games level... it's insane.

http://blakeyrat.com/2007/01/lost-planet.html

To quote myself:

So all in all, Lost Planet is a pretty good game with a really lame story. Which is pretty much par for the course for most console FPS games. Hell, most FPS games period. But it still upsets me because, of all the low-hanging fruit, the story is the lowest hanging and it still hasn't been plucked. Sad, really.