cobolhacker.com

A little MATX tower with its guts hanging out, opened for testing. I don’t remember the exact details, but the presence of the second hard drive makes me think that one drive is being duplicated on to the other for some reason.

I don’t play Eve Online, and I have no idea whether the recent accusations of player favouritism are justified, but one thing I do know is that my buddies who play Eve always complain about how the game sucks. I don’t know why they put themselves through it, honestly. If I want grief, I go to work.

From commenter nobodyman (link):

Honestly, I don’t get this game at all. I read several stories about EVE, and the interesting thing that they have in common is that

1. Nobody seems to be having fun
2. Everybody takes it way too seriously

He could be right. To put it in perspective, my buddies who are into World of Warcraft often tell me about how much fun they had doing something in game. Things like their Guild went out on Saturday night, ripped some baddie a new asshole, scored a cool drop, dragged home sacks of gold, whatever. I have no idea what they are talking about, mind, but at least they sound like they’re enjoying themselves.

In World of Warcraft, all you need to do to level your character and get more cool stuff is play the game. You can fight your way up to a respectable level in a few days. If you’re new and dedicated, you can grind up to level 70 in a few months (a few weeks if you’re really dedicated). The improvement of your character is tied to your ability as player to knuckle up and get it done. Which is what you bought the game for anyway – to pass the time killing bigger and bigger bog monsters.

In Eve Online, however, dedication to gameplay only gets you gold, and in terms of character improvement, is somewhat irrelevant. In Eve, my pals tell me, skills that make your character better take a set amount of real world time to “learn”. The process is automatic, you don’t even have to be logged on for skills to train. Skills get you the bigger ships, better weapons, bigger battles, more fun, etc. The problem with this real time bound system is that it guarantees that a new player can never, ever catch up to players (like that contentious Band of Brothers) who have been playing the game from the beginning. They will always be ahead, and any new high-end content will be theirs for the taking because their characters are more powerful and will always be more powerful. Even if they aren’t cheating, the rules of the game effectively insure they will always be on top.

I see this as the biggest problem with Eve, and it bears a similarity to the real world people are looking to escape when they play it: it is impossible to catch up to the ones on top no matter how well you play the game. Personally, I would find such a system unbearable, knowing that all the coolest game content is going to a select few players who got in at the beginning.

The reason I play computer games is because they are a simple escape from the bullshit of the real world. The last thing I would want to do is escape into more bullshit. Hell, at least in the real world there’s a slim chance that you can catch up to the ones on top — win the lottery, come up with a really bankable invention, write that screenplay, etc… in Eve there is no chance. BoB will always be better than you, they will always have more money, better ships and cooler stuff. Maybe I’m missing something here, but it doesn’t sound like much fun to me.

I was rooting through my comp the other day and I found my old Cobol-85 compiler. So for chuckles I spent a few hours trying to get to get some code to compile. Ahh, the memories… I have often wondered if I should bone up on my Cobol and look for work as a programmer again.

Here is an interesting article to ponder.

Gartner has estimated that there are 180 billion lines of Cobol code in use around the world.

. . . the use of Cobol is growing — by about a billion lines per year.

I’ll bet that’s over double the amount of Java code in use, and around 179.5 billion more lines than all the Ruby ever written.

Cobol, like Latin, is the language that will not die. As I’ve lamented before, by the time I started to get into Cobol the mindset of most educators was that they had to teach it to us, not because it was any good, but so we could convert it into something like Visual Basic or C. Maybe that idea was wrong.

Young CIO: We need to migrate all our Cobol code to something object oriented like C++ or Java.

Old CEO: Why? Is the old code not doing the job?

Young CIO: Well, uhh, no it’s working fine, but we need to get with the times. That Cobol stuff is old!

Old CEO: Will this make us more money?

Young CIO: Sure!

Old CEO: How?

Young CIO: What do you mean?

Old CEO: How will re-writing what we already have make us more money? We’ll have to hire dozens of new programmers. If anything it will cost us money. How am I supposed to explain that to the board?

I’m sure this very same argument played out in conference rooms across the world. Little did the futurists, the educators, the object oriented disciples and Edsger Dijkstra know that most of the world was content with their Cobol and saw no need to change it. Why? It might not be fancy, but it gets the job done with a minimum of fuss. Sadly, one of the problems the computer industry has is the notion that change is always good. It’s ignorance of a most important aphorism: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I laugh because even to this day, the people who were poo-pooing Cobol back in the nineties are very likely still depending on it to manage their bank account, their mutual funds, stocks, insurance, tax, medical records, etc… Dead programming language? Ha!

Sometimes the furry ones are not so cute. Not only were there pets around, there were also smokers (you can tell by the brownish colour and the smell). A system like this is so foul you have to clean it outside of the shop. We keep a box of nitrile gloves on hand for just such occasions.

Now this is highly cool: liveatc.net. It’s a collection of real-time continuous audio feeds from Air Traffic Control centres around the world. You can listen to Toronto Pearson International Airport (approach) for example. In most cases you can simply click on the link to listen, or copy the link location and paste it into the “Open URL” box in a stream-aware media program like Winamp, Media Player or XMMS.

Pearson’s ATC is very busy and it’s sort of like a talk show with an endless supply of guests. Most of the time it is highly professional, but now and again the controllers and the pilots make jokes or have quick conversations about various things. Every now and again they even get mad at each other. Makes great background sound.

All civilian ATCs broadcast their signals in the clear so everyone from jumbo-jet to Cessna can hear the instructions. Air flight enthusiasts around the world digitize the signals and Streamcast for your enjoyment, free of charge. How cool is that?

thx Codesmith

I’ve often wondered if people would find the surreal nature of my job humourous. As it turns out, down-on-their-luck American television network NBC seems to think so. They are pressing forward with the launch of a comedy based on information technology workers. The IT Crowd will follow the day to day trials of the long suffering techies of some office somewhere. Odd, but it’s nice to see television based on the lives of people other than cops, doctors and lawyers.

Given their piss poor ratings as a network, it’s not surprising to see them trying something original. Except that this is not. Like a lot of interesting TV these days, The IT Crowd is a remake of a British show of the same name. What puzzles me about this is that NBC could have simply purchased the entire show, rather than just the rights to it, and probably saved a bunch of money on production. British sitcoms shows are often hysterically funny, even if some of the turns of phrase are confusing to North Americans like me (and that’s half the fun). Americans laughed at Shaun of the Dead, didn’t they?

So sadly, Americanizing it will likely spell the doom for this curious show on NBC, but at least the U.K. version has been picked up for a second season. All I have to do is figure out how to get the first season…

Check out this fantastic submerged computer hack.  Most of the components are submerged in an aquarium full of mineral oil, complete with bubble bar.  Not the first one of these I’ve seen, but probably the nicest looking.

Via Engadget

This is for you MMORPG players!

I thought I’d try my hand at making an image macro. I initially wanted to make something kinda highbrow, but then decided on simply mashing together as many derivative Internet memes as I could.

In addition to generally copying the whole lolcats theme, including the kitty pidgin and gamer slang, it completely rips off a concept from someone else, mimicks graphic design from these guys, using an image stolen from a popular movie. So I think I did okay, first time out.

I just loves deh Internetz.

Core principles trumped by the almighty buck? That’s impossible! Not in America! That could never happen in the land of the free and the home of the brave!

What’s particularly galling is that the shareholders voted down the anti-censorship proposal because management (the ones who came up with the motto “Do No Evil”) recommended it.

What a stellar reason for giving up on your morals this is:

Pulling out of China, shutting down Google.cn, is just not the right thing to do at this point. But that’s exactly what this proposal would do.

So doing an oppressive government’s work for them is the right thing to do at this time? Nice. I wonder what Google management would do if the Chinese say they have to start flogging their employees for better results?

Nobody is really threatening Google over such a proposal. The big bad Chinese aren’t going to come to the U.S. and arrest the board of directors, nor will Google go bankrupt if adopted. The only threat they face is not making as much money. When did Google’s management get so feckless? Up until recently I used to think of them as a good example of a moral company. Now I’m starting to think they are no better than Exxon, Haliburton, Microsoft and all the rest that continue to screw the planet and everyone on it. All for a buck.

I would love, just once, to see a large business show some morals. Just once.

My customer is leaving in a very good humour. I’ve added 256MB of RAM to his middle-aged rig (Athlon XP 2100+) and Windows XP has sped up considerably.”It will be nice not having websites drag so much,” he says cheerfully as he pays.

“This old box has a few tricks left in it. If all you’re up to is downloading music and surfing the web, this will do nicely for the next few years,” I tell him as I unhook the machine from the spare console we keep out front for demonstrations such as these.

“Well thanks so much!” he says and takes his upgraded compy out the door.

This is the kind of result that keeps me doing this job. I was able to do exactly what the customer wanted: make the machine to go faster so he can surf the Internet better. I cleaned off a bit of spyware with Adaware, pared down some of the spurious startup processes, replaced the expired Norton Antivirus with AVG and added a used 256MB stick of DDR266 to bring the machine’s total up to 512MB. The total came to under $100 including the taxes. It’s still a perfectly good computer and worth the money. Maybe it’s not so good for playing modern action games, but more than capable of accessing any content on the Internet. Now it has enough RAM for all that content to stretch out in. Another successful job at the shop.

Well… maybe not so much. A little while later I get a call from the same customer.

“You know that RAM that you added?”

“Yeah…”

“Did you really add it?”

“Come again? Well… uhh… I’m pretty certain we added more RAM. I seem to remember sticking it in.”

This previously happy transaction has now turned into a nightmare scenario for a service business: a customer who is saying, for whatever reason, that he did not receive something he paid for. If he’s not mistaken, that means I fucked up or he is trying to scam me. Both these two latter scenarios are a problem for me. In all the years I’ve been doing this, I have never charged someone for hardware I forgot to put in. But there’s always a first time, and if so, it is my duty to make it right. If it’s a scam, on the other hand, I need to deal with it head on because you can’t let that kind of thing go unanswered. Either way, I’ve got a reputation to consider. I just can’t have someone going around telling people my shop is dodgy, even if it’s not true.

The fellow is polite, but seems quite convinced he had 512MB of RAM before. He doesn’t come out and say that we ripped him off, which makes me think that he’s honest and also a little uncertain too. He says that he was looking at his “records” and that they seem to say the machine was purchased with 512MB. I tell him firmly that the machine really did have 256MB when it came in, hence the reason we recommended upgrading to 512MB. Arguing over the phone is quite pointless at this stage, so I tell him to bring the computer back in and any of those records he has for it. I’ll check to make sure the new RAM is working, and so on. I’m basically calling the bluff here. If this is a scam attempt either he won’t show up all, or he will show up but with no paperwork, saying he lost it.

In the end he does show up with the computer and every receipt he’s ever had regarding it. We go through the receipts together and discover that the 512MB was an option for his system when he first bought it new, but the option was not taken. Inside his computer I point out the original DIMM module and the newly installed one, with our test markings still attached (little green sticker with the capacity printed on it). It’s now pretty obvious that he was mistaken.

“You know, I’m sorry about this,” he says a bit sheepishly.

“For what? For checking up on us? You’d be surprised at how many customers don’t bother checking, even if they know how. It’s the first time you’ve come here, so a bit of suspicion is probably not a bad thing. There are all kinds of computer shops out there who are trying to screw you. You’ll find some in this town, even. This isn’t one of them.”

Case closed. Customer is happy again.

I’m guessing he was satisfied with my candor because he’s been back a number of times since. Trust and honesty form the backbone of professional information technology service. Without these things, everything else is a lie. A customer should feel as if he trusts his computer technician like his doctor. We don’t expect this to happen on the first go. But long term, if honestly supplying my product engenders trust, then it’s all good. People always go back to the people they trust and that’s an honest way to make money.

Sadly, computer industry being the way it is these days, my convictions also probably explain why I’m not rich yet.