nonzero

For the first time in many years, I have a video card that can handle current video games. Unfortunately I don’t have any current games — I might buy CS:S or TF2 soon — but I do have CS 1.6, and I was surprised to learn it’s still very much active. So for the last few days I’ve been playing cs_assault, cs_italy, scoutzknivez… hoping that the skill I once had at age 15 will suddenly rekindle. My performance last night showed some promise. We’ll see.

In any case, if your Half-Life client mysteriously stops displaying chat messages like mine did last night, here’s how to fix it (or how I fixed it at least):

1. Bring up the console by pressing the tilde key (`).
2. Type hud_saytext_time X where X is the number of seconds that a message will stay on the screen. (I used 5.) Press enter.

This value had been zeroed out somehow which had the effect of hiding chat messages altogether. If you want to hide chat for some reason, execute hud_saytext_time 0.

Today on 3W I spotted a special New York license plate: “ACIDBRN”

I tried to catch up to the guy but lost him in traffic. But even if I did catch up to him, what was I going to do? I wonder if there is a universal hacker signal to go along with the universal hacker emblem.

If you were to plot my interest in Ruby on Rails on a graph, it’d resemble a turtle shell. When I first heard about RoR, I was mostly anti-framework. I didn’t like (and still don’t) the idea of blackbox development. It’s fine for simple CRUD applications (and for complex ones too I suppose), but for anything outside the box it usually ends up in a struggle.

Despite this opinion, I eventually let down my guard and began reading up on RoR. It was difficult to separate the fanboyism from actual reviews; it seemed that all Rails users were fanboys! (I’m generalizing here for the sake of communicating a point.) Maybe the RoR team had actually found the perfect balance between convenience and flexibility?

After a few reads at B&N and some playing around locally, I decided to give it a try on a new project at work. Here’s my experience:

1. Install Rails: Easy.
2. Complete useless Rails scaffold demo: Easy.
3. Get Rails to communicate with PostgreSQL db: Easy.
4. Get Rails to communicate with the correct schema on the PostgreSQL db: Tricky. Rails was only able to see schemas owned by the “public” postgres user for some reason. I also had to include an obscure directive in the db config file.
5. Get Rails to play nicely with existing schema: Very difficult, not worth the trouble.

That’s how far my RoR experiment went. To paraphrase a user from the freenode IRC channel, Rails isn’t meant to be “bolted on” an existing project. It needs to be there from the start, else it’s a headache to even get to the point where you can leverage the features of Rails.

This “greed” factor reminded me of Apple. And then it hit me: Rails fans are the developer version of Apple elitists:

“Oh, you’re having trouble with your PC? Well, my computer just works! It’s a Mac!”

“Oh, you’re having issues with development? Well, my framework just works! It’s Ruby on Rails!”

Of course it works. It works because the framework owns everything in your application.

For the last few months or so, I’ve been doing a radio show with the Combobreaker crew themed on comedic yet honest video game reviews. We don’t really have a typical show format, but we usually end up discussing game play mechanics, character control, level design, music, overall fun factor, overall stupidity factor, and, occassionally, we dip into the political side of the gaming industry. Be sure to check out our shows here and our 8-bit t-shirts here.

On to the guts of the post… If you clicked the above link to the podcast and you don’t have iTunes installed, you’ll be prompted to install it before continuing. As a fan of Winamp on Windows and XMMS on Linux, I simply do not have room for iTunes in my life. The last time I installed iTunes—this was a while ago—I recall the installer program completely destroying the directory structure of my music archive and renaming every file to conform to the iTunes catalog. Never again.

The good news is that you can usually get at the audio content without iTunes installed. When you get to the page that says “We are unable to find iTunes on your computer” view the source and check out the onload attribute of the body tag:

<body onload="return itmsOpen('itms://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=269238657&ign-mscache=1','http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/download/?itmsUrl=itms%3A%2F%2Fax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net%2FWebObjects%2FMZStore.woa%2Fwa%2FviewPodcast%3Fid%3D269238657%26ign-mscache%3D1','userOverridePanel',false)">

The first parameter of the call to itmsOpen holds an itms:// URL. Now, if you had iTunes installed, this link would naturally open up with iTunes, but we do not. Fortunately, the itms:// scheme is actually just XML over HTTP, so we can replace itms:// with http://.

http://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=269238657

View the XML document in your browser, or download it, and search for instances of the string episodeURL. After each instance, you’ll find a string element containing a URL of the episode:

<string>http://www.combobreaker.com/episodes/cb_ep_001.mp3</string>

And there you have it.

For next time, maybe I’ll rant on Apple’s anti-human marketing tactics, e.g., the injection of the word “podcast” into web vernacular. I still feel uneasy saying “podcast” but I just can’t beat ‘em.

If you’re looking for Re-Flex’s second unreleased album, Humanication, you can download it here. If you like The Politics of Dancing you’ll like Humanication.