Geek Skillz

Persuasive Whipping-Up Rhetoric

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:41:00 EST

Tags: Politics, Rants

"So, let's talk instead about the flexibility of language, linguistic elasticity, if you like." "We are defined by our language, if you will."

If our language defines us, then there's been a lot of people tinkering with definitions. Camps are being created, teams forming up, and new cults being created where there shouldn't be. The new cult of Darwinism is possibly the fastest growing cult today. Well, it would be if the term Darwinism was meaningful, and if you ignore the fact that it's a cult created by those who don't subscribe to whatever that cult is supposed to preach. Imagine you wear blue t-shirts all the time, and I pronounce that you are a Bluist. You and I are instantly divided and basic psychology takes over from there. You may say, "What the heck is a Bluist?", but it doesn't matter. You're now a Bluist. Being on different teams, we begin to generalize about each other. Bluists don't like salad, Bluists always lose at video games, Bluists become enraged at the sight of the colour red, and so on. It becomes easy to act without compassion towards you, all because I put you in an arbitrary team.

And "Darwinism" is an arbitrary team. In contrast, I think that "Social Darwinism" definitely has meaning. People who condone genocide are Social Darwinists, but it's more meaningful to say that they condone genocide instead of using an obscure label, isn't it? As far as I can tell, a Darwinist is someone who has taken a biology class or two, and passed! If you understand evolution and accept the evidence for how it happens, then you may find yourself labelled a Darwinist. In truth, you aren't a Darwinist, you're someone who can evaluate and learn from evidence. The term suggests that Charles Darwin was the one and only source for evolution and its evidence. It ignores the countless other scientists who contribute to this single field of science. But if you acknowledge their work, then you lessen the visceral impact of the "Darwinist" tag. The label implies that one follows the words of only one man, to the letter, and without question, which is not a very good way to live. Do Darwinists think this way? Trick question! There's no such thing as Darwinism.

Then why is it acceptable to label people as Darwinists? It's not just religious fundamentalists that use the term, you might even hear scientists referring to themselves as Darwinists! Why?? Shouldn't we also hear about people who believe in gravity as Newtonists or Gravitivists, from the cults of Newtonism or Gravitivism? People who believe in chemistry as believers of Chemistrism? Anyone who designs a nuclear reactor must surely worship at the altar of Physicism. It all sounds so mystical, it's easy to laugh at it! But that's the point, I guess.

If you can't argue with someone based on the content of their message, then you can use cheap tricks to make them look silly. It can be difficult to refute someone who is credited as being a Biologist. Call him a Darwinist and suddenly he seems like a complete loon! Don't agree with a Physicist? Call him a believer of Gravitivism. Oh what a quack!

So when the so-called Darwinists embrace the title and start using it themselves, what's going on? I think it's the same thing that gay people did with the words queer, dyke, and so on. What's the name of the annual lesbian parade in Toronto? The Dyke March! What used to be a hateful word has been completely neutered by those who it was intended to hurt. Take ownership of the labels and they will gradually lose their hateful meanings. We are defined by our language, so we must try to control how language is used about ourselves. Is Darwinist an inherently hateful term? I guess not. It can be understood to mean that Darwin was a great man worthy of respect. Is it so bad for biologists to adopt the name? It's certainly more friendly than most racist terms! The strategy to disarm the word is probably a good one, as long as it is eventually abolished.

When I read news, blogs, articles, tweets, and hand-outs from people on the street, labels are red flags. When someone uses cheap labels to reference a person or group, you know there's something fishy about the author's motivation. Leftist (Leftism?), Neo-Cons (New Conservatives, because old is comfortable and new is scary), New Atheist (disbelieving for the second time?), Marxist (because we all know socialism is evil), Capitalist (only fools make money), Abortionist (who surely do it for fun), etc. These labels are smoke and mirrors used by lazy people who would rather not address underlying issues. Call someone a Marxist or Capitalist if you don't want to actually talk about public policy issues.

If you can't write about something without resorting to these manipulative, emotional words, then you probably don't have anything to say.

Now I must go to the gym to lift weights in an effort to make fools of those stupid Gravitivists! If the weights are so heavy, why do they go UP? Haha!

Develop on Windows, Fail on Linux

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:24:00 EST

Tags: Programming, Rants

Poor blog, how I have been neglecting you! Precious, rambling, delicious blog. Always patient, loyal, and expressful.

In honour of my blog's title, I will post something that is somehow about geeky skillz that I have. No, the title of this blog is not "Geeks Kill"! That's something else.

Many things have changed in my geek ecosystem. I play no games on computers with keyboards and mice anymore. I have a PlayStation 3 with a funny thing shaped like a molecule that responds to the twitchings of my thumbs, and sometimes fore fingers. It seems to do a decent job of simulating a keyboard and mouse. Good enough to justify gaming from the couch! Ah, to play Oblivion in the horizontal position! Try it, you'll like it too. Was I a console hater before? Not really, but I definitely preferred pointing and clicking in the past. Did I hate upgrading my PC just to play games? Heck yeah! Goodbye to that. Toodles.

My beautiful rusty red Alienware PC has been sitting under my desk since January, unplugged and abandoned. I lost the desire to play any games on it, probably because of the pitiful PC games I last purchased: Spore? Complete shite. Utterly unplayable. Hellgate: London? Almost good, but kinda awful. Bioshock? Bio CRASH! Or maybe it was the experience of reinstalling Windows yet again, faced with the task of reinstalling everything. That was the last thing I did on my Alienware, and it kinda drained any enthusiasm I had left for the beast.

One day I connected my pristine white MacBook to my 20" widescreen monitor, and discovered how wonderful it is to program on a dual-display Mac! Wow, why didn't I do this the day that I brought my MacBook home?

Next, I installed Ubuntu on the IBM ThinkCentre I use as a web server. I'm now ashamed to admit that I had been using Windows XP Professional for the server before. I know, I know! XP as a server OS?? It was a moody animal, that's for sure. It was cute the first time it decided to install automatic updates while I was out of town, reboot itself, and fail to start my website services. Haha, good one, Windows! You got me! The second time? Not as funny. Every time after that? Die, Windows. Just die. You hate me, and I hate you. Ok, it was my mistake to use Windows XP on a server, but I thought it was reasonable to assume that if I disable Automatic Updates, that Automatic Updates would be disabled. I guess Microsoft has a different interpretation of the word "disabled".

So, Ubuntu server, and Mac development. Today I really appreciate how well the two work together. They really complement each other. Here's why.

A couple of my websites were begun on my Alienware PC (running Windows, of course). Later I moved development to my Mac. But tonight I started using Phusion Passenger to deploy my Rails web applications in Apache 2. An elegant and revolutionary solution for the Rails community, no doubt! But there was a problem when I finished the migration and started up the websites under the new Passenger setup. A lot of files failed to load. All HTML loaded fine, as did many images. But some images failed to load, and the stylesheets too. Hmm... Why would some images load and some not, if they're in the same directory?

It turns out that the images added when I was developing on Windows were not loading, but the images added from my Mac loaded fine. Why? Permissions! When you copy Windows files to a Linux server or to a Mac, the permissions look like this:

-rw------- 1 geek geek 781 2009-01-31 01:23 accept.png

-rw------- 1 geek geek 789 2009-01-31 01:23 bell.png

-rw------- 1 geek geek 882 2009-01-31 01:23 clock.png

Not good enough for Apache to serve them to site visitors. Mac and Linux copy the files with more friendly permissions, like this:

-rw-r--r-- 1 geek geek   652 2009-05-03 14:13 feed-icon.gif

-rwxr-xr-x 1 geek geek 18173 2009-05-03 14:13 GeekSkillz_logo1.png

-rwxr-xr-x 1 geek geek  3214 2009-05-03 14:13 IK_guy_footer.jpg

So, a simple chmod on the files fixed the problem and all files started getting served again.

To me, this is a testament to how well Mac and Linux work together, since Mac OS X is really a highly customized distro of Linux. Develop on Mac, deploy on Linux, and win! Or just develop on Linux and deploy on Linux, I guess.

Why does Windows set the permissions like that? Another way that Windows tries to babysit its users? Assume users have the worst intentions and implement strict restrictions?

Anyway, what am I rambling about? Rails development on Mac for a Ubuntu server with Apache and Passenger are awesome? Abandoning Windows has made me fitter, happier and more productive? Yeah, I guess those are good conclusions.

Blah blah blah. I'm going to bed. Good night, blog.

[Review] Spore

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:41:00 EST

Tags: Games, Rants, Reviews

In my mind, I imagined that Spore would be the ultimate game for me. A game based on evolution? Brilliant! Battles between cellular organisms? Yes! Sandbox gameplay set in an entire galaxy? Oh please! Colonization, terraforming, space ship design? Gimme!

After only about 5 days of playing, I turned the game off tonight in disgust and made a pact with myself never to play the game again. The shortcut has been removed from my desktop, the manual hidden out of sight. A game hasn't made me this frustrated and irritable since Black & White, which is my most hated game. Peter Molyneux is shit, but Will Wright is not! What happened?

Spore is broken down into 5 stages of play, so I'm going to review each phase separately. The space stage was the one I was looking for the most. I would have bought Spore if it only included the space stage. So if I seemed to have good things to say about the early stages, it hardly matters. Ok, here I go...

Cell Stage

This phase is a gorgeous re-interpretation of Pac-Man. It is elegant, fluid, and calming. I suspect that this is where the game's inspiration started and ended. "Wouldn't it be neat if you could play a multi-cellular organism and play through it's evolution?" Yes it would be neat, and it is! Huzzah! As I played this stage, I marveled at how my creature gradually grew in size and shape with each generation, and the fuzzy gigantic organisms in the depths of the primordial ooze gradually focused and joined my creature's food chain. Then a few minutes later, my creature was the gigantic organism and they were the nuggets I was snacking on, soon to be too small to even see. Checking my creature's history at the end of the stage, I saw that almost 7 billion years had passed. This stage truly captures the essence of evolution, and more importantly, it's a fun game. Still, it's Pac-Man and the novelty wears off after half an hour.

Creature Stage

Still grinning from the cell stage, I enjoyed the creature stage. I got the most enjoyment after having my creatures "mate" so that I could change my species. With each generation, I improved the look of my species so that I liked it more as I played. In a sense, my satisfaction with my species increased a bit with each generation. This stage didn't feel so much like evolution as it did intelligent design. *shudder* My choices while playing had little impact on the evolution of my species. Playing the creature stage means doing only a few things: picking up species customizations from the ground, killing other species, and making friends with other species. That's it. Killing and befriending are really the same action with different animations. As for the evolution, couldn't the developers have thought of something more creative than picking up parts to evolve your species? I don't think Darwin suggested that birds got their wings by finding them on a beach, or that reptiles scooped up their brains from a pond.

Still, I enjoyed this stage well enough. It plays like a prototype of World of Warcraft, except without any cool features. Hmm... did I really enjoy it? Maybe I was just excited to be playing Spore, with the promise of the space stage still to come. *sigh*

Tribal Stage

Having reached the tribal stage, the hours spent customizing my species were made irrelevant and my highly evolved brain began to tell me that Spore might suck. Still, the space stage will be great! Right?

In the tribal stage, my creatures were too small to make out any of the details that made my species so cool! (If I do say so myself.) It plays like a real-time strategy game, like the original Warcraft games. But I played the first Warcraft RTS, and it had a lot more going for it than Spore's tribal stage. Spore has stripped down the RTS formula to its most basic elements, so that you end up with a stage that isn't fun, isn't challenging, and abandons everything you've done in the game so far. This stage is where the train wreck that is Spore begins. Spore has officially gone off the rails here.

On the bright side, I unlocked the achievement for beating the tribal stage in less than an hour. I hated it almost immediately, so I got through it as fast as possible. It's so simple, I can't see how anyone could spend more than an hour, or why they would want to.

Civilization Stage

The civilization stage is awful, awful, awful. And I had to spend more than an hour on it. I don't even want to write about it.

What's worse is that elements of this stage carry forward into the space stage. Arranging buildings in your little cities is a chore you will need to perform repeatedly in the space stage after every attack (see later). There's nothing fun about designing and arranging the idiotic cities in Spore. Even on the highest graphic settings, they are a blurry, blobby mess. And I still can't see my wonderful species, as they're being blocked by blurry buildings! Bah! Frustration rises!

Space Stage

And here's where the train wreck appears in all its horrifying glory. I played the space stage for three evenings (about 10 hours), because I just couldn't look away. "Is it really this terrible?" Yes, I've concluded that it is. Here's are some of my problems with it:

1. Endless Attacks: My colonies are always under attack, and I have never had more than 2 colonies at a time! Every 5 minutes a popup message tells me I need to save a colony. I decided to just ignore the attacks, which turned out to be a bad strategy. There's no time to explore space between all the attacks. While I investigate a planet to see if I want to colonize it, it's a sure thing that I'll be called away to deal with yet another attack. How is that supposed to be fun?

2. I want to explore! Following on number 1, I don't know how I'm supposed to explore space if I am kept busy with unprovoked wars and pirates. Can't I just have time to explore space and colonize planets for a while?

3. My ship won't defend itself outside of planets. My allies' ships will defend me, but there's no way to use my own ship's weapons in space. Why? Will I need to buy an expansion pack for this feature? Will I care?

4. Micromanagement of colonies: Each city on each planet needs to have its buildings plopped down inside a circle with connected lines that I guess is supposed to be a mini-game... It's annoying. Whenever a colony is invaded (every 5 minutes), buildings get destroyed. But I don't know which ones, so I need to check each city and replace what I think is missing. There's no shortcut for doing this, so I need to drag and drop each building again and again and again. While I'm doing this, it's possible that another attack will start somewhere else.

5. Space is crowded. It seems that the developers assume that space is filled with intelligent life. All the systems around me were quickly colonized by alien species, so I need to travel far away to find uninhabited systems. While searching, attacks are happening back home. Are you getting the picture yet?

6. Where's the sandbox? In marketing for the game, the space stage was promoted as a huge sandbox for you to play in. But this sandbox is the kind that throws sand in your eyes and kicks you in the groin repeatedly! It hurts! The sandbox hurts! Make it stop! I don't have any freedom to do anything creative or interesting in the space stage. It hates me, and I hate it.

The space stage, more than any other part of the game, is so disappointing it's maddening. How could Maxis have made it so irritating? Did the playtesters actually enjoy it, or were they simply ignored?

I'm not sure that I can play Spore anymore. If there's a patch that somehow fixes the space stage, then I'll give it another try. Or maybe some talented modders make some changes. I want to play it because the idea of Spore is alluring. I want the game that was supposed to be Spore!

If I find out how to make the space stage fun, I'll be sure to write a post about it. If you know what I'm doing wrong, please leave a comment! I would like to give Spore a second chance and start enjoying it. But for now, I'm completely disappointed.

Rake db:migrate Fails on nil.info

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:57:00 EST

Tags: Programming, Ruby on Rails

I'm posting this so that it can be Googled by others having the same/similar problem.

In both Rails 1.2 and Rails 2.1 on Mac and Windows, I hit a problem in the ActiveRecord migration code which causes a database migration to abort. Here is the rake db:migrate --trace output:

Macintosh:geekblog me$ rake db:migrate --trace

(in /Users/me/rails/geekblog)

** Invoke db:migrate (first_time)

** Invoke environment (first_time)

** Execute environment

** has_many_polymorphs: rails environment detected

** has_many_polymorphs: preloading parent model Tag

** has_many_polymorphs: preloading parent model Tag

** Execute db:migrate

rake aborted!

You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!

The error occurred while evaluating nil.info

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:421:in `migrate'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:420:in `each'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:420:in `migrate'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:357:in `up'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb:340:in `migrate'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rails-2.1.0/lib/tasks/databases.rake:99

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:546:in `call'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:546:in `execute'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:541:in `each'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:541:in `execute'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:508:in `invoke_with_call_chain'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:501:in `synchronize'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:501:in `invoke_with_call_chain'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:494:in `invoke'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1931:in `invoke_task'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1909:in `top_level'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1909:in `each'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1909:in `top_level'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1948:in `standard_exception_handling'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1903:in `top_level'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1881:in `run'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1948:in `standard_exception_handling'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/lib/rake.rb:1878:in `run'

/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.1/bin/rake:31

/usr/bin/rake:19:in `load'

/usr/bin/rake:19

On line 421 of /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.1.0/lib/active_record/migration.rb, we find this:

Base.logger.info "Migrating to #{migration} (#{migration.version})"

At this point, Base.logger is always null (nil) in all my Rails projects, at versions 1.2 and 2.1, on Mac and Windows, in development and production environments. I don't know why... But the fix is simple. Change the above line so that it checks to see if the logger is null (which it should probably be doing):

Base.logger.info "Migrating to #{migration} (#{migration.version})" unless Base.logger.nil?

Since this "bug" has persisted for years, I assume this is a problem that others are not hitting. Logging works in my development and production environments, so logger should not be null in this case.

*shrug*

Life goes on.

Anyone else hitting this problem with rake db:migrate? Let me know so we can bond and so on.

Oblivion Super Top Secret Tips!

Fri, 09 May 2008 12:00:00 EST

Tags: Elder Scrolls

I'm not a noob to Oblivion, but still I'm discovering new things about how things work. Here are my three newest discoveries. If these tips are old news to you, then you are not allowed to post mean comments! Just go away! Shoo! This post is insightful and it will blow your mind and the internet is forever changed, and I don't want to hear otherwise!

Here they are, in order from number 1 to number 3, whatever that means:

1. When your Mercantile skill reaches 50, some merchants will have new unique magic items to sell you. For example, the Birthright of Astalon becomes available from Claudette Perrick in the Imperial City, providing a nice boost to agility (+5) and magicka (+50). The skill description forgot to mention this nice perk! Until now, I've been ignoring Mercantile because it takes forever to level up. Now I'm starting to warm up to it.

2. Illusion skills that claim to have a max level do not become obsolete for high level characters. For example, the best Command Creature spell says that it affects creatures of levels 25 or lower. In fact, Command Creature 25 pts will work on creatures of any level, as long as your spell effectiveness is 100%. Go ahead and command that level 45 Minotaur Lord to fight for you. The key for high-level illusionists is to wear no armor to keep that spell effectiveness maxed.

3. This one might have been obvious to others, but I just figured it out... *blush* When crafting potions with the Alchemy skill, you can use the "View All" button to add reagents that don't match others in the potion. In this way you can use four components, such that there are two pairs of components independently adding effects to the potion. It's like crafting two separate potions into one. For example, for a journeyman alchemist to create a potion with both Fortify Strength and Fortify Endurance, you can use these four components: Monkshood Root Pulp + Blackberry (fortify endurance), Arrowroot + Root Pulp (fortify strength). You may end up using more components this way, but it allows you to get effects that are otherwise impossible to combine in a single potion.

I've got a sudden urge to create an illusionist/alchemist/merchant...

The Right Number Of Lines [Poetry]

Wed, 07 May 2008 09:00:00 EST

Tags: Poetry

One line.
Two lines.
Three lines is better.

Four lines.
Five lines.
Six lines. Too much.

For Oblivion Book Collectors

Mon, 05 May 2008 16:28:00 EST

Tags: Elder Scrolls, Games

Yes, I'm still playing Oblivion. It's a rare game that I don't get bored of after so much time.

My latest and greatest character is a Hermaeus Mora worshipper, that crustaceous blob with the great library. How does he read with lobster claws for hands? Anyway, I designed a house for myself using the construction set and put some big book shelves in it. My plan is to collect all the books in the game that I can find. Oblivion has a lot of books. Lots! This quest should keep me entertained until the next Elder Scrolls game comes out.

So, I needed a way to keep track of my character's growing library. Which books do I already have back at home? Which ones do I need? You get the point. Having just bought iWork '08 for my Mac, I decided to give it a try by creating a list of all the books. And so I did.

For all the other Elder Scrolls geeks out there, I'm sharing this checklist. It doesn't export well to Microsoft Word format, what with all the fancy layout I did with iWork. So it's only available in PDF and Pages format.

Get the files at the Oblivion Book Collector's Checklist page!

Let me know if I missed any books or if there are typos. Or just let me know if you're a book collector like me!

Dune v3.0

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST

Tags: Books, Movies

One of my favorite characters in the Dune novels by Frank Herbert is Duncan Idaho. He's the character who just won't die, no matter how many times he gets killed. This guy survives thousands of years and countless resurrections!

And so it is with Dune. Yet another film adaptation of the sci-fi space opera classic masterpiece Dune is confirmed, as reported months ago to everyone but me.

Peter Berg will be directing and promises a huge budget. I've never seen any of his films, but now I definitely need to. The Kingdom, Friday Night Lights (yuck to american football!), and Very Bad Things are notable movies on his resume. This doesn't scream "sci-fi masterpiece" to me...

David Lynch was the first to take a stab at bringing Dune to celluloid, and he did a very... eccentric job. In a way, I really enjoy it. It shows how two people can read the same book, with the same words, and the same dialog, but see it so differently. Lynch's twisted imagination really shows itself in his Dune. I think Lynch saw the word "feud" in the novel and used it as the primary motif that ruled all the film's artistic decisions. However, the movie uses voice-overs in almost every scene, so I must admit that it sucks. When a director needs to use voice-overs to tell a story, you know he's desperate. Narration is for books, not movies. There are two things that I hate in films and TV: 1. narrators and voice-overs, 2. actors who whisper. Speak up! You're in a frikkin' movie! Anyway, Lynch did a crappy job on Dune version 1.

Next, the Sci-Fi channel gave it a try with a mini-series. I liked it because it took its time to tell the story more coherently without voice-overs whispering in the audience's ears. However, production quality was undeniably TV-quality, not big budget. You could easily tell that the desert was just a small sound stage. In a movie called "Dune", you really should have a good budget on the desert scenes! "Arrakis! Dune! Desert planet!" Idiots.

Also, the script was unpolished and often failed to make clear the plotting, scheming, and double-crossing, despite the long scenes of wooden dialog. I don't understand why they felt the need to add more characters to the story, like Irulan. The story had plenty of strong women. There was no need to add more. Dune is a hard enough story to portray on screen (apparently...), so don't shoot yourself in the foot by adding more complexity to it. Irulan appears at the end of the story in Herbert's original, and I think it is an interesting reveal in the end-game. What kind of person is Irulan, who promises to be the only one in the feud who can keep the human universe together? By keeping her invisible for most of the story, I think the impact of her arrival is increased a great deal. Good writing and direction would be able to pull this off.

Ok, I've given myself away. I'm a Dune fan. It's the kind of story that gets better with age. Frank Herbert clearly saw oil for what it is: a finite resource that will soon run out and has the potential to destroy human civilization as we know it today. In the end-game, whoever controls the last reserves of oil stands to win it all. How might that play out? How is it playing out today? Who are the big players? It's science fiction at its best, I say!

Good luck to Peter Berg on his attempt at Dune. Third time's a charm? I would like to see the rest of the series brought to life, so I'm hoping that Berg's Dune will be the start of a great new sci-fi franchise.

In other news, Berg is also set to do a Bran Mak Morn film. Could this be paving the way for a big-budget The Call of Cthulhu film? Geeks will dream.

[Review] Mozy Remote Backup

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:49:00 EST

Tags: Reviews, Software, Web

Geek Skillz, this green and white blog that has somehow caught your attention, is just one of my websites that I run as a hobby. I've got four websites running on an old IBM ThinkCentre box sitting on my desk. Why pay a monthly fee when I can run my own server? Until recently, there has been one problem with my setup: backups. Yes, I've been taking regular backups of the websites and the databases, but those backups have been sitting in a hard drive only one foot away from the server itself. So if my place were to burn down, both the server and the backups would be gone. If someone robbed me, they would probably take the server and the backup drive. What good are backups if they're in the same building as the source computer? Not very good at all, I say.

A few weeks ago, I discovered Mozy.

Mozy is an online remote backup service that gives you up to 2 GB of space on their servers for FREE where you can backup your files. Even better, it will keep the backups up-to-date automatically, similar to the way Mac OS X's Time Machine works. I'm a huge fan of Time Machine, and wish that Windows had something as elegant. Mozy comes close. Instead of keeping a huge archive of backups like Time Machine, Mozy keeps a backup of only the latest versions of files. This will probably be good enough for most users' needs.

If you need more than 2 GB of space for your backups, Mozy offers monthly and yearly payment plans for as low as US$4.95 a month. For businesses, there are Mozy Pro plans. I've been more than happy with the MozyHome free plan, so give that a try before deciding whether a monthly plan is for you.

How Does It Work?

To start backing up, you need to first install the Mozy software, which is available for both Mac and Windows. Once installed, the easy-to-use interface lets you choose which files you want to backup on the Mozy servers. There are some predefined backup sets that you can choose to let Mozy decide how to do it. For example, if you want your e-mail to be backed up, choose the Outlook or Apple Mail backup set. Other sets include Firefox Favorites, IE Favorites, Word Processing Documents, iCal, Keynote Presentations, and many others. Backup sets make it easy, as Mozy will figure out which files need to be backed up for you.

The backup sets aren't good enough for me, as I want to backup the code for my websites and my database backup files. Mozy lets you choose any files and directories on your computer easily. Click on the screenshot to the left showing my backup configuration on my Mac, where my Ruby on Rails code resides. I checked the "rails" folder and a few of the subfolders underneath.

Once you tell Mozy which files and directories you want backed up, you can set a schedule for how often Mozy will send backups to its servers. Or you can let Mozy perform the backups whenever your computer is idle. Note that Mozy will only backup changes to your files. It won't waste time by uploading files that haven't changed since the last backup. Nice.

Mozy allows you to include more than one computer in your account. I've got my server, which runs Windows, and my laptop, which is a Mac. Mozy backs up the database backups from the server, and my website code from my laptop. Both the Mozy website and the Mozy client software keep track of how much data is being stored from each computer. The website will even tell you when each machine was last backed up, so you don't need to log in to each computer to check the status of your backups. It's a simple feature that's makes the service even more convenient to use!

What Doesn't Mozy Do?

Mozy is not a "file archive" service. It is a remote backup service. What's the difference? A file archive service lets you upload files where they will be stored and never changed unless you change them yourself. A backup service like Mozy will keep backups of the latest versions of your files. If you delete a file from your computer that Mozy had been backing up, then Mozy assumes that you don't need it anymore. From their FAQ: "If you delete the working copy on your machine and then run a backup, Mozy will assume that you no longer need a backup copy, since you got rid of the working copy, and will mark the file to be removed from our system in 30 days. (We keep it on file for 30 days, just in case you change your mind.) After 30 days, you cannot get these files back."

So, you can't upload all your vacation pictures to Mozy and then delete them from your hard drive. If that's the kind of service you're looking for, then Mozy isn't going to help.

Also, you can't share files with others. You can't backup a file to Mozy and tell your friends to download it.

Let Mozy Do What You Should Have Been Doing All Along

Mozy is a backup system for your files. If your computer gets stolen, or your hard drive goes up in smoke, or a meteor crashes into your house, Mozy will be there to restore your files to the way they were a few days or hours before tragedy struck. That's what Mozy does, and it does it automatically. Tell Mozy what to backup, and it will do it all by itself, without asking you to do anything. Set it and forget it.

In my opinion, Mozy does what computers should do for us. Why should I have to worry about such mundane tasks as keeping backups of my files, keeping track of which files have changed recently, and finding a safe place to store my backups? Our computers need to be more autonomous, making decisions for us. Even the most tech savvy computer users make bad decisions when using and maintaining their computers. It's about time that software starts doing these things for us, and Mozy is one of those products that does that for me. MozyHome is free, so give it a try.

Confession: Yes, the links in this article are referral links! I can make a few dimes and nickels by recommending Mozy to you. Nevertheless, my opinions are sincere. Managing data is a nerdy thrill for me, so Mozy is an exciting service because it's an elegant solution to an important problem. Anything that manages data automatically for me is awesome! Mozy was recommended by Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times and PC Magazine, so my glowing praise is hardly original.

[Review] The Lies of Locke Lamora

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 23:43:00 EST

Tags: Books, Reviews

I just finished reading The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, and let's just say that I'm impressed! February in Canada is a great time to curl up under a blanket and lose yourself in a great book set in a warmer place. Lies, the first novel by Lynch, was more than capable of helping me escape February! I haven't been this excited about an author since I discovered George R. R. Martin, whose recommendation led me to discover Lynch.

The Lies of Locke Lamora is set in a fantasy city similar to Venice, except with a lot more sharks. Locke Lamora is a con artist, who robs from the rich and... well, has some good times afterwards. The story is a fast-paced series of cons, robberies, shark battles, fancy-dress parties, assassinations, sword fights, back-stabbing, and all kinds of swashbuckling goodness.

Even though this is the first in a long series of forthcoming books, Lies isn't just setting things up for a future climax (*cough* Robert Jordan *cough*). It's a complete novel in every sense. All plot threads are concluded by the end. Lynch doesn't string the reader along. Instead, he does everything he can to delight and amaze! In a genre that has recently been encouraging bloated, aimless fantasy series of huge tomes (I'm looking at you, Steven Erikson!), it's refreshing to find a new fantasy author who writes a briskly paced story with the reader's enjoyment in mind.

Check out the following interview with Scott Lynch to find out how his blog helped him get his book published and launched his career as a writer. Yes, his blog got him published!

Crazy!

I know!

That's what I said!

Crazy!

He speaks like a role-playing gamer.
Don't ask me what that means. It's just true.

Go get The Lies of Locke Lamora. Seriously, it's great.