The Squid Zone

It’s almost Earth Hour!

2013-03-23T23:28:34Z

Big whoop.

Here’s an environmentally friendly, recycled post about what I’m doing.

Earth Hour… Idiocy in Green.

An open letter to the Ottawa Citizen

2013-03-21T10:43:42Z

The Ottawa Citizen has really been pushing its “digital edition” or “digital subscription” lately. As you may be aware, they dumped the Sunday edition not long ago and it’s obvious they are really pushing people to read their news on the Internet. However, they expect people to pay $9.95 a month for digital access. This letter is out there to let them know that I, for one, will very likely never pay for digital access to their web site even though I have been a subscriber to their newspaper for a long time.

The newspaper is a morning ritual for me. Prior to the advent of widespread morning papers, it was an evening ritual, going back to when I first started reading the papers in 1970 (the earliest I can remember reading them). I sit each morning, with my coffee and the paper, and catch up on yesterday’s news. This is what I’m paying for when I subscribe to a printed newspaper – not the news, but the ritual.

Take away the printed paper, and the ritual goes away. Fair enough; I recognize that a newspaper is physically wasteful of paper. But there’s the ritual… If I’m going to sit and read news on the computer in the morning – AND I DO – why would I pay $10 a month for something I already get to do for free and have been able to do for free for decades? There are plenty of free, advertising supported news sites in the Internet that provide excellent news coverage. Some of them are better than the Ottawa Citizen in my opinion. I don’t pay for the Citizen’s awesome news, I pay for the morning ritual. As proof of that, I offer that for some of the time I’ve lived in Ottawa, I subscribed to the Ottawa Sun.

Sometime over the next few years, I expect newspapers to disappear. When that comes, I won’t be coughing up any amounts of money similar to a paper subscription to a paywall site. Realistically, I can’t see paying for it at all, since all the news is available free already.

So good luck with your new marketing model, Ottawa Citizen. Your days in my home appear to be numbered.

Minecraft as a digital design tool

2013-03-08T11:35:52Z

I was derping around the internet a while ago and I found an article about building logic gates in Minecraft. It is very simple to build inverters (NOT gates) and OR gates. From those two alone you could build all the basic logic circuits, but as it turns out, there is a shortcut for AND, NAND, and many others… You just figure out the right combination of stone blocks and redstone pieces.

The article I read talked about using these gates to make simple decisions, but I had a grander vision: It should be possible to build something like a real computer in the game. Now, because I have a wife, and friends, building a computer was not in the cards, but I did put together a 7-segment display decoder similar to a 7447 chip. This is a basic bit of computing that lies behind pretty much every digital clock/watch/calculator/etc. display you’ve ever seen.

My design is actually better than a real 7447 in that it doesn’t just do 0-9 and 6 weird characters – it will actually output a proper hexadecimal digit from 0-9, A, B, C, D, E, and F.

Limitations of Minecraft redstone building require repeaters every 15 units, and I haven’t made a huge effort to make these circuits efficient, so there is some noticeable lag.

Since you can build pulse generators in Minecraft, with the logic gates it is possible to build flip-flops, and latches. This means a working digital clock is possible with sufficient free time. Obviously other circuits are also possible: there are pressure plates to serve as push buttons, so one could build a calculator or cash register, or other more complex computing device.

I originally started to build this with monsters on, but creepers would show up and explode things. Hence, I restarted and built in non-explodable obsidian. Eventually I learned how to turn off monsters.

Here is the video of the decoder in action. It’s about 8 minutes, and not terribly exciting, but it does show it working and a bit about the guts of the thing:

Nerdity!

2013-02-25T02:49:49Z

Work was raffling off some old computers last week, and I managed to score 3. They are dual-core Pentium 4 machines with 768 MB or 1 GB of memory. Not what you’d call top-shelf for gaming etc. They are, however, adequate for running Linux. This has allowed me to fill in some computing gaps I’ve had.

1. I now have a Linux desktop machine I can muck around with, play games on, and more importantly, have available for guests who want to access a computer. This way, they can log in the guest account and I don’t have to worry nearly so much about malware, etc.

2. I now have a log server that collects all the logs from all the devices that produce them, and compiles them into a single place. The machine is only accessible by SSH, so it hides away in the network doing its thing. I had tried to log out to my Amazon Linux servers, but that never seemed to work right.

3. I have a third machine with an undetermined disposition. I may make it a camera server, or I may just sell it off (I put a wireless card in it, and a keyboard and mouse, so the new bits alone are worth *something*.

Took a few hours of tweaking to get the log server working, simply because there’s no monitor or keyboard attached to it, so every misconfiguration is a PITA to fix.

But it’s all working for now, and should be loads of fun in a geeky sort of way.

The IOC tips its hand!

2013-02-13T03:19:52Z

It’s no secret that I’m a cynic. I tend to expect or suspect the worst in things, and unfortunately, I’m not let down enough.

As most people know, I’m not keen on the Olympics. Although there are feel-good gems in the Olympics that have come up over the years, for the most part I think the games are a festival of greed and political bullshit, where each nation’s best juiced-up medical experiments and mutants compete against each other for a shot at a lifetime of luxury care of corporate sponsors. However, I could never prove that my position was any more than me being an ass.

Could never prove, that is, until now.

It was big news today that the IOC is recommending the removal of wrestling as a sport in the 2020 summer games. Among the reasons for this are “television ratings” and “ticket sales”. That’s right, the sport that pretty much DEFINES the thousands-of-years-old tradition of the Olympic games is what they are planning to toss aside because it doesn’t make them lots of money in TV and ticket sales.

The spirit of competition? Fuck that. If we can’t pack an arena full of people paying $16 for a hot dog, it’s not worth it. Tradition going back to the original games in ancient Greece? Fuck that too… tradition doesn’t cough up a billion dollars for TV. Instead, we’ll have those completely awesome Olympic sports like golf, any all the sports judged on “artistic merit”. Golf. Wow. When your life is reduced to watching golf on TV, what have you become?

Remember when the Olympics were about amateur athletes genuinely competing to see who was best in the world? Nor do I; but now I know for sure that the Olympics are all about the money and definitely not about competition.

Well done IOC. You reduced my Olympics GAF factor into the negatives.

No, prices are not going to all round up

2013-02-04T12:55:03Z

The penny is, finally, retired today. Starting today, cash transactions will be rounded to the nearest nickel at the till: $0.98, $0.99, $1.01, $1.02 will all round to $1.00, and $1.03, $1.04, $1.06, $1.07 will round to $1.05. If you pay by plastic (credit/debit, not the new plastic money) transactions will still be calculated exactly, so no worries.

What does worry people who don’t seem to have a grasp of basic elementary school arithmetic is that merchants will rejig prices to always round up, thereby pocketing boatloads of extra profit, one or two cents at a time. This is not possible to do, and I will attempt to show why.

First off, there are exactly as many round-up scenarios as round down. If prices were a random distribution, which they are not, they would round up and down exactly 50% of the time. You can see that in the first paragraph of this article: 4 round up, 4 round down (U, U, D, D for $1; U, U, D, D for $1.05). But we all know that prices tend to end in 99 cents, so they’ll round up, right?

Wrong.

The rounding is done on the whole transaction, so tax is applied. In Ontario, that’s 13% most of the time. 99 cents becomes $1.12 and rounds down. $9.99 becomes $11.29 and rounds up. Here is a table of the first $25 of “99 cent” prices and their effects:

Price	With Tax	Round	Price	With Tax	Round
$0.99	$1.12	-	$1.99	$2.25	0
$2.99	$3.38	+	$3.99	$4.51	-
$4.99	$5.64	+	$5.99	$6.77	-
$6.99	$7.90	0	$7.99	$9.03	+
$8.99	$10.16	-	$9.99	$11.29	+
$10.99	$12.42	-	$11.99	$13.55	0
$12.99	$14.68	+	$13.99	$15.81	-
$14.99	$16.94	+	$15.99	$18.07	-
$16.99	$19.20	0	$17.99	$20.33	+
$18.99	$21.46	-	$19.99	$22.59	+
$20.99	$23.72	-	$21.99	$24.85	0
$22.99	$25.98	+	$23.99	$27.11	-
$24.99	$28.24	+

As you can see, there are 10 round ups (+), 10 round downs (-) and 5 even-money (0) situations. This result repeats for as long as you’d care to calculate it. Round up will be about 40% of the time, round down will be about 40% of the time, and the rest of the time it works out to a nice even price anyway.

And it gets even better. The really paranoid consumer will say “but the merchant can set the price so even with the tax it rounds!” Yes, he can, but I’m pretty sure the cost of doing that will be greater than the one or two cents he’d get from doing it, but in any case, THAT ONLY WORKS IF YOU BUY ONE! As soon as you buy multiples of something, it changes the round, and there’s simply no way to guarantee making money by manipulating prices in this way. Look in the chart: $4.99 will ultimately round up, as it will if you buy two – the price is $9.98 which will round up, buy three or four and it will round down or even, however.

There simply is no way to reliably take profit by ripping off the consumer due to rounding. However, if you are still afraid of being ripped off for one or two cents, pay by debit and credit and leave your cash behind.

Wow, the spambots are out in force

2013-02-02T14:28:23Z

Was looking at the blog stats, and January 2013 was the second spammiest month on record. This blog received 309 spam comments, none of which leaked through the spam blocker. The record is 398 in June 2012.

Spam comments are largely fake posts (i.e. Hi I love your blog, click here to see mine) that have links to what are almost invariably Asian counterfeit sites (fake Ugg boots were popular in January, but I’ve seen fake Canada Goose jackets, fake designer labels, etc.). Many times there will be 5 or 6 comments all with the same text but different links, so it’s probably being done by some slave with spamming software.

Anyway, I use Akismet to catch ‘em all, and it rarely misses.

A quarter century

2013-02-02T02:52:35Z

Some time in the next 2 weeks, I will complete 25 years of living in Ottawa.

After requesting “anywhere on the face of the Earth except Ottawa” when I was asked to choose my first posting as a 2Lt, I was sent here on a snowy day in early February 1988. I wasn’t even given the luxury of a trip to arrange a place to live – fortunately I had friends on course with me.

Today, after work, I drove past my first house out in the east end. The person who lives there now has two satellite dishes. Heh. 3 of us lived there in 1988 and we had the infamous (and now retired) “green chair” – a genuine naugahide masterpiece of furniture – which we scrounged from someone tossing it out, and a lot of milk crates. Lots of memories in that house… the Red River cereal that came alive, flaming chicken on the front lawn during “chicken and porn” night, the rabbit ranch next door, making a wading pool in Stu’s truck.

But that all started 25 years ago.

I guess that makes me really an Ottawan now. I’ve become a fixture.

Happy New Year

2013-01-01T05:01:15Z

This New Years squid is brought to you by Heather, who reminded me that I had forgotten to put up a squid for this year. Traditionally, I write this in September and it sits in the queue waiting for 1 Jan, but right now it’s 19h31 and I’m panicking one off…

So have a happy and peaceful 2013 from the New Years Squid

Happy New Year from the 2013 New Years Squid

Guild Wars 2 Screen Shots

2012-12-30T22:00:19Z

I’ve been playing GW2 for a while now, and have made a computer change along the way. The first screenshot below was in the old resolution… before upgrading to a Radeon 7970 and three Samsung Syncmaster S24B300 LED monitors. Now I play in Eyefinity mode at approximately 5760 x 1080 resolution.

Happy Squidmas

2012-12-25T05:01:57Z

I hope you all have a happy Christmas and a peaceful new year.

If you’re reading this it means the predictions didn’t come true.

2012-12-21T11:28:08Z

This should come as no particular surprise, but the world was predicted, by complete morons, to end at 06:11 local today (that’s 11:11 UTC). Obviously, it didn’t because this is here and it’s 06:13 (or later depending on when you’re reading it, but it’s posted at 06:13). I waited two minutes in case the destruction of Earth isn’t instantaneous.

I feel fortunate knowing that my friends and associates aren’t dead from the neck up, so nobody I know took this whole end-of-the-world pseudo-Mayan bullshit seriously. If someone you know did take it seriously, I feel sorry for you, but since they’re probably the type that eat the packets of silica gel anyway, take comfort in the fact that you’re getting up and going to work and they’re sitting wrapped in an asbestos blanket with a tinfoil hat on and a can of Redbull up their arse or whatever it is they need to do to stave off impending doom.

Today is Friday. It’s not the end of the world, but I can still shaft you with this… enjoy:

ok, sorry for that… here’s something more apropos :

Or this if you’re more the type: