pc page 4 - Dave's Blog

Eat Pants - Interactive Fiction Sessions from my Server Logs

I've looked at my web server logs previously to see if anyone had used my Web Frotz Interpreter and until recently didn't realize that awstats (the web server log report generator) was truncating the query from my URL, so I couldn't tell that anyone was actually using it. But after grepping the logs manually I've pulled out the URLs of visitor's text adventure sessions. If you'll recall, my Web Frotz Interpreter stores the game state in the URL so its easy to see user's game states in the web server logs.

I've put some of the links up on the Web Frotz Interpreter page. Some of the interesting ones:

• Apparently you can eat pants in Lost Pig.
• Someone teaches me that in Zork the egg goes in the display case.
• There's a creepy exchange in Galatea.

PowerShell Scanning Script

I've hooked up the printer/scanner to the Media Center PC since I leave that on all the time anyway so we can have a networked printer. I wanted to hook up the scanner in a somewhat similar fashion but I didn't want to install HP's software (other than the drivers of course). So I've written my own script for scanning in PowerShell that does the following:

1. Scans using the Windows Image Acquisition APIs via COM
2. Runs OCR on the image using Microsoft Office Document Imaging via COM (which may already be on your PC if you have Office installed)
3. Converts the image to JPEG using .NET Image APIs
4. Stores the OCR text into the EXIF comment field using .NET Image APIs (which means Windows Search can index the image by the text in the image)
5. Moves the image to the public share

Here's the actual code from my scan.ps1 file:

param([Switch] $ShowProgress, [switch] $OpenCompletedResult)

$filePathTemplate = "C:\users\public\pictures\scanned\scan {0} {1}.{2}";
$time = get-date -uformat "%Y-%m-%d";

[void]([reflection.assembly]::loadfile( "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.Drawing.dll"))

$deviceManager = new-object -ComObject WIA.DeviceManager
$device = $deviceManager.DeviceInfos.Item(1).Connect();

foreach ($item in $device.Items) {
        $fileIdx = 0;
        while (test-path ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,"*")) {
                [void](++$fileIdx);
        }

        if ($ShowProgress) { "Scanning..." }

        $image = $item.Transfer();
        $fileName = ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,$image.FileExtension);
        $image.SaveFile($fileName);
        clear-variable image

        if ($ShowProgress) { "Running OCR..." }

        $modiDocument = new-object -comobject modi.document;
        $modiDocument.Create($fileName);
        $modiDocument.OCR();
        if ($modiDocument.Images.Count -gt 0) {
                $ocrText = $modiDocument.Images.Item(0).Layout.Text.ToString().Trim();
                $modiDocument.Close();
                clear-variable modiDocument

                if (!($ocrText.Equals(""))) {
                        $fileAsImage = New-Object -TypeName system.drawing.bitmap -ArgumentList $fileName
                        if (!($fileName.EndsWith(".jpg") -or $fileName.EndsWith(".jpeg"))) {
                                if ($ShowProgress) { "Converting to JPEG..." }

                                $newFileName = ($filePathTemplate -f $time,$fileIdx,"jpg");
                                $fileAsImage.Save($newFileName, [System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat]::Jpeg);
                                $fileAsImage.Dispose();
                                del $fileName;

                                $fileAsImage = New-Object -TypeName system.drawing.bitmap -ArgumentList $newFileName 
                                $fileName = $newFileName
                        }

                        if ($ShowProgress) { "Saving OCR Text..." }

                        $property = $fileAsImage.PropertyItems[0];
                        $property.Id = 40092;
                        $property.Type = 1;
                        $property.Value = [system.text.encoding]::Unicode.GetBytes($ocrText);
                        $property.Len = $property.Value.Count;
                        $fileAsImage.SetPropertyItem($property);
                        $fileAsImage.Save(($fileName + ".new"));
                        $fileAsImage.Dispose();
                        del $fileName;
                        ren ($fileName + ".new") $fileName
                }
        }
        else {
                $modiDocument.Close();
                clear-variable modiDocument
        }

        if ($ShowProgress) { "Done." }

        if ($OpenCompletedResult) {
                . $fileName;
        }
        else {
                $result = dir $fileName;
                $result | add-member -membertype noteproperty -name OCRText -value $ocrText
                $result
        }
}

I ran into a few issues:

• MODI doesn't seem to be in the Office 2010 Technical Preview I installed first. Installing Office 2007 fixed that.
• The MODI.Document class, at least via PowerShell, can't be instantiated in a 64bit environment. To run the script on my 64bit OS I had to start powershell from the 32bit cmd.exe (C:\windows\syswow64\cmd.exe).
• I was planning to hook up my script to the scanner's 'Scan' button, but HP didn't get the button working for their Vista driver. Their workaround is "don't do that!".
• You must call Image.Dispose() to get .NET to release its reference to the corresponding image file.
• In trying to figure out how to store the text in the files comment, I ran into a dead-end trying to find the corresponding setter for GetDetailsOf which folks like James O'Neil use in PowerShell for interesting ends.

Send URL to Cellphone - QR Encode Accelerator

I've made a QR Encode accelerator around Google Chart's QR code generator. QR codes are 2D bar-codes that can store (among other things) URLs and have good support on mobile phones. The accelerator I've written lets you generate a QR code for a selected link and view it in the preview window. In combination with the ZXing bar-code scanner app for my Android cellphone, its easy for me to right click on a link in IE8 on my desktop PC, hover over the QR Encode accelerator to have the link's associated QR code displayed, and then with my phone read that QR code to open my phone's browser to the URL contained inside. Its much easier to browse around in the comfort of my desktop and only send particular URLs to my cellphone as necessary.

Investigation of a Few Application Protocols (Updated)

Windows allows for application protocols in which, through the registry, you specify a URL scheme and a command line to have that URL passed to your application. Its an easy way to hook a webbrowser up to your application. Anyone can read the doc above and then walk through the registry and pick out the application protocols but just from that info you can't tell what the application expects these URLs to look like. I did a bit of research on some of the application protocols I've seen which is listed below. Good places to look for information on URI schemes: Wikipedia URI scheme, and ESW Wiki UriSchemes.

Cadbury Hits Fireplace Shovel

	Cadbury Hits Fireplace Shovel Cadbury jumps out of her toy box hitting the fireplace shovel, and does a few other cute things.	From: David Risney Views: 76 1 ratings
	Time: 00:44	More in Pets & Animals

Finished Paper Mario Games

Sarah and I have finished playing through the games "Paper Mario", "Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door", and "Super Paper Mario" last week (including the various Pits of 100 Trials). We played them all on the Wii, because even though Super Paper Mario was the only one released explicitly for that platform, Wii maintains compatibility with Game Cube games such as Thousand-Year Door and Paper Mario although originally released for the Nintendo 64 is now available as a pay for download game on the Wii's Virtual Console. So, yay for Nintendo!

I think my favorite of the three is Thousand-Year Door mostly because of the RPG attack system. In Thousand-Year Door and Paper Mario when you come into contact with an enemy you go into an RPG style attack system where you take turns selecting actions. In Super Paper Mario you still have hit points and such, but you don't go into a turn based RPG style attack system, rather you do the regular Mario jumping on bad guys thing (or hitting them with a mallet etc...). Thousand-Year Door and Paper Mario are very similar in terms of game play but Thousand-Year Door looks very pretty and has made improvements to how your party-mates are handled in battle (they have HP and can fall as you would expect) and there's an audience that cheers you on during your battles.

Even if the gameplay sucked the humor throughout the series might be tempting enough. Mario's clothing and mustache are mocked throughout and standard RPG expectations are subverted. I hate to describe any of these moments for fear of ruining anything but, for instance, an optional and very difficult enemy who may only be killed after hours of work only results in one experience point, or a very intimidating enemy who you imagine you'll have to fight actually challenges you to a quiz.

Despite how I personally rank them, all the games are great and I'd recommend any of them.

Dinner with Goodwins at Icon Grill

The Goodwin family, except for Michelle who is taking a class trip to Washington DC and New York, was in Seattle this week. Sarah and I met up with them for dinner last night at the Icon Grill. I enjoy the Icon Grill in general and last night was no exception especially having dinner with the Goodwins which was a lot of fun. It was particularly cold and at one point snowed. The Goodwin's are seeing all the classic tourist attractions in Seattle some of which are depicted in the following 1962 Seattle's Worlds Fair postcard. The postcard is featured on Paleo-Future and unsurprisingly the 1962 Worlds Fair favored Seattle's Space Needle and monorail.

URI Addressable Text Adventure Games

This post is about creating a server side z-code interpreter that represents game progress in the URI. Try it with the game Lost Pig.

I enjoy working on URIs and have the mug to prove it. Along those lines I've combined thoughts on URIs with interactive fiction. I have a limited amount of experience with Inform which generates Z-Code so I'll focus on pieces written in that. Of course we can already have URIs identifying the Z-Code files themselves, but I want URIs to identify my place in a piece of interactive fiction. The proper way to do this would be to give Z-Code its own mimetype and associate with that mimetype the format of a fragment that would contain the save state of user's interactive fiction session. A user would install a browser plugin that would generate URIs containing the appropriate fragment while you play the IF piece and be able to load URIs identifying Z-Code files and load the save state that appears in the fragment.

But all of that would be a lot of work, so I made a server side version that approximates this. On the Web Frotz Interpreter page, enter the URI of a Z-Code file to start a game. Enter your commands into the input text box at the bottom and you get a new URI after every command. For example, here's the beginning of Zork. I'm running a slightly modified version of the Unix version of Frotz. Baf's Guide to the IF Archive has lists of IF games to try out.

There are two issues with this thought, the first being the security issues with running arbitrary z-code and the second is the practical URI length limit of about 2K in IE. From the Z-Code standard and the Frotz source it looks like 'save' and 'restore' are the only commands that could do anything interesting outside of the Z-Code virtual machine. As for the length-limit on URIs I'm not sure that much can be done about that. I'm using a base64 encoded copy of the compressed input stream in the URI now. Switching to the actual save state might be smaller after enough user input.

Vegas and New Year

Two and half weeks ago Sarah and I went to Las Vegas where I got to see Jesse, Pat, Chris, and (briefly because he's some kind of big shot too busy for his friends now etc) Grib from college. They're mostly in San Jose and I hadn't seen them for a while so it was a lot of fun to hang out. We all stayed at the MGM which is a nice hotel with some good restaurants. In other Vegas related links, Sarah added Sarah's Las Vegas restaurant reviews to her reviews and Jesse has Jesse's Vegas photos up too.

Sarah and I saw the Blue Man Group (video from a concert) and the Price is Right Live Show. The Blue Man Group was very cool although the music was all rock with a heavy drum focus (not depicted in the videos I linked) which I got a little tired of. But despite that I really enjoyed the show, very funny and I totally recommend it. The Price is Right Live Show is like the regular show on TV except the recording is not televised and its not hosted by Bob Barker or Drew Carey. So folks from the audience are still called up to play the same games and really win prizes. It was advertised as hosted by Todd Newton, B-list game show host, but was instead hosted by JD Roberto who hosted such things as "Reality Remix" and the show "Are You Hot? The Search for America's Sexiest People". The showcase showdown included the 2008 version of my car and thankfully I wasn't picked to compete for that because, well I don't know where they bought the car, but I would have gotten the price very wrong. We sat right next to the stage for that show and had a good time.

For New Years Eve Sarah and I stayed in and watched the glitched Seattle Space Needle fireworks show from a safe distance. On New Years we went to a pot-luck at Todd's house and had a fun time. Todd's place is on the top of a hill and has a lovely view of Washington's snow-capped mountains.

Old Miscellaneous Thoughts

• A History Channel program had a reenactment of a 1920's archaeologist discovering a stone tablet, sending the tablet to a warehouse, etc. all behind the voice over giving the dry facts. The reenactor hammed it up a bit and I would have rather had clips from Indiana Jones in the background. If they're already not showing me the archaeologist who discovered the tablet, they may as well show me one who will be entertaining.
• There are many parodies of the Get a Mac ads and so when I saw a UK Get a Mac ad I payed attention to see what the joke was. I was disappointed by the 'parody' because it was a conventional Get a Mac ad with different actors. Apple localized their Get a Mac ad campaign in this fashion in the UK and in Japan. I've got a playlist of the US, UK, and Japan's version of the Piechart ad. Ranking the lovable bumblingness of the PC I give the order UK, Japan, then US and ranking the sumgness of the Mac I give the order UK, US, then Japan. But don't take my word for it, view the ads for yourself.
  
• Yahoo Pipes lets users generate an RSS feed altering service that runs on Yahoo's server using a GUI. This is very different from Microsoft's Popfly which allows users to component-ize and share javascript utilities that run client side on a webbrowser. Both have the awesome power of buzzword associations like 'Web 2.0' and 'Mashup' but in my mind Yahoo Pipes is for server side RSS feed modification and Popfly is about client side javascript webpages. And neither will allow me to run an arbitrary XSLT =).