hi clear, bye clear

A few months ago, I had to cancel my home internet service with Time Warner. It turns out, TWC was executing a telemarketing campaign with some severely broken equipment. This meant random calls to my cellphone that never left a message and in the off chance I did manage to answer I was promptly hung up on. TWC left no way to get in touch with anybody who might be responsible for the calls, and letters I wrote asking them to stop went unanswered, so after two weeks I finally told them to cancel service.

To replace home connectivity, I went out and snagged a 4G wireless modem from Clear. The prospect of 6MB that I could take on the road with me for less than TWC was charging me sounded like a good deal, and for the past 3 months it's been everything I'd hoped for. Less downtime, and waaaaay less harrassing phone calls.

However, earlier this month (last Friday in fact), Clear instituted some mechanism that attempts to rate limit users who pass an unspecified bandwidth usage threshold. If you trip their bandwidth-hog alarm, your connection drops from 6Mb to 0.25Mb download speeds, and this makes doing pretty much anything relatively impossible... the speed is basically bumped below the throughput of a dialup modem from 1999. It is impossible to watch Netflix movies uninterrupted, and it's introduced some real problems when I try to play games or use VoIP services.

The intent is pretty obvious. Rather than scale up their bandwidth to accomodate a large influx of customers, they have chosen to ration out access. They were clearly assuming people would only be using the service to check email or maybe listen to a few mp3's... fools burning 30 hours a week on movies and video games will quite easily wreck that business model. The problem is that rather than cap me at the speed I've paid for, they serve up more than I paid for (12Mb) until I hit this limit, and then slap on a draconian limit to punish me for the amount of traffic I've pushed. From my point of view, I have very little to show for it since most of the bandwidth is from dynamic services (ie, Netflix and WoW) rather than from downloading files.

It's basically akin to flipping on the TV to discover that the cable company is only going to let you watch public access channels and CSPAN because you've spent entirely too much time watching HBO this month.

This is a total deal breaker for me. I don't really care about throughput so long as it's greater than 1Mb. I'd be happy taking a price break and using the slower service to having my provider suddenly and without any warning yank my leash for violating rules I don't understand and have no way of monitoring. Unfortunately for Clear, the faster (and cheaper) solution is to just cancel the account and install DSL service rather than give them "a month" to iron out the bugs in their rate limiting ubersystem.

uml deadend or why your proprietary file format is a really, fantasically bad idea

So, I'm working on a project. Pretty big SQL setup, lots and lots of complexities. Good news is that the whole thing is described well with a "UML" document. There is also a tool in place to generate SQL-like stuff for MS SQLServer, but it takes advantage of some of MS SQL's quirks in the code it generates.

What I'd like to do is take the UML document as input, and have it spit out a bunch of ORM files for me in another language and just let the ORM's framework worry about the messy SQL details for whichever database ends up being used. Not only would this be (slightly) less tedious than manually building up the objects by hand, it would have the benefit of making the UML document a single point where the database could be managed in the abstract and I could get on with doing the stuff that's more computer sciencey and less data enterishy.

But. I can't. Because the UML file was created with a very feature rich UML editor that lets you draw really nice and really well annotated diagrams, but locks it all up inside of a very non-UMLish file format. And for the icing on the cake, the company that made the editor closed up shop in May and has decided to not only stop taking orders for their software but providing the free evaluation download as well.

From my point of view, this makes the file just as programmatically useful as a jpeg picture of a diagram of the database layout. The tedious grunt work of examining the diagram and manually hacking it all together is unavoidable, which means that now we've introduced the chance of documentation skewing away from the implementation. Inadvertent forks from last minute bugfixes or poorly communicated design changes are now on the table.

All because a software developer thought his method for storing UML data was better than just using simple UML, and that his clever method would assure him of job security.

Wrong on both counts, mang.

And now we're both hosed.

Just stick with the standards, people. Please?

screw you, firefox tab complete!

For some reason that is completely unfathomable to me, the URL that's shown as hilighted in firefox's URL window can get out of sync with options that show up in the drop down menu of possible alternatives, yet firefox gives preference to the drop down menu when you hit the TAB key to complete.

Case in point: I want to go to gmail. I start typing in "http://www.g" and the drop down shows up. The first thing its got highlighted is "http://www.google.com/", which makes sense. I next hit "m" (so what I got in the URL window is "http://www.gm")... the text in the URL window goes ahead and auto-completes out to "http://www.gmail.com", BUT the drop down highlight remains on "http:"//www.google.com/").

So when I hit ENTER, I'm being queried for a search string instead of looking at my inbox.

I sigh and once again curse my blazing fast touch typing skills and lightning quick ENTER key pressing reflex. So I go fumble around for the mouse, point the stupid pointer over the URL, double click to highlight the entire URL, hit BACKSPACE, and... we go back to where I said "Case in point:" up above.

Repeat 3-4 times until I finally am able to remember to force myself to stop and wait for the drop down to catch up and get to my email so I can read the latest chain letter my old high buds have forwarded to me.

KAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHNNNN! \o|

win32 c++

So I was presented with a situation where I needed a binary to simply run some predetermined commands on Windows. I said, "Why, this is a simple fork/exec under Linux. How hard could it be in Windows?"

Turns out, a lot fscking harder than it needs to be.

The primary problem stems from the way Windows "attempts" to support multibyte characters. Or rather, the wayS it supports multibyte characters... you have a choice of the ANSIish widechar that can do UTF-8, or the one that MS Visual Studio defaults to LPWSTR for UTF-16. The Windows libraries helpfully provide replacement functions for stuff like sprintf() and such, but the common and well known string functions are cut off from you. Worse, some wrappers to system calls like GetCurrentDirectory() will only return LPWSTR and only take LPWSTR args, and because these are differently sized types you can't just cast your out of the problem.

Oh, and stuff like malloc()/calloc() doesn't appear to work with the macros, either. Or at least I didn't have the time to unravel what the correct way to use them were in the time I had alotted.

In the end, I used something like:

wchar_t* thing[SIZE];

and just used a typecast whenever I needed to move into or out of the variable: (LPRWSTR) thing, like when using _stprintf() to build up these strings.

So, basically, I ended up being corralled into doing freshman level C just to get stuff working.

What I've taken away from this experience is that I absolutely, positively, 100% don not ever want to do any serious Win32 C/C++ development. Ever. EVER. And if I do have to go down that road, then I'm going to try and stick with ANSI... maybe even to the point of using cygwin exclusively to avoid getting sucked into this nightmare again.

first impressions of warhammer

So, got the beast installed (2 dvd's!!) and took it for a test run.

Overall, I'm not very impressed with the game. Let me give you a taste of the gameplay so far:

*) create your account with EA/Mythic (note the name.. it becomes important later on)
*) start up WAR, wait for 45 mins for the 255MB patch to download (seriously?)
*) finally get the patch downloaded, start the game, agree to the license and ToS
*) begin selecting your character and deciding which set of tusks best describes you as a hulking minion of the Armies of Destruction
*) frown as the game starts to lag during the character customization phase until it gets so bad you just give up and hit the "PLAY" button hoping it'll go away
*) enter the game and begin walking to the first quest giver only to be struck by crippling lag after taking 2 steps
*) spend 5 minutes fighting through the lag in an attempt to get the visual config menu opened up and turning everything down to lowest possible settings
*) give up when that doesn't do anything, and try restarting the game
*) agree to the ToS a second time
*) re-enter game, resume your walk to the first quest giver, and get hit with crippling lag inside of 5 steps this time
*) hunt for the in-game help feature to report the problem, and experience a complete lockup of the game and a tone that sounds ominously like a flatlining EKG machine for 10 seconds
*) wait for lag/death tone to subside, hit the help button, and begin filling out your report only to discover there's a hidden character limit on the input box labelled "be as descriptive as possible"
*) revise your bug report down into "terribad lag, bad tone + lockup, plzhlp" (all the while experiencing said terribad lag... we're talking IRC on a 2400 bps modem here, folks) and have the game completely crash before you can submit it
*) sigh, and decide to use the web form to report the bug... spend a while typing in your WAR account/pass and your EA Mythic website account/pass before noticing that in order to report a bug you have to have an EA.com account
* register with EA.com, wait a few mins for warhammeronline.com site to accept your new credentials, and submit bug report
* go whine about the whole experience on your blog that only 2 people read

It's not a very fun game, so far. :)

In seriousness, though, I did get a chance to kill a couple of dwarves and get to level 2 before things got too bad. It's got some major differences from WoW... the two big ones for me are that there's no autoattack (ie, you have to use an ability from your action bar for each swing of your weapon) which slows things down with what appears to be a 1.5s cooldown between swings. I'm thinking that it's going to be tricky to get into a button-mashing groove later on and such grooves will depend on your action bar layout as much as your talents. Hrm.

The other complaint is the orc quests are written in orc "flavor" language... which is some funky hybrid of Cockney, Sottish, and gangsta rap. It's kind of difficult to tell what the hell the plot is, and tempting just to read the list of stuff you need to go grab.

The interface is pretty well laid out, and it preserves a lot of controls and features from the WoW interface, so... at least that transition has been eased. I find the compass much easier to read, and there's a lot of stuff there natively that you had to rely on add-ons for in WoW.

Not too bad.

Other than the sever, crippling lag thing. And the byzantine maze you have to navigate to submit a bug report.

why is jill greenberg surprising?

I've gotten a bunch of emails from friends and family trying to make me aware of the Jill Greenberg controversy, and I'm left wondering: Why is it a big deal?

By way of background, Greenberg is a photographer who was hired by some rag called The Atlantic to shoot some pics of John McCain for a story they were doing. She basically didn't retouch the photos that the mag used, and so McCain ends up with red eyes and "bad looking skin" on the cover shot. She also apparently used the shoot as an opportunity to sneak in some strobe light pics that makes McCain look like he's casting an ominous shadow or something. The laundry list of complaints is here, and her response has been a sophomoric "not my fault" using the reasoning that The Atlantic knew she was anti-Bush, so it's they're fault for hiring her.

And it's impossible for me to give less of a crap. I don't read The Atlantic... didn't even know it existed until today. But even if I did, I would probably assume that the editors of the mag were just like the editors of other magazines, who are just like the editors of newspapers, who are just like producers of TV news, and who are just like the lone freaks creating the blogs I read:

Freaking biased and not above lying by omission or resorting to cheap images or loaded language to further their own agenda.

Let's face it. The ideal of objective journalism is gone, people, and it's the editors who strangled it. I give as much credence to CNN and the NYT as I do slashdot... maybe even less as at least the latter allows a forum for its consumers to debate the slant of the article.

Everyone knows this already. How can you be surprised when they do what you know they're going to do?

depressing headlines

"Feds take break from bailouts to tackle inflation"





/o\