Neal Stephenson pointed out something that struck a chord with me in “In The Beginning Was The Command Line”. He pointed out that car interfaces weren’t cursed with having to be “intuitive”; instead they made up steering wheels and gear shifts and all sorts of arcade controls. He expresses relief that cars weren’t invented in the computer age, or we’d have to steer with a mouse and change gears by clicking a drop-down menu.

The moral of this story: some things can’t be improved upon. We have to realize when we got something right, and then leave it alone. Similarly, there are some things that nobody is ever going to want, and we just have to stop trying to invent them. Because – get ready for some politically-incorrect judgment – they are bad ideas!

Touch screen computers

On a phone, it makes sense. On anything bigger than a phone, up to a desktop computer, it doesn’t make sense.

Hey, prove me wrong. As you read the rest of this post, follow along with your arm stretched out and your finger on the screen running along each line. Click around the site with your mouse with one hand, but keep your finger on the screen with your other hand following along the same gestures, as if your finger were the mouse pointer. Time yourself.

How long did you last? Fifteen minutes? Twenty? You’re arm feels like a swollen football of pain, doesn’t it? Oh, and you were slower than how you usually use a computer, and now you have to mop your smeary fingerprints off the screen. Now imagine that tech leaders think this is a good idea. Things like Microsoft Surface, fueled by some overpaid engineer who saw “Minority Report” and thought it looked like fun. It looks cool, but try standing up and waving your arms around for fifteen minutes.

Animated assistants

Look at this rogue’s gallery! Don’t you just want to take out the whole lot with a machine gun? So does everybody else. Everybody turns them off. Everybody complains about them. Everybody avoids using a tool that has them if there’s no way to turn them off.

So why are we still seeing them deployed in the year 2009? We’ve known that everybody hates animated desktop assistants since at least the Bronze Age. I believe it was Aristotle who, in his “Corpus Aristotelicum” in 320 BC, wrote “This damn animated dog sucks! I’ve been trying for an hour to turn it off, and it keep coming back! My writings will be lost to history at this rate. I’d like to strangle the idiot who came up with this!”

What part of “Everybody hates animated assistants!” needs to be explained to developers?

A new search engine

You have a unique case here: for the first time in history, we have a voluntary, benevolent monopoly. Google got it right in 1997. Google is smart enough to know this. Everybody else’s search sucks, period. If you can point to something that Google does wrong, so wrong that people will come to use your search engine instead of Google’s, then go for it. Otherwise, forget it.

Take a word from the cowboy: “Sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you.” Hang it up, pardner, you’ve done been beaten to the draw.

HDTV

OK, we admit it: back in the 1960s, you got us with color TV. That’s a huge improvement over black and white. And a few more improvements came along, like going from vacuum tubes to all-digital. But after that, it’s time we faced the fact that seeing moving pictures on a screen with sound just isn’t going to get any better. Not better enough for everyone to throw out their existing sets and pay three times the price for a new set that improves the picture quality by 2%, anyway.

You want to innovate? How about making the programs more intelligent? There used to be a knob on TVs called “brightness”, but it never made the people on TV more bright. How about an IQ button on the remote?

Paid site subscriptions

Hey, here’s something we’ve been getting for free for twenty years now, but now we want to start paying for it. Why? So the old newspaper and television world can move into the Internet medium and still make the same money. Forget it, it’s not going to happen. The Internet made everything free, and it’s not going to settle for anything less.

Live software updates

I hope developers for every platform – Microsoft, Apple, and Linux – are listening: Updates are a PAIN! They hassle you at the worst times, they take up your resources, they nag you with popups, and after you update you barely have time to fix everything that was broken before guess what? You’ve gotta update AGAIN! Whether it’s Windows patches, Linux apt-get upgrades, Firefox extensions, anti-virus-ware, whatever. We don’t want software that constantly whines for attention like a spoiled puppy. We want software that leaves us alone.

The latest buzz in knowledge systems is Wolfram Alpha. Let’s make this clear: it is not a Google-killer and doesn’t claim to be. It is billed as an “answer engine”, instead of a search engine. Search engines give you links to websites that answer your query; answer engines just try to give you an answer, full stop. Just to clear that up.

I’ll try here to find the border of its knowledge, just to have a good idea of what it can handle and what it can’t. So, let’s calculate the odds of a “royal flush” in draw poker:

All it understood was “royal flush”, and gave me odds for five and seven cards. No note as to whether this is natural deal, or discard and draw.

“Which country had the most wars?”

Here’s a more typical Wolfram Alpha experience: it’s stumped. No idea what I wanted. Neither of the provided links lead me anywhere near the answer I wanted. This is an example of a major problem with knowledge systems – they have to be ready for every wacky thing that users will throw at it. And this query is just the kind of thing that would be practical and handy to know.

Other queries which have stumped Wolfram Alpha so far:

• “calories in bat guano” – stumped.
• “world’s oldest piano” – stumped.
• “alternatives to photoshop” – stumped.
• “map of Dictionopolis” (It interpreted it as “Divinopolis”) Dictionopolis is the first city in the book “The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster.
• “map of Mordor” (did you mean “Gordon, Nebraska”?) Look, if I wanted MapQuest, I know where to find it.
• “number of teeth in adult”
• “who is charlie brown?” It gave me the United States musician Charles Brown, whoever the heck he is.
• “lifespan of a cockroach” – totally stumped!
• “microchip inventor” – stumped. Here’s the exact same string in Wikipedia’s search, with the correct answer as the second result. And just clicking ‘microchip’ gives you only the company, “Microchip Technology”!
• “who is winston smith” – It gave me statistics for both surnames, unware that he’s the protagonist of the novel “1984“.

Now before everybody goes, “That’s not fair! You’re trying to trick it!” Well, the PR has gone out of its way to document these silly Easter Egg examples. Somebody spent far too much time trying to rig this demo and too little time making a useful tool. And before anybody cries foul on my searching for fictional characters, it sure as heck knew “who is john galt”:

You know, because if you want the social web to hype your engine, you’d better cater to the Randroids.

I had better luck with straightforward calculations. But how far could I push that? How about converting between two measures of length, using the most arcane units I can think of…

Ta-daaaaa! I was almost accidentally impressed for just a minute there.

Bottom line: This thing has a long way to go on all fronts before it even comes close to what we want an answer engine to do.

Hi, I’m running for the President of Computers! Vote for me, and I promise to:

Remove the ‘forward’ button from every email client.

You should never forward email. Ever. In the history of ever. Not even if it will save the world. The world doesn’t want to be saved that way. Also, everybody doesn’t love you when you forward them this funny thing you found. The exception is, of course, sharing the hilarious and pithy wisdom of the premium content to be found on that pinnacle of website perfection which is askreamaor.com.

Remove the CAPSLOCK key from every keyboard.

Why do we still have to tell people this? It must be that Caps-Lock, like the One True Ring, has a will of its own that will not be thwarted. It’s always there just to the left of your pinkie, whispering “Use me! Abuse me!” with an evil hiss. Yes, just thinking about it makes me want to HIT IT RIGHT NOW AND RIDE, BABY RIDE, BECAUSE IT’S CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL! You see? We have to take that thing out. Even Oprah fell for it. It’s like having a wetbar built into the dashboard of every car.

While I’m at it, I would ban Oprah.

Oprah is the female equivalent of Ron Paul. She amasses a huge cult that will do anything she asks, but it’s all composed of cheeseheads who couldn’t think for themselves if you set them on fire and handed them a garden hose. Look, now all of the readers of this site who also follow Oprah will never come back, just because I said this. You see?

Outlaw the ‘NSFW’ tag.

Once upon a time, a real employee of an actual company noticed a link that unexpectedly led to a booby picture (we think it might have been this one), and politely asked the poster to state that it was so. The ‘NSFW’ (Not Safe For Whiners) tag was born. “Oh ho!”, said the Web Trolls Union (local 549), “We can make people attach this tag to anything we complain about! And so they spread out, starting flamewars over every single post on every single site. Everything can be argued that it is indecent to someone, for every possible ridiculous purpose. Forget it! The whole Internet is NSFW. It’s the web; take your chances!

Every web page would have to pass a bench test for load speed, with a cap on memory.

So, these are really good ideas, aren’t they? Aren’t you glad you’re reading them now, instead of waiting for the page to still load while staring at your spinning mouse pointer?

ISPs would make you take an IQ test to join.

Various countries have licenses for everything else. Driving, building, marriage, fishing… An Internet license! One with a test, where you’d have to study a little book, and then pass a little multi-choice quiz. You’d have more web safety, fewer spam, bot, and malware attacks, maybe even people who at least knew some rules of etiquette exist, even if they forget them two minutes after their first click.

See what a better world I can make? cast your vote in the comments.

Let me make it clear for the one leper colony member who has been locked in a basement for the past two years and thus has not heard the news: What is Twitter? It’s IRC. On mobile. Yeah, that’s it.

Oh, OK, let’s back up a little. It’s not IRC. If IRC lost all but one of its servers, had its scripting and commands taken away, was confined to 140 characters, couldn’t share files, and had no moderation, then Twitter would be IRC. The sole innovation is that it runs on mobile devices. One IRC client Perl script ported to the Blackberry and Twitter would be gone faster than the first funk train out of Jivetown.

That’s why everybody’s making fun of Twitter now. That’s why 60% of new users in the US quite after one month. That’s why things like the swine flu get reported on it.

Also things like “who farted?” and “I have to pee.” You do? Good for you! Do we have to change your nappy or can you make it to the potty all by yourself like a good girl? Seriously, search Google for “site:twitter.com” and “I have to pee” in quotes. 4,080 people have announced that their bladder is full on Twitter. No more dignity than a Sim. Don’t even ask about Number Two.

Clearly, this is indispensable technology, so it will be a shame to see it go away in a few months when people realize “Hey, this is just another plain old text message system!” Let’s take a moment to remember and pay tribute to the staggering hype that was Twitter, before it passes into the shadows.

And to flory10, who’s so unclear on the concept that she keeps posting her home page link over and over again.

And to meeshmeesh, who posted one disgusting update.

And to the GetAFreelancer job poster who needs 1000 female profiles (with PICS!) delivered in batch.

And… oh, what’s the use? This is too easy! I’m bored again.

With the new 2009 Star Trek movie out, science fiction geeks the world over can once again begin their ritual of dissecting, analyzing, and arguing about Star Trek. And, wow, has it really been eleven movies already? How hip! So here’s my favorite “WTF?” moments which I experience whenever I ponder my favorite show about wearing tight uniforms to trespass all over the galaxy:

Mr. Spock: Besides the anomalies like how he always has to stand up and peer into a garbage chute, there’s the mere existence of the pointy-eared one himself. He’s a half-human, half-Vulcan. As Clifford A. Pickover, my favorite mad scientist, points out in this article on the unrealistic science in SF, it shouldn’t be possible for an alien from another planet to impregnate a human. Think how difficult it is to get two Earthling species to cross-breed, even two species of ape.

While we’re discussing the problems of breeding aliens and humans, I’d better link Larry Niven’s “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” before somebody else does. There.

The Federation is an unsustainable mess. It has no money, it’s staffed by volunteers, and yet it has a military capable of defeating any menace and is present throughout the galaxy. They also have their own exploratory fleet, of course. Oh, and it’s officially an “interplanetary federal republic”. And if you need anything, you don’t have to earn it, just punch your order into the nearest replicator and it magically appears. Now somehow, everybody in this universe has a job and shows up at work every day, instead of, say, getting it on with supermodels in the holodeck. The Federation is a Utopian dream outside the wildest fantasies of the most idealistic extremes of any philosophy known to political science.

The Borg are just Zerglings with better graphics. And I don’t even mean that they’re Zerg. The whole Zerg race from Starcraft actually has the sense to at least assimilate different kinds of life forms for every task. The Borg could pick anything from an elephant to a jellyfish to assimilate, just on Earth alone. Or even salt vampires or Gorns or Klingons or Hortas or any of the other bigger, tougher sentient beings in the Star Trek universe. But no, they’ll just stick with boring old humans, thank you very much. After all, they’re only going to launch them in attack waves of thousands of units just to watch them all die like flies anyway.

Wonky Technology Don’t you love how everything works, until the plot calls for it to fail? We have communicators, but whoops, too much static in this area. We have phasers, but whoops, they don’t work on this particular strain of protein. We have transporters, but dammit, they just aren’t working today because the Big Swirly Energy Thing In Space is making them fail. We have shields, but they got hit so now we don’t. We have warp engines, but gosh darnit, we’re out of gas, and we can’t replicate more diluthium crystals with the replicator because, well, heck, we didn’t think of it. Of course, the solution to everything is to either increase the power or reverse the polarity. Naturally.

Why, I can remember when pirates kicked ass. From The Curse Of The Black Pearl to Captain Hook from Peter Pan to The Pirates of Penzance, pirates have been the magnificent bastards of fame and legend, able to hold their own against zombies and ninjas. After all, whenever somebody hacks your website, what do they leave as a calling card?

That’s right, the skull-and-crossbones, because the idea of somebody hacking up a PHP XSS exploit while typing with a hook for a hand is scary.

What’s the best we can do for pirates these days? Well, we have Somalia, and what is this? This skinny kid who breaks down crying in court when they tell him that they called his mommy? That’s not a bad guy! What kind of villain is this? He looks like he belongs on MySpace with photos of him posing in front of his weekly hotel room while he fans out his money and tries to look gangsta.

It’s even turning out that the Somali pirates aren’t even the bad guys. A better question would be “What the hell are all these ships doing in Somalia to begin with?” Oh, it turns out that the ships of other nations are fishing off the Somali coast and dumping nuclear waste there – so next time you open a can of tuna and it glows green, you know where it came from. Anyway, this makes the “pirates” seem less like buccaneers and more like ragtag beach bums going out in their rowboats to chase the tankers away. Which is pretty much all the navy you get in Somalia.

So we come down to the Pirate Bay. Forget the doubloons and cannons, it’s all about ripping the latest Hannah Montana album to share with your geek mates. Oh, and they’re Swedish. When’s the last time you met a bad-ass Swede? Never that I can recall, but they do lay out a mean buffet, so much so that the world calls any buffet a Smörgåsbord.

Anyway, the Pirate Bay website found its sails clipped when the site’s owners got convicted of… well… being pirates. They’re getting fined $3.6 million and sentenced to a year… you get this in the United States for driving without insurance.

And how did they get this conviction? Did the Swedes, fed up with this brazen swashbuckling going on, rise up in a village mod with pitchforks and torches to storm the bay? No, it turns out the damn judge was bought, and so they’re going to have to have a new trial. As for the Swedes, far from being outraged, they have the Pirate Party, which is supporting copyright law reform and is coming out in support of the Pirate Bay. They’re growing bigger than ever, but still…

Bah! This isn’t swashbuckling! There should be more swash and less buckling! Real pirates fight with cannons and swords! I want to see peg legs, eyepatches, and parrots squawking about pieces of eight. More rum and wenches and less lawyers and lobbies, please!

Well, sure, but if we want to see the old news going back to the dawn of the Internet, we know where to find it. And since we’re all on social news sites and many of us browse multiple sites in this age of RSS, chances are good that everybody who cared saw it the first time.

Meanwhile, there are very good reasons why duplicates hurt a social news site. These are:

1. It annoys the users. That, right there, would be reason enough in a world where common sense was common. Perhaps the starship Enterprise can discover such a world out there someday.

2. It promotes spam. Spammers find out that they can get infinite traffic just by popping up with the same link every two months.

3. It creates a clique. The same small group of “power elite” buddies end up re-submitting each other’s sites and voting each other up. Legitimate users can’t get a submission through.

4. It chokes out new submissions. There is plenty of new content on the web every day, which gets pushed down when duplicate content hogs the top of the list. In some cases, user bases of social news sites have slipped into antiquity, since all they see is the same circle of memes going around and around while the rest of the world has major news happening.

5. It wastes resources. Why take up another slot in your database with the same link, when fewer and fewer users will even visit it each time? Even when breaking news happens and manages to get into the submission cue, forty duplicate submissions of the same story appear on the front page all at once, followed by at least ten posts by people yelling at the submitters to quit submitting the dupes. That’s an extra 240 megabytes on your server to report a story that, had you prevented duplicates, would have taken up only 5 megabytes.

6. It’s anti-business. New content creators and new website owners can’t get traffic, because the duplicated content from years ago is clogging up the system.

7. It’s boring to read the same thing over and over again.

8. It’s boring to read the same thing over and over again.

9. It’s boring to read the same thing over and over again.

10. It’s boring to read the same thing over and over again.

You know what obsessive-compulsives do, don’t you? They repeat the same meaningless activity over and over again for no apparent reason. You know what obsessive-compulsives do, don’t you? They repeat the same meaningless activity over and over again for no apparent reason. And video games, both by design and habit, tend to bring out the worst in compulsive repetition. Here’s the ten cases where it seems to be particularly bad:

Jumping over the final punk’s head at the end of stage one in Shinobi.

Yeah, this guy. The arcade Shinobi was chock full of villains who spawned at a certain point, and if you memorized their triggers, you could make them spawn over and over again. For instance, if you stood at a certain spot at the end of the second to the last stage in mission two, you could shoot an endless parade of ninja cops dropping out of the helicopter. But the really compulsive one is this plucky little guy. To “win”, you have to make the jump completely without touching him, after which point he’ll just keep running in the same direction and you can casually fire a shiruken into his butt.

Trying for the highest possible jump for the flagpole at the end of a Super Mario Brother’s level.

Yeah, like points mean so much to you when you only bothered to grab one coin. But at least this is one that everybody can identify with, right?

Saving the power pills until last in PacMan.

Oooooh, now we’re upping the ante. It makes sense to wipe out a few lane’s worth of dots when the level’s just starting and the ghosts are still busy coming out of their pen. But when you’ve methodically finished off every dot without touching a pill, it’s really, really time to go outside.

Picking up gold in Diablo 2.

Somebody at Blizzard North needs to re-take Economics 101. Because gold in the Diablo series is so ridiculously plentiful, that it isn’t even the currency standard in the online realms – Stone of Jordan rings are. The Stone of Jordan is a super-rare ring that only drops a collective 0.000000000000001% of the time if you’re already a level 87123 character and have killed Ultraviolence Superarmored Jetpack Ninja-Vampire Baal using only a toothpick 1000 times if you are carrying 999% magic-find. That’s what giving every character one million times as much gold as they need does to a game. Yet people never get tired of running back to scoop up every lousy two bits that fall from a quillrat.

Having to completely destroy every last enemy building in Starcraft.

The sadistic bastards at Blizzard rather enforce this one. You have no choice here, you must level every last building in your enemy’s camp to claim victory. It doesn’t matter if all they have left is a porta-john and the only unit left breathing is an SCV huddled up against the cliff. We couldn’t declare victory if there’s still a supply depot up, could we? I mean, the enemy could still food you to death!

Packing without holes in Tetris.

That’s great, but what if the straight red piece never comes? Never ever ever?

Completely replacing the wooden fence with rocks in Harvest Moon.

Oh, you’ve got to be kidding! No, see, if you leave the stupid wooden poles for your fence, then every time it rains some of the poles rot away overnight (yeah, that makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?) and then wolves will get in and take pictures of you sleeping nude at night to post on 4chan or something. the solution is to use all those extra rocks you have laying around and throw away all the wood poles. You’ll have rocks to spare, no matter how big your farm grows! All it takes is staying up until sunrise to run back and forth with poles and rocks…

Trying to get every last yarnball in Bubsy.

Noooo! I missed them again! Now I have to run back to the cave, bounce up the trampoline, ride the blimp across, jump down to the water-slide, and hop off the waterfall again! This is my 657th attempt, and there’s 312 more yarnballs to go on this level alone!

Juggling inventory in Earthbound.

This one drives a certain type of person crazy. You moved my stuff! See, when you buy a new frying pan for Paula and equip it, it will stay down at the bottom of the list. That’s right where you’ll be using items from when Gygas is creaming your ass and you have to eat a croissant to restore your life while your hit-point counter is…. oh, just forget it. Anyway, every time you have to buy or sell an item, you have to stand there and reorganize your items by giving them to each other before you can go on with the damn game. It only happens about 80 billion times though, so no sweat.

Torturing Sims.

Admit it: you’ve been laughing up your sleeve at me all the way through this list. How pathetic, you snicker. Glad you’re not that bent? Oh, but you’ve tortured your Sims. Everybody’s done it. There’s a reason why “Sims torture” returns 554,000 hits on Google. Drowning your Sims by letting them go swimming in the pool and then removing the ladder… depriving them of a bathroom or food or even a place to sleep… making them stand in a walled isolation room until they die standing up because there’s no room to lie down and pass out. Really, Maxis should wake up and realize the real attraction to the Sims franchise and knock it off with all this happy-happy stuff. The next expansion pack should be “The Sims – BDSM Dungeon of Pain”!

But here we have Larry Ellison.

Pay attention to this name; he’s the fourth-richest human being on the planet. The Forbes wealth rank for 2009 runs Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim Helú, and then there’s Lawrence Ellison. There used to be a bunch of other names between them, but they’ve gotten weeded out this year thanks to the global real estate and banking crash. Sorry boys, play-money wealth doesn’t last.

Larry Ellison is the CEO of Oracle Corporation, and amongst Oracle’s various holdings pretty much runs the back end of every major business’ server room. And this company releases a Linux distribution called “Oracle Enterprise Linux“. Linux, being a software base popularized by people like this guy:

Amazing, isn’t it? And you thought Linux was all basement hippies sharing free love!

But let somebody buy Sun, and all of a sudden they’re front-page news. Hoo-boy, Oracle buys Sun and suddenly ten thousand Java hackers cringe protectively around their virtual machines and shriek “What’s gonna happen to my job?!?!?” And anybody who uses MySQL (owned by a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems), is suddenly wondering where their next ’select’ statement is coming from.

Well, the two companies have each been quick to reassure everybody. There’s a page at sun.com about Sun and Oracle and a page at oracle.com about Oracle and Sun. There, don’t they look cozy together?

With such a huge company formed from such a giant merger, unforeseen by even the biggest blog names such as TechCrunch (who’s never right about any prediction, ever), it seems that Oracle Corporation is in a very good position to sweep the PC market out from under Microsoft’s feet. With both Sun’s Solaris and Linux under Oracle’s belt, plus a software stack that ranges from Open Office and Java to MySQL and, well, Oracle Database, Oracle could very easily pluck the whole computer world like the ripe, luscious plum that it is.

Gee, it looks like Microsoft could be doomed. Microsoft… doomed… hey, has anybody you know said that before? Nah, probably just my imagination.

So I took off in search of the Meaning Of The Internet. This was no easy journey. I crept about in the dark of night and eavesdropped on counsels of Illuminati. I prayed to the Flying Spaghetti monster. I viewed ‘2 girls 1 cup’ with my eyeballs propped open with toothpicks and my head taped to the chair-back so I couldn’t look away. I unraveled the truth of the Time Cube. I mixed Mentos and Diet Coke in a Klein bottle. I took a binary approach to Zen and became zero with everything.

I solved Portal and stole the cake and ate it and came back and converted GlaDOS to Objectivism. She’s my ho now.

I drew flowchart pentagrams and hexagrams and chanted the lyrics to “Never Gonna Give You Up” backwards and summoned an Internet daemon to give me its answer, but it didn’t know and directed me to Google. Then it hung around the house and became a poltergeist, just to irritate us. We took the novel approach – instead of performing an exorcism, we ignored it. We’d just casually dodge the stuff flying around and talk over the noise it was making until it got bored and left.

And after all that: What the heck, I learned something!

I learned that the Internet for humans is like buzzing for bees. It means we’re alive.

Did you think that the answer would be 42? You are *SO* web 1.0!

It’s right there for free all over the web. Make a habit of it, and pretty soon you’ll train yourself to see the second web – the world of Meta-tags and Javascript libraries and CSS style and comments – some of them quite fun! I’ve known several sites that were easier to read from the source code than they were in the web browser proper.

2. Switch Window Managers

Mainly this is for the Linux/BSD crowd. Try a lightweight like Blackbox or Window Maker, if it comes with your distro. Edit a style. By changing your desktop every now and then, it just keeps your mind loose and limber.

3. Try a New Distro

From the same reasoning as above. Live CDs are great to shop around, especially the smaller distros that never seem to get any love. You find out about new programs you never would have known about, see new styles and ways of doing things, and you might just get an inspiration for your next project.

4. Bookmark a Cheatsheet

For things like Unicode, CSS, SQL select statements, Emacs commands, Firefox hotkeys, and so on. They’re good to go over every now and then to learn them so they’lll be in your head when you need them.

5. Read a Classic Programming Book

Everybody praises them, and you know they’re great, but you never seem to get around to reading them. Here’s a whole bunch.

6. Learn a New Language

That can be programming, or mark-up, or – hey! – how about a spoken language? You know, for talking to people? The web is one big international terminal; your next coding project could bring you together with people from all over the world. Getting conversant in more than one language just helps broaden your range.

7. Write a Script

Whether it’s Javascript, PHP, Bash, DOS, or Visual Basic, pick some menial task that you do all the time but you could shorten it to one step with a script. Writing a shell script does for your programming brain what taking a spin around the block does for your car: both activities keep them from rusting.

8. Spend a Day Learning a Subject You Hate

Sure, you would just as soon hammer railroad spikes into your temple as study cross-site scripting attacks. But you that know one of these days your blog’s comment box will be hacked, your database will be hosed, and you’ll be up at 3 AM cussing yourself for not learning more about cross-site scripting attacks.

9. Try a Mad Scientist’s Project

Like, oh, I don’t know, run Windows 3.1 inside of DOSBox from a Linux desktop, all to play the original Chip’s Challenge. Worth the effort just for the “You’re running WHAT?” reaction you get from people.

10. Go outside

Walk your dog. Start a garden. Mow your grass. Shovel your snow. Re-introduce your skin to the strange yellow ball in the sky that emits radiation. Seriously, I don’t know how many times I was stuck for an idea and I just went outside and a few lungfuls of fresh air was all I needed. Even if it involved a walk to the pub.

“Underdogs”, as it’s commonly referred to, is a site devoted to archiving the forgotten video games of history, from the earliest day to titles as recent as last year, which deserve better recognition. You’re almost guaranteed to find something interesting that you’ve never heard of before. There’s games that just didn’t sell well, games that were released by an obscure company with no promotion, games that were produced by a company that went under, and all sorts of odd bits and pieces.

Downloading free abandonware makes for some fun Wine tasting. On a random romp where I just grabbed whatever looked interesting and tried it out, I encountered these gems:

Sanitarium

While I have yet to have the game go to the second stage without crashing, I might get it fixed. This game is an adventure runner where you solve puzzles and talk to people. It has a story and a terrific dark, hallucinatory atmosphere. In it, you are an incarcerated inmate at the insane asylum from hell, and it’s up to you to find out why you’re there and how to get out.

Sim Isle

There are many Sim games on the Underdogs site, so many that they get their own category. SimIsle is notable for being a unique cross-over game between Maxis’ SimCity versions, with interesting variations such as being able to manipulate individual people who staff the island. The graphics and game play are pretty cool and the music is this incredibly soothing, tranquil background.

The Lost Island of Alanna

Have you noticed how hard it is to find a Myst-type graphical adventure game for free download? Now, did you know that Cherry Coke, of all things, released just such a game? While nowhere near the quality of Myst, this game is quite enjoyable and playable. Because the game was released as a promotional tie-in to Coca-Cola’s product, there are puzzles with no clues in some places because you were supposed to find clues in bottles of Cherry Coke. The Underdogs site links to a walkthrough to make up for this, but really every such puzzle in the game can be solved pretty easily by brute-force – trying every possible combination. It runs like a charm in Wine.

AnkerCAD

Just in case you were thinking that there’s nothing but games here, Underdogs also hosts some applications. One very handy little toy is AnkerCAD, a freeware graphics editor where you build isometric models out of 3D blocks. This program, as the Underdogs review says, is very intuitive and easy to use. It actually feels very similar to Google’s SketchUp, which also runs on Wine, by the way.

Underdogs is even better for finding freeware and abandonware for DOS games, many of which are just as much fun today as they were when they were released. I’ve blogged about vintage DOS gaming on DOSBox before here, and about running Windows 3.1 itself in DOSBox for other gaming uses here.

I say it’s an emulator. It creates a virtual Windows environment on a non-Windows operating system, for the purpose of running Windows-specific programs. And once you’ve overcome the first barrier in knowing what it is, you have plenty of hurdles left.

Starcraft – Famous for running perfectly on Wine.

Bottom line: Wine is a mixed bag, depending on the game or application you’re running. When it works, it is sheer Heaven. When it fails, it will cause some of the most spectacular crashes you have ever witnessed on a Linux desktop. Be prepared for the eventual ordeal where you have to remember how to navigate your way blind around a screen that’s stopped showing video, or how to press Ctrl-Alt-backspace to reboot the X desktop environment, or even Ctrl-Alt-F2 to a console where you run “ps aux” to find out the process number of the program so you can “kill -9″ it.

Let’s try to remember not to be too impatient with the Wine developers. After all, it isn’t like Microsoft is jumping all over itself, eager to help the open source community run native Windows programs on a non-Windows system. Many game manufacturers turn a blind eye to open source systems, though this situation is improving.

“The Incredible Machine – Even More Contraptions” runs like a top!

Basically the process for getting a Windows program going on Linux will work like this:

• First, head over to the Application Database at Wine HQ and go to the search box in the side bar and type in the name of the program you intend to run. Read everything you find. You will usually at least find out whether anybody has ever had any luck with the program, and what trouble-shooting steps you can take to fix problems if they come up.
• Mount the CD with the Windows application to /mnt/cdrom, either by command line or however your system does it.
• Run the installer from the CD-Rom with Wine, usually with a command such as “wine /mnt/cdrom/setup.exe” With luck, a virtual Wine desktop will fire up and run the installer.
• If the install program finishes successfully, you might need to simulate a Windows reboot.
• Start wine again with the name of the executable installed program. For instance, to run the *very* old game “SimTown“, you go “wine ./.wine/drive_c/SimTown/SIMTOWN.EXE”.
• Use to your heart’s content!

Never heard of SimTown? You’re not missing much.

Now for some Wine-related concepts:

The “home” directory for Wine is the folder “.wine” in your home directory on Linux, within which is a “drive_c” which will function as your virtual drive “C:\”. At least, no matter how much you hose something up, it will be contained to your virtual C:\ drive, gracefully letting you off the hook from the consequences of viruses. This is often the subject of smug write-ups. Indeed, getting good at virus-handling on a Windows emulator could prove to be a handy skill in anti-virus work.

Wine’s configuration dialog.

Just as on Windows XP where you sometimes have to set “compatibility mode” for legacy program support, Wine has a setup to tweak settings as well. Typing (or picking from the menu if it’s there) “winecfg” will get you this handy dialog, where you can set such things as which version of Windows to emulate, how to handle graphics, and what to do about sound drivers. Hopefully, your system will already have things like drivers set up for Wine, because it is a puzzle to figure out, especially if you have a system that does weird things with GTK+ and Alsa.

Edit the registry, just like the good old days!

Another program you’ll need to be familiar with is the regedit. Start it with “wine regedit” (or menu if you have one in KDE/Gnome) and then… edit the registry as needed using the same skills you used in Windows. You should only have to do this on an as-needed basis.

You’re almost always better off running Wine on KDE or Gnome – these integrate better with Wine and in most cases wine will even install the program in your menu, so you can call it just like in Windows!

You are advised to have the biggest, baddest hardware you can find. There’s usually a performance hit with emulating a top gaming title in a window. At the least, you’ll need an OpenGL graphics card on which to emulate DirectX. This isn’t as much of a concern with older games.

Later, we will explore more about emulation, including a user-friendly front-end to Wine.

There are two times when I would have expected vilification of video games: (1) When they first hit the mainstream, as did happen when I was growing up in the 1980s, and (2) whenever Jack Thompson is talking.

If you’re a permanent citizen of Batty-Bonkersland, sure, hate on video games. It keeps you off the minorities. And when any young teen during the 80’s, twiddling quarters in their juvenile fingers on their way into a video arcade, would have viewed all the negative media press about video games, they would have done so with a jaundiced eye. Yeah, sure, they go through this about every entertainment medium. They used to raise a flap about novels back in the day. They’ll get over it.

Yet here it is, the new millenium, and you still see daily panicky headlines about “OMG! TEH DANGERS OF VIDEO GAMES!”, with yet another self-proclaimed expert ragging on how video games are responsible for every imaginable social ill.

After all this time, there doesn’t seem much that I can do to put down this nuttiness, but here’s how I’d try to do it if I thought I could change the mind of those whose career depends on inventing boogey-men to scare us:

In the first place, a couple of generations have had time to grow up in a world populated by video games, and yet, where are the damaged people? Unlike with alcohol and gambling, there are no “Gamers Anonymous” groups where the afflicted meet to struggle with their addiction. People are certainly fumbling up and blaming everything else in their lives, but I have yet to see somebody use an excuse like, “Excuse my poor social skills, I was a gamer as a child.”

But more importantly, as a person who equally enjoys the deepest esoteric intellectual pursuits and the most base guilty pleasures, I’m going to shock you with this revelation: there is equal merit to a game of Quake and a game of chess. “Nonsense!”, you might scoff.

But if you do, that just shows that you haven’t played enough Quake.

Consider that you are halfway through a dungeon, now in a dimly-lit hall right where the corner turns. You haven’t peeked around the corner yet, so God knows what’s waiting to leap out at you. But it is temporarily quiet. You are down to 45 health with 15 armor; you need supplies, and you don’t see any around. You are also down some ammo; you have about 18 rounds of shell for your shotgun and 12 grenades. Furthermore, you have heard the faint, distant sound of what sounds like a troll grunting.

Trolls in Quake-classic are distinct. They have two weapons: a chainsaw for close combat and their own endless supply of grenades. If they spot you, they usually immediately shout out and begin lobbing grenades at you. Their aim is fair, but they’re not crack shots. They also have a tendency to be caught unawares; you can sneak up on a troll as long as it isn’t looking right at you. Finally, you should know that in planning an attack, you have to consider that it takes time to switch weapons and tactics, costing you potentially crucial seconds in the heat of combat. So, what do you do?

One advantage of grenades is that they don’t detonate right away. You can bounce a grenade off a few walls before it blows up. Since you have a tight corner to work with, you can always fire a couple grenades at the wall catty-corner to the angle of the hallway, sending them around the corner at the position where you think the troll is. You can then listen for the telltale yelp after the explosion (each creature has it’s own unique vocabulary of vocalizations), and if you find you have a hit and you will soon be confronted by a lightly-wounded, charging troll, you can back-pedal the way you came – being careful to avoid the trap-gate you discovered a while back! – while firing more grenades after your pursuer.

Of course, this takes some skill and luck. Grenades work both ways, after all, and I’ve been nuked plenty of times in Quake by a surprise grenade that landed at my feet when I was hiding in what I thought was an inaccessible hole. Furthermore, trolls are pretty good at dodging grenades, being a little more cunning. There’s plenty of risk factors to make the grenade plan worth reconsidering.

You could also simply ready your shotgun and charge around that corner. This direct approach exposes you to risk, of course, since the shotgun just doesn’t kill very fast and you’ll doubtless take a hit or two before putting down your enemy, but it has more guarantees that you will eventually put your enemy down. Shotguns work great at close range but they’re miserable at a distance; the worst possible scenario is to be covering a retreat with the slow, weak pumps of the shotgun.

There are other courses of action yet to consider: you may be wrong about the troll, or the hallway may have a different shape from what you anticipate. Maybe he’s on a platform suspended over the hall, so that if you fire a grenade and hear no resulting dismay, and then stroll confidently around the corner you may be surprised to find a hail of grenades raining down on you from a troll who is hidden from your fire, but now alerted to your presence. For that matter, are you really that sure you need to go down that hallway? You might be able to get to the exit by another, clearer route. You haven’t found all the secret passages in the level; there might even be some better ammo stashed behind a panel whose access button you overlooked in the dark when you fought your way past charging knights.

This scenario I’m describing is actually one of the least complex Quake situations. There are times when you have to be not only very fast, but very smart and quick-thinking to be able to survive certain situations. Most of the time you deal with multiple enemies. Some co-operate, some act alone, some are more dangerous from far away than they are at close range, some pursue you relentlessly while others guard their territory. Some are as alert as owls, and are guaranteed to spot you and sound an alarm for stronger but less agile creatures to join the attack, even as they fire their opening shots at you.

But what about the violence? That’s a point: many video games simulate violence. But are we not simulating violence also when we jump checkers on a checkerboard? After all, checkers, chess, and even Go are simulations of battle – those playing pieces represent soldier’s lives. Virtually any competitive game, by its nature, requires some form of conflict as an element of play. We have long accepted that games simulate violence; we are just now negotiating the acceptable level.

So here, a little jargon list about computer security, just for the people who need the jargon-free “elevator pitch”.

First, the Big Three categories:

• Virus – A nasty program whose mission in life is to spread itself and infect as many computers as it can. The difference with a virus is, it uses another program to reproduce. Just like a flu infects cells in the body to make more flu viruses, a computer virus cannot spread on its own.
• Worm – So what’s a worm? Another nasty program that spreads itself and tried to infect as many… wait a minute, didn’t we just do this? Well, no. The difference between a worm and a virus is that a worm can spread itself without using any other program.
• Trojan – This is another kind of dirty program, which appears to be clean program. It might do something essential when you use it, but it’s misbehaving in the background. The name comes from the legendary Trojan horse, which pretended to be a gift but was full of soldiers ready to conquer the city from the inside. Another difference is that trojans do not reproduce. Instead, a virus or worm might plant them, or they might be mistakenly downloaded.

So, every kind of computer program which can infect your system breaks down into one of these three types. Now we need to know what these things do:

Payload – is the term for whatever malicious function the bad program does once it’s in there. That might be spying on you, stealing hard drive space to host malicious software, turning your PC into somebody else’s slave, nuking your system, crashing a network… whatever. So, here are some terms having to do with payloads:

• Spyware – Software that spies on you. It might be the payload of a virus, trojan, or worm. The idea is that it secretly listens to your system, recording goodies like credit card numbers and passwords, which it then relays back to somebody like an identity thief.
• Adware – The whole idea of adware is to force advertising on you. Trojans and adware go together like bread and butter. If you’ve downloaded a free program which makes constant popups on your desktop and tried to take over your system, you’re got some adware from a trojan.
• Backdoor – A backdoor is where your computer’s security was broken to allow later access. Just like if somebody made a secret tunnel into your house past all your locked doors! A typical kind of backdoor is a “rootkit” – which is very hard to detect and installs itself as having “root” – or highest system authority – on the system. Can be the payload of a virus, worm, or trojan.
• Bot – A bot – short for ‘robot’ – is a computer which has been infected by any means in such a way as to leave it in somebody else’s control. Typically, a computer ‘bot’ tried to show no evidence of infection to the user, but is secretly using ports, chats, or emails to communicate with its “true master”. This is where most of the spam comes from.
• Bot Herder – The person in charge of the bots. May link them together into a “botnet” and sell their services to spammers, identity thieves, and other goons around the web.

When you put them all together, we collectively call the malware, which stands for “malicious software”.

Just to throw it in for clarity, phishing is not part of the malware family tree. In phishing, the perpetrator sends an email which pretends to be from your bank, but actually links to the bad guy’s site. there they steal your credit card information, for instance. Or they could infect you with a virus while you’re there!

There, now, isn’t that clearer than everybody else explains it?