Brian Jamison

According to this I just beat the 9th highest score ever officially recorded on Spy Hunter. I hadn’t played in months but I got this score on the first run on the sit down Spy Hunter we have in the office. One of these days I’ll hook up a video camera and make a legit attempt. Ryan’s the old owner and holder of the #7 spot.

Saw this great elevator art at the building Chime software is located in.

this toy is specifically built to crash – but if you do the sticker says the toy will break! Which is right? (seen@ Fry’s electronics)

A leaf fell from our walnut tree and stuck in this Jack-o-lantern’s mouth giving it the appearance of a tongue. Completely random and wonderful at the same time.

Gargoyle allows you to play almost every kind of interactive fiction under the sun. It’s a little tricky to get running since there is no package for it under Karmic for amd64. (But if you’re running 32 bit Karmic go here for the 32 bit package).

First download the Gargoyle source code from the Gargoyle repo. As of this posting the current version is gargoyle-2009-08-25-sources.zip.

Unzip the file to a directory.

Now get the dependencies:
sudo apt-get install jam libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libgtk2.0-dev libfreetype6-dev libpng12-dev

And finally compile:
jam install

You’ll find the executable under the build/dist directory. The INSTALL text file has more details. Happy IF’ing!

I recently upgraded vi to vim on one of my servers and was puzzled why changes weren’t being saved when I edited my crontab file using crontab -e. I would make changes to the file, save them, but still get this error:

crontab: no changes made to crontab

I found a lot of unhelpful advice from checking permissions on the files and directories, to using different editors, to checking cron.allow and cron.deny. None of those worked.

It turns out that .vimrc needs to have a one line configuration option set. You’ll find .vimrc in your home directory (/root for superuser). Just add this line:

set backupcopy=yes

and you’re on your way.

I’ve been a Netflix customer for over a decade, and for years I’ve been using an old Compaq laptop to watch high quality streaming video from Netflix. And despite being old, the laptop was more than fast enough for the highest bitrate streaming Netflix offered. Once it a while I’d have a buffering issue, but the playback was always smooth at 1024×768 resolution.

Until tonight, when Netflix required me to install Microsoft Silverlight in order to watch streaming video. With Microsoft Silverlight installed, the video is unwatchably choppy at 1024×768 resolution – I get maybe 12 frames per second. At 800×600 it’s still choppy. And the video quality is substantially worse. I’ve gone from near-DVD quality to what looks like a badly copied VHS tape. There’s no excuse for it – this is shoddy programming from Microsoft. The old player worked fine, and other high quality streaming video works great as well.

I’ve got no problem upgrading to new technology when something better or faster comes along. I bought an iPhone 3gs recently because of the improvements from the prior models. I can’t stomach wasting money because Microsoft can’t be bothered to write quality software. My choice now seems to be, give up instant viewing, or waste hundreds of dollars on another laptop. Looks like I’m giving up instant viewing. Way to go, Microsoft. Fantastic move, Netflix.

Oh, wait. YouTube just announced they’re going to offer pay per view. And their high quality video streams great using Flash Player! Looks like Google just won over a customer.

“I do not like this Sam-I-am.”

Spotted on the garden train tour