eclecticism

Someone discovered a fun easter egg in Apple’s Final Cut Pro 5:

> Open up “Final Cut Pro.rsrc” (/Applications/Final Cut Pro HD/Contents/Resources/Final Cut Pro.rsrc) in any text editor and you will stumble upon this hidden message: > > > If we can’t ship this puppy by then, we might as well be herding yaks. I’m glad it’s getting weird again. I didn’t understand it when it wasn’t weird. The C switch statement: Mmmmmm! Chock full of nooses! That would be like crossing the streams or something. Mmmm… Chicago style pizza! I’ve got my blankie, I’m good to go. A lot of this job is mental. “Mostly clockwise, sometimes reverses…” What’s the sound of one luma clamping? I just wanna be in the app! Oh, rough and woeful music which we have! Cause it to sound! The Yak is a delightful creature… rather like a visit with a bovine Confucious…

There’s a lot more there, I’ve snipped it for the sake of brevity. I think it’s a hilarious little random screed — and my guess is that they just took every little “in-joke” from the FCP programming team and tossed them all semi-randomly into a single text file. That’s what it reads like to me, at least — with the recurring Yak theme and the general random silliness of what’s in there, reading it reminded me a lot of some of my old brainstorming sessions with friends.

“As Long As I’m Singin’” by Brian Setzer Orchestra, The from the album Dirty Boogie, The (1998, 4:03).

This is hilarious…and (at times) freakishly accurate.

> Disaffected! - a videogame parody of the Kinko’s copy store, a source of frustration from its patrons. Disaffected! puts the player in the role employees forced to service customers under the particular incompetences common to a Kinko’s store. > > […] Disaffected! gives the player the chance to step into the demotivated position of real FedEx Kinkos employees. Feel the indifference of these purple-shirted malcontents first-hand, and consider the possible reasons behind their malaise — is it mere incompetence? Managerial affliction? Unseen but serious labor issues? > > […] Disaffected! is an arcade-style game with fast action and high replayability. The player controls one or more employees behind the counter at a typical copy store. As each level starts, customers enter the store through the front doors and line up behind the cashiers at the counters. The player must try to find and deliver each customer’s order. Obstacles include confused employees, employees who refuse to work, employees who move orders around indiscriminately so the player cannot find them.

After the number of years I spent working at Kinko’s (now FedEx Kinko’s)…heh. Count me as very, very amused. And very glad I’m not working there anymore.

(via Boing Boing)

“Headinabag” by Bagman from the album Wrap (1997, 7:28).

Okay, yes, diff’rent streaks for diff’rent freaks and all that, but — without meaning any offense — I’ve got to admit that an all-economists Dungeons and Dragons game just might rank fairly high in my personal descriptions of hell.

Is it really financially prudent to go after this troll?

What’s the expected profit-to-loss ratio if we attempt to capture the dragon’s hoard?

Does our raiding party’s net worth really justify attacking in this instance?

Disclaimer: I am neither an economist nor a D&D player, so I have no real personal experience to draw upon for this — though while my exposure to economists is nearly nonexistent, I’ve known, been around, and lived with enough D&D players to know how wacky they can get on their own — I just thought that the combination of the two was simultaneously amusing and frightening. Please take this post as the good-natured ribbing that it’s meant to be.

iTunes: “I’m Too Sexy (Extended Club)” by Right Said Fred from the album I’m Too Sexy (1991, 6:39).

This was originally a LiveJournal meme, but it was so goofy and intricate that I had to join in the fun. So. Bear with me.

1. Take your LJ username and replace each letter with the corresponding number (A=1, B=2, etc…). If your name contains numbers, you’ll need to convert them to letters first before you can convert to numbers.

Since I’m doing this here, rather than on LiveJournal, I’ll use the name I post under on this weblog — which, conveniently enough, just happens to be my real name.

Michael Hanscom = 13 9 3 8 1 5 12 8 1 14 19 3 15 13

1. Add all of the numbers together to create a kind of super number.

124

1. Make a note of the first digit of this number, then add the digits of the number together.

First digit is 1.

1 + 2 + 4 = 7.

1. Find the post of this number in your LJ. If you don’t have that many posts, add the digits together again. Keep doing so until the number is smaller than your pathetic number of posts.

My seventh (archived) post was Mulder, Scully, Carey Grant, and Max Schreck, posted on December 17, 2000.

1. Take the digit you noted in step 3, and count that many words into the post.

Just

1. Use the resulting word in a Google Image Search, and select a picture from the first page.
2. Post the results for us all to see.

A quick note regarding this image: while it was by far the best of the images that Google found for me, it was found on this journal page (no permalink, entry “Wow wow wow!!!” from Jan. 25, 2004), where it had been re-posted from Anger Dog Studios. I debated re-re-posting it here, but liked the image enough that I decided to go ahead and toss it up with credit to the original artist, who I’ll also be e-mailing and asking formal permission to leave the piece up. There’s a lot more excellent artwork at Anger Dog Studios, too, so feel free to wander that way and peruse what’s available in their galleries.

iTunes: “Eisplanet” by Beborn Beton from the album Tales From Another World (1997, 5:11).

Very silly, and not as simple as it seems — how long can you keep this drunk man upright?

I just got to 67 meters on my second try.

(via Kottke)

How many petals around the rose?

I figured it out in under a minute (my first guess was half right, three subsequent rolls allowed me to fine tune and confirm the answer).

If you know the answer, please don’t spoil the fun for others. Let ‘em figure it out for themselves.

Related: Bill Gates and Petals Around the Rose at a 1977 computer conference. Memorizing dice rolls. Fascinating.

(via MeFi)

Another good online time-waster: a version of Breakout that actually manages to put a new twist on the game by giving it a circular playfield — Plastic Balls.

Rather than running your paddle back and forth across a plane…well, you know those bright yellow plastic funnel coin collectors where you drop a coin down a trough and watch it go spinning in circles down the funnel? Put bricks around the outside edge of the funnel, put your paddle rotating around the funnel, and let the ball bounce between your paddle in the center and the bricks on the outside.

Very cool, and the extra level of pseudo-dimensionality adds a nice new touch to the gameplay.

(via Collision Detection)

iTunes: “It Takes a Thief” by Coolio from the album It Takes a Thief (1994, 5:07).

This rocks.

I’m not much of a gamer. Never have been, likely never will be. Most computer games bore me, requiring far too much time and mental effort to bother with (any strategy based game — StarCraft, WarCraft, WoodCraft), or just being so pointless I can’t envision devoting time to them (EverCrack). Generally, if I get into a game, it’s for a few minutes at a time, and either brainless but fun point-and-shoot (Doom) or brainless drive-around-in-circles racing games (Star Wars Pod Racer, Wipeout for Playstation).

One of the few games that ever really got my attention was Descent. At the time it came out, it was a groundbreaking game — taking the then-typical pesudo-3D first-person-shooter approach of Castle Wolfenstein, Doom, and so on, and putting it into a true three dimensional world.

Where previous “3D” games were actually two-dimensional (your only real choices of movement were on a plane — forward, backwards, left, and right turns, etc.), Descent put you in control of a small spacecraft flying through tunnels within planets and asteroids, adding the final third dimension, allowing you to pilot your craft through all three axis of movement. You could dive, barrel roll, loop-de-loop, swoop down on targets, anything.

We had some great multi-player Descent games at The Pit (my old apartment in Anchorage), and for once, I had the advantage. While I would occasionally play games, I wasn’t enough of a gamer to have very many old habits built in, so when I started playing with the controls of Descent, it didn’t take me long to get the hang of moving through a fully three-dimensional world. My roommate Jason wasn’t able to adjust as quickly, due to the ingrained habit of only thinking along two axis of movement. Many was the time when he’d end up behind me, blasting away, when suddenly I’d go round a bend in the tunnel just out of his sight, fly into a large open room, and immediately shoot straight up to hover just above the entrance. Jason would come screaming into the cavern and start trying to find me — panning left and right. Meanwhile, I’d be targeting him from above, suddenly unleashing a blistering stream of laser fire onto the top of his ship, and sending him off into blissful digital oblivion.

Of course, Jason being the jobless obsessive-compulsive that he was, he soon spent far too many hours doing nothing but play Descent, so it was only a matter of a week or two before he was flying circles around everyone else in the apartment. Still, my little reign of terror was fun while it lasted.

What got all this started running through my brain, though, was Phil tipping me off to some wonderful news — Descent 2 has been ported to run on Mac OS X, and is freely downloadable!

Schweeeeet.

It’s downloaded, just waiting for me to install it. I think I better wait ‘till the weekend to do that, though, otherwise I’m likely to get nothing done from here on out.

iTunes: “Last Day on Earth, The” by Marilyn Manson from the album Mechanical Animals (1998, 5:01).

Hey Alan — you thought this game was bad?

Wait ‘til you start this one…;)

My first game I made it to level six, with 3650 points and 141 coins.

I’m going to waste so much time on this thing!

(via D)

While I’m still bummed that the TRON 2.0 project ended up being a game instead of a new feature film, at least the game is being released for OS X next month. I just might look into buying another computer game (I’m not much of a gamer — the last one I purchased was Star Wars Pod Racer, and I think the one before that was Oni, neither of which I ever devoted a ton of time to).

iTunes: “**** (Jungle Law)” by Love and Rockets from the album Love and Rockets (1989, 4:33).

Nick just dropped me a quick note to let me know that I’m showing up on Slashdot again. It seems that word just hit the ‘net that Microsoft has released the SDK for the upcoming XBox2, and said SDK is being distributed running on Apple PowerMac G5 dual-processor machines running a customized NT kernel. This prompted Mr. Muskrat’s comment…

Michael Hanscom almost blew the XBox2 story wide open back in October.

Remember when Microsoft fired that guy because he mentioned that they bought G5s. Too bad he didn’t know anything about why they bought them.

I did wonder a bit about the G5/Xbox2 link back in November, when news first broke that the Xbox2 would likely be running on the G5 chip. At the time, I was idly wondering about the possibility of an Xbox emulator for the Mac (similar to Connectix’ old Virtual Gamestation software that allowed Mac users to run Playstation games on their home computer).

Now, though, the news that the seeded G5’s are running a custom NT kernel has me wondering along different lines.

In February of ‘03, Microsoft bought Virtual PC, the PC-emulation software for Macs that allows them to run Windows software inside an emulated PC. They’ve continued to support and update Virtual PC for the Mac, along with releasing Virtual PC for the PC, allowing Windows machines to run multiple virtual machines on one physical box — handy for software testing purposes. Unfortunately, Virtual PC depends on a feature of earlier PowerPC processors that is not present in the G5, so there hasn’t been a version of Virtual PC released yet that will run on Apple’s flagship G5 desktop machines.

Last month, Microsoft announced that a new G5-compatible version of Virtual PC would be released along with Office 2004. Considering that the Xbox2 SDK is apparently running a customized NT kernel that runs on G5 systems, could some of those same customizations be worked into Virtual PC 7, making for a major speed increase, as more of the low-level code would be running natively on the Mac rather than having to pass through an emulator? I don’t really know enough about the innards of how software like this works, so I could be entirely off-base here — the differences between the emulation required for Virtual PC and the customizations needed to get the NT kernel running on the PowerPC processor may have absolutely nothing in common — but it was enough to get me wondering.

Even more interesting, though, would be if someone could leak some form of benchmarks, even rough ones, showing what kind of performance this customized NT kernel was getting on the SDK machines. I’m assuming it must be at least somewhat respectable, as the machines are being used for creating software for the Xbox2 — but how respectable?

And going even more wildly out of the bounds of reality…for years now, there have been rumors of Apple porting the Mac OS to be able to run on Intel-based PCs (realistically, that’s not likely to ever be released publicly, but the technology is there). However, what about going the other direction? What if Microsoft were to take these customizations to their kernel and and eventually supplant Virtual PC with an actual build of Longhorn for the G5, either as a “red box” that would allow you to run Windows applications concurrently with Mac OS X applications (we can already run Mac OS X apps, “Classic” Mac OS apps, Unix command-line apps, and Unix X-11 apps all at the same time as it is), or as a dual-boot option (Which OS would you like to run today)?

Likely? I seriously doubt it. But fun to play with.

And I’d still love to find out just how zippy those G5s are running NT. Wouldn’t it be a fun little tweak if they were running as fast as (or faster, even) than high-end PCs?

Marc, are you out there? Ambrosia just updated Escape Velocity and EV: Override to be Mac OS X native…and they ported EV: Nova to Windows!

Get ready to get sucked back in all over again…

(via MacSlash)

A couple days ago, I linked to something called 911survivor (the site is down as of this writing) in my ‘Destinations’ sidebar. The site was about an Unreal game modification that replaced the standard sci-fi battle arenas with the World Trade Center towers during the Sept. 11^th 2001 terrorist attacks. At the time, it looked to me like a surprisingly disturbing attempt to capitalize on the tragedy of the day, and I commented on the link as being tasteless.

This morning, Kirsten left a comment letting me know that while at Siggraph, she had met one of the creators of the 911survivor mod. Read the rest of this entry »

By now, most websurfers will have seen the standard ‘404 Error’ webpage that pops up when a requested page doesn’t exist. Some 404’s are cooler than others — and THCnet has the coolest I’ve seen yet. If Royce checks my page anytime soon, he should check it out.