blueZhift Blog

SecurityFocus is carrying this story about a digital plague in the World of Warcraft. Basically, the game developers, Blizzard, introduced a monster which a self replicating curse which could spread from player to player. But they failed to limit the curse’s active area to the dungeon. This allowed mischievous/curious players to teleport to populated areas such as cities and spread the curse to other players!

It’s an interesting study of what happens when you mix self replicating code with unpredictable human players. While I’m sure that a lot of WoW players were surprised and pissed at getting sick and dying in the supposedly safe cities, it certainly must have added some spice to the game. Sometimes I wish the cities in the MMORPG I play, Final Fantasy XI, were not so safe. I’d love to see the beastmen invade the cities for a change. The carnage and heroism would be pretty cool!

Prior to the landfall of Hurricane Rita, I filled my gas tank because I just knew that gasoline prices were going to soar once the hurricane hit Texas. The analysts on TV were talking about $4/gallon or more! Then the hurricane hit and guess what? No price increases yet, regular in Chicago is still about $2.99/gallon.

This just didn’t seem natural at all because the oil companies have in the past seized upon any excuse to raise prices sharply. So assuming this is true, I would like to take a moment to thank Vice President Cheney for the gas in my tank. Why? Because I’m sure that Dick got on the phone and told his oil buddies to put on lid on price hikes. The Bush administration has been pretty good to the oil industry, but the rising prices have become an increasing weight on the economy and more importantly, those Red Staters that put Bush back into the the White House are starting to get pissed. Not only that, they stopped buying those ginormous gas guzzling SUVs which is now putting a serious crimp in the profits of Bush and Cheney’s other friends in the auto industry. President Bush’s popularity is at an all time low and while he himself does not face reelection, many Republicans do.

So thanks again Mr. Cheney! Heck, President Bush is even telling people to drive less now! What strange times these are indeed.

Sunday WillowBrow returned from visiting her family in Hong Kong and the people rejoiced. No really, we did indeed rejoice as I’m sure the kids are much happier now that mommy is back. I can fill in a bit, but am no substitute. My cooking is adequate at best and my empathy is probably best described as algorithmic. They are good algorithms, but algorithms nonetheless! And even with a house full of kids, I was a bit lonely without her.

From what she’s told me, she had a good time reuniting with family and friends, but being back in Hong Kong also brought back some bad memories too along with the usual issues that only one’s parents and family can dredge up. For one thing, my wife is bigger than the average Chinese woman. She’s not fat, but at a little under 5′7" (170.18 cm) she towers over most of the women in Hong Kong. And she has a beautiful golden complexion which is darker than most Chinese people. She really is quite a babe, but her features fall outside of what she tells me is the Chinese standard for beauty (pale skin, tiny body), never mind that she’s been turning heads in Hong Kong since she was a 12 year old schoolgirl. In Hong Kong there is a lot of pressure to comform, perhaps more than in other parts of China. So she feels very very self conscious about her appearance and says that one of the reasons she left Hong Kong was so that she could be her own person without being judged. She’s such a smart and beautiful person, but even with that, it seems that you can never escape the judgement of one’s parents. I wish they could see her the way that I do. Perhaps they do, deep inside, but just don’t express it very well.

Can’t we all just get along? I was reading about the new GTA Trilogy and the article had an ad for the new Quattro Power razor from Schick. Obviously this is just a response to the M3 powered razor from Gillette. This is vacuous marketing at its finest because there is no undisputed evidence that battery powered vibrating razors work any better than their nonvibrating versions. Indeed, it also isn’t clear that the Quattro’s 4 blades are any better than the M3’s 3 blades, which  by the way Gillette spent millions of dollars developing. Ironically, Schick’s parent company, Energizer Holdings Inc., requested and got an injunction against Gillette’s claims that the M3 power razor’s vibrating lifted whiskers up away from the face.

So while the Cold War is over, the battle for razor supremacy continues.

WTF! That was my first reaction when I saw the new controller for the Nintendo Revolution. Now, hours later…WTF! Nintendo certainly has an interesting idea here though, but somehow I am not sure that a controller that looks like a TV remote is going to get more nongamers to play.

The real test will be what the game developers design around this controller. While I’m sure that some of it will be interesting, I cannot help but notice that titles that take full advantage of the new controller will not be easily portable to other game consoles or the PC. Is this "innovation lock-in" a sneaky way for Nintendo to get more exclusives? I don’t know, but clearly Nintendo is trying to do something different here and I have to admire them for that.

Out on Michigan avenue these days, there appear to be two kinds of cyborg. There are what I’ll call the "iBorgs" with their nearly implanted digital music players, usually iPods. And there are the "cellBorgs" with their cell phones seemingly glued to one ear or the other. Well lately the cellBorgs appear to have received an important upgrade. These upgraded cellBorgs now have a small earphone and mike combo that just sits conveniently in the ear, leaving both hands free for other activities and actually looking a lot cooler (or dorkier depending on your taste). Some of these are wired to the� cellphone, the one pictured below use a Bluetooth� remote unit to connect to the phone. Pretty cool in my opinion, but still the thought of walking down the street appearing to talk to oneself is not an appealing one.

I wonder how many of these people realize that Star Trek’s Lt. Uhura was wearing a similar piece of headgear long before many of them were born! Once again life imitates art.

Okay, I suppose other people have noticed this before, but heck, I just wanted an excuse to post some Uhura pics. I met her at a Star Trek convention many years ago, kinda reminded me of my mom! Here’s one last pic for good measure.

Yesterday I used a gift card I got for my birthday (thanks Virginia!) to buy a USB wireless network adapter for my TiVo. I did this so that I could play the music on my computer on the TiVo which can play through the home stereo system. This was easier said than done because the current version of the TiVo Desktop for Windows doesn’t integrate with iTunes for Windows at all. So after setup I could get to and play the MP3s in my library, but I couldn’t use the existing iTunes playlists. And the TiVo didn’t recognize the export iTunes playlist export formats, text or XML. Needless to say this was not the experience I was hoping for, so I started Googling for an answer.

What I found out was that TiVo does recognize WinAmp’s M3U playlist format. A little more digging revealed Phil’s iTunes Songlist To M3U Converter that converts the iTunes playlists exported in the text format into the M3U format. So I converted the playlists into playlistname.m3u files and placed them in the directory I setup for shared music in TiVo Desktop. Now the playlists show up in the TiVo menu available for use. Yay! Thanks Phil!

The only trouble I ran into was with songlists containing songs from albums with Asian characters (Chinese and Japanese in my case) in the names. These wouldn’t show up in the converted list or at least the TiVo couldn’t deal with them. So I had to give those albums names in Romaji ASCII characters and reconvert the lists, just a minor issue. And of course, right now TiVo cannot play anything I bought via the iTunes Music Store, but since most of my collection consists of MP3s, this isn’t a big issue yet and I expect this limitation to change in the future.

Almost without noticing it, I’ve found myself surrounded by and using Samsung devices. I hadn’t really thought about this at all until yesterday’s news of Samsung developing new flash memory technology that could allow the creation of flash memory drives as large as 32 GB. I already have Samsung memory chips in my computers. The color printer in my office is a Samsung, and so is my increasingly beloved cell phone. All of these devices not only function well, but were mostly bought to replace devices that were subpar (cough cough Motorola cough!). And in the case of my phone, it functions better than I even thought possible, that alone is worth a few blown kisses in Samsung’s direction! <3

I needed to get out of the office for lunch today, so I proceeded to a Corner Bakery and had a salad. Today I was listening to my Otakon 2005 playlist on my iPod and had a couple of things strike me as particularly memorable. One of them was just my own vanity at the reaction I got from the crowd for my rendition of Shizukana Yoruni. Probably just my imagination, but I think people actually liked it. Even if they didn’t, it was still a lot of fun singing it.

The other thing that struck me is just how much the young people of today are different from the way we were in my younger days. I went to the Otaku dance on Friday night and observed a number of interesting things. The crowd was divided into several distinct groups. There were couples dancing together, most of these appeared to be people who already knew each other fairly well. There were groups of two or more women dancing together. These women appeared to be just friends, but danced with a familiarity similar to the couples. Another grouping consisted of men dancing in groups of three or more. The men tended to dance in circular groupings and were not as familiar as the similar female groupings. At the fringes there were men and women dancing solo, though the men doing this appeared to outnumber the women.

In the main room there were also two large areas were some very skilled black and Asian men were competitively breakdancing. There were a lot of people who appeared to spend the evening watching this. These groupings were repeated on a smaller scale in the room where the rave party was going on.

So what’s the point? The point is freedom. All of the aforementioned people were just doing what they wanted and having fun. In the past, a dance consisted of couples dancing, the occasional strangers hooking up and everyone else standing or sitting along the wall either hoping to be asked to dance, if female, or working up the courage to ask someone to dance, if male. But the kids today have not been raised with such restrictive gender dictated roles. Watching all of this I had the feeling that the human race had actually made some progress and I felt very proud of it.

I finally bought a PSP a couple of weeks ago, shortly before update 2.0 came out for the U.S. models. The new update includes, among other things, a fairly decent web browser. Since that time, I’ve been happily putting the browser through its paces, mostly reading news, sports, and checking web mail on Yahoo!. This is all good, but if the browser supported Flash it would suddenly open the door to playing many of the thousands of browser based Flash games on the internet.

Given that Sony makes its money from the royalties they get from the sale of 3rd party games on the PSP, I tend to doubt that they will be eager to add Flash support to the browser. Flash Lite games formatted specifically for the PSP would be great for gamers (if they don’t suck), but wouldn’t make a dime for Sony.

Even without Flash support, I think there will be some server side web games targetted for the PSP, at least from the homebrew crowd. I have one proof of concept idea I’m working on which may not suffer from the relatively slow PSP browser. I don’t think there’s any money in it, but if it works it should be fun!

I was sitting in/on my reading room today perusing the October GamePro and ran across a couple of interesting ads. One of the ads says,"If you’re going to sit in your basement PRETENDING TO BE AN ELF, you should at least have some friends over to help." This is an ad for the pencil and paper version of Dungeons and Dragons, you know, what we played before computer and console games took over. While playing D&D is not what I’d call the real world, playing with real physical humans in the room with you is at least a step in that direction.

The second ad features a beautiful landscape image, trees, a lake, and distant mountain tops. In the foreground on the grass lies a game control with the words, "Maybe the last level isn’t." The controller is between the words "level" and "isn’t". This is an ad for for Outward Bound wilderness adventures. Now this is a direct appeal to gamers to get out and adventure in the real world. Though I suppose you could still play D&D on your wilderness adventure by the camp fire.

I find it interesting to see ads like this in a video game magazine because it offers another clue as to how much a part of the mainstream culture video games have become. There have been stories about how TV viewership among young males has fallen due to competition from video games. Companies spending money on ads to pull them away from video games is additional evidence of this.

I must admit though, that my adventures in the online world of Vana’diel and others has given me a renewed appreciation for adventures in the real world, even if there are no monsters to kill! And like the Outward Bound ad says, real world graphics are infinitely better. And there’s no load time!

With BnetD having been ruled illegal, I wonder if the outcome would have been different if everything else were the same, except BnetD prevented the use of pirated copies of Diablo or Starcraft. I think it’s great when a game has such a following, that the players want do all kinds of cool mods, but if the game’s creators aren’t onboard, then it can only end badly. It’s hard to make the interoperability argument for something as proprietary as a game service, and the judge didn’t buy it.

In any case, the BnetD genie has already escaped the bottle, so I guess the next step for Blizzard is the probably impossible task of shutting down all of these servers out in the wild. Oddly enough, their best bet may be to just leave them alone as long as none of them take on too high of a profile. Afterall, people playing on small private servers can get hooked on the game and eventually be enticed to play on the official servers which presumably should be able to offer a  wider range of experiences. That may just persuade them to buy legitimate copies of the game. Indeed, Blizzard might be well served to provide a mechanism for legitimizing a pirated copy to play on Battle.net servers if they haven’t already.

As I’ve gotten older, I find myself looking longer and harder for bargains for the things I like/need. Some of this is the influence of my always bargain conscious Hong Kong born wife and part of it is my relentless need to make the most efficient use of resources possible. In any case, the constant flow of coupons and promotions from Borders has served to keep down the cost of my manga addiction this summer. In an almost Pavlovian pattern, when the coupons come out, I buy.:) The beauty of it though is that manga are treated as books and not comics, which are never discounted. So if you want graphics with your text, forget the comics, pick up a manga and save some money!

Hey! I’ve got another coupon!