TV page 9 - Dave's Blog

Portal is fun; the cake is a lie!

2007 Oct 22, 4:47I purchased the Orange Box off of Steam a bit ago and like others before me who have discussed elsewhere, I already owned two of the five games that come from the Orange Box. However, the combined price of HL2E2 and Portal, the two games I actually wanted was supposedly equivalent to the price of the Orange Box bundle. Incidentally, if anyone would like HL2 or HL2E1 I can gift them to you.

HL2E2 was excellent of course but the big surprise for me was Portal. (Mild spoilers follow) It has a sort of zen simplicity: there are a few simple game-play mechanics, a handful of textures and objects, and a deceptively simple story all used well and tied together to produce an entertaining and polished game. It seems a bit short but its probably better to end with the gamer demanding more. The humor and the sort of play within a play aspect of the game is what really sold me though. It has the funniest ending theme I've heard (also blogged by the creator). The voices of the automated turrets are so adorable I would feel compelled to hug them if they weren't always trying to kill me. Additionally the weighted companion cube seems like an experiment in understanding gamers' attachment to NPCs. In this case the NPC is a box and yet I still felt awful incinerating it. The whole time I was vaguely reminded of Solitary the reality show that sticks contestants alone in small rooms forcing them to endure various tests all the while being watched by a humorous computer with a female voice. Someone should sue...

RPS has articles on Portal including a Portal review, a page suggesting Portal is a tale of lesbianism, and others.hl2e2 game hl2 solitary valve portal nontechnical

Why I Feel Old

2007 Oct 12, 3:20And now to fit in better with the rest of the emo kids on LJ, in no particular order here are some reasons why I feel old:

• I've attended friends weddings sorted chronologically by when I met them: Lucas from high school, followed by Carissa from college, and then Palak from Microsoft.
• I rarely get carded for alcohol.
• Jon's moving to Germany soon -- this time permanently. He's already started the process of getting rid of possessions he's not taking with him like his car and TV. However, after doing so he couldn't maintain his smug "I don't even own a TV" attitude and ended up trading me my small CRT TV (as mentioned previously) for his DDR pads and games. A good trade for both since we were each looking to dump these items. So far I've only convinced Sarah to try DDR once with me. Somehow I've gotten much worse at something I wasn't that great at to begin with.
• I have business cards.
• I still have semi-monthly nightmares in which I'm taking a Linear Algebra course for which I haven't studied or done homework in years. This differs from the more frequent nightmares I had immediately after finishing that series of classes in which I was taking the final and it was all on the one topic I didn't study. In reality, the prof. had done his PhD work on this one topic and I, correctly betting it wouldn't appear on the final, didn't study it. Apparently this was a traumatic bet for me to make given the wake of destruction left on my dreams.
• I have to remind myself that 2005 was two years ago.

personal nontechnical

Moved

2007 Aug 6, 4:07I've moved from my previous apartment in Redmond into Sarah's condo in Kirkland. Over the past week I'd been coming home from work and packing and sorting all of my belongings. Everything had a few destination options:

• Sarah's condo
• Storage
• My office
• Recycle/Donate

I donated two carts of computer related junk (two CRTs, two desktops, six laptops, untold number of cables, piles of network and sound cards, etc) to RE-PC and six garbage bags of clothing that I either never wear or into which I have worn holes into friendly looking clothing donation bins. Of course I still need to find some place to get rid of my 15 inch CRT TV, VCR, DVD player, and X-Box. I finally emptied my bags of coins that had been collecting for about seven years (one of the bags was from my college orientation) through Coinstar and got ~$160. Some items seemed to fit very well at work like my satirical RIAA propaganda poster and my Darth Vader Nutcracker. This past weekend I had movers come and actually move my furniture. Most of its now in storage except for my living room which is moved into Sarah's second bedroom. Now all I have to do is unpack...move personal repc recycle nontechnical

Wp64 Issues

2007 Aug 6, 3:43Miladin told me about the Visual Studio compiler's promising option Wp64 that finds 64bit portability issues when compiling in 32bit. If, for instance, you cast from a (long*) to a (long) you get a W4 warning. However, the #defines are still set for 32bit builds. This means that other parts of the code can make assumptions based on the #defines that are valid on 32bit but generate 64bit errors or warnings.

For instance, in winuser.h the public published Windows header file there's the following:

...
#ifdef _WIN64
...
WINUSERAPI
LONG_PTR
WINAPI
SetWindowLongPtrA(
    __in HWND hWnd,
    __in int nIndex,
    __in LONG_PTR dwNewLong);
...
#else  /* _WIN64 */
...
#define SetWindowLongPtrA   SetWindowLongA
...
#endif /* _WIN64 */
...

In 64bit everything's normal but in 32bit SetWindowLongPtrA is #defined to SetWindowLongA which takes a LONG rather than a LONG_PTR. So take the following code snippet:

...
LONG_PTR inputValue = 0;
LONG_PTR error = SetWindowLongPtrA(hWnd, nIndex, inputValue);
...

This looks fine but generates warnings with the Wp64 flag.

In 64 bit, p is cast to (LONG_PTR) and that's great because we're actually calling SetWindowLongPtrA which takes a LONG_PTR. In 32 bit, p is cast to (LONG_PTR) which is then implicitly cast to (LONG) because we're actually calling SetWindowLongA. LONG and LONG_PTR are the same size in 32bit which is fine but if you turn on the Wp64 flag there's a W4 warning because of the implicit cast from a larger size to a smaller size if you were to compile for 64bit. So even though doing a 32bit or 64bit compile would have worked just fine, if you turn on the Wp64 flag for 32bit you'd get an error here.

It looks like I'm the most recent in a list of people to notice this issue. Well I investigated this so... I'm blogging about it too!wp64 technical 64bit compiler c++ visual-studio setwindowlongptra

Chicken Roundup

2007 Jul 11, 3:52I realized that I have short list of chicken related things I find humorous and they're all available for the linking to via youtube.

Chicken: The Powerpoint Presentation. This is a power point presentation of a research paper written in the language chicken. (video)

Bluth Family Chicken Dances. From the show Arrested Development many Bluth family members had their own chicken dance. (video)

Peter Fights the Giant Chicken. A man sized chicken fights Peter from Family Guy for multiple minutes in several episodes mimicking famous action sequences. I must admire the writers dedication to the gag. (video1, video2)

roundup video personal chicken humor nontechnical

MoHo Living

2007 May 13, 12:16My parents and grandmother came to visit the weekend before this current weekend, starting Friday May 4th. They arrived via their new motor-home which is quite the machine. Of course its my parents motor-home so its very well decorated inside including drapes and mini-chandelier. I didn't have a memory card for my camera at the time but I'm sure my parents will put up photos on their new blog dedicated to their motor-home at some point in the future.

At any rate, they parked the motor-home in an RV park in Issaquah so that Friday night I drove over to them and we ate at the conveniently closely located Pogachas. The next day they came over and I showed them the various cool looking things my computer connected to my flat screen TV can do. This includes Vista Media Center showing my photos from recent trips and Google Earth mapping out our respective homes and my recent trips (and Paris). Additionally, we played Wii which, unsurprisingly based on anecdotal evidence from varied sources across the Internet, was a seeming hit. Mom broke records playing bowling with my dad and I, Dad did an excellent job fishing, and Grandma's slow but steady win's the race approach to cow racing worked very well.

The next day I drove them to Seattle and we walked around Pike's Place. My parents made dinner that night at my place which was very good and made my apartment actually smell like cooked food. Also, we exchanged Christmas gifts. For the past two years I've flown back to my parents' house for Christmas and ended up with gifts I couldn't take with me in both directions. Those I left at their house they drove up and I was able to give them the ones I left at my place. They started the drive back the next day. I really enjoyed seeing them here.motorhome family personal nontechnical

Missing Bee Roundup

2007 Apr 15, 4:06For the past several months I've seen various articles suggesting why bees are disappearing. At first I thought this was another crackpot's article that somehow made it onto digg.com. But they keep coming and sometimes from credible sources. After the article I saw tonight I thought I should go back and put together the various articles I've read on this topic. Bees may be disappearing due to pesticides, new organic pathogens, genetically modified crops, mobile phones, or climate change. Apparently, the US hasn't been keeping accurate counts of its bees so we don't know the extent of the situation. There's an interview with Maryann Frazier, M.S., of the Dept. of Etymology at Penn State and a congressional hearing on the matter.

I know this is all very serious and could signal the end of our ecosystem as we know it, but I can't help throwing in the following links as well. The bees could be hiding in this Florida couple's kitchen. Or perhaps they're laying low while being trained by the government to fight terrorism. Or they're hiding in extra dimensions that we mere humans can't perceive (I'm fairly certain that's what this article is suggesting. Really. Read it. Seriously. Its awesome.)roundup personal bees nontechnical