How To Spot A Psychopath

An enterprising Supreme Commander fan has come up with Core Maximizer, a utility for people with dual-or-more-core computers (or even hyper-threaded single cores, though you can’t expect a great improvement from those) that makes the game run considerably better. It does it by more efficiently shifting the game’s multiple threads onto cores other than the first.

The effect is a large increase in frame rate, at the cost of a small decrease in maximum “sim” speed - which isn’t a very big deal, since I for one often find it beneficial to slow the game down a bit when complicated stuff is going on, anyway.

On my dual-core Athlon 64 PC (this one), running the standard “perftest” benchmark showed that Core Maximizer slowed sim-speed to 96% of what it had been, but accelerated render-speed by a factor of 2.4. This resulted in 23% more frames logged during the benchmark, which is pretty darn impressive for this extreme stress test. Other users have reported similar improvements.

(And yes, as an old TA player I, too, originally thought it sounded like a downloadable unit. “The Core Maximizer is a roving optimization system. It upgrades other units so that they move more smoothly.”)

I rely on spam for my daily dose of randomness. Whether it’s the smattering of apparently genuine (or maybe just address-testing) messages about adopting adorable puppies on the other side of the world that I received a week or so ago, or the numerous opportunities to build a collection of Korean-made railway rolling stock, old freighters registered in Panama and, of course, Chinese pumps, the less common flavours of spam give my inbox a pleasingly gonzo edge.

Recent examples:

An outfit called ByteShark, previously chiefly notable for its very plausible claims of a cure for baldness, has now decided to become some sort of “visual content” search engine.

I think you’re meant to be able to upload a picture from your computer and find Web pages with similar pictures on them, or something, but all the search seems to do at the moment is take an incredibly long time (while showing you an ad for the baldness remedy!), and then turn up a bunch of severely sub-Google-Images results. If you upload an image, ByteShark appears to be very good at finding other images that resemble it in no way whatsoever.

The best part about the e-mail, though, was that it was sent to me, because Byteshark had brilliantly decided that since dansdata.com is hosted by SecureWebs, I must be the contact address not for securewebs.com, but specifically for shop.securewebs.com, which is the server that delivers the little “Hosted By” image on the bottom of dansdata.com pages. Which ByteShark now indexes. Hurrah!

It’s OK to play around with exciting new search engine paradigms. Just don’t start spamming people about your revolutionary product until it can at least pretend to work.

(UPDATE: Just now, on the 24th of October 2007, ByteShark have sent me another copy of the exact same announcement message.)

Example two:

I’ve always enjoyed the interminable politico-religious screeds that some people spam. Fair enough; you can’t wait for people to discover your 500-kilobyte one-page Geocities site when the fate of Christendom, or something, hangs in the balance.
Here’s something I got yesterday. I hope you’re sitting comfortably.

  mr. dan,

 

     I was looking for computer check meters, I got your message on google images, saying , the meter told me that and reached you,

here what I have written to a computer software specialist, same for you. In the last my complete introduction.

:

   Dear mr. mansoor,

   sql server magazine,

  

 

       I append below my general information for your kind perusal

   It was good to see the name, mansoor, as my brother’s name is

   also mansoor and he is settled in  southafrica.  I would be glad to know  your origin.  I have a question,

 

    how to put a sign-in seal , that would create a link between a certain

   computer cpu, and yahoo.  I have got many accounts closed. so I complained to hong kong arbitration centre.

 

   what do you think a sign-in seal means authorised access by yahoo

to a certain computer, and what if firewall is put on, will sign-in seal

be created, or we should remove the firewall first and then , sign-in

seal could be made.  I was unable to put a sign-in seal, to prevent

password theft.  However my password was
not stolen, yahoo company officials have been frequently closing my e.mail accounts.

 

  I knew about yourself, that you are founder and chief technology officer of  I S P R I N G.  My introduction is appended below.

 

  munsifrasool_007@yahoo.com

  pakistan

 

  

 

 

  My name: Munsif rasool, s/o Late ghulam rasool

  surname: 
Babbar,

  comp. NIC NO: 41303-1480967-9 issued from Pakistan’s

                                national database authority.

 

  education:  commerce graduate

 

Deasirs/mam,

 

   I am munsif rasoo, aged 37, and former agricultural developmentbank employee.  I worked for this bank from  17-5-95 to 30-8-2002.  During my service tenure in the year 1997,98, I wrote some direct requests to the
authorities of bank for legitimate purposes, to which bank responded, and I got the due advantages from bank.  In the month of februaray-2001, security guards of army run company called sms security, fought outside first women bank ltd, gul centre branch, Hyderabad, and they later got a complaint registered at cantonment police station, saddar, hyderabad.  I was later removed from the service on the pretext that I defamed the image of the bank.

 

  However, I explained my position with regard to all the allegations levelled against me, explaining that why would I go to a police station to get a complaint registered, so that image of agricultural bank should be defamed.

 

  In the month of august-2002 some conspirators ignoring head office instructions issued to audit zone-10, hyderabad, where I was posted,

came up with old matters and turned them into allegations that I wrote direct
requests to head office.  On the contrary matters of the past had settled in past.

 

  The bank, outside where , sms company security guards made the hue and cry and made scuffle, are still in first women bank ltd, opposite , pakistan airforce recruitment and selection centre, saddar, hyderabad. And the woman named iffat bashir who was manager, at the time of scuffle outside first women bank ltd, gul centre branch, has now joined united bank ltd, of his excellency sheikh nahyan bin m,abarak al-nahyan. a renowned industrialist of abudhabi.  she joined this bank in the month of april-2004.  In the month of june-2004, I also received a letter from the head office of united bank ltd, karachi.  The sender was one mr. shahid habibullah, div. head, hum,an resources.  He said that my cv had been included in computer database, as and when opportunity arose , I would be contacted.  I kept wandering around the UBL,
regional head quarter for three years, but I could never get the job of even marketeer.

 

  Hundreds of people were seen in the two branches of united bank ltd, i.e. gul centre branch and civic centrebranch, but some terrorists started terrorism and they onceagain started to fight.

 

  That I am a poor and orphan, I was looking for a job to support my research activities, and goons from mohajir mafia started to get jobs in this bank.

 

  I received a valid letter no.ps/DH/RCD/278,  21-6-2004, for a permanent post in united bank ltd, but terrorists started to threaten me, and I started to send a case against this bank to UAE and the newspapers of other countries.

 

  I have made hectic efforts to get my job in agricultural bank back, but nepotism, and hostitlity never go, and I became a victium of hostility.

 

  my father was regional manager, Agricultural development bank of pakistan , he passed away in the month of nov.1991, my mother also passed away in the month of may-1995, and now after august-2002 I am on roads and streets to find a source of income.  What it turned out to be later, I have drafted a complete report against the psyche of pakistanis in the banks and other govt. institutions, please read this report at     munsifrasool_007@yahoo.com

 

munsif_55@yahoo.com, because when I started to send my report to the newspapers of other muslim countries , I started to find my e.mail accounts to be closed.  Hoping that someone gracious, and generous will help an educated person.

 

 

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

I’m surprised how many people don’t know…

…that tonic water glows under ultraviolet light.

(In this case, light from a UV Photon light.)

Modern tonic water (and bitter lemon, and a beverage made frae girders) only has a little bit of quinine in it. The original anti-malarial version of tonic water had far more of the stuff, which made it medicinally effective but also very bitter, such that adding a generous slug of gin to it could only make it taste better. Well, after you’d consumed enough doses, anyway.

Even a little quinine is more than enough for an impressive glow, though - quinine is often used in photochemistry as fluorescence standard, for this reason.

The ingredients label on the tonic I drink (usually straight; it’s an acquired taste) lists quinine as “0.5%”. If that’s an accurate by-weight figure, then if you manage to put away a whole 1.25 litre bottle of the stuff, you’ve consumed something in the order of 6.25 grams of quinine. That’s more than ten times the every-eight-hours medicinally effective dose of quinine dihydrochloride or sulfate (for IV or oral administration, respectively), which suggests to me that the listed concentration is a severe overstatement.

I did a nice before-and-after shot of a whole bottle of glowing tonic water for this old letters column. Wikipedia’s version of the same thing is here.

This Consumerist piece about Why Geeks Steal Porn From Your Computer (When They’re Meant To Be Fixing It, If They Get A Chance), is both informative and entertaining.

Let me tell you right now that if I were 21 again and working in some dead-end computer store McJob, I too would be rifling through the files of any user who needed our help to install iTunes. Anybody who is even marginally surprised about this would probably be horrified to see the contents of the back-room bulletin board of the average one-hour-photo place before the advent of the affordable digital camera.

There are some good tips in the Consumerist piece, but I disagree with the assertion that “drive encryption on your home computer is worthless”. There are many easy-to-use encryption systems which provide data security that’ll probably defeat the National Security Agency, never mind some dude in a pot-leaf T-shirt. If you just use Windows EFS and hand your password to the computer store along with the PC then they can of course access your data (and ordinary users who use EFS often lose all of their data as a result…), but there are other very fine options for people who just want to encrypt their accounting data, passwords and pr0n.

Hell, just putting that stuff in a Zip file with a ten character password’ll probably do the job. Standard Zip encryption isn’t very secure compared with many other schemes, but it’s still often not practically attackable from any normal human’s point of view. If the password’s moderately long and not a dictionary word, and the attacker doesn’t already have a copy of some of the data in the archive (giving the option of a “known plaintext” attack, which is the major weakness of standard Zip encryption), then a brute force attack is likely to take a very long time indeed. Even refined brute force attacks are likely to take centuries on current hardware.

Learning how to use encryption software is a good step towards learning how to use the rest of your computer like a “pro” as well. Before you know it, you won’t have to hand your computer over to Super Excellent Computer Store’s Data Commandoes just because you can’t get rid of some crapware.

I just spent a little while perusing the Hobby Corner section of the excellent Discover Circuits site.

I reviewed a “shake flashlight” a while ago, and have since answered a letter from someone who bought a fake one.

Here’s a page about how, exactly, the (genuine) lights work - or at least how the cheap knockoff versions do. It suggests a better design, but the shake-light idea is pleasing despite its inefficiency; with decent components they work well enough, and they let the light retain a normal unbroken flashlight casing, rather than requiring a crank handle or pull-string to stick out somewhere.

I’ve got some of the cheap-yet-functional ones as mentioned on that page; I bought them very cheaply on eBay, so I’m not too bothered that they take a lot more effort to charge and glow more weakly and for less time.

If you feel the urge, you can follow the Discover Circuits suggestions and upgrade the cheap lights with better diodes and capacitors to be much closer to the quality of the brand name versions.

Another Discover Circuits highlight: A super-simple capacitor-based constant current LED power supply to let you run long strings of LEDs from mains power (or fix these crappy LED nightlights).

It is also my considered opinion that the words DANGEROUS VOLTAGES EXIST EVERYWHERE are the mark of a truly excellent schematic.

Apropos my previous mention of old games where you do bad things to people: If you’ve never played Carmageddon II, you really should.

Don’t try to tell me that stuff like this happens in the racing games you usually play.

Every kid’s used to running over old ladies in 3D these days, of course. But Carmageddon II came out in late 1998, before Grand Theft Auto had made it to (2D) instalment two. And I, and others, think it still holds up quite well today.

It’s not, to be fair, a game for the precision car simulator enthusiast. Keyboard controls, a weird lunar-gravity feel, and very little reason to actually bother running through the checkpoints once you’d stacked up some spare time by killing pedestrians and another racer or two.

(There are timed challenge levels that actually force you to perform particular tasks before letting you at the next batch of levels. But you can always cheat past those.)

But despite the cartoonish physics, this actually is a simulator, of a sort. Driven and steered wheels affect car behaviour as they should, as you can see when a car’s ridiculously smashed and bent and so can only drive in little circles. You can even get rear-wheel-steer and front-wheel-drive, if you drive the combine harvester.

You also don’t have to perform contortions to get Carmageddon II to run on modern hardware. The game’s still commercial software so you can’t just (legally) download it, but once you’ve got it and patched it to v2.0 all you need to do is replace the carma2_hw.exe file with this further patch to make it run on Windows XP (and maybe Vista; I dunno).

And then you’ll be in business, playing in Direct3D mode in a magnificent 640 by 480. 800 by 600 was possible, but only on 3dfx hardware, back when those cards were so powerful it was kind of ridiculous. Multiplayer requires the bad old IPX/SPX protocol, by the way.

You can take advantage of a modern graphics card by editing the data\options.txt file and changing the value on the “yon” line to 100 or more; that’ll give you a much more distant view, so you’ll be able to see further down the road, or a whole level at once when you’re high up. Extending the view distance seems to hang the game occasionally when the view changes suddenly - like when you press the “recover” key or switch to the in-cockpit view - but that may just be because I’m using an unnecessarily high “yon” value.

People have also modded realistic looking cars into C2…

…and even turned it into a banger racing simulator. The low-polygon high-ridiculousness standard cars are perfectly adequate for starters, though.

To be honest, the only thing that irks me about unmodded Carmageddon II is the unfortunate fact that if you want to remove the dogs from the game, because you’re cool with running over people and everything but deliberately whacking Fido goes a bit far, you can only do it by turning off all animals. That includes the far more amusing sheep, cows, moose and penguins. And the elephants, who’re something of a challenge to kill.

Oh, and if you try to register your “new” copy of Carmageddon II, you’ll fail.

I wouldn’t try clicking any of those buttons, if I were you.

Before you see that window, though, you get this one:

And, more amusingly, this one:

There’s your retro game console collection guide, right there. Note the separate entries for the CDTV and the CD32, baby!

Yes, my eMate is now actually useful, but I had a bunch of fun figuring out how to get data onto and off of it.

I started out by moving data back and forth with a plain old serial cable. I bought the bits to make one, but then a kind reader sent me his old Maclink cable for free!

And, after trying almost everything else, I’m back with the serial cable.

If you want to move documents - as opposed to contacts and calendar entries - to and from a Newton of any flavour, my official recommendation is to stick with serial and save yourself the pain.

But, I hear you say, the eMate has an infrared transceiver, which can talk to standard IrDA things if you install some software!

Yes. Sort of.

To enable IR data transfer, I did as I was told and used the serial cable and Newton Connection Utilities (which is what you use on Windows for serial document transfer as well) to install a bunch of stuff from 40Hz. I installed IC/VC and Neo and Nitro and Ntox and NHttpLib, not all of which were necessarily entirely essential for simple document transfer, but what the heck.

Then I tried to get the eMate to to connect to a PC, only to have it error out at the precise moment it connected, every time. Yes, even if I used the OBEX:IrXfer option, as instructed. This happened with a desktop machine with a USB IrDA interface; it also happened with my ThinkPad.

You actually can transfer data from a PC to an eMate even when it’s doing this. What you have to do is kind of trick it, by starting a transfer (which will immediately fail) so Windows lets you pop up the what-file-would-you-like-to-send requester, then selecting the file you want, and starting another transfer. Then you click the OK button just as the connection happens… whereupon it works. For that one file transfer. Then it instantly disconnects again.

(I was sidetracked for a while by the instruction to run “irftp“, which is a program that exits silently every time I run it, presumably because it sees no IR connection, because of the instant-disconnect problem. Oh, and if you transfer a plain ASCII text file to an eMate it won’t be able to read it, unless you install plain text “stationery” as well. Fun!)

All of this is purely academic, though, because there’s no trick you can use in the other direction. If you’ve got this problem, you can’t send anything back from the eMate to the PC via IR.

Neo is supposed to “convert [an] object to text and send it”, but all it ever actually does for me is convert an object to the generic eMate errors -8007 and -48205, and send nothing.

Perhaps all of this 40Hz stuff does actually work if you want to sync address book and calendar data, but I just wanted basic file transfer, and it wasn’t happening.

You can also, apparently, use some Orinoco 802.11b cards with an eMate, and wired Ethernet cards too. But the Orinoco driver only works if you install Newton Internet Enabler, which is for… accessing the Internet, and doing other perverse things. Not transferring data from other computers. Well, not unless you do something ludicrous like transferring your documents via e-mail and installing a mail client on the eMate.

There’s also commercial software that lets you use a CompactFlash card in a PCMCIA adapter as storage for a Newton device, instead of the old “linear” PCMCIA cards that work natively in these devices. I’d almost certainly be able to do this, since my dusty-old-stuff drawer contains the 8Mb version of a 16Mb card that’s on the compatibility list, but it wouldn’t help me much either, since the files the eMate put on the card would be in Newton Note format and I’d have to translate them somehow to access them on my PC anyway. Might as well hook up the serial cable and translate on the fly.

So, verily, did I say Screw It, and go back to the serial cable.

(I’m using the serial cable with my old ThinkPad, which is the handiest computer I’ve got that has a real serial port. I think Newton Connection Utilities will work with a USB-to-serial adapter, but I haven’t tried it. For a bigger dose of old-stuff-on-new-hardware shenanigans, check out this page about running Windows 1.01 on 2005 hardware.)

Every now and then someone who’s read the stuff I wrote about Swiss Army knives writes to make sure I know about the ridiculous Victorinox super-knives, the SwissChamp XLT (which is just about still usable) and SwissChamp XXLT (which is really just a showpiece, though every now and then you find one on sale for a surprisingly reasonable price because some store accidentally got ten in, thinking they were products a human hand could actually hold).

Wenger, the now-wholly-owned-by-Victorinox second manufacturer of “genuine” Swiss Army knives, would appear to now have one-upped Victorinox in the monster-knife stakes, with…

…the Giant.

It’s only a thousand dollars if you buy online!

(I’m pretty sure that one of those big plastic shop-window Swiss Army knives with the motorised blades that slowly go in and out will cost you rather less than the Giant, and be just as useful.)

Whaddaya know - another compression scheme that violates rules of information theory has turned out to be a great big scam. The only part of this that surprises me is that I’d never previously heard of this Brent Kovar and his particular take on the broadband-down-a-thin-straw idea.

(For more shenanigans of this sort, check out the last letter in this column.)

I’ve played enough of Overlord now to get a proper feel for the game (one of the seven bosses dead, three of the four minion colours collected). I am continuing to like it.

The PC control system works pretty well. The console version of the game uses an analogue stick to let you tell your minions where to go, on the occasions when you’re not just saying “go in the direction I’m pointing”, but need to steer them around the map. The PC version lets you do this by holding both mouse buttons and moving the mouse. This usually does not result in half of your minions drowning.

The different flavours of minion are also pretty easy to manage, because the game deliberately limits you to ordering one type around at a time, or telling them all to move at once. I presume they were tempted to include some kind of RTS-type grouping so you could order two or three flavours around in a group; I’m glad they didn’t, if only because that would have further tempted them to make fights you could only win by doing that.

The level design is also good. The levels so far look like the kind of “natural layout” game levels in which you’re forever wandering around places you’ve already been trying to figure out where the hell you need to go next, but they are not in fact that kind of level. Which is good, because there’s no map display.

The level structure - move this to access that, get a shortcut back to the start when you get to the end, all that stuff - is also competently done.

I’ve seen a couple of bugs - the game locked up once, and there’s other occasional oddness like minions that’re carrying something getting stuck on an obstacle even after you’ve removed it. The bugs are easy to work around, though.

Back in the real world, I keep feeling the urge to order our cats to charge out, kill something, and bring back treasure.

The first part’s probably quite doable, but the cats unfortunately do not share my opinions regarding what constitutes “treasure”.