Mark Wilson's Blog

Entries in "Tech Amusements"

More Great Moments in User Intefaces

In the same spirit as a previous entry about the online time-entry system here... I'm home for fall break, and while I was lazing around avoiding any real work, my dad asked me to take a look at a problem he's been having getting his USB drive to work with one of his computers.

After fiddling with the system for a few minutes, I began to suspect that the problem was one of drive-letter assignment (which turned out to be correct). On a whim, since I wasn't really sure how to fix the problem right off the bat, I clicked the "Troubleshoot..." button on the USB drive's device-properties dialog. Microsoft's diagnostic tool appeared and asked me to provide it with some helpful input:

I'm tempted to advocate this as a model for forms at the doctor's office.

Patient Name:
Date:
Social Security Number:

Patient Signature:

Now HERE'S something I can do with a CS degree

I just came across a fascinating article at Cnet's news.com about the burgeoning Christian computer-game phenomenon which is sweeping the nation. The developers apparently feel that what Christianity needs these days is another attempt to fit in with mainstream pop culture -- after all, if we can lure kids away from Green Day with Christian rock, we'll have them leaving their Grand Theft Auto CDs to gather dust in the drawer in no time.

As I started this article, I was reflecting to myself that I really don't think I could devise a computer game that could pass as truly Biblical. I mean, the Bible is, barring some of the gorier bits toward the end that really don't play as family material, about stuff that already happened. Not exactly dynamic and engaging.

However, that's just because I don't have the kind of grand and glorious vision that inspires these people. I visited the website for one of the companies mentioned in the article, and I was so overwhelmed by their vision that I had trouble breathing for a while.

It's hard to pick a favorite out of these games. I've narrowed it down to two. One is the side-achingly-named Fluffy and God's Amazing Christmas Adventure. Frankly, it's hard not to be stunned by a vision of this caliber: And God is bursting with interactive stories, details, background info and questions... If you get bored with God and his boring old bursting interactive stories ("you know how God is"), there's the "really thought-provoking" DJ Fluffy Jam.

The other contender for my favorite game comes straight from the realm of Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goalposts of Life. It's the BIBLE GRAND SLAM DELUXE -- best imagined with Strongbad's announcer voice -- Biblical football!! You can play against a friend OR one of the game's six "biblical computer opponents." (Those of you who were unaware that the Bible said anything about computers, much less game AI, apparently didn't catch the A&E special last year which suggested that the Bible contains messages that were coded in by aliens with the aid of computers. And clearly any such aliens would have been sure to leave six encoded computerized football players. Ha ha! Boy, do I bet YOU feel silly!) You have to be careful, though -- you don't want to foul up the game, 'cause the penalties... Well, nothing's more irritating than sitting back with a brewski to watch my favorite team head out to cream their big rival, only to have the QB miss a Biblical-trivia question and get sacked inside the first five minutes.

Up next: a computer game based on Song of Solomon.

Upgrade time?

Here's a question for any computer-oriented folks out there, because I don't keep up with the latest and greatest in hardware...

Before my freshman year, I bought an eMachines desktop -- not the greatest choice, but it was cheap and I needed the money. Since then I've made some upgrades and replacements, and these days their patented NanoCase is having overheating issues, which I've just been living with. There may be power issues, too, but since I installed a new power supply that should have the necessary wattage not too long ago, it's hard to tell that till I get the heat problem resolved. The DVD drive is the latest component to start failing, so here's my dilemma.

I can pay $70 and stick another drive into a computer that's getting older and definitely showing its age. Or I can pay a few hundred dollars, get a new mobo to replace the questionable OEM hardware, a new CPU to go along with it, a new case, maybe a new power supply, probably new memory, knowing hardware manufacturers, and port all my reusable peripherals over to the new system.

Or I can try to save up a few thousand dollars which will come from God knows where and get myself a laptop, which will be new and fancy and shiny and expensive as #@!$ and PORTABLE, which would be a huge boon.

Any suggestions? If you have a suggestion, any sub-suggestions in the way of specific purchases to look into?

But do they use bullet points?

A suitemate pointed me to a story about these MIT students, who wrote a program that generates gibberish academic papers and succeeded in getting one (rather dodgy-looking) conference to accept one such paper for presentation.

The random-paper generator is fantastic. These things read like some of my CS texts, only infinitely more amusing.

Clearly, we disprove that despite the fact that the foremost game-theoretic algorithm for the visualization of suffix trees runs in Ω(logn) time, Moore's Law and A* search are rarely incompatible.

Continuing with this rationale, we carried out a trace, over the course of several minutes, verifying that our framework is unfounded.

And my personal favorite:
Compellingly enough, two properties make this solution optimal: our application allows the simulation of architecture, and also our system is impossible.